Son of SoTI

The next version of Flip’s cutesy Mino pocket camcorder will have a built-in Wi-Fi connection.

The Mino was a huge hit when it first hit the market last year, practically inventing a whole new product genre all on its own. Flip followed it up with the MinoHD earlier this year, which sweetened the deal by bringing high-def shooting to the table.

But with rivals great and small snapping at its heels, Flip is now dangling wireless capability in front of pocket cam enthusiasts, which will let you fling video effortlessly from the Flip to your computer without the need for the pop-out USB connector.

Wi-Fi aside, the third-gen Flip Mino will also feature a much bigger screen, which will slide back to reveal the record and menu buttons tucked away underneath, though it won’t be a touchscreen. The only bad news is that you’ll have to wait until early next year to get your hands on one.
Read Next Flip Mino will have Wi-Fi on FiveFWD

Image via Wikipedia

I've spent a fair amount of time reading university social media policies over the past few weeks. Here's an example that is representative of how most universities are approaching it:

University Officially Recognized Social Media Accounts

The University has established an application process for groups to be recognized by the University as official social media accounts.

The policy only applies to social media accounts created to represent groups, departments, programs, entities, etc. and does not apply to private individual accounts.

In other words, you're only allowed to participate as a department or some other organizational entity. No personal identities allowed. If you're using your real name you're on your own. Do not speak for the university. Don't even think about wearing your university hat.

This is sad. It's the old industrial era concept of a work and personal life. Like we're naturally schizophrenic? We all know this is a total myth. These attempts to remove the person from their social media strategies (and that's what they are, strategies) are doomed to fail.

I found the whole exercise of looking at the policies a bit depressing. So when I saw this blog post by Andrew Douglas it spoke to me: B2B's Big Hurdle: Developing a personality in social media:

Know what doesn't work in social media? Twitter or blog posts by nameless corporations. And that's going to be the biggest hurdle for people like me who do B2B public relations.

The rules of successful social media engagement -- frequent updates, transparency, engagement with other users, personality -- don't mesh with corporate PR 1.0.

Or university PR 1.0. The approaches the universities are taking to social media are not going to work. They are not designed to be engaging, conversational, or transparent. They will lead to the old push, broadcast, sterile world of old. This is not what the people are wanting. You can't get real while hiding behind an organizational facade.

So here's my advice. Dump the policies. They aren't going to work anyway. Turn your faculty and staff loose. Tell them they represent the university 24x7. Just like they represent themselves 24x7. The only policy required is common sense.

Image by curiouslee via Flickr

At one point, a college leader asked the panel from Google if Wave would be compatible with IMS Global standards, which helps education software from various vendors work together.

Is this going to eliminate my job bottling knowledge? Will faculty be able to engage students in learning without using our million dollar Learning Management System? Are we going to need some policies that will keep faculty from using this? Just saying, cause this would be really bad for our budget and my job security.

The person asking the question was a very astute observer. They cut straight to the chase. They could see the threat of Google Wave and thought, "We better get this under control before it eliminates our reason for existance." We can only hope.

All this money being spent on these silly control-freak standards could be much better spent cutting tuition costs. When was the last time you heard a university leader talk about cutting costs and making their institutions more affordable? There are plenty of places where costs could be cut. Learning Management Systems would be a good place to start.

Today Skype announced that the company has reached a settlement with Joltid. The net result is that Skype now owns the technology and Joltid founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis will join the investor group that is in the process of buying Skype away from eBay as well as the Skype board.

If those names sound familiar, they should. Zennström and Friis were also the founders of Skype, back before eBay bought the company.

While there's a lot of backroom politics involved in the deal, here's what it means for users: Skype isn't going to close up shop anytime soon.

Skype lives on, reaches settlement with Joltid originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I've had this really strong feeling ever since I got enamored of Twitter in 2006 that it was something the news and entertainment world would jump on if it had leadership that was as bright and ambitious as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at their prime. Alas, those days must be long gone, because they busily tried to litigate peace in the old war, which they lost long ago, looking for the reparations that are due the loser who manages to make the victor feel guilty. (In other words the crumbs left on the table after the meal is over and after the cleaning people have made their first pass.)

"Look over here!" I've said over and over. "You should be competing here."

"We don't see why," they respond.

Here's why.

Twitter got Google and Microsoft to pay for the content that the media industry should have been hosting instead of Twitter. There was money here. And as we all know, the media industry can't find enough money to keep going. They're looking for handouts from the government. Meanwhile there was money everywhere. They just had to evolve.

I'm not saying this payday means Twitter has it made, they don't. Google and Microsoft are sharks and Twitter may be a goldfish. It could be that Evan Williams and his team have the competitive instincts of a Gates or Jobs, if so, they certainly have a few tricks up their sleeves, or they wouldn't have done these deals. They better, because Google and Microsoft are almost surely executing an Embrace & Extend. What that means for Twitter is that they have clones of Twitter in development. The race is certainly on. Have they cross-licensed their streams? In other words, does Twitter have reciprocal rights to any realtime content generated by users of Google's TwitterLand? Microsoft's? Even if they do, could they handle the load? My guess is that both Google and Microsoft will quickly take the search function away from Twitter. Now everyone has the Twitter stream. What streams can Microsoft and Google add to differentiate theirs?

And what business are they in now? I believe they're in the news business. This isn't tech anymore. This is what the Times and CNN should have become, what CBS, NBC and ABC should be. What Jay calls a pro-am system where everyone collaborates to create the realtime stream of news on all levels, national, international, local, broad coverage and specialized stuff. Everything from newsletters to nightly news. Everything flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested. This is the way news is done from here-on. We're not talking about the future, we're talking about now. And the moguls of the media industry, without a single leader thinking in advance of the wave, are sitting on the sidelines, hoping someone will give them some money because they're such great writers or whatever it is they're so great at. Soon they'll be looking for reparations.

They should own the platform.

And it's bad for the rest of us that they don't because the moguls of Silicon Valley have a very crude understanding of what news is. Witness the longevity of the 140 character limit and the inability of Twitter to carry any type of content other than text. The horror of the Suggested Users List. I don't expect Google or Microsoft to do much better, but they'll probably have the sense to hire a few news pros to advise them on how to build a system that works for news. The Twitter guys are fumbling around, and in doing so, holding all of us back.

And FriendFeed. Oh man what a wasted opportunity that was. If they had an ounce of competitive spirit they would have noticed that the news industry wasn't seeing their way into this space, and they would have gotten on a plane and camped out in NY and found someone, anyone, with a good flow of news to partner with, to guide them toward creating the fantastic news system that Twitter wasn't building. They had the technical ability to do it, but they were too much of homebodies, they enjoyed the comfort of other engineers too much.

This is what we still have to do -- create the connections between people with technical knowhow and people who can make the news flow to create a safe harbor for the millions who want to participate in news to do so, without being owned and controlled by the titans of tech.