It’s a known fact that some of the worst movies in existence feature some of the best car chases ever created. Films like Bullitt, Vanishing Point, The Wraith and To Live and Die In L.A. are terrible from a script standpoint. However add in a good car chase, and BOOM! Instant classic. The following is a montage of some of the best chases ever recorded on film and I’ve got to say that the way it was put together is pretty damn impressive.

Source: http://vimeo.com

An 18-year old girl who impersonates Taylor Swift to earn extra cash was recently bullied by some classmates, and she says it’s because of who she looks like.

Xenna Kristian says she’s bruised and possibly has a broken jaw after a girl allegedly pulled her by her ponytail out of her chair and kicked her repeatedly. The college student says things have gotten ugly since her classmates found out she’s a professional Taylor lookalike.

“Some girls at college had started making nasty comments, but it escalated really quickly,” Kristian said. “It just came as a complete shock.”

Kristian says her friends eventually intervened in the altercation, but not before she suffered several injuries to her face. Police are investigating the incident.

“I never expected anything like this to happen. It’s not nice to see people being nasty about you. Since I started being a lookalike people have been saying stuff. They must be jealous that I’m going off to do something with my life,” she says.

The pain of the violence will eventually go away, but for now Kristian says she’s upset that she has to cancel appearances until the physical marks go away.

Image: Caters News Agency

A company called AoTerra is doing very well indeed on the German crowdfunding platform Seedmatch. At the start of this month it broke the record for the most crowdfunding received so far by a German startup, leading Seedmatch to raise the limit on its round (investors get a share of the startup’s profits) from €500,000 ($648,000) to €750,000. The limit may have to be lifted again: AoTerra hit it minutes ago, and it still has 24 days to go.

So what makes Dresden-based AoTerra such hot property? The fact that it does just that: heat properties. But these are no ordinary heaters. These are heating systems with servers in them.

AoTerra’s system comprises a server connected to a heat exchanger or heat pump, which is in turn connected to the property’s ventilation system, and a hot water tank. It’s intended for new-build and renovated properties that meet modern energy efficiency standards and, according to the company, efficiency is nearly 100 percent (the company also only uses “green” energy for its devices).

Each system has a broadband connection and forms part of a distributed, OpenStack-based data center. The result is AoCloud, which offers compute, block storage and object storage (all are currently in beta). Customers can be pretty sure their cloud is as green as it gets, but there are other benefits too – the distributed nature of the cloud should mean low latency, and AoTerra is touting security as a plus too.

AoTerra is also involved with a couple of Europe-funded projects, namely LEADS (trying to create a “data-as-a-service” model on top of geographically distributed micro-clouds) and ParaDIME (trying to making computing more energy-efficient).

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the idea of using waste heat from data centers to heat homes — London’s Telehouse West data center was going to do that, although the local council never set up the distribution network and the housing development never got built due to the recession, and Telus is planning something similar in Vancouver. But what AoTerra has come up with is a step beyond.

Property owners or developers pay €12,000 for the system (about the same as a normal heating system), but they don’t have any ongoing operating costs – from that point on, they get free heating and hot water. And AoTerra gets out of having to pay for air conditioning, which is a pretty major chunk of the cost of running a traditional data center.

Overall, AoTerra claims, its distributed data center costs the company about a tenth of the normal set-up costs for a data center, with its running costs being less than half and CO2 emissions around a third. The company has only been going for a year, and it already has 20 AoHeat devices with over 200 servers installed. It had a turnover last year of €100,000, and has already signed contracts worth €400,000 this year.

AoTerra says it’s negotiating €1.6 million worth of contracts at the moment, and has another €3.1 million worth in the pipeline. This year it wants to sell 100 AoHeat devices, and next year 500 – at that point, it would be one of Germany’s biggest cloud providers. They need the crowdfunding investment to grow the team to match demand, they say.

It’s all very, very clever.

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A block from the Mariposa on-ramp and in the eye-line of 90,000 cars whizzing by on 280 sits an old warehouse that was home to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local alt weekly, and Digg. Most of the building is gutted and inside they are working on the “greatest enabler of hardware on the planet,” according PCH International head Liam Casey. It will be the new home of Lime Labs, a hush-hush design consultancy that Casey bought in 2012 for an undisclosed amount and, most important, the U.S. gateway to Asian PCH’s manufacturing might that allows hardware startups to access stem-to-stern services in design, coding, manufacturing, packaging and shipping.

Casey, dubbed “Mr. China” in a James Fallows article that outlined the rising importance of Shenzhen as a manufacturing giant, is one of the biggest machers in Asia. A teetotaling Irishman, the inexhaustible Casey ostensibly lives in a hotel in downtown Shenzhen but is nearly always in the air. He and his cross-cultural team make nearly all the accessories you can imagine for multiple vendors. You couldn’t point a finger in a Best Buy without hitting a product PCH builds.

He envisions his new building as a gateway to China and a way to help clients – and the public – understand the vagaries of mass manufacturing. The space will contain a public foyer and cafe where visitors can learn about materials, design, and manufacturing. C-Level training will go on in a large anteroom on the first floor with a huge video screen suspended on epoxy-sealed walls.

In short, it’s the Apple Store if the focus was all the trouble that went into products before they ever reached the consumer.

“We want it to be the most photographed building in San Francisco,” said Andre Yousefi, co-founder of Lime Lab. The company, which started in the doldrums of the recession, consisted of Yousefi and his partner Kurt Dammermann until Casey bought them and expanded the team to 25. They expect to hire 15 more engineers by October and hope to fill 80 seats in their new HQ by 2014. Not bad for a tiny, two-man shop in a run-down district of San Francisco.

Yousefi is the buttoned down member of the group, clean shaven more more dedicated to design than manufacturing. Dammermann is the scruffy mechanic who has seen factory floors and is at home with drill presses and band saws.

The Lime Lab vision is born of the needs of hardware startups and companies that need a full service consultancy to help their product move from idea to packaged product in a few short months.

“What we don’t do is the high volume accessories work,” said Yousefi. “We’re doing more up-front product development, end-to-end.” Using PCH’s retail distribution platform, TNS Distribution in Dublin, Ireland, coupled with the company’s extensive contacts in China’s manufacturing centers, Lime Lab can take a sketch of a product and bring it to fruition at a speed unimaginable for most strategic design houses.

Yousefi and Dammermann were former IDEO designers and CAD jockeys who wanted to build their own consultancy.

“You come to us with either a napkin sketch or just an idea and we do the detail design and development to flesh it out,” said Dammermann. “One we have the idea fleshed out with the design team, we work with the team in Shenzhen to take it to the finish line.”

The team was reticent to mention their clients or current employees although they have hired ex-Apple, Intel, and IDEO engineers and designers who were looking for something more rewarding. They are working on everything from audio products to mini-computers and their current offices, though small, hold CNC machines, 3D printers, and a small testing facility. The new lab on Mississippi Street will contain far more gear as well as a situation room for describing the retail shipping patterns laid out by PCH and the design decisions made for each product – all in a building that is bathed in natural light thanks to a long bank of leadlights windows.

“A lot of engineers in the Bay Area have become more strategic. We’re trying to close that loop and create engineers that are really good at manufacturing,” said Dammermann.

“The physical-making aspect of engineering is slipping away,” said Yousefi. Lime Lab hopes to change that.

Like proud parents, the pair were excited to show off their new baby. The building is not nearly finished but already they talk about the epoxy-sealed floors as if they’ve been walking on them for weeks and the banquette style wooden stairs as if they’re getting ready to present to a group of schoolkids the next day. The space is huge and outside there is a definite whiff of marijuana in the air, as if the neighbors were enjoying the relative quietude of the neighborhood to run a grow house. One of the previous tenants left a Diego Rivera-style mural of mightily straining migrant workers on the stairs up to the second floor, an addition that the partners haven’t yet decided what to do with. The walls have been stripped down to studs and you can see the thick joists peeking out from between whiffs of insulation. In short, it’s a great place to start again.

Before

Brady Forrest, formerly of Khosla Ventures, will run PCH’s Incubator program from the third floor of the building where two rows of desks will house ten small- to mid-level startups. These companies will have a direct line to Asia. Most Lime Labs employees will also spend three months in Shenzhen to become accustomed to working with a bi-continental team.

“People are always talking about how manufacturing expertise has moved to China. The best thing is that we’re bringing it back,” said Dammermann.

The “after” renders the team shared with me show a building that is half factory and half Prada store. The exposed brick is mostly hidden and the space is all light and air. Gone are the remnants of industrial San Francisco, replaced with a shape as form-fitting and beautiful as an iPad box.

“We never gave up on hardware. I’ve never started a web company.”

“It took us a little while to look for buildings. When we first started, Liam was like ‘Nope.’ He wouldn’t even get out of the car,” said Dammermann. They settled on the biggest building they could find, signing a 10-year lease on the space. There is enough room to invite groups to hold meet-ups at the space and there are plans to offer engineering seminars to incubated companies as well as executives who may be interested in starting up using Lime Labs expertise. While they are looking for larger clients in the Valley – the company is also looking to help Kickstarter projects join the ranks of successful business. “Hardware makes software sticky,” said Dammermann. It’s this ethos that drives the pair to make their lab accessible to all comers.

The last floor of the new space is a roof deck dedicated to the incubator participants and engineers. From here you can see the iron belt of the highway girding the edge of the Bay. It’s windy up there, a problem the pair will have to solve down the line. Until that time comes, probably sometime in mid-2014, the team can simply focus on hiring and building.

“The junior guys are awesome. Their network is immense. They’re like pigs in shit. We send them out to China and they come back with smiles on their face. One trip alone gives you two years of experience,” said Yousefi.

“We never gave up on hardware. I’ve never started a web company,” said Dammermann with obvious pride as the sun set over downtown SF.

(Soon-To-Be) After

Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley explains why strategy has to be more than an aspiration. For more, see Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, by A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin, or, from the HBR archive, his 2009 article, What Only the CEO Can Do.

Google is all about searching. Well… not “all” about, but it’s what the company is known for. Any firm that logs information about how customers are using its services are usually berated, but Google Trends can provide a fascinating insight into how the rest of the world is using the internet. This tool has been available for a while but there’s now a sexy new full screen mode available — and you can turn it into a screensaver.

If you’ve ever been curious about what people in other parts of the world are searching for, head over to the full screen visualization tool and you can find out. At the bottom of the screen you can choose from one of several countries, or opt to see an overview of global searches.

By default you’ll be shown a single search at a time, displayed on a background in one of Google’s four colors. Want to see more? Whizz your mouse up to the upper left of the page and hover over the 3×3 grid icon that appears. In the popup you can then select a number of search tiles that should be displayed — each shows a different search term, and the display can become quite mesmerizing.

As you change country and tile options, you may well notice that the URL in the address bar changes. Each setting change results in a unique URL, and this can be exploited to turn Google Trends into a rainbow search screensaver. When you’ve chosen a view you like, copy the address to the clipboard.

Turning a web address into a screensaver isn’t something that’s built into Windows, but there’s a great free screensaver tool hosted on Google Projects. Download a copy of Web Page Screensaver (it’s free), and move the .scr file to C:\Windows\System32.

The screensaver can then be configured from the Display Control Panel — right-click the desktop and select Personalize before clicking the Screen Saver icon at the lower right of the window. Select Web-Page-Screensaver from the drop down menu, click Settings and paste the URL you copied earlier.

Now when your computer is idle, global web searches will be displayed on your screen. It’s hardly an incentive to get on with work, but it looks cool and is an interesting way to keep up with what’s happening in the world.

There are various other search visualization options available on the Google Trends page.

For the first time in many years, Sony’s mobile division managed to pull in a big increase in sales thanks to its new flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z.

According to the company’s latest financial report, Sony sold no less than 33 million smartphones last year, only 1 million short of Sony’s forecast.

… (read more)

In my research, I use eye-tracking technology, facial-expression analysis, and lab experiments to better understand why people choose to view online videos, what narrative techniques keep them watching, and what features prompt them to share videos with friends. Since writing about this work in HBR last year, I’ve received a steady stream of requests from companies asking: How can we put that research to use?

As a result, I’ve been studying how companies create and distribute online video advertisements, and I’ve examined some of the new firms that specialize in helping them do so. I’ve found many examples of companies that have produced effective campaigns for 10% or even 1% of what they would have spent on traditional ad agencies and paid mass media. The ways of doing this are via a DIY approach or an outsourcing approach.

Here are four successful examples I’ve come across that span both techniques; the first two incorporate a DIY technique, while the latter two use oursourcing. Read my full analysis in this month’s issue of HBR (registration required).

DC Shoes

In 2009, DC Shoes began shooting videos featuring its cofounder Ken Block driving a tricked-out racecar around closed-off airports, theme parks, and even the port of San Francisco. Instead of buying expensive TV time, DC Shoes uploads the videos to YouTube. Over the past four years they have gotten more than 180 million views — and in 2011 alone, sales jumped 15%. One was YouTube’s most-shared video of 2011; another garnered a million views in its first 24 hours. Paying online media for this type of exposure would cost upward of $5 million.

Blendtec

In 2007 the kitchen appliance company Blendtec created a series of videos in which the founder, Tom Dickson, demonstrated the power of its products by blending such items as marbles, a rake handle, hockey pucks, and iPods. The videos went viral on YouTube, landing Dickson on the Tonight Show and the Today Show, and sales took off. The Blendtec videos have been viewed nearly 240 million times to date. But the odds of replicating that success are low: Just 3% of YouTube films are viewed more than 25,000 times.

Speed Stick/Tongal

Many companies have turned to Tongal, a four-year-old firm that, for a fee, posts specs for a project and matches it with freelance creative talent willing to work for relatively low pay. Companies generally use the ads online, but some go further: Speed Stick paid $17,000 for a Tongal-produced ad and laid out $4 million to air it during the 2013 Super Bowl, whose viewers ranked it higher than conventionally produced ads for Coke, Pepsi, Subway, Lincoln, and Anheuser-Busch.

Golden Grahams/Mekanism

Companies seeking more-aggressive distribution often look to social media syndication firms such as the San Francisco-based agency Mekanism. For a campaign for Golden Grahams aimed at recent college graduates, it posted a series of animated videos about job interviews gone comically awry. It then solicited viewers’ own stories via Twitter, turning more than 50 of them into online videos. Together the videos got more than 2.5 million views (60% of which were the direct result of influencers’ actions).

This post contains excerpts from Thales Teixeira’s June 2013 article “How to Profit From Lean Advertising.”

Along with updates on the Google Chrome Beta channel for desktop systems that were made available yesterday, Google also announced the availability of an update to the Chrome Beta for Android app. The new update for Chrome 28 takes it up to version 28.0.1500.21. Headlining the improvements is better integration of the Google Translate service which will automatically detect whether a web page is in a different language from what your Android device is set to and will make the translate bar easily available similar to the desktop version of Chrome. Scrolling on a page will now cause the toolbar to disappear, providing a fullscreen browsing experience. Google also added in a new graph to show estimated bandwidth savings due to the experimental data compression feature and improved, mobile-friendly error pages. If you want to grab the Chrome Beta for Android app, just hit one of the download links below.

Google Play Download Link

Come comment on this article: Chrome Beta for Android updated, adds better translation and full screen options

American consumers are sleepwalking into being permanently locked to ever-rising phone bills from monolithic incumbents. This is exactly the scenario that the government tried to avoid when it broke AT&T into seven Baby Bells in 1982. In France, the average mobile bill is now dropping by $7 a year. In America, the average bills from AT&T and Verizon Wireless keep rising as operators force consumers into texting bundles and sneak in new monthly charges. European incumbent operators are facing a consumer revolt as millions of Europeans switch to cheap challenger operators every month. American incumbents have no fear; AT&T and Verizon have locked in 75% of the smartphone market and keep growing.

Continue reading…

Learnist may have launched out of a company focused on test prep and more formal education, but the social learning site is quickly showing that its appeal is much broader.

Since its launch about a year ago, the service, which was created by startup Grockit to enable users to curate and follow “learn boards” of videos, text and other web content focused on specific topics, has attracted about 700,000 registered users (150,000 to 200,000 are active monthly users). Each month, the company said, it receives about two million page views and has grown its traffic 30 percent week over week since its latest update last month.

But while a significant portion of its traffic goes to content relevant to K-12 teachers and students, the site is also drawing a large crowd for content unrelated to the classroom.  Co-founder Farb Nivi said that about 25 to 30 percent of the content on the site is education-related and it receives about a quarter of the total Learnist traffic. But he added that while just 6 percent of the content on the site is lifestyle-related (focusing on food, cooking, home design and other similar topics), it receives about 35 percent of the site’s traffic.

It underscores that while the site does accommodate teachers and the education-only crowd, it’s moving further away from being a typical ed tech app.

“We want to be the Instagram of knowledge-sharing,” Nivi said, adding that as it grows it plans to make it even easier for users of all types to share content and receive the bits of content most relevant to their interests, “like a smart RSS.”

Unlike a true RSS reader, the site doesn’t allow people to subscribe to blogs and news sites to get the most timely stories. But it wants to be a service that enables people to easily keep up to date on the topics they care about – from technology to art to cooking to politics – by following people and topic-focused tags. While an RSS reader only enables people to view content from sources to which they subscribe, Learnist aims to suggest and surface all kinds of crowd-sourced content that could match a user’s profile.

Now, the site has about 25 million pieces of content but, in the next twelve months, he added, Learnist plans to increase that by as much as 100 times. Last month, it removed the sign-up process, which was a big barrier to entry. Going forward, Nivi said they’re considering removing the concept of the “learn board” to simplify content sharing, as well as adding more publisher partners (now they partner with only Discovery and the BBC).

That growth could raise the amount of lower-quality content on the site. But to keep the signal to noise ratio high, the company this week added a LinkedIn-like endorsement feature to help its algorithms identify the best contributors and content and it’s playing with applying natural language processing to publisher content to help it route the best content to users.

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Yelp has been accused of extorting businesses by burying positive reviews for businesses who won’t advertise with them, and surfacing those reviews if they do advertise. The company staunchly denies that this is happening, but there have been multiple reports and lawsuits alleging that this has been going on.

Do you think Yelp is extorting businesses or are businesses allegations simply false? Have you had negative experiences with Yelp? Let us know in the comments.

This is not a new story. Businesses have been accusing Yelp of extortion for quite some time. Back in September, for example, a restaurant in Connecticut told a local news station that Yelp had been taking down their positive reviews because they refused to buy advertising. Here’s that report:

Fast forward to this week, and similar stories are appearing. Here’s a report from Brook Silva-Braga at The Washington Post:

“A lot of business owners say what Yelp is really doing is extorting them for advertising money,” says Silva-Braga.

The piece discusses a business who lost all of its customers, and attributed this to a one-star rating and bad reviews on Yelp. Interestingly, it claims deals services like Groupon and LivingSocial will no longer work with the business either, due to the poor rating.

“I signed a contract with Groupon about a month ago to run a deal, and they’re not running a deal because of the reviews,” the business owner says in the interview.

Silva-Braga says in the piece that many business owners say Yelp wields its power unfairly. He goes on to point to the paid Yelp ads for competitors that appear above actual reviews on listings for specific businesses. He notes that when he clicks on a listing for one of the paid advertisers, there are no competitor ads.

“But that’s just a small example – one Yelp doesn’t debate,” he says. “It’s something else much harder to prove that gets business owners really upset with Yelp.”

The basic story, according to the report, is that a business gets a bunch of new customers because of the reviews, Yelp reaches out to the business to advertise, then after it doesn’t advertise, the positive reviews start disappearing, and only negative or indifferent reviews stay. The other reviews appear in the filtered section, which is accessed when a user clicks and enteres a CAPTCHA.

Yelp strongly denies that any of this is going on, which the report also mentions. It even includes footage of Yelp’s VP Communications & Public Affairs, Vince Sollitto, discussing how the filtering algorithm works. The review filter, he says, does not take into account advertiser status. The report then goes on, however to showcase a business owner claiming that a Yelp salesperson said they would unfilter filtered reviews if they advertised. The business reportedly did start some “small scale” advertising, and “magically,” five or six of the filtered reviews became unfiltered. Finally, the report notes that all “evidence” of the allegations at hand are circumstantial.

Sollitto took to the Yelp blog to discuss Yelp’s side of the story further, calling out the Washington Post report and an LA Times article as stories that rehash “sensational” allegations, which he says are not, and have never been true.

Sollitto points to research from Harvard Business School and Yale professors finding no connection between advertising and Yelp’s automated filtering, though the claim in the Washington Post piece indicates there was human intervention in the automated process. He then notes that courts have “rejected the conspiracy”.

“Some business owners have even gone so far as to take these accusations to court, but their claims keep getting dismissed for lack of any fact-based evidence,” he writes.

“A simple Google search debunks the conspiracy,” he adds. “Want to see if businesses that advertise on Yelp really do get ‘special treatment?’ Feel free to do your own version of a simple Google test like this [site:yelp.com/biz ‘Yelp sponsor’ AND ‘rude staff’] by inserting your own negative phrases in the last set of quotation marks. The words ‘Yelp Sponsor’ only appear on pages of advertisers, which begs the question: if these Yelp advertisers get a special ‘Delete’ button for negative reviews, why in the world aren’t they using it? (Hint: because it doesn’t exist.) Nor is there any rational incentive for a Yelp sales team member to jeopardize his or her career by pitching a product that can’t be delivered because it doesn’t exist.”

I’m not sure what that says about the possibility that reviews could be hidden on Yelp in the “filtered” section rather than actually being deleted.

Sollitto goes on to note that you can also find many non-advertisers with good ratings.

“So why does this misbelief exist?” he asks. “Ironically, it stems from Yelp’s efforts to protect consumers from those who are constantly trying to game the system. Yelp uses automated software to showcase the most helpful and reliable reviews from among the millions submitted. Those that don’t make the grade — about 20 percent — are posted to a separate ‘Filtered Review’ page. So, in trying to prevent unethical wrongdoing on Yelp, Yelp gets accused of the same.”

Earlier this month, Yelp revealed that its average monthly unique visitors grew 43% year over year to 102 million, and revenue was up 68% year-over-year. Cumulative reviews grew 42% year over year to more than 39 million.

Do you think Yelp is wronging businesses? Let us know in the comments.

With news of Yahoo’s Yahoo’s $1.1bn purchase of Tumblr still rumbling, I thought I’d seen the big social media story of the week. Then late that same night, surprise news of Flickr’s revamp began to emerge. A radical, Pinterest-influenced new layout. One free terabyte of storage for every user.

A torrent of emotion ensued on feedback forums. “I HATE IT! CHANGE IT BACK!” is the defining comment from Flickr’s loyal base of members. Nearly 16,000 comments later, and pockets of positivity are starting to temper the wrath. The debate will rage on. As ever, a major new vs. old bun fight is developing. Digital media commentators could rival the Paris Left Bank in fashion week for backstabbing and vitriol.

As the digital team lead for DFID, I must admit the new format came as a shock. There was no warning. The page looks and feels very different. Gone is the lightbox-style of viewing each picture individually, with a civilised amount of air, space and text around it.

The new, masonry-style picture stream completely fills the screen, refilling as you scroll down into what feels like infinity. The images somehow feel less meaningful when viewed packed alongside hundreds of others, I thought. How will we get used to this? Is it better?

Captions are completely sidelined. While they are still there, the redesign makes it harder to find them and we will need to rethink our approach to the text we publish alongside. Wired calls these captions and picture info “icky white space and meta-data that only your photographer cousin cares about.” It’s true we need to know a whole lot more about what people want or need out of both.

DFID has been posting on Flickr for almost six years, so we could be forgiven for getting used to the format. Our 2,000 or so photographs have been viewed more than 2 million times, so it’s a vital tool to communicate the important work British taxpayers are funding in developing countries.

The archive covers everything from flood and earthquake relief efforts to maternal health and mine clearing initiatives. Many of our photographs are taken by staff in the field and by members of this team, sometimes with extraordinary reach, such as this series of spider web trees following the Pakistan floods by our picture editor Russell Watkins.

Trees cocooned in spiders webs, an unexpected side effect of the flooding in Sindh, Pakistan. Picture: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development

Our Flickr pics have been well received so far. Having high quality images online in one place makes them easy to share too. Whenever possible, we allow the images to be reused free of charge, providing they are credited to the source (known as creative commons licencing, but also the Open Government licence).

Now we’ve worked with the new format, I’m reassured. Our latest batch of photos from a cement factory in Ethiopia by colleagues Simon Davis and Gavin Houtheusen looks fantastic:

The detail of the factory and the people working there stand out in a way they didn’t before. There is a sense of purpose and direction in the pictures which reflect that country’s growing economy. Indeed, different perspectives on African countries – such as the BBC’s recent Africa Rising series – are beginning to change how the world thinks about the continent.

So, now the stream looks rich and varied. The question is what will users think? Will they miss the prominent, information-rich captions, or will they be happy simply browsing pictures?

Suffice to say we care deeply about photography at DFID. It’s a topic I hope we can explore in these blogposts as part of the Digital for Development blogging group, along with thoughts on the rest of our social media, meeting needs of the citizen on GOV.UK and collaboration with the other digital teams within the organisation. So please stay tuned.

The Flickr changes make two things clear to me more than ever about digital communication. Firstly, never get too comfortable – the oft-quoted “change or die” mantra. The times shift relentlessly and half the job is keeping up. Secondly, the visual web is more important than ever, and central to this is photography.

Unlike traditional communications work, digital comms people need to be ready to adapt to the market forces that determine the direction of big web endeavours. While it can be tiring, it can also be really rewarding and exciting.

Lastly, we would love to hear from you about any aspect of digital communication, DFID’s or otherwise, so do get in touch via this blog.

David Hasselhoff has a brand new home, and it’s not located in Germany.

According to a TMZ report, Hasselhoff has just bought a new mansion in Calabasas, California. The house is reported to have 5,767 feet of floor space, five bedrooms, and six bathrooms. It also has a basketball court and swimming pool. The price of the mansion was reportedly $1.95 million.

The new house is smaller than Hasselhoff’s last home, and less expensive. The actor reportedly sold his larger house in Encino late last year for around $3.8 million.

Hasselhoff is best-known for his acting roles in the TV shows Knight Rider and Baywatch. In Europe, he is also well-known for his music albums and for staging a concert on top of the Berlin Wall on New Year’s Eve 1989. The star recently urged his fans to sign a petition to save a section of the Berlin Wall that is one of the last pieces of the wall to remain standing.

Hasslehoff is currently participating in the Gumball 3000 rally in Europe, where he is drawing crowds of tens of thousands of people:

Follow @DavidHasselhoff

David Hasselhoff
@DavidHasselhoff

Wow Gumballing in Poland, Warsaw and Krakow biggest turnout ever 50 thousand… http://t.co/TM5qSjagQd

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It seems like Google may have casually leaked a preview of an updated Gmail app. During an I/O session called “Structure in Android design,” a few screenshots of what looks like a revamped Gmail app design were shown, highlighting a new navigation drawer and a moved action bar.

The navigation bar looks like it would be scrollable, considering important functions like trash, archive, and drafts are missing from the screenshot.  The action bar has been consolidated into just compose and search, and have been moved to the top of the screen, allowing for more room to read emails. There are a few more less significant changes as well, like larger stars in the inbox.

These changes look great, and should make the app easier to use. I’m interested to see what other changes, if any, the update will contain. We’ll let you know when more information comes out, and of course when it releases.

Source: Android Police

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McDonald’s is huge in Japan, and it just got bigger with its Mega Potato Fries.

IT Media reports (via Kotaku) that McDonald’s is now offering its largest calorie item in the history of the chain with the Mega Potato. It holds the equivalent of two large fries, but at almost half the price.

Unfortunately for you McDonald’s french fry fans, the Mega Potato is only available in Japan. You could hop on a plane to grab some, but you have to be fast. The Mega Potato will only be on sale through the end of June. After that, you’ll have to start forking over $6 for two large fries.

This isn’t the first time that a fast food restaurant in Japan has offered ridiculously sized meals. For the release of Windows 7, Microsoft teamed up with Burger King to offer a seven-patty whopper. Earlier this year, Japanese restaurant chain Lotteria outdid everybody with a nine-patty cheeseburger to coincide with the release of Evangelion 3.33.

Talk about getting lost in translation.

A Bronx teacher claims that she was fired for using the word “negro” in reference to a student. I must admit, it sounds reasonable at first – except for the fact that the teacher in question was teaching a lesson in Spanish.

65-year-old Petrona Smith, formerly a teacher at bilingual PS 211, says that she was instructing her students on how to say colors in Spanish. “Negro,” of course, is Spanish for “black.” She claims that she was fired after a seventh-grader reported the incident. Smith is black, and a West Indies native. She has filed a lawsuit over the firing.

“They haven’t even accounted for how absurd it is for someone who’s black to be using a racial slur to a student,” Shaun Reid, Smith’s attorney, told the NY Post. “Talk about context! There’s a lot of things wrong here.”

Smith even claims that she differentiated between “negro” (black) and the Spanish word for black person, “moreno.”

According to court documents, Smith was also accused of calling some students “failures,” but she says that this is also untrue. Apparently, she asked students who had failed a test to move to the back of the classroom.

In fact, Smith claims that the slurs were coming in the other direction. The Post notes that she reports being called a “f*cking monkey” and a “n*gger.”

As of now, facts in the case are pretty one-sided. A spokesperson from the city told The Post that they will review the papers – but that’s all they had to say.