ImaginativePRO Blog

FACEBOOK REPORTS STRONG Q3 2013 REVS OF $2.02 BIL, UP 60% FROM 2012, MOBILE REVS NEARLY HALF OF TOTAL FOR QUARTER

Buoyed once again by strong mobile ad revenues, Facebook  (FB +3.14%) crushed investor expectations with a much higher-than-expected third-quarter profit of 25 cents a share on revenues up 60% from a year ago, to $2.02 billion.

Shares rose in immediate after-hours trading by as much as 15% to top a new high of more than $56 a share. As of 1:30 p.m. Pacific, before the earnings call when any guidance on the future may further influence investors, they had settled back to about a 10% rise.

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) public shares dropped $1.79 or (-3.60%) in early Thursday morning trading, but rallied lto end the dat at $50.25, up $1.20 or (+2.44)  on news of its Q3 2013 earnings report. (Click Image To Enlarge)

Although investors initially were wowed, during the earnings call Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman mentioned a couple of facts that appeared to spook investors and eliminated most of that 15% jump. For one, he said Facebook would not increase the number of ads its users see in their newsfeeds, as it has in recent quarters. That’s significant because the increases in ads has been a big contributor to Facebook’s revenue growth.

Ebersman also cited a decrease in the number of younger teens using the service daily. Although he said overall teen users are stable, there have been persistent anecdotal accounts of a drop in teen usage of Facebook in favor of newer services such as Snapchat and Instagram (owned by Facebook, of course). All that said, Facebook also pointed out its wide lead over other services. With Instagram, Facebook commands more mobile time spent on the service than YouTube, Pandora, Yahoo, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, AOL, Snapchat, and LinkedIn combined, according to comScore.

At 3:45 p.m. Pacific, shares were hovering at a half-percentage point in the green, but later they were down a fraction. One analyst, Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research, said in a note to clients that investor concerns were overdone:

Reactions to comments on teen use of FB seemed an over-reaction to us. As teens aren’t the entities spending advertising on Facebook, there is little to worry about near-term, certainly. Of course, investors are concerned if these audiences favor other social media. However, so long as they can be reached on Facebook to a degree and so long as FB has a unique capability to reach more total people than any other media owner, Facebook retains advantage in its ad sales efforts against most advertisers. Further, Facebook’s holding of Instagram hedges risks against this audience. Other concerns arising during the call related to expectations on ad loads were also over-done, as statements highlighted that the company is intending to work within limits in not overwhelming consumers with commercials. Our view is that while limited inventory has some constraining effects on revenues, they will likely be more than offset by FB’s ongoing efforts to improve yield management, targeting and optimization. Further, brand advertisers may be somewhat indifferent to changes in prices per ad units so long as their broader media goals are satisfied.

Analysts had expected Facebook to post a profit of 19 cents a share, up from 12 cents a year ago, on a 52% rise in revenues to $1.9 billion. Facebook’s shares, which have nearly doubled in the past quarter to as high as $54.83, closed down a little under 1% today, to $49.01. The day after the second-quarter report that showed strong mobile ad revenues, Facebook’s shares jumped 26%.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Click Image To Enlarge)

“For nearly ten years, Facebook has been on a mission to connect the world,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. 

”The strong results we achieved this quarter show that we’re prepared for the next phase of our company, as we work to bring the next five billion people online and into the knowledge economy.”

Revenue growth was “impressive,” Andrew McDermott, vice president of product at Facebook ad partner Spruce Media, said in an interview. But he said that the increasing number of ads in the newsfeed had been a “major driver of growth,” so Facebook’s intention to back off those increases means growth could moderate.

However, he said that the Instagram ads announced last week, as well as possible video ads in the Facebook news feed, should “more than make up” for that growth slowdown as they roll out. McDermott said.  

“That could more than compensate overnight.”

Some of Facebook’s ad growth may be driven by Instagram already, says Craig Elimeliah, VP of creative technology at the customer experience ad agency RAPP. That’s because Instagram’s mobile DNA is likely already informing Facebook’s own mobile ads and in any case has gotten many more advertisers excited about the prospect for more mobile ad formats on the social network. He said advertisers and agencies need both more creative formats and more control to target people by what they’re posting, where they are, and the time of day.

The highlights from the call are below, but Facebook provided its own as well:

• Revenue: $2.02B up 60% from last year (ahead of analyst consensus which was $1.91 billion on average)
  
• Revenue from advertising: $1.80B, up 66% from last year
• Mobile Ad Revenue: 49% of advertising revenue during the third quarter (up from 14% in Q3 2012)  
• Payments and other fees revenue: $218 million
• Earnings per share: $0.25 (beat consensus of $0.19)
• ARPU, average revenue per user, is up to $1.72
• Mobile revenue represented 49% of advertising revenue for Q3, approx. $881 million
• Mobile MAUs (monthly active users) grew 45% year-over-year to 874 million 
  
• Mobile DAUS (daily active users) were 507 million on average for September 2013
• MAUs were 1.19 billion as of September 30, 2013 up 18% year-over-year  
• DAUs were 728 million on average for September 2013 up 25% year-over-year

COMMENTARY:  The word “BlackBerry” did not come up during Facebooks Q3 earnings conference call yesterday, but you can see why such a crazy idea like the social network buying the beleaguered handset maker might have a sliver of plausibility to it. The company is moving closer to a tipping point where mobile usage and revenues will soon be outweighing that of desktop, and although Zuckerberg has ruled out the so-called “Facebook phone,” you never know how the company may want to capitalize on its mobile muscle in the future.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg today noted during the company’s earnings call that 48 percent of users on a given day are only accessing it from mobile. That comes as nearly half — 49 percent — of the company’s advertising revenues, its key revenue driver, now come from mobile ads. That means nearly $890 million in Q3 was made from Facebook’s different mobile advertising units such as app install ads and engagement ads.   He said.

“It’s a pretty incredible sign of how Facebook has evolved in the past year.”

This shows that Facebook is on track to match the prediction it made in Q2 that mobile revenues would pass desktop by the end of this year. And from the looks of it, the change of balance could come soon on mobile, too. Mobile continues to grow much faster for Facebook. Mobile MAUs grew by 45 percent over the last year (to 874 million in Q3 2013 from 604 million in Q2 2012) — these include both those who are using mobile exclusively for Facebook, and those who are using mobile at some point in the month in addition to desktop. That 45 percent works out to 2.5 times as much growth as MAUs overall, which were up 18 percent ($1,189 million in Q3 2013 and $1,007 million in Q3 2012).

Facebook points out its figures do not include Instagram-only usage, but during the call COO Sheryl Sandberg provided some striking figures that point to just how much time consumers are spending on Facebook’s mobile properties when you do add it in. Combined with Instagram, the very popular mobile-first, photo-based social network, Facebook now has 150 million monthly active users. It accounts for one of every five minutes spent on mobile in the U.S., Sandberg noted. And that is even having an impact on desktop: Facebook (again, with Instagram) account for one in 8 minutes on desktop, she said.

What does Facebook’s mobile traffic work out to compared to other popular properties? Sandberg noted that Facebook accounts for more mobile minutes in the U.S. than “YouTube, Pandora, Yahoo, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, AOL, Snapchat and LinkedIn — combined.” (It seems that this stat was taken from comScore research, which actually combined Instagram and Facebook.)

Mobile-only users on a monthly basis now stand at 254 million, Facebook noted in one of the slides that accompanied its presentation. The full deck of those slides, which also spell out other metrics like MAUs and DAUs across mobile and desktop, is here. With 1.19 billion MAUs overall, it means that 21.3 percent of MAUs are now mobile-only. That is up 2.3 percentage points from 19 percent in Q2.

The same may not be said for desktop. CFO David Ebersman noted that daily actives on web “declined modestly” in contrast to what is happening on mobile. Facebook’s daily active users on mobile worldwide now stand at 507 million, up by 38 million over Q2; while monthly active users are up to 874 million, up 55 million from Q2.

Courtesy of an article dated October 30, 2013 appearing in Forbes and an article dated October 30, 2013 appearing in TechCrunch

HOW INTERIOR DESIGNERS USE STAINLESS STEEL TUBES AND SLIDES TO GET DOWN FLOORS IN THEIR HOUSE DESIGNS

 Stainless steel tubes or half-tubes are being installed in homes and apartments as a fun way to get from a top floor to a lower floor while having a lot of fun doing it. (Click Image To Enlarge)

Take a straight shot between floors or twist up your ride with a spiral. An indoor slide puts the playground right at your feet

For some intrepid homeowners, their home is their playground. Bringing slides indoors is not common enough to call a trend that's sweeping the world, but we're starting to see it here and there, and the idea is spreading. From taking center stage in swanky Manhattan penthouses to providing the fun secret way to get from the laundry room to the basement in Minnesota, these playground pieces are anything but child's play.

We've all got our heads wrapped around an indoor slide like this one, but what about ...

Eclectic Kids by Toronto Interior Designers & Decorators Jenn Hannotte / Hannotte Interiors 

... this?  

Contemporary Family Room by New York Architects & Designers TURETT COLLABORATIVE ARCHITECTS

This slide in New York City's East Village, originally in the pad of a bachelor professional poker player, received a ton of press online, in magazines and on TV. I saw it on one of those high-end real estate shows, and the slide's projected effect on resale value caused some entertaining manufactured-for-TV drama. When square footage is at a premium, taking up a lot of room with a slide is a very specific homeowner choice, but wow, it really dazzles, and I bet it gets the endorphins going if you slide downstairs to get the first coffee in the morning. 

Contemporary Living Room by New York Architects & Designers Joyce Elizabeth

The slide was conceived by the creative minds at Turett Collaborative Architects. It connects an upstairs office to the middle of the open floor plan below; it's a half-tube design in stainless steel. 

However you feel about its function and the room it takes up, the slide certainly stands up to the 18-foot-high ceilings in the large, open space.

This image shows what the apartment looked like after Joyce Elizabeth staged it for resale.

This slide is for recreation and art; its beautiful form is a huge presence in Skyhouse, an artful Manhattan penthouse, connecting the attic to the guest room hallway, then continuing down in a second leg to the living room below. This place is like something out of a movie, perhaps a remake of Sleeper.

Contemporary Spaces by Astoria Media & Bloggers John Hill

Inspired by German artist Carsten Höller, architect David Hotson's slide design has a futuristic form and serves as a sculpture in this unique space. It was fabricated in Germany and put together onsite, before many of the walls inside the penthouse went up.

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Contemporary Spaces by Astoria Media & Bloggers John Hill

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The end of the slide makes a huge design impact and also serves as a work of art on its own. Houzz contributor John Hill put together a wonderful tour showing more of this one-of-a-kind home.

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Contemporary Spaces by Astoria Media & Bloggers John Hill

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Eclectic Kids by Hopkins Architects & Designers Kuhl Design Build LLC

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Rather than serving as a sculpture or major design statement, some slides are surprises hidden in the walls. The basement rec-room fun begins with the trip down a level in this Minnesota home. This one's entry point is tucked away in a first-floor closet.

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Spaces by Hopkins Architects & Designers Kuhl Design Build LLC 

The round opening does not give away what the slide experience will be, which builder Steve Kuhl describes as "severe tubular craziness." He estimates that installing a slide like this somewhere else would run from $2,500 to $5,000. 

Contemporary Drawings by Hopkins Architects & Designers Kuhl Design Build LLC

For those of you considering head-first descents, be sure to have a soft landing spot at the bottom. 

Contemporary Spaces by Hopkins Architects & Designers Kuhl Design Build LLC

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Two New York City penthouses were combined into a single two-story unit, prompting the owner to request a slide connecting the two. How great is that? I've seen people put fire poles in their homes, too.

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Contemporary Family Room by New York Architects & Designers TURETT COLLABORATIVE ARCHITECTS

 

See the rest of this house

COMMENTARY:    Adding stainless steel tubes or half-tubes to slide from an upper floor to a lower floor is the coolest idea I have seen in quite a while.  Kudos to the architects and interior designers who incorporated slides into the interior design of their houses and apartments.  The slides definitely takeup a lot of room, and I would be concerned that very small children might use them, so parents will need to take extra precautions to prevent terrible accidents from occurring.  

Little rugrats take the plunge down a stainless steel tube slide installed in their house.  (Click Images To Enlarge) 

Having said this, if you have a very large home or apartment with two or more floors, and can afford the cost of adding stainless steel slides, go for it.  It is obvious that if you are going to hire an interior designer to add slides to your home, that you have already decided to make the necessary financial investment for such an endeavor.

Courtesy of an article dated October 30, 2013 appearing in Houzz.com

DOES TWITTER HAVE A QUITTER PROBLEM ON THE EVE OF ITS INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING?

Heading into the tech company's highly anticipated initial public offering, a problem with users leaving Twitter because they find it too confusing or unnecessary isn't something the company wants to hear about. 

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll tried to find the rate at which people are signing up and quitting Twitter, and the results could be a turn-off for potential investors:

Click Image To Enlarge

Emphasis added. That's 43 percent of those surveyed saying they no longer use Twitter at all. Closing your account instead of leaving it on the shelf to collect dust, with the possibility of a potential return, is just cold. A comparative look at Facebook users with a higher survey pool found only seven percent of users left, and five percent shut their account completely. 

Quitting Facebook has been trendy for years now. And yes, the site's growth rounded out to around 10 percent year-over-year after the service reached the half-a-billion user plateau. But it's been able to survive by providing a service to users: the modern phonebook for relatives and old acquaintances. (At least, the ones who are still on Facebook.)

But nothing much has been made about Twitter users bailing on the service. Some threaten to make the plunge after certain unpopular redesigns, but they never do. The tech company said it has 232 million active users in its IPO released last week. But heading into the road tour pitch to investors, questions will be raised about the company's size and sustainability. We've looked before at how Twitter isn't yet too big to fail: that the service could still evaporate if fortune take the wrong left turn at Albuquerque. 

The number one reason survey participants gave for quitting Twitter was confusion about the service's unique conversation etiquette: at-replies and retweets, RTs and MTs, and let's not even mention hashtags. Any regular Twitter user tasked with explaining the service to a newcomer knows how difficult this can be. (Twitter acknowledged new users find it confusing in its IPO.) 

Perhaps Twitter's biggest obstacle is it hasn't established that indispensable reason to stay signed up the way Facebook has. Maybe this quote, from a 2011 story by The New York Times' Jenna Wortham about quitting Facebook better applies to quitting the blue bird:

"People always raise an eyebrow. But my life has gone on just fine without it."

COMMENTARY:   According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo,

"Twitter aims to become the fabric of every communication in the world and to eventually reach every person on the planet."

Still, Twitter acknowledged in its IPO prospectus that

"New users may initially find our product confusing."

The company prides itself on staying true to its roots: it lets people send 140-character messages and does not pack in scads of extraneous functions. Since its inception, Twitter has resisted overtly manipulating how people use its platform, instead preferring conventions to be formed organically.

As a result, new users often find it initially difficult to grasp how discussions ebb and flow, complaining that features such as the "hashtags" that group Tweets by topic, abbreviations for basic functions (for instance, "RT" for retweet) and shortened Web links, are geared towards a technologically-savvy crowd.

Larry Cornett, a former executive at Yahoo and designer at Apple, who now runs product strategy and design consulting firm Brilliant Forge says.

"The average person that's coming on here, they're still baffled by it.  If they want the mass adoption and that daily engagement, they have to make it really easy for people to consume."

According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, 38 percent of 2,217 people who do not use Twitter said they did not find it that interesting or useful. Thirteen percent said they do not understand what to use Twitter for. The results have a credibility interval of 2.4 percent.

Twitter has taken steps to help new members. In December 2011, it introduced a new "Discover" section to highlight the most popular discussion topics based on a person's location and interests.

The company also simplified some features and rolled out new tools that embed photos and videos directly in a person's tweet stream, making for a richer and easier-to-use experience.

These changes may mean that Twitter's retention rate for the past several months is better than its overall retention rate, which includes people who joined years ago, say analysts.

Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group, said Twitter's current user base is already big enough to be valuable to advertisers. Investors need to get more comfortable with the idea that Twitter is not for everyone, he said.

He said.  

"The practical matter is that this is a niche medium.  Their appeal, they will never be as broad as Facebook."

Twitter As A Firehose

At its heart, Twitter is a firehose. Everything you tweet shows up to every one of your followers. It’s what makes Twitter feel like the real-time pulse of the world. But it could also be preventing Twitter from growing. Follow too many people, and you lose track of those you love and stop following anyone new.

Imagine you’ve just joined Twitter. You follow some popular accounts of big publishers and celebrities you’re interested in, as well as some friends and acquaintances. The unfiltered feed works. You get up-to-the-minute news and stay aware of what people you know are up to. There aren’t so many tweets in your stream yet that you miss the ones from the people you care about most.

But then you follow a few more people, and then a few more. You find more distant acquaintances and colleagues on Twitter so you follow them. You subscribe to experts in the niche areas you geek out about. Friends retweet something funny and you follow the author. Or somebody random @ replies and follows you so you do the polite thing and follow back.

Gradually, your feed gets noisier and noisier. A few of the accounts you’ve followed post dozens of times a day and drown out everyone else (TechCrunch’s account is renowned for this). Twitter’s a stream, not a queue where you have to read every tweet, but you still. You find yourself missing great jokes, links, and insights from your closest friends who only tweet occasionally. When you visit Twitter, you see fewer interesting things in your feed than you used to.

And that’s where the problems for Twitter’s business start.

At Capacity

You put up with the mess but don’t enjoy your experience as much. If you’re a power user, you might create a Twitter List of your favorite people, but it takes a lot of effort. For everyone else who wants to trim the fat from follow lists, it’s tough to know where to start.

Twitter keeps on recommending more people to follow, both organically, and in exchange for ad dollars, but doesn’t tell you who you never interact with and should unfollow. It takes multiple clicks to unfollow someone, making it a laborious chore to ditch 10 accounts, and you still have hundreds left. You might have noticed that the “Follow Friday” trend where you’d recommend people other should follow has died off. No one has the bandwidth.

Your firehose is full, and it leads to two behaviors that are devastating to Twitter: You visit less and you stop following new people.

• The first means you encounter fewer of Twitter’s ads. It only gets paid when people click its ads, and you can’t click if you don’t visit. You’re also not around to @ reply, favorite, and retweet other people. That means they see fewer notifications and return to the site less frequently, so they see fewer ads, too. Another active user disappears, and Twitter’s MAU stagnates.
• The second means that the friends, acquaintances, publishers you would have followed end up with a smaller audience. No one wants to feel like they’re talking to a brick wall or shouting into a black hole. After a few days, weeks, or months of tweeting with no one listening, these people give up.

Twitter is littered with the corpses of accounts that passed away too young or never truly lived.

Quitter

Some reports, like one from Mike Isaac, peg Twitter at having more than 1 billion registered users, yet in their IPO filing, Twitter confirms that only 218 million are active. That’s a painful attrition rate that is hindering Twitter’s ability to grow large enough to become profitable.

Worse yet, people who quit Twitter or just hardly visit likely return to Facebook. It’s literally friendlier. People have a built-in audience of real-life chums who Like and comment on their posts. They don’t have to be ‘thought leaders’ battling to be heard. They accumulate friends just by living, and it’s not a contest to have the most connections.

Even if it were, Facebook’s filtered feed is built to adapt to however many friends you make or Pages you Like. Rather than show an unfiltered feed of everything posted by everyone in your social and interest graph, it just shows you the best posts — the ones with the most Likes and comments from the people you interact with most.

That doesn’t make it as good as Twitter at being a source of breaking real-time news, but Facebook does its best to make sure your feed is always interesting. It doesn’t always succeed, but the filtering happens automatically. And Facebook gives you direct control, allowing you to select how frequently you want certain people to appear in your feed or even what kind of stories (photos, games) you want to see. These controls are little-known and buried behind far too many clicks to be used efficiently, so it has room to improve.

Twitter’s not the only one with unfiltered feed problems. Instagram may eventually have to grapple with it. But for now it’s younger, has fewer users, and its casual feed of photos is less vulnerable to noise since it’s just pretty pictures.

Getting people to manage their own streams is an extraordinarily tough design problem. But Twitter’s role as the most popular unfiltered feed on the web means it needs to pioneer ways to make the format sustainable as it grows.

Fixing The Firehose

Twitter should not abandon its unfiltered feed. It’s the foundation of its whole user experience. Still, there are other ways to alleviate the overflowing firehose problem.

Twitter may want to forge as many connections in its “interest graph” as possible. Each follow tells it more about what kinds of ads to target to people. But the company should look to make it easier to unfollow people who clutter your feed.

First, making it quicker to unfollow someone by adding a button to expanded tweets would help. More forcefully, Twitter could analyze which people you never @ reply, retweet, favorite, expand the tweets of, or visit the profile of. Then it could suggest that you unfollow them either in the sidebar or with an immediately accessible button on their tweets in the stream.

Twitter could also provide a feed-cleaning tool. It could rank who you follow by your engagement with them, and make it easy to bulk unfollow people you don’t care about but who tweet a lot, or add to a List the people you interact with most. These tools will need to work from mobile, considering 75 percent of Twitter users access the service from their small screens.

If Twitter doesn’t address these issues, veteran users may tune out and new recruits might never see the magic of its global forum. There’s nothing like tweeting something and getting responses within seconds. It makes the whole world feel smaller. The challenge is whether Twitter can retain its intimate town square atmosphere for everyone as it grows to become a digital city…and a public company.

Courtesy of an article dated October 20, 2013 appearing in The Atlantic Wire and an article dated October 5, 2013 appearing in TechCrunch, an article dated October 20, 2013 appearing in Reuters

A SCIENTIFIC GUIDE TO WRITING POPULAR--AND SHAREABLE--HEADLINES FOR TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND YOUR BLOG

WHAT WORDS ARE WE MOST ATTRACTED TO ON TWITTER? WHY DO WE CLICK ON PARTICULAR PICTURES ON FACEBOOK? HOW LONG IS TOO LONG?

Ever since we started Buffer a little more than two years ago, people have been asking us about one very specific question:

How can I write great headlines for social networks and my blog?

The topic is a very tricky one as the accuracy for what works best is hard to nail down. While we have some specific techniques that we are using for our own postings and headlines every day, I thought looking at the most cutting-edge research is definitely required.

So I decided to look at all the research we’ve done for the Buffer social accounts and our blog as well as the best research out there and combine this research into one comprehensive guide.

Without further ado, here is a scientific guide to great headline writing on Twitter, Facebook, and your blog:

WHAT WORKS BEST ON TWITTER?

Finding the right headline for your tweet is one of the most important things to do, especially since Twitter only allows for text display.

While there is a ton of data out there on which words to use and how to write headlines, the best way to do anything truly scientifically is to test and learn yourself.

TEST IT YOURSELF.  HERE'S HOW.

For Twitter, we’ve experimented with A/B testing the right headline. A/B testing on social is arguably very hard, in fact easily one of the biggest social media mistakes. Yet we’ve found it’s possible to still get reliable data that way. Here is how we approached this:

1. Find two headlines for an article that you think will perform well.
2. Tweet both of these headlines at roughly the same time, at least one hour apart. Here, I’ve found that doing the two tweets both in the morning or both in the afternoon works best--9 a.m. is much more similar to 10 a.m., than, say, 12 p.m. is to 1 p.m. So going with clear “morning” or “afternoon” times is crucial.
3. Compare the data for which headline to settle on.

Here is how we learned which headline to use for our recent blogpost, using this method.

First tweet:

Click Image To Enlarge

Second Tweet:

Click Image To Enlarge

The second tweet clearly performed better as we found out through our social analytics, and Buffer’s algorithm also identified it as a top tweet. In fact, you can clearly see that the second headline got double the number of clicks.

So this was an easy call and we settled for that headline, which subsequently turned out to be a really good decision. The article spread (and still does) like crazy, and I do think it’s partly due to the headline improvement.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS.

A lot of the time, it’s hard for us to do it with testing ourselves. Of course, the optimal time to tweet is also something that comes into play here. Either we don’t have enough time or we don't have enough followers to get meaningful and actionable data from a Twitter A/B test.

In that case, what comes in a close second when trying to be scientific is to look at public research data. The writer Dan Zarrella has done a fabulous job here to help us with general guidelines on which words to include in tweets.

I think the first and most interesting element that Dan highlights is to use action words when scheduling your tweets--in short, more verbs, fewer nouns:

Click Image To Enlarge

Twitter itself has also recently published some hard data on what they found to increase clicks, retweets, and more most dramatically. Here are the top three:

ASK FOR A DOWNLOAD.

Click Image To Enlarge

According to Twitter, this will increase your clicks by an average of 13%.

ASK FOR A RETWEET.

    Click Image To Enlarge

Another fact that both Twitter and Dan Zarrella have emphasized multiple times is to specifically ask for a retweet: 

Click Image To Enlarge

THE 20 MOST RETWEETABLE WORDS.

While at Buffer we generally try to optimize for CTR and not retweets, the two often go together and can’t be separated. Dan Zarrella published an amazing list that shows clearly which words tend to be in the most retweeted tweets, which of course also go in line with the time you’ve scheduled these tweets:

1. you
2. twitter
3. please
4. retweet
5. post
6. blog
7. social
8. free
9. media
10. help
11. please retweet
12. great
13. social media
14. 10
15. follow
16. how to
17. top
18. blog post
19. check out
20. new blog post

I think this is a great list, because it is consistent with general copywriting tips, that you’d find over at Copyblogger and also contains real data.

We also covered also some of the latest changes to Twitter with this piece aboutTwitter statistics, where a lot of the new insights get put into a very different, new context.

Time to move onto the next network to optimize your headlines: Facebook

HOW TO APPROACH FACEBOOK POSTINGS: THE POWER OF SELF-EXPLANATORY PICTURES.

Of course, when posting to your Facebook page or profile, the underlying elements are very similar to Twitter. And yet Facebook couldn’t be any more different as a medium than Twitter.

TEST IT YOURSELF.  HERE'S HOW.

All the research, latest Facebook statistics and sensational headlines aside, the key to knowing what works best for you on Facebook is to test it well again. For example, saying “post pictures” isn’t at all helpful.

Instead of pictures alone, which is often one of the biggest social media mistakes, here is one assumption that we’ve found has been validated over and over again on our own Facebook page:

Click Image To Enlarge

Let’s compare two picture postings that explain this best. Both were shared at the same time, on two different days during weekdays.

Here is example 1:

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Here is example 2:

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Clearly example 1 performs much better and the biggest difference is that the picture itself already tells the whole story. In example 2, on the other hand, you have no idea what’s going on. So we’re using this as an internal rule to avoid the “post pictures to Facebook craze,” that I’d put as this:

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Looking at our data from our social analytics, we see this over and over again from the “Top Posts” algorithm that we have in place. The ones that perform the best are those where the picture is self-explanatory: 

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Now although this may sound anecdotal, I see a lot of people following the “post picture” advice too blindly (ourselves included!).

Instead, what we found is that if you think something is a strong article, but doesn’t have a good photo--post the link, which goes in line with what the latest Facebook statistics and research found as well.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

All the general research on this topic from any company out there that has analyzed Facebook data agrees on one point: Pictures outperform everything.

Our friends at KISSmetrics put it the best way, showing that this applies for likes, clicks, shares, and comments alike:

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In terms of post length, they also have some interesting findings where it seems to be crucial to keep it short to increase your engagement:

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One other interesting element that I’ve personally observed is that self-reference works wonders on Facebook. While this isn’t such a good idea on Twitter, where I (anecdotally) rarely get engagement for being self-referential, this can be very powerful on Facebook.

The more you mention “I,” the more likes you can get, says Dan Zarrella:

Of course, be wary of what the best time to post to Facebook is, on which we’ve recently published a guide, because that will likely have a huge impact on how well the posting will perform too.

With Facebook being an entirely different beast from Twitter, we’ve got one place left, where headlines are more important than anything: your blog posts.

Let’s dig in!

HOW TO WRITE GOOD BLOG POST TITLES--THE ULTIMATE SCIENCE.

Now onto the most powerful of all, the headline of articles. If you’d do a quick google search here, you’ll quickly see that I’m not the first one who has thought to write about that. For another crucial element, the best time to publish your posts, we’ve written a separate guide.

Of course, let’s start with a testing method again:

Test blog post headlines first on Twitter--the Andrew Chen technique

Here is how he validates which articles he should write and how to name them, too:

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Here is the tweet he sent originally to validate this:

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And with dozens of retweets on that quote, he went ahead and wrote that exact article, which has now become an almost legendary post. Joel picked up on this and recently tried the same thing with this tweet, which wildly validated the idea for a blog post that will go live soon, too:

Click Image To Enlarge

So, if you have created a Twitter following that you can use to validate your blog post headlines and ideas, I think this is one of the most powerful ways to make sure none of your precious time goes to waste.

You can, of course, use that same technique for Facebook, too, in case Twitter is not your forte. The advantage of using Facebook is that you’ll probably get a bunch of interesting comments, too, that you can use for the article and make writing it easier still. Here is how Joel did this.

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The best research on writing great blog post titles

Of course, there has been tons and tons of research on which article headlines spread the best. The single most comprehensive source I’ve found however comes from Iris Shoor. Iris and her company Takipi have analyzed the top 100 blogs on the Web and tried to figure out which headlines work the best.

Here are her three top tips:

GIVE YOUR READERS NUMBERS -- THE BIGGER, THE BETTER.

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Of course, we can’t always make a list post for every article we write. In that case, the following might work:

EVERYONE WANTS TO BE TAUGHT: USE "INTRODUCTION", "THE BEGINNER'S GUIDE", "IN FIVE MINUTES" AND "DIY"

A key idea about writing great headlines that great copywriters have emphasized for a long time--and that Iris and her team also underscore--is to teach people something.

After all, we all want to get smarter. A common way to think about it is to make a lot of “How to” articles. The bad news is that while they do teach people something, they don’t spread as far.

Instead, change it to something more specific, so people will know beforehand what they will get.

An example:

Click Image To Enlarge

Being specific, while also showing that the article will be in depth, is one of the most important things to focus on. In a recent example of a post about how to go about social sharing, this seemed to resonate extremely well with people.

GENERAL WORDS THAT MAKE POSTS MORE VIRAL

Last but not least, Iris also offers us a list of different words, that, if used in a headlines, they make for a big uptick in viral spread:

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Iris also offers some more great tips on this topic and the research methodology. Fortunately all of this seems to be in line with the top performing articles on our blog, too.

Over to you now. How do you approach finding great titles for your tweets, Facebook posts, and blog posts? I’d love your best tips on this in the comments.

(Reprinted with permission from Buffer.)

COMMENTARY:  A bit lengthy, but absolutely great advice for improving your blog and social media headlines so they are more impactful, interesting and engaging.  And, don't forget the best days of the week and best times of the day to post your social media updates and blog posts by referring to by blog posts dated October 21, 2013 and October 21, 2013.  Well worth looking into.

Courtesy of an article dated October 22, 2013 appearing in Fast Company

PINTEREST'S NEW SAN FRANCISCO HEADQUARTERS REVEALS CLEAN AND UNFINSHED SPACES THAT FOSTER CREATIVE COLLABORATIVE

Located in San Francisco's SoMA neighborhood, Pinterest's new 45,000-square-foot headquarters feature four "houses," architectural volumes where employees can collaborate in groups. (Click Image To Enlarge)

TO MATCH THE UNCERTAIN NATURE OF STARTUPS, COMPANY FOUNDER EVAN SHARP STEERED AWAY OF SLEEK DECADENCE IN FAVOR OF CLEAN SPACES THAT FOSTER CREATIVE COLLABORATION.

When talking about workplace design, the buzzword “collaboration” flies around the tech world faster than a speeding foosball. From startups working out of garages to sprawling corporate campuses, everyone is looking to harness the creative energy of people working together. Pinterest is no exception. The design-driven company is using its new 45,000-square-foot headquarters in San Francisco’s SoMA neighborhood as a test site for collaboration.

The hubs within the office are meant to foster community. But perhaps, in the spirit of Pinterest, they are more like fun houses, with something a little strange or unique in each one to bond people together. (Click Image To Enlarge)

The “war room” is designed for power-working sessions on deadline. Desks allow designers and engineers to work shoulder-to-shoulder on their laptops and then feverishly cover the whiteboard and glass walls with their brainstorming notes. (Click Image To Enlarge)

Employees moved into the space in April, filling a brick warehouse on 7th Street that had been stripped down to basics: large industrial windows, wood beams, steel structure. But into that raw space, concept designers Janette Kim, of All of the Above, and Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood, from First Office, along with executive architect Neal Schwartz, inserted a grid of four white volumes. Each 20-by-20-foot cube-like “house” functions as a different kind of meeting, working, or gathering area. Almost totemic, these architectural interventions answer the challenge of how to have 150+ people working in an open-floor plan and still have places for quiet, creative intensity--and yes, collaboration.

Another meeting area. (Click Image To Enlarge)

 
 The office is left intentionally unfinished. Says Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp: “The one certain thing about a startup is that the future is highly uncertain, and so like an information system, we wanted the design of the office to be flexible enough that the design would be able to adapt as the company changes over time. (Click Image To Enlarge)

Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp explained. 

“The one certain thing about a startup is that the future is highly uncertain, and so like an information system, we wanted the design of the office to be flexible enough that the design would be able to adapt as the company changes over time.  Like Pinterest (the service), we wanted our space to accommodate the most heterogeneous set of occupations possible. That's architect speak for, the space should enable you to work in many different ways. Whether you're comfortable working at a dedicated desk, on your laptop at a communal table, or in a dark corner in the basement, it's likely that you'll find a place that works for the way you like to work.”

“Like Pinterest (the service)," Sharp continues, "we wanted our space to accommodate the most heterogeneous set of occupations possible. That's architect speak for, the space should enable you to work in many different ways. Whether you're comfortable working at a dedicated desk, on your laptop at a communal table, or in a dark corner in the basement, it's likely that you'll find a place that works for the way you like to work.”  (Click Image To Enlarge)

“We didn't want the space to give the impression of success or complacency or decadence, the way a lot of studio and agency spaces feel to me," Sharp says. (Click Image To Enlarge)

That doesn’t mean that emphasis is placed solely on efficiency or productivity. Like literal houses, the hubs within the office are meant to foster community. But perhaps, in the spirit of Pinterest, they are more like fun houses, with something a little strange or unique in each one to bond people together. For instance, an oversized circular table is intentionally too big for a single meeting or group lunch.  Kim explains.  

“We wanted to design a table that would be so large it would welcome anyone to work on it.  If your table holds 20 people and five people are sitting at it, anyone can feel invited.”

By contrast, the “war room” is designed for power-working sessions on deadline.  Desks allow designers and engineers to work shoulder-to-shoulder on their laptops and then feverishly cover the whiteboard and glass walls with their brainstorming notes.

Still, there's an element of fun, with vintage signs and tchotchkes brought in by employees. (Click Image To Enlarge)

The office is housed in a renovated brick warehouse on 7th Street. (Click Image To Enlarge)

The conversation of how to work collaboratively began for Kim long before she sketched a plan. Sharp was her student in 2008, when he was a graduate student studying architecture at Columbia University in New York City. Kim and Sharp remained in touch after he founded Pinterest in a garage and would discuss the connections between architecture, startup culture, and information design, contemplating how meaning is generated for spaces, objects, and photographs. Recalls Kim.  

“We talked about a square, a circle, a cross--really basic things--but it was also a way to talk about the collaborative culture of the office, of relationships between people.”

The four "houses." (Click Image To Enlarge)

That dynamic culture expresses itself in the architecture and in the ever-changing displays of vintage signage and funky objects brought in by the staff. DIY art projects made by crafty “Pinployees” hang from the rafters, evidence of after-hours creativity.

Sharp explains.  

“The office feels intentionally unfinished.  We didn't want the space to give the impression of success or complacency or decadence, the way a lot of studio and agency spaces feel to me. We wanted it to feel like one stepping stone on a larger journey. This helps remind us how far we are from our ultimate aspirations for what Pinterest will become.”

COMMENTARY:    I have always preferred the simplicity of open space plans over the confinement of office cubicles.  Pinterest's new headquarters are quite typical of today's high technology startups:  fast growing, team-oriented, highly social, creative and innovative.  You almost have to do away with the cubicles in favor of just a few private places where peope can gather for collaborative brainstorming and private meetings.  It means less investment in office furniture and sacrificing some privacy, in favor of clear lines of communication and social interaction and collaboration.   When done properly, the architecture and interior space plan can, as in the case of Pinterest, appear very impressive and appealing to the eye.  

I love the interior space plan concept of the "four houses," because the office spaces are purposely designed to foster a sense of community and belonging.  Pinterest's HQ is probably a very noisey place, especially the lunch room area.  It gives one the feeling of a community, a corporate family, if you will.  Everything is out in the "open."  Even the conference rooms have glass walls, so there is no attempt to hide anything.  I didn't see any curtains, so I wonder how they handle confidential information.  Just the same, Pinterest's new HQ came out quite impressive.

Courtesy of an article dated October 22, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design    

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3020285/inside-pinterests-intentionally-unfinished-new-headquarters?partner=newsletter#1

SHREDDIES: THE HIGH-TECH UNDERWEAR THAT KEEP YOUR FARTS FROM SMELLING

Shreddies use a layer of activated carbon to mask odors. (Click Image To Enlarge)

Scientists and innovators may be hard at work curing malaria or generating cheap renewable energy, but these issues--while important--perhaps pale in comparison to the work of a British man named Paul O'Leary. That's O'Leary has invented Shreddies, a pair of underpants that prevents the odor from farts from entering the nostrils of unsuspecting people nearby.

The company calls its odor-masking technology Zorflex. (Click Image To Enlarge)

The underwear are available for men and women (there are also models for incontinence), and uses a layer of activated carbon cloth to mask odors. The porous nature of the carbon traps the smell, leaving nothing but roses for the rest of the world. All you have to do is wash it to reset the smell-trapping abilities. The company calls its miracle fabric "Zorflex" and says that it went through rigorous testing to determine its odor-masking abilities:

"De Montfort University in the U.K. tested our new 100% activated carbon jersey cloth and presented their findings at the 86th Textile Institute World Conference."

Shreddies are designed to absorb odors, not to muffle the sound.  Most flatulence sufferers are able to control the noise by altering their body position. (Click Image To Enlarge)

The Textile Institute World Congress accepts no half-assed fart-masking test results.

Shreddies start at $30 for women and $45 for men. As to the most important question, the company has some regrets, but also a note of advice:

"Shreddies are designed to absorb odors, not to muffle the sound. Most flatulence sufferers are able to control the noise by altering their body position."

Shreddies come in multiple styles, for men and women. (Click Image To Enlarge)

COMMENTARY:    Man, I must buy several pairs of Shreddies.  Finally, a "fart stopper."   LOL

Courtesy of an article dated October 22, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Exist

APPLE UNVEILS TWO NEW IPADS: A 5TH GEN 1-LB, ALUMINUM iPAD AIR AND 2ND GEN iPAD MINI WITH RETINA DISPLAY AND A-7 CHIP

Apple CEO Tim Cook holding the new 1-Lb iPad Air tablet at the San Francisco unveiling on Tuesday, October 22, 2013. (Click Image To Enlarge)

On Tuesday, October 22, 2013, Apple held a new product unveiling event before the press at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center For The Arts.  Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke about Apple's recent product releases and its quest for new product innovation, then turned the microphone over to Phil Schiller, Apple's V.P. of Global Marketing, who introduced the press to the iPad Air, a 5th generation iPad equipped with a 9.7 inch retina display, the new 64-bit A7 microprocessor and weighing only 1-lb, and the 2nd generation iPad Mini now equipped with a 7.9 inch retina display and new 64-bit A7 microprocessor. 

 

Apple CEO Tim Cook was joined on stage by marketing chief Phil Schiller, iTunes head Eddy Cue and software chief Craig Federighi, who took turns demoing new products. As always, the audience was filled with tech notables, including Path CEO Dave Morin, Flipboard co-founder Mike McCue, former Apple CTO Avie Tevanian, and Apple board member Bill Campbell.

iPad Air 

Click Image To Enlarge

Apple unveiled the iPad Air, the fifth generation of its iPad tablet.  The newly named iPad Air features a design that's reminiscent of the iPad mini released last year.  It's thinner and lighter than prior versions, and features a smaller bezel, which shrinks the footprint of the tablet down without compromising on screen size. Apple says it's 20 percent thinner at only 7.5mm thick, and weighs just 1.0 pound (28 percent less than the previous iPad). The screen remains the same; it's a 9.7-inch Retina Display with 2048 x 1536 pixel resolution. This is the first major redesign of Apple's flagship tablet since the iPad 2 was released in March 2011.

 

The iPad Air features the 64-bit A7 processor and M7 motion coprocessor found in the iPhone 5S, which Apple says is 8 times faster and has 72 times better graphics performance than the processor in the original iPad released in 2010. It also has a 5-megapixel iSight camera and FaceTime HD front-facing camera and 10 hour battery life. Apple says the iPad Air has twice the data transfer rate on Wi-Fi thanks to new MIMO 802.11n support, but it doesn't support 802.11ac.

Phil Schiller, Apple V.P. Global Marketing, explains why the new iPad Air is so thin (Click Images To Enlarge)

The iPad Air will be available in silver and white and space grey and black color options starting at $499 in dozens of countries on November 1st. An LTE version will be available starting at $629. Apple is also keeping the geriatric iPad 2 in the lineup for $399. All of the new iPads will be shipping with iOS 7.

iPad Mini 2

iPad mini with Retina display and 64-bit processor coming in November for $399 (Click Image To Enlarge)

Apple's worst-kept secret and one of its most momentous announcements of the day has just been made: the iPad mini is getting upgraded with a new Retina display. The new screen's resolution is 2048 x 1536 — matching that of the latest 10-inch iPads — and the processor powering it is the same 64-bit Apple A7 chip as in the iPad Air and iPhone 5S.

Available in November for $399 with Wi-Fi or $529 with mobile data, the new mini is more expensive than its direct predecessor, but the first-gen device is being kept around as well. The 2012 iPad mini gets a price cut, now costing $299 and acting as Apple's entry-level tablet device.

 

The 2013 iPad mini will be available in either a white and silver color combo or a space gray and black pairing. One of the subtler upgrades on the list of changes is the addition of a new 128GB storage option — that will set you back $699 on the Wi-Fi mini or $829 if you want a mobile connection as well. Apple's being unusually cagey with the timing of the new iPad mini's release, identifying it only as "later in November," but Tim Cook closed off today's presentation by promising that all the new products will be available in time for the holidays.

Phil Schiller, Apple V.P. Global Marketing, alks about the new iPad Mini with retina display at the San Francisco unveiling (Click Image To Enlarge)

Alongside the refreshed 7.9-inch iPad mini, Apple is introducing a new set of colorful Smart Covers, costing $39 each, and more expansive wraparound cases that cost $69. 

The new iPad Mini comes with a 7.9 inch retina display with a resolution of 2048x1536 and 326 pixels per square inch. (Click Image To Enlarge)

The new iPad Mini is equipped with the A7 chip with 64-bit architecture which is 4X faster, has 8X faster graphics with 10 hours of battery life. (Click Image To Enlarge)

iPad Air and iPad Mini 2 With Retina Display Prices and Specifications

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Full-Size Tablets Compared - iPad Air vs The Competition

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This iPad Air comparison chart includes Google's Nexus 10 (Click Image To Enlarge)

Mini Tablets Compared - iPad Mini 2 vs The Competition

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COMMENTARY:   In his overview of the iPad, Tim Cook said Apple has sold 170 million tablets since introducing the “magical device” three and a half year ago. 

Investors have been clamoring for Cook and Apple to speed up their new product rollout schedule to boost sales growth and fend off rivals from Amazon to Google to Samsung in the two markets where it gets about 70 percent of its sales: smartphones and tablets. Amazon, with its Kindle, and Google, with its Nexus, already offer high-definition displays in their small screen tablets, and Samsung beat Apple to market with its release last month of a smartwatch called the Gear that works with its Galaxy phone.  Analysts don’t expect Cook, who last month introduced the new iPhone 5s and  iPhone 5c as well as a faster iMac desktop, to unveil a smartwatch until next year.

Ovum analyst Jan Dawson praised Apple for adding the most advanced tech to its iPad Air, saying,

“The iPad Air is a good enough boost to the previous version to trigger good upgrade sales and get iPad shipments growing again, which was a key objective for this launch.”

But Apple’s pricing across the iPad line may not woo users away from lower-priced tablets built around Google’s Android operating system.

Milton Booty, a technology analyst, said in an email statement.

"This is the clearest statement Apple could have made that it is only interested in competing in the premium tablet space. The yawning gap between the specs of the cheaper iPad Mini and iPad 2 and the new iPads signifies that it is only willing to compete at the lower price points with older models. This leaves a huge chunk of the tablet market unserved by Apple while others such as Google, Amazon and a raft of others aggressively target the sub-$400 market. This reinforces our view that Apple’s share in tablets will continue to fall as Android’s share rises over the coming years.”

How Apple Created The Lightest iPad Yet

Just 7.5mm wide and weighing one pound (20% lighter than the iPad 4), the iPad Air is the thinnest and lightest full-size tablet Apple has ever created.   To get an idea of the magnitude of this accomplishment let's look at a comparson of the dimensions of the iPad Air and its predecessor the iPad 4.

Dimensions

iPad Air: 240x169.5x7.5mm, weighing 478g
iPad 4: 241.2x185.7x9.4mm, weighing 662g

If you were wondering how Apple's engineers were able to achieve this, it comes down to good ole fashioned design ingenuity and innovation.   

• Thinner Bezel - The bezel around the iPad Air display is 7.5mm thick compared with the iPad 4's 9.4mm bezel -- a reduction in the bezel of 43 percent.
• Aluminum Chasis - The iPad Air kept the lightweight aluminium chassis of the iPad 4, but due to a thinner and lighter A7 microprocessor chip and thinner bezel, the aluminum chasis is also thinner and contributes to the overall lower weight. 
• A7 Microprocessor - The iPad Air is equipped with the new A7 microprocessor chip with 64-bit architecture which is blazzingly fast:  Processes data 4 times faster than the A6 chip and displays graphics 8 times faster.  Apple was also able to shrink the down the process with which the A7 chip was made from 32 nanometers to just 28 nanometers--remember, the smaller a chip is, the less electricity it needs to run--meaning that, not only is the A7 chip powerful enough to drive an iPad's Retina Display, it's more power-efficient too.
• Power Saving Retina Display - The iPaid Air is rumored to be using Sharp's indium gallium zinc oxide or IGZO thin-film transistor display technology (or something like it). IGZO allows more light from a display's backlight to shine through to the pixels of the screen to produce a brighter display without draining excessive power from the battery. During the iPad unveiling event, Apple quietly made mention in their presentation unveiling the new iPad Air and Retina iPad mini that both devices used "improved backside illumination."
  

With the iPad Air and Retina iPad mini, Apple has been able to finally ditch the much thicker and power-draining A6 microprocessor.  The 64-bit A7 chip that Apple debuted with the iPhone 5s has powerful enough graphics in its default configuration to handle a 3-million-pixel-plus Retina Display. Apple was also able to shrink the down the process with which the A7 chip was made from 32 nanometers to just 28 nanometers--remember, the smaller a chip is, the less electricity it needs to run--meaning that, not only is the A7 chip powerful enough to drive an iPad's Retina Display, it's more power-efficient too. 

Courtesy of an article dated October 22, 2013 appearing in The Verge, an article date October 22, 2013 appearing in The Verge, an article dated October 23, 2013 appearing in Business Insider, an article dated October 24, 2013 appearing in The Gazelle, an article dated October 22 2013 appearing in Mashable, an article dated October 22, 2013 appearing in Forbes, an article dated October 23, 2013 appearing in The Inquirer, an article dated October 22, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design

KATY PERRY CELEBRATES HER 29TH BIRTHDAY WITH A SPECIAL 'ROAR' CONCERT AT A COLORADO HIGH SCHOOL

Katy Perry celebrated her 29th birthday by giving a private concert at the Colorado high school whose spirited lip dub video to her pop anthem "Roar" became a 

Perry chose the winning video, which was shot in a single take and featured over 2,000 students and staff at Lakewood High School in Lakewood, Colo., lip-syncing to Perry's lyrics group by group, from student athletes to cheerleaders to members of the pep band and more, for its school spirit. 

Perry told "GMA."

"It was thousands of kids coming together to 'Roar' and that's what this competition means to me."

That tremendous sense of school spirit was on display today as Perry arrived in the ultimate pep rally fashion at the school, walking through a sea of thousands of students in orange and black, and took to the stage in a cheerleading uniform to perform, live on "Good Morning America."

The students, whose school mascot is fittingly a tiger, transformed their gym into a concert venue, complete with banners and signs reading "One World, One Roar," for the singer arrival.

Perry, who just released her new album, "Prism," turned 29 today, but said she often feels like a teen at heart. 

Perry said to a packed audience of thousands. 

"I'm 29. I feel great.  I still feel like I'm 13 sometimes. Obviously you can tell by my music and my spirit. I'm so excited about this record and I just love all the participation and the unification …of all of you guys coming together and roaring."

Perry got the crowd roaring with a spirited performance of her hit, "Roar," which featured a jump-rope routine. She also sang her new single, "Walking on Air," and her classic, "Firework."

 Courtney Coddington, Lakewood High School's student body president who directed and produced the winning video, and fellow senior Gavin Rudy, an aspiring filmmaker, edited it. Coddington said it was "awesome" how the entire student body collaborated on the winning video.

The school presented Perry with a special Varsity letter jacket and a birthday cake for the occasion.

Lakewood High School's "Roar" video was one of hundreds submitted after Perry put a call out on "Good Morning America" for high schools to submit their own rendition of her mega-hit "Roar," igniting an online frenzy that made local headlines around the country.

Perry scoured through submissions and was inspired by the stories and the creativity. The singer narrowed it down to Lakewood High School and four other finalists -- Pickerington High School Central in Ohio, Cooper High School in Abilene, Texas, Spanish Springs High School in Sparks, Nev., and Verrado High School in Buckeye, Ariz. -- and said picking a winner was "one of the hardest decisions" she's ever had to make.

Courtesy of an article dated October 25, 2013 appearing in ABC News 

HOW FACEBOOK'S NEW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TEAM IS UTILIZING DEEP LEARNING TO FIND MEANING IN USER POSTS

Artificial intelligence software and a technique called deep learning could help Facebook understand its users and their data better.

Facebook is set to get an even better understanding of the 700 million people who use the social network to share details of their personal lives each day.

A new research group within the company is working on an emerging and powerful approach to artificial intelligence known as deep learning, which uses simulated networks of brain cells to process data. Applying this method to data shared on Facebook could allow for novel features and perhaps boost the company’s ad targeting.

Deep learning has shown potential as the basis for software that could work out the emotions or events described in text even if they aren’t explicitly referenced, recognize objects in photos, and make sophisticated predictions about people’s likely future behavior.

The eight-person group, known internally as the AI team, only recently started work, and details of its experiments are still secret. But Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, will say that one obvious way to use deep learning is to improve the news feed, the personalized list of recent updates he calls Facebook’s “killer app.”

Facebook already uses conventional machine learning techniques to prune the 1,500 updates that average Facebook users could possibly see down to 30 to 60 that are judged most likely to be important to them. Schroepfer says Facebook needs to get better at picking the best updates because its users are generating more data and using the social network in different ways.

 

Schroepfer told MIT Technology Review.

“The data set is increasing in size, people are getting more friends, and with the advent of mobile, people are online more frequently.  It’s not that I look at my news feed once at the end of the day; I constantly pull out my phone while I’m waiting for my friend or I’m at the coffee shop. We have five minutes to really delight you.”

Shroepfer says deep learning could also be used to help people organize their photos or choose which is the best one to share on Facebook.

In looking into deep learning, Facebook follows its competitors Google and Microsoft, which have used the approach to impressive effect in the past year. Google has hired and acquired leading talent in the field (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”), and last year it created software that taught itself to recognize cats and other objects by reviewing stills from YouTube videos. The underlying technology was later used to slash the error rate of Google’s voice recognition services (see “Google’s Virtual Brain Goes to Work”).

Meanwhile, researchers at Microsoft have used deep learning to build a system that translates speech from English to Mandarin Chinese in real time (see “Microsoft Brings Star Trek’s Voice Translator to Life”). Chinese Web giant Baidu also recently established a Silicon Valley research lab to work on deep learning.

Less complex forms of machine learning have underpinned some of the most useful features developed by major technology companies in recent years, such as spam detection systems and facial recognition in images. The largest companies have now begun investing heavily in deep learning because it can deliver significant gains over those more established techniques, says Elliot Turner, founder and CEO of AlchemyAPI, which rents access to its own deep learning software for text and images.

He says.  

“Research into understanding images, text, and language has been going on for decades, but the typical improvement a new technique might offer was a fraction of a percent.  In tasks like vision or speech, we’re seeing 30 percent-plus improvements with deep learning.”

The newer technique also allows much faster progress in training a new piece of software, says Turner.

Conventional forms of machine learning are slower because before data can be fed into learning software, experts must manually choose which features of it the software should pay attention to, and they must label the data to signify, for example, that certain images contain cars.

Deep learning systems can learn with much less human intervention because they can figure out for themselves which features of the raw data are most significant. They can even work on data that hasn’t been labeled, as Google’s cat-recognizing software did. Systems able to do that typically use software that simulates networks of brain cells, known as neural nets, to process data. They require more powerful collections of computers to run.

Facebook’s AI group will work on applications that can help the company’s products as well as on more general research that will be made public, says Srinivas Narayanan, an engineering manager at Facebook who’s helping to assemble the new group. He says one way Facebook can help advance deep learning is by drawing on its recent work creating new types of hardware and software to handle large data sets (see “Inside Facebook’s Not-So-Secret New Data Center”).  He says.  

“It’s both a software and a hardware problem together; the way you scale these networks requires very deep integration of the two.”

Facebook hired deep learning expert Marc’Aurelio Ranzato away from Google for its new group. Other members include Yaniv Taigman, cofounder of the facial recognition startup Face.com (see “When You’re Always a Familiar Face”); computer vision expert Lubomir Bourdev; and veteran Facebook engineer Keith Adams.

COMMENTARY:     For several years, Google has been heavily involved in a branch of artificial intelligence or AI called deep learning.   Deep-learning software attempts to mimic the activity in layers of neurons in the neocortex, the wrinkly 80 percent of the brain where thinking occurs. The software learns, in a very real sense, to recognize patterns in digital representations of sounds, images, and other data.

The basic idea—that software can simulate the neocortex’s large array of neurons in an artificial “neural network”—is decades old, and it has led to as many disappointments as breakthroughs. But because of improvements in mathematical formulas and increasingly powerful computers, computer scientists can now model many more layers of virtual neurons than ever before.   

Jeff Dean, hired by Google CEO Larry Page to headup the development of large scale computers capable of handling the computing required for modern day artificial "neural networks" and deep learning, explains Google's research into deep learning and how this technology is appled across Google's product offerings: 

 

With this greater depth, they are producing remarkable advances in speech and image recognition. Last June, a Google deep-learning system that had been shown 10 million images from YouTube videos proved almost twice as good as any previous image recognition effort at identifying objects such as cats. Google also used the technology to cut the error rate on speech recognition in its latest Android mobile software.

In October 2012, Microsoft chief research officer Rick Rashid (YouTube video below at 33:00) wowed attendees at a lecture in China with a demonstration of speech software that transcribed his spoken words into English text with an error rate of 7 percent, translated them into Chinese-language text, and then simulated his own voice uttering them in Mandarin. That same month, a team of three graduate students and two professors won a contest held by Merck to identify molecules that could lead to new drugs. The group used deep learning to zero in on the molecules most likely to bind to their targets.

 

Google in particular has become a magnet for deep learning and related AI talent. In March the company bought a startup cofounded by Geoffrey Hinton, a University of Toronto computer science professor who was part of the team that won the Merck contest. Hinton, who will split his time between the university and Google, says he plans to “take ideas out of this field and apply them to real problems” such as image recognition, search, and natural-language understanding, he says.

Extending deep learning into applications beyond speech and image recognition will require more conceptual and software breakthroughs, not to mention many more advances in processing power. And we probably won’t see machines we all agree can think for themselves for years, perhaps decades—if ever. But for now, says Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Research USA, “deep learning has reignited some of the grand challenges in artificial intelligence.”

Click Image To Enlarge

In June 2012, Google demonstrated one of the largest neural networks yet, with more than a billion connections. A team led by Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng and Google Fellow Jeff Dean showed the system images from 10 million randomly selected YouTube videos. One simulated neuron in the software model fixated on images of cats. Others focused on human faces, yellow flowers, and other objects. And thanks to the power of deep learning, the system identified these discrete objects even though no humans had ever defined or labeled them.

What stunned some AI experts, though, was the magnitude of improvement in image recognition. The system correctly categorized objects and themes in the ­YouTube images 16 percent of the time. That might not sound impressive, but it was 70 percent better than previous methods. And, Dean notes, there were 22,000 categories to choose from; correctly slotting objects into some of them required, for example, distinguishing between two similar varieties of skate fish. That would have been challenging even for most humans. When the system was asked to sort the images into 1,000 more general categories, the accuracy rate jumped above 50 percent.

Big Data

Training the many layers of virtual neurons in the experiment took 16,000 computer processors—the kind of computing infrastructure that Google has developed for its search engine and other services. At least 80 percent of the recent advances in AI can be attributed to the availability of more computer power, reckons Dileep George, cofounder of the machine-learning startup Vicarious.

There’s more to it than the sheer size of Google’s data centers, though. Deep learning has also benefited from the company’s method of splitting computing tasks among many machines so they can be done much more quickly. That’s a technology Dean helped develop earlier in his 14-year career at Google. It vastly speeds up the training of deep-learning neural networks as well, enabling Google to run larger networks and feed a lot more data to them.

Already, deep learning has improved voice search on smartphones. Until last year, Google’s Android software used a method that misunderstood many words. But in preparation for a new release of Android last July, Dean and his team helped replace part of the speech system with one based on deep learning. Because the multiple layers of neurons allow for more precise training on the many variants of a sound, the system can recognize scraps of sound more reliably, especially in noisy environments such as subway platforms. Since it’s likelier to understand what was actually uttered, the result it returns is likelier to be accurate as well. Almost overnight, the number of errors fell by up to 25 percent—results so good that many reviewers now deem Android’s voice search smarter than Apple’s more famous Siri voice assistant.

Limitations of Deep Learning

For all the advances, not everyone thinks deep learning can move artificial intelligence toward something rivaling human intelligence. Some critics say deep learning and AI in general ignore too much of the brain’s biology in favor of brute-force computing.

One such critic is Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing, whose latest venture, Numenta, is developing a machine-learning system that is biologically inspired but does not use deep learning. Numenta’s system can help predict energy consumption patterns and the likelihood that a machine such as a windmill is about to fail. Hawkins, author of On Intelligence, a 2004 book on how the brain works and how it might provide a guide to building intelligent machines, says deep learning fails to account for the concept of time. Brains process streams of sensory data, he says, and human learning depends on our ability to recall sequences of patterns: when you watch a video of a cat doing something funny, it’s the motion that matters, not a series of still images like those Google used in its experiment.  Hawkins says.  

“Google’s attitude is: lots of data makes up for everything."

But if it doesn’t make up for everything, the computing resources a company like Google throws at these problems can’t be dismissed. They’re crucial, say deep-learning advocates, because the brain itself is still so much more complex than any of today’s neural networks.  Hinton says.  

“You need lots of computational resources to make the ideas work at all.”

What’s Next

Although Google is less than forthcoming about future applications, the prospects are intriguing. Clearly, better image search would help YouTube, for instance. And Dean says deep-learning models can use phoneme data from English to more quickly train systems to recognize the spoken sounds in other languages. It’s also likely that more sophisticated image recognition could make Google’s self-driving cars much better. Then there’s search and the ads that underwrite it. Both could see vast improvements from any technology that’s better and faster at recognizing what people are really looking for—maybe even before they realize it.

This is what intrigues Kurzweil, 65, who has long had a vision of intelligent machines. In high school, he wrote software that enabled a computer to create original music in various classical styles, which he demonstrated in a 1965 appearance on the TV show I’ve Got a Secret. Since then, his inventions have included several firsts—a print-to-speech reading machine, software that could scan and digitize printed text in any font, music synthesizers that could re-create the sound of orchestral instruments, and a speech recognition system with a large vocabulary.

Today, he envisions a “cybernetic friend” that listens in on your phone conversations, reads your e-mail, and tracks your every move—if you let it, of course—so it can tell you things you want to know even before you ask. This isn’t his immediate goal at Google, but it matches that of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who said in the company’s early days that he wanted to build the equivalent of the sentient computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey—except one that wouldn’t kill people.

For now, Kurzweil aims to help computers understand and even speak in natural language. “My mandate is to give computers enough understanding of natural language to do useful things—do a better job of search, do a better job of answering questions,” he says. Essentially, he hopes to create a more flexible version of IBM’s Watson, which he admires for its ability to understand Jeopardy!queries as quirky as “a long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping.” (Watson’s correct answer: “What is a meringue harangue?”)

Kurzweil isn’t focused solely on deep learning, though he says his approach to speech recognition is based on similar theories about how the brain works. He wants to model the actual meaning of words, phrases, and sentences, including ambiguities that usually trip up computers. “I have an idea in mind of a graphical way to represent the semantic meaning of language,” he says.

That in turn will require a more comprehensive way to graph the syntax of sentences. Google is already using this kind of analysis to improve grammar in translations. Natural-language understanding will also require computers to grasp what we humans think of as common-sense meaning. For that, Kurzweil will tap into the Knowledge Graph, Google’s catalogue of some 700 million topics, locations, people, and more, plus billions of relationships among them. It was introduced last year as a way to provide searchers with answers to their queries, not just links.

Finally, Kurzweil plans to apply deep-learning algorithms to help computers deal with the “soft boundaries and ambiguities in language.” If all that sounds daunting, it is. “Natural-language understanding is not a goal that is finished at some point, any more than search,” he says. “That’s not a project I think I’ll ever finish.”

Though Kurzweil’s vision is still years from reality, deep learning is likely to spur other applications beyond speech and image recognition in the nearer term. For one, there’s drug discovery. The surprise victory by Hinton’s group in the Merck contest clearly showed the utility of deep learning in a field where few had expected it to make an impact.

That’s not all. Microsoft’s Peter Lee says there’s promising early research on potential uses of deep learning in machine vision—technologies that use imaging for applications such as industrial inspection and robot guidance. He also envisions personal sensors that deep neural networks could use to predict medical problems. And sensors throughout a city might feed deep-learning systems that could, for instance, predict where traffic jams might occur.

In a field that attempts something as profound as modeling the human brain, it’s inevitable that one technique won’t solve all the challenges. But for now, this one is leading the way in artificial intelligence.  

Dean says. 

“Deep learning is a really powerful metaphor for learning about the world.”

Conclusions

Although artificial intelligence has made some significant contributions in the science of deep learning, the technology is not even close to emulating the thinking processes that go in inside the human brain.  Although IBM's Watson computer has demonstrated that it can compete and win against humans in a television game show like Jeopardy, we are a long way from developing systems that can match or outperform the human brain.   Apple's personal assistant app SIRI uses voice commands to locate restaurants, movie theaters, Starbucks, and so forth, but results are often incorrect or way off course.  In short, artificial intelligence is not really very intelligent. It is still computer programming that does a certain thing fairly well.  When artificial intelligence has risen to the level of the HAL 9000 computer, and can think logically, intelligently, autonomosly, and learns and refines, then maybe we will take this science beyond the realm of science fiction to reality.   

Courtesy of an article dated September 27, 2013 appearing in MIT Technology Review and an article dated April 23, 2013 appearing in MIT Technology Review

 

FARM 432: A KIT TO GROW AND FARM BUGS AT HOME, TO EAT!

This is Farm 432. It’s sorta like an ant farm. But the bugs aren’t doing the farming. You’re farming the bugs.  (Click Image To Enlarge) 

DON’T THINK OF IT AS EATING BUG BABIES. THINK OF IT AS PROTEIN GARDENING.

As the population grows, so, too, will its hunger for meat. By 2050, meat production will need to surge by 50% to quell demand. The only problem is, producing so much (red) meat is already an environmental nightmare. And we simply might not have the resources to scale.

It’s a house to raise black soldier flies so that you can eat their larvae. (Click Image To Enlarge)

Meanwhile, Katharina Unger is planning to invite her friends over to a barbecue. (Really.) The University of Applied Arts Vienna grad has built a pretty impressive domestic insect-breeding concept called Farm 432. Over the course of 432 hours, with just a few food scraps, she can coax 1 gram of black soldier fly eggs into 2.4 kilograms of larvae protein. And if you listen to Unger long enough, her arguments are pretty convincing as to why we should all be growing fly larvae at home.

 

Unger explains.

“Black soldier flies themselves do not eat, they just drink. And they do not transmit any disease to humans.  Unlike normal house flies they usually do not sit on food and they do not sting or bite, either. They also fly very slowly, so in case one should escape it is easy to catch them.”

But the relatively gross idea has been packaged as a convenient consumer product. (Click Image To Enlarge)

Over their eight-day lifecycle, soldier flies need space to fly around, mate, and lay eggs. In response, Farm 432 has a bulbous sphere at the end, connected to the "fly fun park" nozzles. These nozzles were designed after insect-attracting plants like the Rafflesia, and serve several functions. They waft in food waste from another chamber, convincing the flies that this will be a safe place for their offspring to thrive. And they provide a spot to lay eggs. Eventually, when the larvae hatch inside, they’ll fall through a hole to the food source below.

The flies use the bubble area to live. They lay their eggs in the blue funnels. The eggs hatch into larvae, which fall into food scraps. And eventually, the larvae climb their way out… (Click Image To Enlarge)

Unger explains.

“There they feed on biowaste or whatever you feed them on and wriggle around for around 14 days.  They then want to clean themselves and find a dry and secure place to pupate, that’s why they climb up the migration ramp. This is when they fall into the collection bucket for harvest.”

…to end up here.  (Click Image To Enlarge)

From here, it’s bon appetit. The larvae have a nutty, almost meaty flavor, Unger says, and her favorite dish is a tomato larvae risotto. But as tasty as it may be, and as well as Farm 432 may work, Unger admits that the design challenge is only part of making such an idea a success.

She says. 

“With my design I am proposing a new lifestyle.  It’s about a potential new Western culture of insect eating and breeding. It’s about making people aware that there is a great variety of food on our planet that we rarely consider.”

It’s a convenient tray for cooking. (Click Image To Enlarge)

Through the process, 1 gram of black soldier fly eggs becomes 2.4 kilograms of larvae. (Click Image To Enlarge)

It’s an incredible ecological savings compared to beef.  (Click Image To Enlarge)

Read more here.

 

COMMENTARY:   This sure looks yucky to me, but if you are into eating insects for the nutrition, I could easily see where you could buy a dozen of these Farm 432 units and grow different bugs to suit your individual taste buds.  Nothig like bugs as a garnish for your favorite rice dish.  Yuck!!

Courtesy of an article dated July 29, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design