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The Future of Social Media: The Walls Come Crumbling Down

...If you examine them closely, the social websites that are all the rage now have a strong family resemblance to the earliest internet giant, America Online. In the early '90s AOL built a walled garden that functioned as the shallow end of the internet pool. People joined to get their feet wet, and then eventually abandoned AOL. The social web is the new walled garden: the photos we upload to Facebook, the 140-character messages we post to Twitter, and all of this other social activity is more or less locked away in those services. A friend cannot reply to your Twitter post without registering an account, and you are basically locked out of doing anything on Facebook unless you sign up. And it's all-but-impossible to take all your stuff out of these services in order to switch to a competitor....

Google has taken the first step toward knocking down the walls. Last week, the company announced, to great fanfare, something called Google Wave. It's an open platform for real-time communication and sharing media, and it's aimed directly at Facebook and Twitter. With Wave. any competent developer will have the tools build a Facebook or a Twitter — or more to the point, whatever comes next — and, even more important, any user content poured into a Wave-based system will be accessible by anyone that user has granted permission to have it. The philosophies of openness and accessibility are baked right in to the tool. If Wave turns into the tsunami that Google hopes it to be, then for the web of the future you will truly need only a single log-in. 

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http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13740181&source=hptextfeature

The argument has been won. It is now generally accepted that the future will involve a blend of both proprietary and open-source software. Traditional software companies have opened up some of their products, and many open-source companies have adopted a hybrid model in which they give away a basic version of their product and make money by selling proprietary add-ons (see article). The rise of software based on open, internet-based standards means worries about lock-in have become much less of a problem.

Clouding the picture

But now there is the danger of a new form of lock-in. “Cloud computing”—the delivery of computer services from vast warehouses of shared machines—enables companies and individuals to cut costs by handing over the running of their e-mail, customer databases or accounting software to someone else, and then accessing it over the internet. There are many advantages to this approach for both customers (lower cost, less complexity) and service providers (economies of scale). But customers risk losing control once again, in particular over their data, as they migrate into the cloud. Moving from one service provider to another could be even more difficult than switching between software packages in the old days. For a foretaste of this problem, try moving your MySpace profile to Facebook without manually retyping everything.

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• My electric power drill
  
• Hot roller curler with metal (stuck in my shirt)
  
• Titanium screw in my ankle
  
• Liquids not in a plastic bag--shampoo, cream, lipstick, perfume
  
• Plastic knife and fork
  
• Metal aerosol container of hairspray
• 40 red balls
• Green apples (oranges are not allowed)
• Baggie full of drill bits
  

What Didn't Make it Through

• Umbrella with a metal tip (Ireland)
  
• Apple juice small bottles, sealed (North Carolina)
  

The university's Solar Electric Vehicle Team, the oldest such team in the country, unveiled the $243,000 carbon-fiber racer dubbed Eleanor on Friday and is shaking the car down to prepare for its inaugural race later this year.

"It drives beautifully," said George Hansel, a freshman physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the team. "It's fun to drive and quite a spectacle."

Eleanor is slated to compete in the tenth World Solar Challenge, a seven-day race across nearly 2,000 miles of Australian outback.

See full article... (and check out the cool photos of the car!)

Plasma TVs were most popular between 2004 - 2006 but with the continued recession, price of Plasmas, and announcement by Pioneer that it was dissolving its TV business by March 2010, experts predict the LCD TV will be here to stay.

Article excerpt:
The end of the Pioneer Kuro line of TVs represented a true tipping point in the TV industry, one preceded by long-gestating momentum from opposing forces. The recession and LCDs tipped over plasmas for good, and the slope downward will be quite steep, and fast.

Last week, Pioneer announced it was killing off its critically acclaimed TV business by March 2010 and will concentrate on car and audio/visual systems. It was a dramatic fall for a company that just one year ago had CES abuzz with its newest plasma TV, the so-called “Ultimate Black” Kuro.

The Kuro’s tech was impressive because it reduced light emissions from black areas of the screen to such a degree that at its maximum brightness, the contrast ratio was “almost infinite.” The result was a plasma display with the most vibrant, colorful images yet.

See full article.

10. Jellycar (free): WIRED's take: Based on the Xbox Community Game of the same name, JellyCar has clever crayonlike graphics and a unique gameplay gimmick where your gelatin-based vehicle rolls and smooshes its way toward the goal. Figuring out the physics can be challenging, and playing with the iPhone can be a bit of a pain. You have to press the left and right areas of the screen to get the car accelerating, then tilt the iPhone to add rotation to the vehicle. A few minutes of this and it's carpal tunnel time.

9. WordWarp ($1): WIRED's take: Do you enjoy playing Jumble in the daily paper? Just like the well-known pen-and-paper puzzle, WordWarp gives you a scrambled six-letter word. You're tasked with unscrambling it, but also with coming up with as many smaller words as can be made from its letters in a two-minute time window. The "warp" feature lets you randomize the letters, which helps when forming words. Unfortunately (and aggravatingly), the word list isn't complete -- we found a lot of words it didn't accept.

8. Cube Runner (free): WIRED's take: Looking very much like an early prototype of Star Fox, Cube Runner is a very simple exercise in not screwing up. Pilot your ship by tilting the iPhone left and right. Don't hit any of the cubes. For each second you stay alive, you get points; crash and it's game over. No checkpoints, no goal other than a high score. Cube Runner makes great use of subtle and responsive tilt controls, but it's less a test of your gamer aptitude than an exercise in seeing how long you can be exposed to the same repeating stimulus until you inevitably get distracted and crash.

7. Tap Defense (free): WIRED's take: You're lucky we even let this one on the list, considering we covered its genre to death with Crystal Defenders and Field Runners in our previous Top 10. Tap Defense is nearly identical to those games -- waves of enemies approach your position, and you have to set up increasingly powerful sets of weaponized defense towers to hold them off. Once you buy and place your towers and the enemies flood in, there's nothing you can do except wait to see if your automatic defense system works.

6. Topple (free): WIRED's take: Blocks fall from the sky. But instead of just rotating them by 90-degree increments and placing them in neat piles, you have to drag and rotate them with your fingers, then gently build a stack that doesn't fall over. At first it's easy, but then you get more-challenging oddly shaped platforms (above) and things like eggs that don't stack perfectly. It's charming, addictive, works very well with the iPhone -- and you can't beat the price.

5. iShoot ($3): WIRED's take: Hey, it's Scorched Earth! We used to play this in high school on the computers in the library. This classic DOS game pitted four tanks against each other in turn-based, 2-D battle. Each tank takes its turn firing off a round of ammo, which destroys other tanks as well as the environment. Last tank standing wins, and you can buy more weapons between rounds. In iShoot, you can aim with the touch screen. Otherwise, it's pretty much identical to the classic, down to the taunting battle cries from your opponents.

4.Trism ($3): WIRED's take: I'll agree with this -- Trism is much more complex than Bejeweled. So much so that it seems to be out of my league. Matching three like-colored gems by sliding the diagonal rows of pieces is one thing. But going beyond that initial match to set up combos isn't something my brain can process. Especially since you can alter the way the blocks fall by reorienting the iPhone so "down" is a different direction. Clever. But I just started sliding the rows in all different directions and racked up crazy combos by tilting the iPhone around randomly. Trism might be great for puzzle nuts, but I wouldn't call it casual.

3. Wurdle ($2): WIRED's take: One of many Boggle clones in the App Store, Wurdle's gameplay will be immediately apparent to you if you've ever played the famous word-creation game. Join up contiguous letters from the randomly generated 5x5 grid to make as many words as you can in 12 minutes. The word lists are far more complete than WordWrap's, so it'll recognize just about anything. But you won't even make a dent in the list of possibilities. If a 5x5 grid is too much for you, competing game Quordy ($3) is almost identical to Wurdle, but with a 4x4 grid instead.

2. Galcon ($5): WIRED's take: Our take: This is my favorite of the iPhone games recommended by Wired.com readers. It's a lightning-fast game where you and your opponent start out with a planet, and quickly start dragging your ships to nearby planets to take them over. The number on each planet is the number of your ships it'll take to conquer it. Each time you take over a planet, it starts generating more ships depending on how large it is. So the optimal strategy is to drag your ships to large planets with small numbers. Games take a minute or two at most -- you don't have time to plan a huge strategy, just to think on your feet.

1. Lux Touch (free or deluxe for $8):  WIRED's take: Similar to Galcon, Lux World is about taking over territory and building your armies in a short span of time. But this game is turn-based instead of real-time, and hard instead of easy. In each turn, you can attack neighboring territories, place more armies on the map and shuffle their positions around. But it takes a careful balance of offense and defense to secure more land without leaving yourself vulnerable.

This article published on Boston.com received the most commentary by former employees, freelancers, and other fans of the publishing industry sorry to see the state of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  It's a shame to see the once thriving independent publisher in such a bleak outlook.

Published on February 1, 2009 and authored by David Mehegan.

It's the latest chapter in the convoluted recent history of a grand old Boston name, a publishing institution since 1832. As recently as 2001, Houghton was a strong independent company with thriving K-12 and college textbook businesses and a stable of such best-selling authors as Roger Tory Peterson, JRR Tolkien, Philip Roth, and Rachel Carson. It has had three owners since then, none of them book publishers. Although it's unlikely that Houghton would disappear, default on its debt could mean a fire-sale breakup and a new owner or owners who could move all or parts of it from Boston.

Moody's last month reported that Houghton, with a debt load estimated at more than 10 times gross earnings, is "a likely default" unless its loans are renegotiated. S&P last month placed parent EMPG on its list of weakest links - companies in greatest danger of debt default. "The debt level is our biggest concern," said S&P analyst Hal Diamond, "given the state of the economy and state budget constraints. While they can reduce costs, they can only go so far."  Read full article...

Commentary from the field--great insights and opinions. 

Announced January 15, 2009 - Six Red Marbles (Cambridge, MA) and Monotype (Baltimore, MD) today announced that its board of directors named Jacques Driscoll as the company's chief executive officer.  Driscoll succeeds Rob Lange, who remains as a member of the board.

Driscoll confirmed the combined companies' commitment to the education market and will drive integration efforts among the print, technology, and editorial businesses.  "Six Red Marbles and Monotype together have the educational expertise and technological vision to revolutionize education.  The boundaries between delivering curriculum digitally or through print are no longer relevant to our business.  Our clients are looking for new ways to create and deliver educational materials.  This team gets it.  I'm truly energized to lead and expand such a creative group," said Driscoll.

"Jacques Driscoll's exceptional leadership skills and career experience will accelerate our growth in the education market.  Driscoll has the passion, drive, and belief in the combined strength of Six Red Marbles and Monotype," said Steve Berger, CFO of Monotype.

Sarah White, President of Six Red Marbles, said, "I am thrilled to work with Jacques and love the personality that he brings to our companies.  He has the right blend of insight and innovation.  We believe in the solutions we provide to clients and Jacques' strategy and focus will help shape the evolving educational publishing market."

With the strategic acquisition and merger of Six Red Marbles and Monotype in May 2008  by private equity firm Calvert Street Capital Partners (Baltimore, MD), the two companies have successfully combined the content development, design, page composition, and technology implementations of publisher programs.  Driscoll's "smart growth" plan for 2009 revolves around integrating content and technology in new ways to improve learning and streamlining development and production processes.

Driscoll comes to Six Red Marbles and Monotype with experience gained by helping more than 35 companies transform their businesses, differentiate themselves from their competition, achieve record sales and build strong brands in the US and around the world.  He has extensive senior management experience on both the agency and client side - with a broad background in advertising, publishing, banking, design, insurance, and retail - that will help shape new ways of thinking about educational publishing.  Driscoll most recently was owner of the boutique brand consultancy Spyglass Creative, and Executive Vice President of Hudson United Bank, where he led 1500 people to record sales.  Driscoll spent four years at West Publishing, now a part of Thomson Reuters, where he helped transition the world's leading legal publisher from print-dependency to a profitable multi-channel distribution system.

Former president of School Publishers, Mike Lavelle, to lead new organizational structure, marking the culmination of integration activities designed to transform the publishing industry

Posted at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's web site

Last update: 11:12 a.m. EST Nov. 12, 2008
BOSTON, Nov 12, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, the world's largest publisher of pre-K--12 educational materials and a global leader in literacy education, today announced the formation of a new K--12 division to serve the educational market. The company also announced that former School Publishers president, Mike Lavelle, has been named president of the new K--12 division.

"Since acquiring Harcourt," Company Chairman and CEO Tony Lucki explained, "we have undertaken a great deal of integration activity to become one company. As we approach the one-year anniversary as a single company, we are now shifting from integration to transformation -- transforming our business and processes to enable Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to drive highly strategic product development, marketing, and sales, and to better respond to the demands and opportunities of the global educational marketplace."

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's K--12 division combines five former stand-alone divisions into a single, unified business that is able to provide unsurpassed educational materials across the continuum of education. "By combining those five former divisions -- School Publishers, Holt McDougal, Supplemental Publishers, Heinemann, and International Publishers," Mr. Lucki continued, "we make a major transformation into a market-driven, customer-centric company, while achieving substantial operating efficiencies."

Continue reading full press release at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt...