Zothecula writes “Google has announced a collaboration with 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums that lets people view over 1,000 high res artwork images and 17 gigapixel images while taking a virtual stroll through their galleries using Street View technology. While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person, the Google Art Project could be the next best thing for those without the time and money to pop on a plane and trade elbows with crowds of tourists looking to catch a glimpse of what some of the best museums have on offer.”
Y Combinator startup Rapportive is updating its Gmail add-on Wednesday, bringing deep Facebook integration to the inbox.
Rapportive is a lightweight Gmail add-on that adds social intelligence to e-mail messages and occupies the same space as Xobni and Gist. Users can install the tool to get a quick glimpse at the e-mail sender’s online persona, complete with recent tweets and LinkedIn integration.
With the Facebook integration, Rapportive users can now request to add e-mail contacts as Facebook friends, see contacts’ recent Facebook updates, view photos, watch attached videos, “like” updates and add comments, all from within e-mail messages.
The integration essentially distills a contact-filtered and personalized version of the world’s largest social network, packages it up in a gift-wrapped box and leaves it at the user’s online doorstep — the inbox.
The purpose of the update, according to Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra, is to help users build rapport over Facebook from within their inbox, something he believes to be a very real possibility.
The problem with going to Facebook to build relationships, he says, is threefold. First, there’s the matter of taking the time to visit the site. Problem number two: “The news feed doesn’t really show me the people I’m corresponding with in my e-mail,” he says. “And finally, the default display only shows me popular items, as determined by Facebook’s algorithms.”
In his personal use, Vohra has found that using Facebook inside his inbox has a number of positive side effects, including enhancing relationships with contacts. “When it’s relevant, I post comments on my contacts’ facebook posts [via Rapportive]. This has actually created follow-on interactions from these people, which themselves turn into conversations,” he says.
Vohra was reluctant to share specifics on the size of Rapportive’s user base, but does say that the startup has added five times as many active users since August 2010. Rapportive, which has upwards of $1 million in angel funding, has also turned down a number of Series A offers, he says.
For centuries you and your peers have helped spread good ideas. For that, I like you. Events are important and organizing them is a thankless job. I’ve run my share of events, so I know. But there is an unspoken, often forgotten, problem I’m compelled to bring to your attention: most speakers do a bad job.
Some of this is not your fault. Good speakers are hard to find, especially ones who are available, affordable, and reputable. It’s challenging to fill an afternoon with great speakers, much less a 5 day, 3 track program. But it’s commonly forgotten in your trade, or by your sponsors, that speakers are the center of your event. They are the core of the agenda. They are what you advertise. And it’s what speakers promise to teach that gets people to pay to come. Yet once signed up to speak, they are often an afterthought, neglected behind the other critical tasks organizers have to manage.
There are simple and inexpensive ways to solve this problem.
Provide audience demographics. Make it easy for speakers to make the right assumptions about your audience. Give a sheet listing: age breakdown, job titles, gender breakdown, reasons for attending, and more. Most events have this information for marketing purposes, but rarely provide it to the speakers. This is dumb. The speakers make the product people are paying for (e.g. talks and workshops) and should be well informed about who the customers are. If nothing else providing this data reminds speakers it’s the audience that matters, not their egos.
Provide speaker training. There are many great books on public speaking and books are cheap. Send them to your speakers, and do it far enough in advance for it to impact their preparation. It signifies you care about their skills and want them to do their best. If even 20% of them read the book, and each avoid one basic mistake, it will pay off dramatically in higher quality sessions. Presentation Zen, which focuses on slide design, and my own book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, which covers everything else, make excellent companions. Major events and corporations hire speaker coaches, as speaking is a performance skill, but this can be expensive for large events. Books are an affordable place to start. Put this in a packet with #1, and send it out when you sign a speaker.
Give them a rundown sheet or a checklist. There are many details speakers have to take care of, and it’s in your interested speakers do as many of them as possible. If you give a rundown sheet, listing where they need to be and when, contact phone numbers, addresses, and confirmation numbers, odds go up they’ll do fewer stupid things. And a great checklist for preparing to speak, helps remind them of the little things that make a big difference.
Send example videos from previous years. Talking about presenting and watching a good presenter present are different things. Give people a sense of what you, as an organizer, hope they achieve. It will also familiarize them with what attendees saw, and how they responded, in previous years.
Schedule a walkthrough / tech-check for each speaker. We know how fear works – unfamiliar rooms and spaces increase people’s nervousness. If you schedule a 15 minute slot early in the day, or the day before, for speakers to go to the room, try out their gear, and get comfortable, everyone wins. It’s also insurance against any compatibility issues (projectors vs. laptops), as there is nothing worse than discovering these problems in front of a live crowd. If you are not allowing speakers to use their own laptops (which is preferable), a walkthrough is extra important.
Have a volunteer in the room during the session. Every room should have a volunteer who can assist the speaker for any last minute needs or problems. This includes assisting with tech problems, getting water, helping with Q&A at the end and more. For a free ticket, many people will be happy to play this role, so everyone wins.
Provide confidence monitors in ever room. One distracting habit among many speakers is they look at their own slides, annoying the audience every time. Some of this is lack of practice, but part of the problem is room design. If you put a monitor in the front of the room, facing the speaker, so they can see their own slides while looking at the audience, everyone wins. It’s cheap to set up, has clear benefits and requires no extra work on the part of the speaker. Events like Ignite Seattle consistently do this, which helps explain why so many good talks have happened there.
Do not inflict a slide template on speakers. Attendees will remember where they are without an a reminder on every single slide in every single talk. Give a basic template to speakers as an option if you must, or as a head start for first time speakers, but that’s the limit of the value of slide templates. For whatever reason they tend to be ugly, confining, and just plain silly. A related suggestion: let speakers use their own laptops. Moving slide decks between computers often breaks fonts and other formatting, problems organizers rarely notice, but can be devastating to even a well prepared speaker.
Have a speaker’s dinner or happy hour. Have an evening early in the event where speakers can meet each other, and the organizers, and make some social connections. You want the speakers to be happy and friendly at the event, as it’s the interactions they have with your customers between sessions that are likely to be the most memorable for them. The more social you are with speakers, the more social they will be with your attendees. And some speakers are dying to meet some of the other speakers and that can only happen through you.
Rate your speakersand share the data. Speakers rarely get any useful feedback on how well they did. Everyone is polite and tells them they were great, even when they bombed. Most events do surveys after each session, but the data oddly never makes it to the speakers. This is broken. A simple stack ranking tells every speaker how they compared against their peers (e.g. “You were the 5th best speaker out of 10, based on audience surveys”) is a potent motivator for them to examine their skills, and to pay attention to what the better speakers did differently. Have a best session award, so everyone sees the feedback loop in action. UIE events even pays speakers a bonus that gets larger the better they scored. Shouldn’t pay be tied to performance for speakers too?
Please consider these simple things. You, your audience and your speakers all benefit at the same time. Perhaps you know better ways that the ones in this list – that’s fantastic and I’d love to hear about them, and I’d be happy to help promote their use to other organizers.
Orome1 writes “Making the content of your Facebook account private can thwart the social network’s plan to share as much information as possible with advertisers, but may not keep out lawyers looking for material that will contradict your statements in a court of law. US lawyers have been trying to gain permission to access the private parts of social network accounts for a while now, but it seems that only lately they have begun to be successful in their attempts. And this turn of events is another perfectly good reason to think twice about what you post online.”
Adding this iPad Omnigraffle Stencil to the list for all those MAC users out there (thanks Ivana for finding it). The set looks pretty decent with a great deal of popovers, buttons, bars, icons, keyboards, alerts, and so on. As an added bonus the set also comes with a few blank and printable PDF sketchsheets – handy for all those times when you don’t feel like drawing out hundreds of screen outlines over and over again. Enjoy.
