Week 8: Sixth Sense Technology

I thought the video by Pranav Mistry was very interesting.  I thought his demonstration of his new Sixth Sense technology was extremely useful and beneficial because I hadn’t ever heard of anything like this before.  I thought his demonstration of all the 3 dimension projections, cameras in devices like a pen or on a helmet, or on the finger tips were fantastic because it was really amazing to see just how advanced technology has become in our society and how heavily dependent we are on it.  I thought his demonstration of taking a picture simply by putting your hands up just like you would if you were actually holding a real camera was amazing to see because it almost looked like a video game how he was able to shape and personalize photos by just using his fingertips.  I thought this idea of the Sixth Sense was truly amazing as it posed for a unity of satisfaction that many millions of people would consider.  It’s so hard to believe that such a small little device can act as such an important piece in communicating with the outer world.  

I think we are moving closer to a more advanced, digital world.  So many of us have devices that limit us from connecting and interacting with the physical world and over the years, our sense of communicating with others face-to-face has been much easier as more advanced and higher resolutions of technology have continued to come out over the past few years.  Living digitally seems much more likely now than it has ever been before as we have based so much of our behaviors on doing so many of our daily routines electronically such as online, phone, internet, texting, emailing, etc.  Yahoo, Google, Facebook and many other email services has regulated data and preserved so much contention that there are reasons why we have become so far advance on our technology ways as we move from problem to problem and from many different technology aspects from the digital world.  I think living in a digital world allows us to use our imagination much more as we familiarize ourselves among one another on developing new ideas that we could use in the future to maximize both profitable attention as well as the capability to allow users to adapt much quicker to society. 

 For example, our social media has skyrocketed more over the past 10 years than it ever has before due to the fact that our social media is so advanced and so many of us rely strictly on social media ways of communication that gets information across much easier and faster.  Below is a video I found which illustrates the benefits and drawbacks of living in a digital world.  Our society relies on electronic/social ways of communication that we may have last the purpose of communicating with everything we do being done online or more easier ways.  Enjoy:

Sources:

 

http://www.itu.int/newsroom/features/digital_world.html

http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/digitalife/docs/digital.life-chapter5.pdf

Week: 6 Blog Assignment

After watching the tutorials in class about the differences between Wix and Weebly, we found it most beneficial to use Weebly for our group presentation.  Although half of our group members decided to work with Wix on the practice day, we felt as if we were most comfortable sticking with Weebly based on the assumption that if felt a bit easier to operate and use when creating our group website.  I felt that adding pictures, videos, captions, and many other forms that associate with Weebly were extremely easy to use because all you do is basically click, drag and paste where you want what included on any of your main pages.  The easiest part of using Weebly compared to Wix was the ability to function everything around so much easier without creating a giant cluster of text that wasn't meant to be there in the first place.  That being said, we did come across a few complications with this free website builder.

For example, although we found it extremely easy to add text and pictures where you wanted them on each particular page, it was very complicated to get the pictures to line up exactly with the text provided based on the fact that we put most of our information into two columns.  As we described in class over the course of the quarter, we took the C.R.A.P. principles into affect as we were laying out the basic design of our group websites making sure everything lined up accordingly and making sure the layout was 100% accurate for each of our 5 pages.  I think that the biggest complication we came across was identifying each picture's size as well as putting the information evenly on the page provided.  Though I haven't ever worked with Wix in the past, I believe we stuck with a good choice on identifying Weebly as the right site for us as we created our project.  Below I have include steps to perfecting the use of Weebly accuratly in the future for students looking to build their own websites:

• There are two different types of pages you can add using Weebly©. 

1) a  normal page such as the one you're on now, and 

2)  You can name your page whatever you want. 

• There are over 70 professional designs that you can use or you can customize your own one.  You can customize the template of your site, or build your own with HTML & CSS in the Weebly editor.

• Some of the things you can put on your Weebly page are pictures, videos, music and audio, documents, maps, links to other websites, links to other pages, photo galleries, files, YouTube clips, slideshows, even online polls.  You can divide your page into two columns to make room for more paragraphs. 

• There are no limits on the number of pages allowed, but there are limitations to a few things such as you have to use a certain font style but you can choose the colour of the font, the size, bold/normal, underlined, italic.    

Week 5: Social Media & Social Change

FACEBOOK:

Facebook is the fastest growing social network in the world with over 100 million active members and continuing to grow every second!  Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.  Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with people they know in a very trusted environment.   In the first half of 2008, Facebook saw significant growth both nationally and globally.  As in the United States, It has become one of the largest and most successful Web sites in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and much throughout Europe.  It also shares ideas and approaches to help get one started when first beginning their tutorials.  Facebook is now available in 15 languages, including Spanish, French, and German and is continuing to grow and add functionality that is appealing to businesses and other work related sources of all kinds.  Facebook nationally recognized that engaging with businesses and buying things are part of the everyday life and with that in mind, it has created a well-drafted system were ads are more relevant and actually enhance, instead of interrupt, the user experience.  This type of market-friendly functionality, coupled with the fact that many customers and prospects are have Facebook and are constantly looking for new business.   

TWITTER:

It is often thought that in social media marketing environments it is easy, quick and cheap. The most difficult aspect of achieving success in social media marketing is dedicating your time and resources to your social media strategy.  This hard work and dedication behind the scenes is what makes success seems so easy.  Twitter is really changing the way businesses communicate. Many businesses have come to recognize its value, and marketing power. Twitter has become a phenomenon with 32 million users, including major companies such as Apple, JetBlue, and CNN. Twitter is a real-time medium and one that is still experiencing rapid growth. It is a powerful marketing tool and is a place to promote products, conduct research, build customer service relations and loyalty, and more-so to get ideas. The use of twitter for marketing purposes is constantly evolving where almost every week an individual can read about a unique application and or strategy for Twitter marketing. With the social media marketing, you will be able to promote your business in the best possible way, create an intact supporters as well as followers. If you are able to build followers and loyal visitors, there is higher chance of dragging your prospect buyers. Compelling words of advertisement and selling point must be established in every social media optimization. Placing your business name and product name all over the social media marketing collateral will definitely increase the chance of generating traffic  that eventually be converted into actual purchase and sales.

YOUTUBE:

YouTube has quickly become as ubiquitous in society as the cell phone. Named as one of the reasons Time Magazine named you as their Person of the Year, YouTube has become the go-to web destination for just about anything on video format, from movie trailers to clips of TV shows to home videos to puppy/kitten cams. Its video domain empire has grown to the point it’s the main resource for Comedy Central’s highest rated show, Tosh.0, a weekly show showcasing the funniest videos on the web with a running commentary by stand-up comedian, Daniel Tosh. So we’ve compiled some information on YouTube to illustrate to you just how wide and massive its operation is, exponentially more so after its acquisition by Google, for you to marvel at and better appreciate.  Some interesting facts regarding YouTube are: it profits over $2 billion per year, 3^rd most visited website ever created, U.S. contains 22% of all users worldwide, averages over 2 billion views per day, 10% of all internet traffic, 900 seconds is average time internet user spends on YouTube every day,  over 24 hours’ worth of video uploaded every minute.  These are many facts that contain to what has made YouTube such a powerful icon among many millions of users and how fast information can travel online that many people can see daily.  This is just one way of communication that allows someone to show the entire world their accomplishments.

These 3 sites are just few of the many that contain millions and millions of people that explore and share information among one another on a daily basis.  It's really crazy just to see how fast communication has grown of the past few years as we have become a society that requires so much of our time on getting information across as quickly as possible.  The following is a tutorial that shows just how fast our society is growing and counting on these rapids amounts of information: enjoy!

SOURCES:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOqRjNXxXBA
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/training/Harnessing-Social-Media-Connect-with-Communities.html
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml