My Leave of Presence: An update http://
j.mp/YRRHq8

—
Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) April 03, 2013

Only a day before legendary film critic, Roger Ebert, passed away, he tweeted a final farewell at the Chicago-Sun Times, promising to pioneer new digital projects, in addition to a hefty schedule of movie reviews. At the ripe age of 70 and the cheery survivor of salivary cancer that left him him without a jaw or voice, Ebert proved that neither age nor disease could stand in the way of a pioneering mind.

After cancer stole Ebert’s powers of speech, he turned to Twitter, becoming an instant sensation. “But there’s something seductive about it: The stream, the flow, the chatter, the sudden bursts of news, the snark, the gossip, time itself tweet-tweet-tweeting away,” he wrote for the Times.

As of less than a month ago, his movie whit was still sharp as ever.

G.I.JOE: RETALIATION. Maybe you should just play with your dolls instead. Richard Roeper's review on my site: http://
j.mp/111oN7L

—
Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) March 30, 2013

He even braved the stage at TED, giving a speech entirely read by Apple’s monotone voice app, and the help of his close confidants. “People who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems,” he said, ” I’ve got to say, in first grade, they said I talked too much, and now I still can.”

His optimism for technology is worth quoting, at length:

All of this has happened in the blink of an eye. It is unimaginable what will happen next. It makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history. Indeed, I am lucky to live in history at all, because without intelligence and memory there is no history. For billions of years, the universe evolved completely without notice. Now we live in the age of the Internet, which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness. And because of it, I can communicate as well as I ever could. We are born into a box of time and space. We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others.

For me, the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence. I cannot speak; I can only type so fast. Computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated, but with my computer, I can communicate more widelythan ever before. I feel as if my blog, my email, Twitter and Facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation. They aren’t an improvement, but they’re the best I can do. They give me a way to speak. Not everybody has the patience of my wife, Chaz.

But online, everybody speaks at the same speed.

Ebert received an immediate outpouring of support from every imaginable outlet and personality, with links to past gems

Ever a class act, @EbertChicago made me love movies even more. bit.ly/Y0z147 #RIP

—
Seth Green (@SethGreen) April 04, 2013

Maltin: “[Ebert] legitimized the idea of talking about movies, of discussing and debating the merits of movies” wapo.st/10CmlRg

—
The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) April 04, 2013

RT @pjdoland: Nothing was funnier than Siskel and Ebert when the camera stopped: buff.ly/XTawdu

—

Facebook is adding a new section to users’ About pages on their Timeline that showcases the social games they play.

The games section is similar to the movies, books, TV and music sections launched with the latest profile redesign earlier this month. It displays the games users have recently played and all those that they’ve Liked. Users can customize the order of their About page to feature games more prominently near the top or hide it completely.

However, unlike those other sections for entertainment, the games section does not include a list of games users “want to play.”

Facebook says the games section will appear for users who have played at least one social game in the last 30 days or who have Liked a game’s fan page.

Developers do not need to make any code changes for their games to appear in this section. However, they can create custom “collections,” standalone sections for their app so that users can highlight their achievements in a particular game. This requires some configuration and approval by Facebook. Here is a non-game example from Foursquare:

Previously, Facebook allowed users to sort their Timeline by games-only activity, which would show summaries about the games they played, levels they passed or virtual goods they collected, for example. This option wasn’t easily discoverable and likely didn’t help drive traffic to games. Facebook also occasionally displayed a “games report” module directly on Timeline, but users couldn’t control where it appeared on their profile or if it showed up at all. The new games and app collections seemed aimed at giving users more options to show off what is most important to them and increase app discovery with more compelling images and easier-to-find modules.

Earlier this week Facebook announced that more than 250 million people are playing games on the social network every month. The company says game installs on the web platform are up 75 percent from where they were in March 2012.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

We’ve all been there: you’ll be watching a movie when someone familiar enters the frame, and you just can’t place a name to the face. Well, if you’re watching said movie on an Android tablet, those days may soon be over. Google has just pushed out an update to its Play Movies & TV app lets users tap into the search giant’s Knowledge Graph as soon as they pause a flick.

Long story short, users who pause in the middle of a supported film or TV episode will be treated to “info cards” that display related information like related films and actor profiles. It sounds novel enough, but it’s really the little touches that seem the most impressive — tapping on a character’s face for instance prompts the app to identify the person’s face to populate the info card with the right actor info, and it’s even savvy enough to identify background music. Granted, this isn’t a strictly new concept (the Google Play Books app has been able to this for the past six months or so), but it’s certainly a welcome addition to the Google video fold.

A brief aside: for all the ink (digital and otherwise) spilt on the promise of tablets as an entertainment companion, this is easily one of the neater steps forward for mobile video that I’ve seen. Maybe it’s just me, but I hardly ever feel the compulsion to socially share my media consumption habits — well, beyond dropping the occasional Doctor Who reference in the TechCrunch backchannel that is. Other apps may focus on bringing those conversations to the fore, surfacing context-sensitive information in an unobtrusive way is a more substantive addition in my book.

Sadly, the scope of the feature is pretty limited for now — according to Google’s list those info cards will only appear in a about 192 movies (though its working to build out its library of supported titles), and even then the cards will only appear if you’re using the app on a tablet running Android 4.0 or later in the United States. Yeesh. Google eventually aims to roll out this feature on a wider scale, but there’s no word yet on when you trivia-hungry international types will be able to get in on the fun.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Paul (not his real name) has never seen the movie The Divide. He’s a horror buff and sometimes tries to find odd and decidedly bad flicks to watch with his wife. The Divide would have fit the bill. It made $16,700 at the box office – that amounts to about 2,100 tickets sold – and closed with $130,839 in the bank. It cost $3 million to make.

The reviews, not surprisingly, were uniformly bad. “Well, yes. I’m another person who got suckered into watching this piece of garbage. The most important thing you need to know about this movie is that it’s just not worth spending two hours of your life to watch it. It’s just bad,” wrote one IMDb user.

“The characters are so cliché and the dialogue is so poorly written that any self-respecting horror lover would quickly roll their eyes, eject the DVD and watch The Mist on cable before falling asleep in his or her clothes,” wrote another. It’s one of those movies for a very specific audience. For guys like Paul.

Paul also admits to occasionally torrenting hard-to-find films. But he’s never seen The Divide. He never downloaded it. I believe him.

However, a month ago, Paul got a letter from his ISP accusing him of torrenting a copy of the file at midnight one lazy evening. His ISP informed him that his IP address, an identifier that, in truth, constantly changes for most Internet users, was identified as being part of the download. Because of this, he’s being sued.

Paul is now in the strange world of copyright trolls, companies that produce or license content for the sole purpose of suing users who pirate it – even inadvertently.

How did Paul get caught? And what is his recourse now that he’s been fingered as a pirate? The answers to those questions are mired in some of the most contentious legal wrangling ever and is the basis of an entire industry, one dedicated to producing Internet-based “bait cars” that allow copyright holders to see a trickle of money for even the arguably worst content imaginable.
First, a brief primer on BitTorrent. When a file, a document, say, is put on BitTorrent, a user makes it available as a seed. This seed is downloaded a few times by other users – peers – and then, once enough copies are available, the peers begin serving up parts of that file. Think of it as a group of people sharing a candle. The first person lights another person’s candle and so on. Eventually, the holder of the original flame is forgotten and the flame is self-perpetuating. While this metaphor isn’t completely accurate, it works well enough.

According to Paul’s ISP, then, Paul’s computer held the flame for a brief period, serving up all or some of The Divide to other users. Whether this is true or not is the biggest problem in this sort of copyright law. If Paul served up a packet inadvertently, is it his fault? If he only served up one packet versus the entire file, is he at fault? And how can ISPs prove beyond a doubt that Paul is the culprit here? They can’t.

The DMCA complaint Paul received came from R&D Film 1, LCC, represented by attorneys Michael Heirl and Todd Pankhurst of Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd. in Chicago. The complaint cited him by IP address and cited this file, a 720p Blu-Ray rip release by BHRG. In the case of The Pirate Bay, the file was seeded by a user called maximersk, who has seeded a number of videos and television programs from various “groups.”

It is important to note that The Divide is still available for download.

Files produced by various groups – in this case BHRG – differ in quality and availability. There are many versions of The Divide, including higher- and lower-resolution copies.

But only this copy is seeing lawsuits thrown at it. If the lawsuit defendants had picked another copy, any other copy, they would have been in the clear. Clearly this particular 720p, high-resolution copy of The Divide is being watched. Every time someone shared a little bit of it, chances are one of the seeders “caught” the IP address of the requester. The seeder made a list, forwarded that list to the appropriate ISPs, and then prepared their case. The IP addresses are sent with a timestamp (which could be wrong) and, as we all know, IP addresses are ephemeral things. Again, Paul was no angel, but he got caught in a dragnet that had little to do with him.

“If entrapment wasn’t done by government entities this would be entrapment,” said Robert Z. Cashman, a patent attorney who runs a website dedicated to researching copyright trolls.
Ross Dinerstein, the R and the D in R&D, is an indie film producer and a nice guy. You can see him chatting about a movie called The Pact here. He lives in Los Angeles and has the round, boyish face of a Hollywood business man focused more on doing deals than going gluten-free. He was executive producer for Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a beautiful piece of indie documentary filmmaking that could be considered a masterpiece. I spoke to him and he laid out his case.

“I’m a producer. I don’t have the bandwidth to chase pirates, so I hired a specialist to handle it,” he said. “As far as I know, [the people being sued] get trapped by stealing copyrighted material which is not a good idea.”

It’s hard to dump the blame on Dinerstein or anyone like him. While he does see a small amount of money from these lawsuits, he has essentially outsourced their enforcement to a company called GuardaLey, a firm that rose to infamy for offering software products and anti-piracy services whose “evidence gathering techniques are far from optimal.” Attorney Jason Sweet told TorrentFreak:

GuardaLey did not respond to requests for an interview, and R&D Film 1 LLC’s counsel at Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, Ltd. said “No comment.”

Disconnecting Dinerstein from GuardaLey is obviously problematic, but let’s assume, for the sake of sanity, that the movie was made in good faith and that his goal was to show people a good time. Who, then, is at fault? Dinerstein for wanting what is, by all rights, his? Or GuardaLay for essentially expressing a level of incompetence that would get most software services houses fired?

Lawsuits like this one started cropping up in 2010 and have risen in intensity since. Pop over here and search for copyright cases with the party name “Doe 1-” in any court. You’ll see quite a few cases, many of them dealing with exactly this type of situation.

Remember that it doesn’t have to be this way. The easiest way to have something removed from the Internet is through a simple DMCA filing. Takedown notices like this one to Google are addressed almost immediately, which is often a boon for copyright holders, but is also a club for those wishing to hide information, as was evidenced in a case against a WordPress user whose plagiarist requested a takedown notice for blog posts they had copied.

There is obviously little monetary value in these notices, but they do remove offending content, for the most part, in a few keystrokes. It’s a method of first resort and makes the most sense for copyright holders.

GuardaLey has a stable of law firms that send out these letters in hopes that customers will settle. If they don’t – if the cases go to court or they are ignored – they stand to lose money. The sweet spot, then, is in those too cowed not to react and too confused to find legal representation.

“My folks just got served a subpoena,” wrote the relative of one of the victims. “They are elderly and I know did nothing wrong; possibly someone else using their IP address. I’m thinking either hiring an attorney as a shield, or doing nothing and praying it goes away. I will not have them appear in court or settle. What do you suggest?”

Others, like a 16-year-old defendant, are worried the lawsuit will ruin their family. Still others see it as a scam.

One user received a subpoena after watching a Mr. Rogers episode online. “There is no reason for them to come after me, my kids, or any of the other thousand viewers, unless stopping ‘piracy’ for copyright trolls is not their real intent.”

Copyright trolling efforts like these are not new. Cashman has been following them for years.

“Copyright trolls are generally production studios and/or they’re enterprising attorneys who have decided that it is more profitable for them to sue defendants and elicit multi-thousand-dollar settlements from accused defendants rather than sell tickets or copies of their copyrighted films at retail or discount prices,” he said. “A porn production company could make millions suing defendants rather than promoting $20 per-month memberships at their websites. For these reasons, these lawsuits in their post-Napster, post-Grokster form took shape.”

But what right do these trolls have to ask for outrageous sums? In copyright law there is a duality. On one hand, you can say that the studio is out one paying customer – $20 at most for the ticket and a few bucks more for popcorn. On the other, you can say that the downloader has, inadvertently, become a pirate distributor. That’s partially why it’s easy for these guys to go after BitTorrent users (that and the ubiquity of the service.)

“Their filings for copyright infringement are probably correct — if a downloader made an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted file, they could probably be held liable for copyright infringement. I am hedging on this statement because I would like to see the laws limited to those who enjoy a financial gain from this infringement, and I do not consider the ‘loss of a movie ticket or sale’ to be substantial enough to sue a defendant for $150,000,” said Cashman.

So somehow Paul’s IP address got on R&D/GuardaLey’s list. They sent a letter to the ISP asking for the specific data pertaining to the accused user, and the ISP, thanks to the DMCA, is forced to comply. In fact, companies will cry “The DMCA made me do it” at the drop of a hat these days, another issue that frustrates content producers to no end.

So what now?
“Don’t be fooled — these trolls can be fought using the same arguments as any of the others. An IP address still does not conclusively link to the subscriber as the downloader,” said Cashman.

“Each of these cases suffered from the same issues which would prevent them from going to trial — lack of personal jurisdiction, improper joinder of accused defendants, and that there were clear patterns in the rulings of the judges across the U.S. where they were clearly misunderstanding what was the real intention of these copyright trolls, and they were denying motions to quash and attempts of the internet users to prevent the copyright trolls from obtaining their contact information,” he said.

Jeffrey Antonelli, an anti-troll lawyer, told us that before those attacked do anything they should confirm that their computers are compromised or that a relative hasn’t been visiting The Pirate Bay without their knowledge.

Then you have to gamble. Do you hire a lawyer and forge ahead or ignore the notice?

“I have represented a number of people who were sued because they ignored the letters. It’s about trying to determine that chance, it’s difficult, and it would be helpful to have legal advice. You can be well-informed by reading the relevant sources. Copyright Trolls and Die, Troll, Die are both good sources and both are being sued by some copyright trolls,” he said.

Again, is this Dinerstein’s fault? No, said Antonelli. “Starting from the presumption that copyright owners – bona fide business owners that are providing content. With those assumptions, I don’t think it’s necessarily bad. I do have issues with the manner in which those people are doing their investigations/litigation and with the selection of people they actually decide to sue.”

Antonelli said Paul is looking at a claim of about $500-$750.

“Other law firms charge more, my firm is able to charge less. Litigation is quite a bit more expensive. Litigation can easily be up to $5,000-$6,000 and can quickly escalate to $50,000 if you’re the main defendant. It’s very burdensome. There should be strict rules on the ability to enforce copyrights through ISP subpoenas.”

In the end, copyright trolling is a sneak attack on folks who may or may not be doing anything wrong. While certainly The Divide is a piece of intellectual property that deserves protection, things break down when it is used as bait to gather lucrative lawsuits. Entire film studios produce second-rate movies to, presumably, show on Netflix and other services and, sadly, use to power these lawsuits. While perhaps the The Divide isn’t such a movie, the chances look good.

It appears to me as if these movie studios have been making second-rate movies for some time, more as a hobby as far as I’m concerned. Setting up a holding company and transferring the copyright to the holding company so that they could sue for copyright infringement appears to be a ‘business model’ of what is known as ‘IP monetization’ that lawyers are so excited about.

“In other words, they say: ‘It’s a bad economy, so let’s threaten to, but not sue the pants off of anyone who downloads our content,’” he said.

Sadly, for folks like Paul, sometimes that strategy works.

With reporting by Michael Seo

[Illustration: Bryce Durbin]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A few years ago, E.ventures co-founder Tom Gieselmann decided to try to use data to give his firm a competitive advantage. And so he built a tracking tool to keep tabs on how different web properties were growing over time. The Daily Gieselmann, named after its founder, has been used by the company internally over that time. But it’s now being opened up for anyone to use.

Rather than rely strictly on metrics provided by the companies that E.ventures was looking to invest in, the Daily Gieselmann gave the firm a more objective look at how potential and existing investments were doing. The platform also keeps screenshots of every new site indexed, so that users can quickly see what they are.

Using third-party data from Alexa and other providers, the internal dashboard helped the firm determine which companies were adding users and increasing engagement, which were stalled, and which were actually declining. It’s also a great way to discover under-the-radar companies to put money into.

The platform enables folks at E.ventures to get updates on these companies daily. But more importantly, it sees the effects of user growth over time. Gieselmann sends out a weekly newsletter with new entrants to the growth index, and also makes note of companies and websites that are already on it, but have hit record highs.

While Alexa is generally an imperfect tool for absolute traffic or page rank, E.ventures has found that it does a pretty good job of measuring growth over time. That said, rather than rely solely on the company’s trending data, E.ventures actually captures the rankings daily and does its own trend analysis based on the data over time.

Also, it’s not just Alexa — the Daily Gieselmann also takes into account data from iTunes: the App Store, eBooks, Movies and TV purchases. (Gieselmann says he’s not that interested in music, which is why the dashboard doesn’t also track music sales.) Using the CrunchBase API, the Daily Geiselmann also lets users cross-reference ranking and trend data across company and investor info that has been collected over the years.

While the internal E.ventures dashboard was useful to people like Gieselmann, who knew the right tags to tease data out of it, it wouldn’t be very useful to the average user. That is, until recently, when the team threw a more useful user interface on it. Now, other data junkies can mine the data that E.ventures has collected over the years.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook just announced that it’s rolling out a Timeline redesign that will make it easier to show off your favorite books, movies, music, and TV shows, either that you’ve Liked or consumed through apps like Flixster, Netflix, and Goodreads. It pushes app activity to a thinner column on the left while collecting all your posts directly to Facebook on the right.

The idea of sharing your favorites is hardly new — indeed, it was one of the only things you could do all those yours ago in the initial version Facebook. The Profile Boxes section at one point gave users more Myspace-style customization options.

Eventually that got too spammy and unpredictable so Facebook turned off the feature, and Likes have continued to get less prominent ever since. For many, Facebook interests became an untended thicket of random things you Liked or friends asked you to Like. With the new design, it looks like the profile is getting more customizable again.

Prior to today’s official announcement, the single-column Timeline design was rolled out in New Zealand, as spotted by ABC, and Inside Facebook noticed tests of a more customizable About page last week

Now Facebook has officially announced the changes, and explains that the redesign moves all your manually entered posts to the right side of the screen, with recent activity moving to the left side. This creates a less “look left then look right” reading experience, as the two columns have very different types of information By default, the top left of your Timeline now shows your core About details, followed by sections about Friends, Photos, Places. Beyond those, you get the option to add other third-party apps like Quora or content types like Movies to the front page of your Timeline.

There’s a new navigation bar just below your Timeline cover that lets you switch between the main view and someone’s About section, friends, photos, and a drop-down list of other apps. If you dive into your About tab, a new Edit Sections menu lets you select and deselect apps and content types to appear on your Timeline and About page. So if you’re all about Pinterest and checkins you can feature those, or if you love watching TV shows and taking Instagrams you can highlight that activity. App developers can read more about how to take use these new capabilities in this developer blog post.

When you look at your About sections, you’ll see a section for things you’ve read/watched/listened to, another for things you want to read/watch/listen, and a third for Likes. It also offers suggestions for other content to add to your profile, and with just a couple of clicks you can say “want to watch” or whatever.

As with most Facebook announcements, there’s a mission-driven motive for the changes, but also a side effect that aids monetization. Facebook wants people to feel their Timeline represents their identity. The apps we use and media we consume increasingly define us, and this redesign shows them off. But getting people to share more through apps also increases developer loyalty and gives Facebook valuable ad targeting data about what people do, not just what they Like. I could also imagine media companies buying space in the suggested content sections.

Overall, by making Timeline more of a home for us online, Facebook could hold on to its place as the center of many people’s digital identities.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Gary Wang, the founder of China’s largest online video site Tudou.com, now plans to launch a Beijing-based animated film studio that the Wall Street Journal calls “China’s answer to Pixar” on April 1. Wang says he has already secured “tens of millions of dollars” in funding from an undisclosed international group of investors–and he’s looking to staff his studio with experts from the U.S. so his movies can compete with Hollywood imports. Wang said he has already gone on a two-week scouting trip to San Francisco and Los Angeles for senior animators, directors, and storyboard artists.

The studio will produce films mostly for the local market, but as Tech In Asia notes, only a few movies from abroad are permitted access to Chinese cinemas each year. China’s movie industry, which was worth $2.74 billion, is still relatively small, but growing rapidly, so Wang has a good chance of creating blockbusters.

After founding Tudou in 2005, Wang served as CEO, steering the company to a merger with rival Youku in a $1 billion stock deal that was dubbed China’s biggest-ever tech deal. Last year, Wang announced his retirement from Tudou and said he’d be chasing his “next interesting dream” (and now we see what Wang was dreaming about).

Wang believes it’s the right time to open a film studio in China because of an improving environment for film distribution, promotion and copyright in that country, as well as an uptick in movie theater screens and rising income levels in urban areas. Wang cautions, however, that it will take investor several years before they see a return because of the film production cycle. U.S. studios he’ll be competing with include DreamWorks, which is currently building a studio near Shanghai under the name Oriental DreamWorks, a joint venture with China Media Capital, Shanghai Media Group, and Shanghai Alliance Investment. DreamWorks enjoyed success in China when its Kung Fu Panda franchise became a massive hit, and hope its winning streak will continue when “Kung Fu Panda 3″ is completed by Oriental DreamWorks in 2016.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is testing new built-in Open Graph actions for lifestyle apps, including a “rated” action for books, movies and other content.

The new actions, which were pointed out to us by developer Tom Waddington, can be found in Facebook’s Open Graph action schemas for books and videos. There are new actions for “rate” and “quote,” along with “wants to read” and “wants to watch.” “Review” seems to be a new built-in object type, which can apply to reviews for books, movies, TV shows and episodes or other forms of content. There also seems to be a new way for users to share the percentage of a book they’ve completed. “Quote” is likely a way to share a particular passage.

Facebook tells us it has nothing to announce at this time, but it appears book app Goodreads is already testing some of these new Open Graph features. It has implemented the “rated” action and allowed users to share their star rating. According to Facebook’s Open Graph schemas, it seems developers could also enable users to share a number rating or a link to a review page instead of stars.

Open Graph is Facebook’s infrastructure for actions and objects in its network. It’s possible for developers to add their own custom nouns and verbs to the Open Graph, but Facebook also offers some that are “built in.” For example, built-in objects include articles, books and videos. Built-in actions include read and watch. What this means is all apps where users watch videos use the built-in watch action, and activity from those apps has semantic meaning and can be aggregated. Follow and Like are other built-in actions. More so than custom actions, built-in actions help Facebook understand the relationship between objects so that it can properly organize them in News Feed, Timeline aggregations and eventually search.

If Facebook rolls out the new actions and objects related to books and video content, for example, it could help users share more stories about the media they interact with and help users discover more entertainment through their friends. In the future, users might be able to see what’s on a friend’s “want to read” list or see friends’ ratings for a new movie.

In October last year, Facebook’s Chris Maliwat spoke about how the company would likely expand its pool of built-in actions.

“In the future, what you’ll see us doing more is translating natural language into the graph, into graph actions,” Maliwat said. “You’ll see more built-in actions that feel natural.”

With Facebook looking to encourage developers to build more lifestyle apps around books, movies and fitness, it makes sense that “rated” and other book-related features would be among the things the social network would be testing right now. We’ll likely see even more throughout the year.

Facebook has also made other recent moves toward being a platform for users to share ratings for places and apps, which get factored into the company’s search and recommendation algorithms. Providing better infrastructure for rating books and movies could give Facebook additional data for organizing and suggesting different types of content for users in Graph Search and News Feed.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

“Iron Man” was one of the biggest winners during the Super Bowl blackout on Sunday. The Paramount Pictures film received as many as 2,000 new Facebook fans per minute following its commercial, which happened to be the first one CBS cut to after the power in the Superdome went out during the big game.

The “Iron Man” page exceeded the next largest Super Bowl advertiser’s growth by a factor of seven, according to data provided by Facebook analytics and advertising company Optimal. This was largely because the commercial for the third film in the comic book franchise included a call to action to see an extended trailer on the movie’s Facebook page. Perhaps because of the game delay from the power outage, viewers were more likely to turn to the social network and seek out the page. Click here for a closer look at the graph below and to compare the growth of other Super Bowl advertisers.

Optimal notes that not only were viewers coming to the page and viewing the extended trailer, but they were also sharing it. The video post has more than 59,000 shares and 88,000 Likes. More than 57 percent of users who shared the trailer were women with an average age of 33. This demographic was 7 times less likely to have been a fan of “Iron Man” before Sunday, according to Optimal’s Audience Matrix. The U.S. fanbase of the page skews 61 percent male with an average age of 24.

From the distribution of Likes per minute, it does not appear as though the “Iron Man” page was running Facebook ads on Sunday, so the new fans are most likely the result of Super Bowl advertising and organic News Feed stories about users’ friends interacting with the page.

“Iron Man” also gained significantly more fans than other movies that advertised during the Super Bowl. “Oz The Great and Powerful,” which included the hashtag #disneyoz after its commercial but no mention of Facebook, got only a slight bump in new fans. “Star Trek” barely registers on the graph below, as it was gaining fewer than 17 new Likes per minute. The commercial for that movie included a call to action to download an iOS app from the App Store, but no mentions of social media pages.

“Fast & Furious 6″ was another movie that advertised during the Super Bowl and included a Facebook mention, but Optimal did not track the Likes by minute for the page. According to our own PageData tracking tool, the movie’s page gained 214,976 new Likes that day, nearly 6 times more than the day before. Its three posts on Sunday received between 16,000 and 60,000 shares each, though we don’t have data on how many of those shares were likely from new fans versus the franchise’s more than 24 million existing fans.

Optimal says the trends from the Super Bowl are a reminder of how television and social media can work together to drive awareness and engagement for a brand. Advertisers wouldn’t have been able to predict the blackout, but they could perhaps consider other ways to time their promotions to maximize the opportunities for users to take action on or offline. The company wrote in a blog post:

“Although the blackout was accidental, the minute-by-minute social data shows the potential for interplay between television, online content and social sharing, and how advertisers need to think holistically about how channels work together to create incremental reach and interest in their products.  In Iron Man 3’s case, the promise of exclusive online content, a ready social audience plus a bit of lucky timing became the fuel that rapidly propelled Tony Stark’s image to a new audience.”

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

The proliferation of organized “hackathons” has been a big story over the past few years. Quite a few developers that I’m friends with see them as a way to keep themselves sharp on their own products and ideas, especially when a different company is the one putting the event on. I recently attended, and judged, a Foursquare hackathon in San Francisco, and saw about 20 presentations from some pros and beginners alike.

Usually the participants hack away on an idea, or series of ideas, over a 24-hour period. During the hacking, teams are built, careers can be made, and new features and companies can be found if people are paying close enough attention. At the Foursquare hackathon, where the participants hacked away on Foursquare’s API, as well as some other sponsors’, I found the things you’d expect at a hackathon – stickers, beer, pizza and geeks.

After attending quite a few of these hackathons in San Francisco, New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle, Mexico and Israel, I’ve found that this is a great testing ground to get ready for pitching VCs for the product you want to spend all of your time working on. Most of the projects aren’t ready for prime time, but facing judges and an audience with a five-minute presentation is a great way to sharpen your pitch skills.

Some of these things might seem obvious, but they can serve as a reminder for you.

Have something finished

There are only so many hours in a day – and in a hackathon. Sometimes, you don’t get your project finished, and you go ahead and present anyway. That’s pretty cool, but it’s a good idea to focus on having something finished. Even if you have to divert from your original idea, showing something that works is putting your best foot forward.

If there are recruiters at the hackathon, they want to see nimble teams that can move and shake in any situation. Simply “running out of time” isn’t an excuse, it’s a hackathon after all, so hack your way through the stumbling blocks. Even if you don’t win, you’ll show your peers that you can get shit done.

At the Foursquare hackathon, there were a few teams that said that they didn’t realize how hard their idea was until the first few hours of hacking on it. When you say that to yourself, it’s time to start on something else, so have a few backup ideas written down before you get cranking. Having nothing to show for all of your hard work bums everyone out.

Explain exactly what it does

Yes, after 10 or 20 hours of coding, you might find it difficult to be coherent in front of an audience. Over the past few hackathons I’ve been to, I’ve witnessed teams trying to explain all of the technical aspects of what they just worked on, but the judges and audience just want to know what it does and then see it work.

If your idea and project is cool enough, you’ll be immediately surrounded by curious coders who’d like to hear about how you did this part or that part. Keep it short and simple, so everyone watching can “see themselves” trying out what you just made. This is what you need to prepare when you are ready to pitch a VC one day. If you can’t explain exactly what your “thing” does, you won’t make it too far.

Discuss who it’s for

So you’ve shown your new app that uses the Foursquare API to show all of the ice cream stores in California with layers of weather information on top of it. That’s pretty cool, and it worked! The next thing that you have to explain is who this product is for. Is it for kids? Is it for ice cream enthusiasts?

Saying that the product is for “everyone” shows that you really didn’t think about it. Even Instagram had to think about who their app was for, and maybe it was for people who loved to take pictures but didn’t want to edit them. That simple explanation got them past all of the boring questions when looking for investment.

When you’re in a hackathon, you should be working on your pitch in parallel with the progress of your project. Your idea will change during the competition, and the pitch must change, too. Believe me, I’ve heard pitches that match a product that I didn’t see demoed. They probably wrote the pitch before they started coding.

Have next steps

Now that the judges and audience understand what you’ve created, who you’ve created it for, and seen that it works, they will want to know where you see yourself taking this. Basically, “What are the next steps?” At hackathons, I’d say that the answer is “we don’t know yet” about 75 percent of the time. While you aren’t expected to quit your current job to switch over to this new project, it is a good idea to have a prepared answer for this, or assert it during your pitch.

If you’ve created a fun game, maybe you won’t be doing anything else with it at all, and that’s okay. If you’ve created something cool that’s a feature, and not a product, maybe you can open source it and put it on GitHub for other developers to use. When you have an answer for that question, it means that you value your work.

How many hackathons is enough?

There’s probably no set amount of hackathons that you should attend before you venture out for funding or try to find a next job. If anything, it’s a great way to keep your coding skills in the now, keep updated on the latest technologies and nuances of popular APIs, meet new people and network a little.

At the Foursquare hackathon, where a team called Droptask won the main prize, I was on a judging panel with two very prominent VCs in Silicon Valley. Will this team get funded for the project? You never know. Maybe Foursquare might hire them for their own team. You won’t even know what could happen if you don’t step out and do something.

What does Droptask do?

You can connect your Foursquare account to the service, and based on where you are, you can assign tasks or accept tasks based on what you need and where you need it. For example, you could be checked into Starbucks, and someone could set up a task to hold a place in line for them. You could accept it. It’s quite brilliant, and in the vain of services like Exec and Taskrabbit, except that there’s no money changing hands. It’s all fun.

Who’s it for?

Droptask is for people who live in big cities like San Francisco or New York City, where there are a lot of lines and a lot of people using a service like Foursquare.

What are the next steps?

The team was pretty excited about their project and they plan on adding more features to it, potentially allowing you to see where all of your Foursquare friends are, then allow you to assign them a task on the spot. Basically, if you were at the movies, I could then ask you to buy me a ticket through Droptask.

You’ll be asked quite a few questions if you have the interest of the judges, so make sure that you get the “boring stuff” out of the way during your presentation. If you do that, then the judges might want to get to know you better and could even give you suggestions to take something to the next level.

Hackathons are usually free, and it’s more than just the free beer, pizza and sticker. You can check out all of the winners from the Foursquare hackathon here, and maybe you’ll find something that you like. I’ll be interviewing some of these teams later in the week, as well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch