Ever wondered how Google‘s visionary (pun intended) gadget, Google Glass, actually works?

Well, artist Martin Missfeldt created an infographic that explains the wonders of technology behind Google’s technologically-enhanced glasses.

At the heart of the tech that makes Google Glass tick are a mini projector and a semi-transparent prism which project an augmented reality layer of information directly to the user’s retina.

The infographic also touches on arguably one of the biggest hurdles in the design of Google Glass — making it work for people who wear normal glasses.

Image courtesy of Martin Missfeldt

This post was originally published on Mashable here: http://mashable.com/2013/04/09/infographic-google-glass/

Get ready to rock. Twitter is about to launch its long-rumored standalone music app, according to a report.

The app’s existence was rapidly becoming one of the worst-kept secrets in social media, especially after American Idol host Ryan Seacrest randomly tweeted about its existence earlier Thursday.

As soon as Seacrest did that, the social music startup We Are Hunted tweeted back at him — and then immediately announced it had been acquired by Twitter. (Another poorly kept secret, this acquisition likely occurred last year and was revealed by CNET last month.)

When we asked Twitter whether the app existed, they pointed us — rather meaningfully — to the We Are Hunted announcement. Now AllThingsD is reporting that the music app will launch Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

We Are Hunted focused on the top trending music on social media, and the Twitter Music app will likely do the same — plus suggest what other tunes you might like based on what you’ve listened to, and allow you to buy tracks via iTunes.

A streaming-only service, it will feature Soundcloud clips you can listen to from within the app and music videos from Vevo, according to AllThingsD. CNET previous reported that the app would be divided into four sections, including “#NowPlaying”, and that a Twitter account would not be necessary to use it.

What we don’t have a lot of details on is what platform the app is launching on. CNET’s report said it would be iOS only; AllThingsD’s sources don’t specify.

Will this be one more app that Android users have to wait more months to experience? Would you download it? Let us know in the comments.

This article was originally published on Mashable here: http://mashable.com/2013/04/11/twitter-music-app-launch/

Image courtesy iStockphoto, mstay

If you’re still trying to get over Sunday night’s premiere of HBO’s Game of Thrones, and suffering from Westeros withdrawal, you can get your fix in Game of Thrones Ascent on Facebook.

Game of Thrones Ascent, released in beta on Facebook in February, is going to start releasing new content each Monday that pairs with episode of Game of Thrones shown the night before. As season 3 gets underway, players will be able to play along as the events unfold in the show.

On Monday, Disruptor Beam, the team behind the game, released the first content update “Episode 1: Valar Dohaeris”, which allows players to access content from that episode as well as the end of Season 2. Players can even take part in Season 2′s Battle of Blackwater Bay.

Game of Thrones Ascent is a story-focused Facebook game where players create their own character in the fictional Westeros, then rise to power and align themselves with one of the major houses of Game of Thrones. (Disruptor Beam said 43% of players have aligned themselves with House Stark, one of the main protagonists in the story.) Players then train troops, trade goods, develop their lands and take part in political intrigue.

Facebook’s social graph is a key feature of the game, where players can form alliances — or backstab — their real-life friends, but Disruptor Beam founder Jon Radoff said he didn’t want a game where you just spammed your friends.

As such, Game of Thrones Ascent will be coming to other platforms where players can interact with the same game but without Facebook involved. While Radoff wouldn’t confirm which directly, job postings on the Disruptor Beam website imply that an iOS iteration is in the game’s future.

The third season of Game of Thrones started Sunday night on HBO, and will run for 10 episodes.

Have you played Game of Thrones Ascent on Facebook? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Image courtesy Disruptor Beam.

This post was originally published on Mashable here: http://mashable.com/2013/04/02/game-of-thrones-ascent/

Photo Credit: Mashable

Google on Tuesday gave businesses a tool to measure their return on investment for mobile ad spending. The company’s Full Value of Mobile Calculator is designed to let marketers keep tabs on sales leads in the form of calls, apps, in-store sales, mobile site visits and cross-device activity.

The company claims that in about 30 minutes businesses can upload data from AdWords and their mobile websites and “make some key assumptions to create your Full Value of Mobile estimate.” The estimate will show businesses the total value, value per click and ROI that mobile is driving across various paths.

Through the exercise, you’ll see the total value, value per click, and ROI that mobile is driving for your business across all mobile customer paths, not just your mobile website. The idea is to see how cost-effective your mobile costs-per-action are. Jason Spero, head of global mobile sales and strategy at Google, says that the tool is designed for all businesses “from smallest to the biggest, it’s as relevant for a Fortune 500 company as for a small business.”

For businesses that want to learn more about calculating their mobile ROI, Google is also offering a free webinar on the subject on March 28 at 1 pm EDT. Those interested can sign up here.

This article was originally posted on Mashable here: http://mashable.com/2013/03/26/google-mobile-roi/.

Is there anything more nostalgic than Play-Doh? Join us Monday, March 25, 2013 at 3:00 pm Eastern on Twitter at #PlayDohPlus as we discuss Play-Doh’s new Play-Doh Plus products! We will also have fabulous Play-Doh prizes to give away! You can RSVP and get the party details by visiting the information below.

In the meantime, learn more about Play-Doh Plus by visiting Hasbro.com and follow Play-Doh on Pinterest at Pinterest.com/playdoh. See you at the party!

THE DETAILS:

TOPIC – Play-Doh Plus Products

TIME – Monday, March 25, 2013 at 3-4 PM Eastern (2-3 PM Central, 1-2 PM Mountain, 12-1 PM Pacific)

HASHTAG – #PlayDohPlus

CUSTOM TWEETGRID – bit.ly/Y9ru2G

PANELISTS – @MomSpark @PlayDoh @MomSparkMedia @Crissy @2Wired2Tired (follow everyone before party!)

PRIZES:

• Frosting Fun Bakery Playset and Flip ‘N Frost Bakery

• Disney Princess Rapunzel Hair Designs Playset and Sparkle Compound Assortment (Cinderella and Rapunzel)
• Comper the Excavator Playset and Tool Crew Assortment (Chip, Rolland, and Sam)

• Color Sticks Box O’ Color and Grab ‘N Go 6 Pack

• GRAND PRIZE: Frosting Fun Bakery Playset, Play-Doh Plus Variety Pack, Color Sticks Box O’ Color, Diggin’ Rigs Chomper the Excavator Playset and Rapunzel Hair Designs Playset

*Winner must be a USA resident and MUST be present at the Twitter party to win! Not sure how Twitter parties work? Email us at momsparkmedia@gmail.com for help!

Going to the party? RSVP HERE! List your “name” as your Twitter handle (i.e. @MomSpark) and your url as your Twitter web address (i.e. http://twitter.com/momspark)!

More than 1 billion people visit Facebook each month, mostly to see photos and messages posted by friends. Facebook hopes to encourage some of them to do a little work for it while they’re there. By asking people to contribute data—from business locations to book titles—and to check one another’s work, Facebook is building a rich stock of knowledge that could make its software smarter and boost the usefulness of its search engine.

“We’re trying to map what the real world looks like onto Facebook so you can run really expressive and powerful queries,” says Mitu Singh, product manager for Facebook’s entities team, a group charged with building a resource called the entity graph.

The entity graph is a little-known companion of Facebook’s famous social graph of around a billion people and 150 billion friend connections. The entity graph describes everything from the restaurants of New York to the concept of philosophy and the connections between those concepts. Singh and colleagues jokingly refer to their work on the entity graph as “project job security,” since mapping every entity in the world is a distant prospect.

That knowledge store is seen as vital to the ambitions of Facebook’s Graph Search service, unveiled last month and as yet available to only a fraction of the company’s users. Unlike a conventional search engine, Graph Search is designed to understand the meaning of the phrases entered by a searcher and then deliver specific results such as people, places, books or movies rather than just links to web pages.

Facebook has already collected some information automatically by drawing on data from Wikipedia and other datasets. But, as it has become clearer that the resource would be crucial to ambitions such as search, a new emphasis has been put on finding ways to harness the site’s hundreds of millions of members as a kind of human indexing squad, a flesh and blood version of Google’s web crawler. “Building classifiers and so on only gets you so far,” says Singh. “At some point you need people to help out.”

Singh’s team has loaded millions of entries into the entity graph by simply watching what people do on Facebook. Entities such as colleges and employers are learned from data typed into profile pages; businesses, movies, fictional characters and other concepts are learned from fan pages created by Facebook users.

Prompting people to tag duplicate content has taught Facebook’s entity graph the different ways people refer to the same thing—for example, that NPR and National Public Radio are the same thing. And analyzing many employment histories on the site allows Facebook’s search engine to know that a search for “software engineers” should also return people who say they are “coders.”

Facebook is now littered with tiny nudges to encourage people to contribute more directly, and these hints may get more direct as the new search function becomes more important. Pages for places such as museums or stores offer “suggest an edit” links that enable a person to change or add information such as opening hours, location, and phone number. Singh’s team is planning to roll out similar appeals for help on other pages, such as those for movies and books, says Singh.

Facebook’s most sophisticated tool for tapping into the collective knowledge of its users is an interface called the “places editor.” It guides users to fix errors in or add to the data for places in Facebook’s entity graph; in one mode it allows a person to rapidly click “yes” or “no” buttons to screen for duplicate entries.

It might sound dull, but Facebook has found it to be surprisingly popular. “As with Wikipedia, what we’re seeing is people really passionate about their hometown or their current town,” says Singh. “They really like to make sure that it’s fixed and corrected.”

Facebook is using social cues to encourage more contributions. The places editor shows a running count of how many people a user’s edits have “helped,” defined as updated data another person has interacted with on Facebook.

Clearing up whether a handful of Walgreens locations in San Francisco were the same or not was enough to be told that more than 1,000 people had benefited, an impressive slug of psychological reinforcement. Messages sometimes appear to let people know which of their friends recently tidied up data. A similar tactic saw Facebook drive a spike in organ donor registrations across the U.S. in 2012.

Facebook is not alone in thinking that a resource like the entity graph will be important to the future of search. Google last year revealed a project called Knowledge Graph, its own system for storing information about entities and their relationships, that’s currently used to return specific answers to some factual queries.

Both Google and Facebook’s graphs could ultimately improve more than search. Facebook’s entity graph is used to help guess at which topics a person would want to see in their feed of updates from friends. The two companies could also use their graphs to target advertisements.

Both projects can be seen as examples of the semantic web, an evolutionary step in the history of online information predicted and worked on for over a decade by, amongst others, the W3C, the body that develops web technology and standards. A core idea was to enable web pages—and data stores—that allowed machines to understand the meaning of the text, images, and other data that humans look for on more conventional web pages.

“The web was designed to provide the backbone of the entity and knowledge graphs that Facebook and Google are building right now,” says Manu Sporny, who chairs the working group at the W3C concerned with RDFa, a technology used—including by Google and Facebook—to add semantic data to web pages.

This article originally published at MIT Technology Review

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511591/facebook-nudges-users-to-catalog-the-real-world/

Google unveiled a groundbreaking new Chromebook laptop Thursday — one with touchscreen capability, powerful chipset and an extremely high-resolution display.

The Chromebook Pixel, available for order on the Google Play store and shipping in April, features a 12.85-inch touch-sensitive Gorilla Glass screen. The resolution is 4.3 million pixels, which works out to 239 pixels per inch. (The average Windows laptop has about half that; technically, it also beats the Macbook Retina.)

The Pixel will come in two versions, both boasting an Intel Core i5 processor. The basic model is Wi-Fi only; a more expensive model has the ability to connect to Verizon’s superfast LTE network. Google claims a battery life of five hours on the device, which has QuickOffice built into the browser and an SD card slot for automatic photo uploads to Google+. Those features can also be used offline (uploads queued for later, of course).

The price, however, is relatively steep: $1,299 for the Wi-Fi only version, $1,449 for the LTE model.

Google was careful to emphasize that the Pixel isn’t for everyone. “This is for power users who live in the cloud,” Senior Vice President of Chrome Sundar Pichai repeatedly told a select group of journalists at a low-key launch event in San Francisco.

Having a touchscreen doesn’t mean that Google plans to integrate its mobile OS, Android, into the device. But Pichai hoped web developers would start making their interfaces touch-sensitive — so that content on the device would be indistinguishable from Android.

“Touch is here to stay, and I’m pretty sure every laptop will have touch in the future,” Pichai said. “Using a laptop with touch seems strange at first, but your day-to-day browser experience starts changing. In our tests, users started replacing the touchpad pretty quickly.”

The aluminum-coated Pixel was designed and built by Google, with help from other unnamed PC manufacturers. Plenty of thought appears to have gone into the design: For example, there’s an extra laser microphone under the keyboard, complementing the two mics next to the camera, allowing the software to cancel out any noise you might make while typing on a video conference.

“Our goal was to have the hardware disappear,” Pichai added.

This article originally appeared on Mashable.

Source: http://mashable.com/2013/02/21/chromebook-pixel-google/

Celebrate the release of The Weinstein Company’s new film, “Escape from Planet Earth,” which hits theaters on Friday, February 15th! This newly animated family film is surely something that everyone can enjoy!

The 3D animated family comedy catapults moviegoers to planet Baab where admired astronaut Scorch Supernova (Brendan Fraser) is a national hero to the blue alien population. A master of daring rescues, Scorch pulls off astonishing feats with the quiet aid of his nerdy, by-the-rules brother, Gary (Rob Corddry), head of mission control at BASA. When BASA’s no-nonsense chief Lena (Jessica Alba) informs the brothers of an SOS from a notoriously dangerous planet, Scorch rejects Gary’s warnings and bounds off for yet another exciting mission. But when Scorch finds himself caught in a fiendish trap set by the evil Shanker (William Shatner) it’s up to scrawny, risk-averse Gary to do the real rescuing. As the interplanetary stakes rise to new heights, Gary is left to save his brother, his planet, his beloved wife Kira (Sarah Jessica Parker) and their adventure-hungry son Kip (Jonathan Morgan Heit).

Join us Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 8:00 pm Eastern on Twitter at #EscapeFromPlanetEarth as we discuss Escape from Planet Earth and more! We will also have fabulous prize packs and gift cards! You can RSVP and get the party details by visiting the information below!

In the meantime, please check out www.escapeearthmovie.com for exciting features such as photos, videos, characters, games and much more!

THE DETAILS:

TOPIC – Escape from Planet Earth

TIME – Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 8-9 PM Eastern (7-8 PM Central, 6-7 PM Mountain, 5-6 PM Pacific)

HASHTAG – #EscapeFromPlanetEarth

CUSTOM TWEETGRID – http://bit.ly/V43hgj

PANELISTS – @MomSpark @MomSparkMedia @superdumb @formulamom @daddymojo @ChildrenTeach (follow everyone before party!)

PRIZES:

• one $25 Visa gift card + Escape from Planet Earth prize pack
• one $50 Visa gift card + Escape from Planet Earth prize pack
• one $75 Visa gift card + Escape from Planet Earth prize pack
• one $100 Visa gift card + Escape from Planet Earth prize pack
• one $200 Visa gift card + Escape from Planet Earth prize pack

*Winner must be a USA resident and MUST be present at the Twitter party to win! Not sure how Twitter parties work? Email us at momsparkmedia@gmail.com for help!

Going to the party? RSVP HERE! List your “name” as your Twitter handle (i.e. @MomSpark) and your url as your Twitter web address (i.e. http://twitter.com/momspark)!

Photo Credit: Mashable

During its BlackBerry 10 launch event, CEO Thorsten Heins announced a new Global Creative Director for the company: Alicia Keys.

“I’m fascinated by technology. I’ve always wanted to work directly with a technology company,” said Keys. “I wanted to do something where I could grow professionally and personally.”

Keys says she is going to be working directly with developers and carriers on the platform, as well as with other artists. Previously a BlackBerry user, she spoke on stage about experimenting with other smartphone platforms over the past few years — she talked about being an ‘iPhone Junkie’ on Google+ just over a year ago — but now that BlackBerry has been “working out” she’s excited to get back together.

“Now we’re exclusively dating again, and I’m very happy,” she said.

This article was originally posted on Mashable.

Source: http://mashable.com/2013/01/30/blackberry-alicia-keys/

The ladies have spoken. The Home Depot is expanding their Do-It-Herself Workshops to more The Home Depot stores! These free weekly workshops are a great way to get step-by-step instructions and hands on experience learning to do basic repairs and easy home improvements.

In the meantime, check your local Home Depot store to see if it is holding Do-It-Herself Workshops!

THE DETAILS:

TOPIC – The Home Depot Do-It-Herself Workshops and DIY Project Ideas

TIME – Thursday, February 7, 2013 at 8-9 PM Eastern (7-8 PM Central, 6-7 PM Mountain, 5-6 PM Pacific)

HASHTAG – #DIHWorkshop

CUSTOM TWEETGRID – http://bit.ly/YEV4T8

PANELISTS – @MomSpark @MomSparkMedia @HomeDepot @DagmarBleasdale @LibbysLibrary @sunandsipcups @aboutamom (follow everyone before party!)

PRIZES:

• 2 – $50 Home Depot Gift Cards
• 1 – $100 Home Depot Gift Card

*Winner must be a USA resident and MUST be present at the Twitter event to win! Not sure how Twitter events work? Email us at momsparkmedia@gmail.com for help!

RSVP:

Going to the event? RSVP HERE! List your “name” as your Twitter handle (i.e. @MomSpark) and your url as your Twitter web address (i.e. http://twitter.com/momspark)!