Locals are winners at Peabody Awards
Local television stations were among today’s winners of the 69th annual Peabody Awards. From the press release: “Awards went to “Under Fire: Discrimination and Corruption in the Texas National Guard,” a startling investigative series by Houston’s KHOU-TV that led to the firing of three Texas Guard generals; “Derrion Albert Beating,” a series of reports by [...]
Use Bing Maps mashups to find your next apartment
Do you move a lot? Do you find it difficult to locate an apartment in the cool part of town when you land in a new city? Do you even know where the cool part of town is? Maybe you don’t want to live where the party crowd hangs out. Or perhaps you want to be near [...]
SimpleGEO launching as ‘iTunes for geo-data’
The Boulder, Colorado company SimpleGEO is debuting a set of tools to make it easy for companies to infuse their products with location-based services. And it’s getting quite a bit of buzz, largely because location isn’t easy. SimpleGEO allows you to store and retrieve data based on location, including data from other providers (like Localeze [...]
Portland bomb explodes in tweets and pins
What happens when there’s a big boom in a high-tech city? Do you turn on the TV? Punch up the newspaper’s website? Nope. You go to Twitter. A mysterious boom that shook homes around Portland resulted in thousands of Tweets with the hashtag #pdxboom, and soon thereafter, hundreds of pins on a Google map, marking [...]
Lasso looking to bring real-time, social web to local ads
Some of the hottest new companies in local advertising aren’t using technology that is all that new. Groupon, for example, attracted $30 million in funding based on a simple once-a-day email that is powered by a direct sales force. But that doesn’t mean that innovation isn’t happening. Companies like Paper G are using technology to [...]
Embracing a new media paradigm
While media executives sat in their leather-trimmed offices and looked out their windows onto streets filled with the denizens of their cities, new media content creators from all corners of the globe emerged. Once people found their voices and the means to shepherd them beyond their audible range, they realized that they could attract sizeable [...]
Notes: Biz ideas you’ll hate, Ways to motivate, Sinclair deal
Noted, as the Northeast is declared a national swimming pool: Here are five innovative business ideas you’ll probably hate. Hint: “Marketing is a Waste of Money.” (Inc.) As long as we’re on “fives,” here are five ways to fire up your employees. (NextLevel Blog, Via Smartbrief) Jeff Jarvis presents his “Bill of Rights in Cyberspace” [...]
National Geograpic wins magazine site of the year
We’re all about local here, but when there’s a good lesson or two to be learned from a non-local site, we like to pass it along. And today’s lesson comes from National Geographic, which has won AdWeek’s magazine website of the year award. What does the site do so well? “The site opens with a [...]
Video: Browsing the iApp store
MacStories shares video it says was sent to them, purportedly showing how the iApp section of the iTunes store will look. One commenter writes that this was done with Apple’s simulator. We can’t verify, but there’s no reason to think this is too far from the experience – it’s pretty consistent with the other sections [...]
Weekend Fun: The Virtual Choir
This is breathtaking. Composer Eric Whitacre sent out sheet music for his all-voice composition “Lux Arumque” and asked people to sing parts on their webcam. The result is astonishing: 185 voices from 12 countries pieced together. If all Whitacre had done was mix the audio – that would have been a remarkable achievement. But the [...]
Facebook ‘Like’ button to rival Retweet tag?
He Diggs. She Stumbles. They Retweet. You Buzz. WE… With the coming of a universal Facebook “Like” button, we might be doing something new with content we find on the web. Content sharing buttons are ubiquitous across Internet sites. We tag, bookmark, and tweet articles to take a degree of ownership over content we discover online. [...]
Local notes: Check.in, iPad, Google location search
- Brightkite debuts a universal check-in service called Check.in (Mashable) – WSJ to charge $17.99 a month for iPad subscription? (Engadget) – Ouch! Newspapers total revenue plunged 27.2 percent in 2009 (PaidContent) – Facebook hires top Google ad exec to grow advertising business (Inside Facebook) – Location may play more visible role in Google web [...]
ESPNNewYork.com to launch April 2nd
ESPN’s local march continues with the upcoming launch of its New York site, timed to coincide with the Yankees-Red Sox game at Fenway Park on April 2nd. The former sports editor of the New York Daily News, Leon Carter, will edit ESPNNewYork.com, which currently features a “coming soon” banner. ESPN has already launched in Chicago, [...]
Bing Maps launching Foursquare app
Just like you can with Twitter, you’ll soon be able to see Foursquare check-ins, mayorships, badges and tips as an app layer over Bing Maps. “Let’s say you’re travelling to New York City for the week, but you don’t know what’s hot in Greenwich Village,” explains Bing’s Todd Schwartz. “Selecting the foursquare Map App in [...]
Public Broadcasting reveals local news project
Last year, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced a new project to launch local multimedia news projects in seven local regions in collaboration with its member TV and radio stations. Today, the CPB revealed a few details of the project — “a ground-breaking new approach to newsgathering and its distribution” that it calls Local Journalism [...]
EveryBlock expands to Portland
The local data and news site EveryBlock.com has added Portland, Oregon to its list of cities. “Portland has consistently been one of the most voted-for cities in our homepage poll,” explains EveryBlock’s Adrian Holovaty. “But what helped make it happen was the City of Portland’s new open data initiative, launched a few days ago, which [...]
UNC taps Baltimore Sun editor to lead new experiment
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced an ambitious new project this week, transforming part of its J-school into a research center that studies products, audiences and communities that form around the news. The school tapped Carolina alum Monty Cook, senior vice president and editor of The Baltimore Sun and baltimoresun.com, to lead [...]
Boston.com launches own video news update
Boston.com has launched its own midday news update, a 90-second take on the day’s news. Boston.com is the online home of the Boston Globe, and the update is called GlobeToday. The update is more of a straightforward, conventional video rather than the New York Times take, which is more of a behind-the-scenes-er. You can watch [...]
