It has been in the cards for a while, but now it’s been shown off for real: the Kinect SDK is coming to Windows. The beta will be available some time in the spring, with an eventual release later in the year. The SDK will give Windows developers access to the Kinect’s array of sensors, and will make both low-level sensor data and high-level skeleton tracking available.
Developers have been interested in Kinect since it launched, with third-party drivers being developed just days after the device hit the market—a swift response that surprised even Microsoft. The company is keen to capitalize on this considerable interest, hence the SDK release. Initially the SDK will only offer noncommercial usage terms; commercial licensing is on the cards, but the company is not yet sure what the terms will be.
Stealing is wrong—or is it? The Internet adds nuances to that question that were once unthinkable. And, according to a newly published study in the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, students definitely think there’s a difference between stealing a CD from a store and pirating that same music online. This belief holds despite the threat of lawsuits and heavy fines from the recording industry, leading the study’s authors to believe that younger people are disconnected from the cost of media when they encounter it online.
The study was conducted by researchers at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and led by professor Talia Wingrove, who surveyed 172 undergraduate students in the midwestern US. The goal was to discover the difference in attitudes when it comes to shoplifting a CD, downloading an album from the Internet, or downloading and sharing the music with others. The researchers then ranked students’ reactions on scales of deterrence (risk of getting caught or punished by the law), morality (the activity being wrong or immoral), social influence (whether peers or parents would disapprove), respect for the industry, and obligation to obey the law.
Companies may soon be required to be up front with users on what personal information they are collecting and how it will be used, lest they face action from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Those are some of the provisions of the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011, formally introduced on Tuesday by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ). The bill also requires companies to offer easy-to-use opt-outs and provide a complaint mechanism to their customer base.
“If there was no law to stop [a] person from collecting or selling that personal information collected, you’d feel beyond violated,” Kerry said during a press conference on Tuesday. “It goes on unregulated every day in the digital world… Right now, there is no law protecting the information that we share.”
Rebecca Black‘s not the only one who thinks there’s something special about Friday. Two separate pieces of research out this week show that the end of the work week is the best time to get traction on status updates and tweets.
Analyzing more than 200 of its clients’ Facebook pages over a 14-day period, Buddy Media found that engagement on Thursdays and Fridays was 18% higher than the rest of the week, and that engagement was actually even better on Thursday than on Friday. Meanwhile, Twitter Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain — speaking at the Ad Age Digital conference earlier this week — said that Twitter users are more engaged with tweets on Fridays.
The reason is fairly obvious, says Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at the Altimeter Group: “People are heading into the weekend so they’re thinking about things besides work. They’re mentally checking out and transitioning to the weekend.”
Rick Liebling, director of digital strategy at Coyne PR, concurs: “It’s a matter of people finally pushing past the work week and coasting toward the weekend, picking their head up a bit to see what’s going on and what their friends are up to.”
However, Liebling adds that there might be another factor at work: There may be fewer posts overall on Fridays, which means a greater number of average click-throughs.
Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist at HubSpot, agrees with that assessment. “I call it ‘contra-competitive timing,’” Zarrella says. “As the overall activity seems to slow down from the hustle and bustle of the week, readers can give each tweet more attention because there are fewer other tweets fighting for it.”
Whatever the case, the fact that Thursdays and Fridays are the best days of the week for engagement isn’t yet common knowledge among marketers. As Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow also noted at the Ad Age Digital conference, most brands are similarly unaware that their status updates will get more pickup if they’re posted after work hours.
But Owyang says that what’s generally true may not be applicable to many marketers, anyway. For instance, “Friday may not be the best time for the B2B audience because they’re checking out mentally.” Similarly, Lazerow said that for movie companies, the weekend is the sweet spot, but for other media companies, Monday is the worst day of the week. “It’s the noisiest time to post,” Lazerow said.
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Quick Pitch: Convofy is a private social network for enterprise, designed for visual thinkers.
Genius Idea: Convofy runs on Adobe AIR and focuses on detailed annotations for images, video, links and documents, making it ideal for firms that collaborate on a lot of documents or multimedia.
Convofy, built by the team behind the Scrybe task manager, differentiates itself through its focus on multimedia, drag-and-drop interface and real-time information stream. These features are made possible because Convofy runs on Adobe AIR and not in the web browser. And because it’s an AIR app, it can be placed in a convenient and always available area of your desktop.
It offers the features you’d expect from a social network built for the enterprise: a newsfeed, groups and file-sharing all fleshed-out features. Its newsfeed is extraordinarily visual, displaying documents, photos, slides and links inside the stream. Adding files to your Convofy network is as simple as dragging and dropping the files onto the app. It also comes with a series of notifications for when your co-workers comment on something you’ve added.
Convofy has a few tricks up its sleeve to differentiate it from the enterprise social networking crowd. One of those tricks is the ability to markup uploaded documents and add conversational notes. It makes collaborating on documents rather simple, although it’s nowhere near as robust as Google Docs. Convofy also includes annotations for videos and photos as well, and these annotations include timestamps so it’s easy to see the history of a conversation around any given piece of multimedia.
The app takes annotations one step further than most of its competitors. A team within Convofy can even annotate the web. Say you read an interesting article and want to point out a key phrase to your co-workers; Convofy lets you comment on that item and gives everyone else in your network the chance to comment and converse on the link.
Convofy is also mobile via a mobile web application built for smartphones that can run HTML5.
If you’re already using Chatter or Yammer, you may not find a lot compelling reasons to switch to Convofy. The enterprise app really shines though if you’re a company or team that shares lots of images, videos and documents. Design, research and consulting firms are the ones who will most likely find it useful, especially if they are willing to learn the ins and outs of the system.
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