I read this great article the other day about the trends in social media and what the writer predicts will happen.

What jumped out at me was the following.

“Small, medium and large companies want to know how they can streamline, automate, budget, and measure social media and social marketing.”

Then the follow on comment:

“How can it move from a series of handcrafted singular projects to a more consistent, more repeatable, more predictable undertaking?”

Later on:

“Many agencies that initially dismissed digital as a peripheral activity are now bent on not making the same mistake again with social.”

Finally stating some powerful statements and the very principles that the OneBigBriadcast platform has been developed upon:

• “Start thinking about ongoing engagement. Audiences can no longer be turned on and off on demand.”
• “The long-predicted new marketing paradigm is finally here. Marketers need to start thinking, behaving and organizing themselves as content producers who treat engage consumers as audiences, instead of fully outsourcing this function to external publishers. Content is still king, after all.”

I'd recommend that everyone read this piece along with the reader comments.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=138522&nid=120237#comments

Great day here on the west coast but fall is definitely in the air!




Pretty soon the leaves will be falling

What a better way to show case our new blog features than adding some of our animal characters from Cinemazoo:

As more and more people are attracted to the iPad and all its cool features the more they realize they want more. Our team now has a couple of iPad devices and I must admin they are way cool - however there are the things that we'd like to see. The first was that a normal WISIWIG interface doesn't work on the iPad - nor does many other features that developers like us take for granted on the other browsers. That's why we are developing apps for the iPad and iPhone that work hand and hand with our OneBigBroadcast digital broadcasting apps. This is our first post using out iPad interface. It's way cool after not being to be able to interface to our powerful platform via my iPhone and to my disappointment - the iPad when it arrived. Now you can - and the power of the overall OneBigBroadcast is available to the mobile user.

Slumping consumer confidence and disappointing earnings results from a number of major companies in the U.S. weighed on stocks Friday, with markets around the globe ending the week in negative territory.

As the close of trading approached, Canada’s benchmark S&P/TSX composite index was down 182. 47 points, or 1.55 per cent to 11,559.30, wiping out the week’s gains as commodity prices fell and financials lost ground.

The dollar was down 1.4 cents to 94.86 cents US in late-afternoon trading.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, oil fell 61 cents to close the week at $76.01 US a barrel. Gold prices dropped steeply on Friday, closing at $1,188.20 US an ounce, down $20.10.

The drop in Toronto came despite news that Canada’s leading economic indicator rose more than expected in June, led by the manufacturing sector. Statistics Canada said Friday the composite leading index increased by one point, while analysts had forecast a gain of 0.7 per cent.

Steve Jobs, after saying five times that Apple wasn’t perfect, promised free cases and refunds on Friday for iPhone 4 customers unhappy about the “death grip” that blocks the smartphone’s antenna.

“We’ll send you a free case,” said Jobs at an unprecedented news conference to answer rising complaints about Apple Inc.’s latest product. “And if you’re still not happy, you can bring your iPhone 4 back undamaged for a full refund.”

In his trademark black sweater, a defensive Jobs said, “When we have problems like this and people criticize us, we take it really personally. But the data supports the fact that the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone in the world.”

Microsoft patches critical bugs in Windows, Office

Outlook vulnerability could be big, say researchers, but Google engineer's bug should be patched first

Computerworld - Microsoft today patched five vulnerabilities in Windows and Office, including a bug hackers have been exploiting for almost a month.

As expected, today's patch slate was short: Just four security updates that included fixes for five separate flaws. Of the four updates, three were rated "critical," the highest threat ranking in Microsoft's four-step scoring system. All five of the specific vulnerabilities patched today were also rated critical.

Two of the bulletins affected Windows, while the remaining pair impacted Office. Four of the five vulnerabilities in the bulletin quartet were pegged by Microsoft with an exploitability index score of "1," meaning that the company expects attacks to materialize in the next 30 days.

But there were few surprises. Last week Microsoft revealed that the two Windows updates would address already-acknowledged bugs in Windows XP and Windows 7.

The most prominent of the pair was MS10-042, the update that addressed the vulnerability in Windows XP's Help and Support Center, a feature that lets users access and download Microsoft help files from the Web and can be used by support technicians to launch remote support tools on a local PC.

In early June, Tavis Ormandy, a security engineer who works for Google, published attack code for the bug -- which also affected Windows Server 2003 -- and immediately unleashed a heated debate. While some security researchers criticized Ormandy for taking the bug public, others rose to his defense, blasting both Microsoft and the press -- including Computerworld -- for linking Ormandy to his employer.

Ormandy disclosed the vulnerability five days after reporting it to Microsoft after he said the company wouldn't commit to a patching deadline. Microsoft has disputed that, claiming that it only told Ormandy it would need the rest of the week to decide.

Users and IT administrators should apply the MS10-042 patch as soon as possible, agreed several researchers. "This is actively being exploited to target XP desktop systems," said Jason Miller, the data and security team manager for Shavlik Technologies. Miller also noted that Windows XP remains the most-popular version of Windows on both consumer and business PCs, a fact that Microsoft itself stressed yesterday when a company executive said that XP was on 74% of all corporate machines.

"I'm impressed that Microsoft was able to do a turn-around on this as quickly as they did," said Miller. "Some bugs linger for months out there."

Microsoft was first told of the Help and Support Center flaw on June 5, and confirmed that by June 15, attacks were exploiting the bug.

The other Windows update, MS10-043, patches a single bug in the 64-bit version of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft confirmed the vulnerability in May with a security advisory, noting then that the flaw was in Windows' Canonical Display Driver, which blends the operating system's primary graphics interface, dubbed Graphics Device Interface (GDI), and DirectX to compose the desktop.

Just saying hi.
Cool. No ckEditor

Virgin gives $6k credit and still loses customer By Ian Hardy ⋅ July 8, 2010 6tweetsretweet

Remember a couple days ago that Calgary-resident named Jason Boutang who went on vacation in France, turned on his iPhone’s roaming and racked up a $8k bill by using a translator app and streaming live radio. Boutang said “Eight grand is pretty much extortion, it’s unjustifiable.”

I guess it actually does pay to become a “Member” of Virgin Mobile because Virgin has credited a whopping $6,000 off his bill to have it reduced to $2,000. Virgin’s Erica Faltous stated that “We reviewed the bill and since then, we’ve made the decision to re-rate his bill as though he had the roaming bundle. These are things that are evaluated on a case-by-case basis; hopefully it will never happen again.”

The kicker is not just the price reduction but that Boutang actually is now leaving Virgin Mobile to go with Rogers on Prepaid. So Virgin misses out on $6k in revenue and a subscriber.