firehose

Yahoo put a lot of marketing behind the revamp of its long-neglected photography service Flickr, unveiling the new look yesterday at a glitzy press conference in midtown Manhattan attended by the mayor of New York and hordes of journalists lured there by Yahoo’s other big news of the day, its $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr. Out in Times Square, 11 digital billboards were commandeered to advertise Flickr’s redesign with a cute tagline: “biggr, spectaculr, wherevr.”

But Yahoo’s marketing masterstroke was in promising Flickr users a free terabyte—rather than calling it unlimited storage, which it effectively is.

How large is a terabyte of information? It’s equivalent to 1 trillion bytes, more than half a million high-resolution photos, an academic research library, or the entire archive of GeoCities (a community of sites that Yahoo shut down in 2009).

The point is that a terabyte is fun to think about. It seems like more than as much as you want, and for most people, it is. Only professional photographers who need to store all of their shots are likely to run up against the limit. (They can pay $500 for an additional terabyte, but Yahoo isn’t expecting many people to do so.) Offering unlimited storage probably wouldn’t have cost Yahoo any more than offering a terabyte, but it would have sounded so much less cool.

Yahoo’s strategy takes a page from Google, which in 2004 launched Gmail with a gigabyte of free storage, then an unfathomably large amount of information. (These days, it offers 15 gigabytes of free storage per user across several services.) The immensity of Google’s offering became a part of the story and large selling point for Gmail in the early days.

Nine years later, it’s less clear how much people care about storage size, at least for photo services. Instagram, the Facebook-owned mobile photography app that stole Flickr’s thunder, doesn’t have a  limit but never makes a point of that. And if Flickr is to make a comeback, it won’t be thanks to storage capacity. People who care about enormous cloud storage have plenty of options that go well beyond image files, from companies like Dropbox, Google, and Amazon.

But as a marketing stunt, Flickr’s free terabyte is brilliant. Some day in the future, a tech startup will steal the ploy and offer a free yottabyte.

Graduate

Erdal Inci

via http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fen%2F9%2F9e%2FTwain_in_Tesla%2527s_Lab.jpg

Vodafone’s and Telefónica’s dismal results for the beginning of 2013 show serious weakness in southern Europe. Today, Vodafone reported its worst annual fall in service revenues in five years (paywall) in its fourth quarter, and blamed its problems (pdf) on “headwinds from a combination of continued tough economic conditions, particularly in Southern Europe, and an adverse European regulatory environment.”

Smartphone penetration is similar in both southern and northern Europe, and data usage inevitably rises as more people get cell phones. However, the growth of data usage in Europe has slowed down in places where the economy has been hit by the euro crisis. Whereas it grew 74.3% year-on-year in Germany, in Spain the growth was just 14.1%.

Hence the success of low-cost carriers like TeliaSonera’s Yoigo in Spain. In 2007, the provider had just 427,000 subscribers. At the end of 2012, it boasted 3.71 million. Yoigo’s plans offer fewer bells and whistles than those of its bigger competitors; its cheapest plan costs just €9 ($11.58) per month, plus €0.01 per minute before taxes for voice calls, and offers 1GB of data. In fact, only its most expensive plan offers more data: 2GB  and unlimited national and international calls for €39.

Vodafone has been trying to break into the low-cost space, but doesn’t play up its cheapest plans and was the last major mobile carrier (link in Spanish) to go after that market in Spain. It tends to push Spanish customers instead towards its high-end “Vodafone Red” plans, with 10GB-60GB of data monthly. Though it says those plans have been successful, if data use is a luxury good they aren’t going to tempt most of southern Europe.

Update: We've taken our seats and are about to roll over to our Xbox Reveal liveblog.

The next Xbox is about to be unveiled in Microsoft's Redmond campus, and Joystiq will be there to scrutinize and document the whole presentation. It starts at 1PM EDT (10AM PDT, 6PM GMT), so get your glib reactionary .gifs ready before then.

Once the event starts, we'll switch this post over to liveblog mode and unleash the flood of quotes, observations and ill-advised jokes about computer chips. (Note: The presence of chips in the new Xbox is a rumor until Microsoft says otherwise.)

"Xbox, reveal!"

Xbox Reveal liveblog on Joystiq originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 21 May 2013 14:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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On a recent episode of Conan, late night host Conan O’Brien gave a comical YouTube video response to Quick and Simple Life Hacks 8 by Household Hacker. He pokes fun at their life hacks, such as: how to light a candle with a stick of spaghetti and how to make ice cream last longer with aluminum foil.

Here is the original Quick and Simple Life Hacks 8 video:

Household Hacker even commented on Conan’s video response:

videos via Team Coco, Household Hacker

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Phil Jackson's New Book Reveals Coach Considered Murdering Kobe Bryant Every Day After Practice

What's the illustrious Chris Hadfield – former commander of the International Space Station – been up to since departing low-Earth orbit? Re-adapting to gravity, for one (Hadfield: "my body was quite happy in space without gravity") and participating in this fantastic press conference, his first since he returned to Earth.

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Comcast and Time Warner Cable may be two of the largest cable and Internet providers in the country, but they’re also the two worst, according to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Though the overall ACSI score for the subscription TV industry enjoyed a bit of a bump, from 66 in 2012 to 68 this year, that is still not high enough to get these companies out of the doldrums, leaving only newspapers and Internet service providers (most of whom are also cable companies) with a worse industry index score.

For the second year in a row, Verizon FiOS came out on top of the rankings, with a score of 73, down one point from the previous year. DirecTV enjoyed a huge 4-point bump from 2012, increasing its score to 72, while the score for AT&T U-Verse increased by three points to 71.

The biggest improvement over 2012 came from Charter, which had come in dead last in 2012 with a score of 59. This year, its score increased by 5 points, allowing it to leapfrog Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Comcast actually improved its score from 61 to 63, while TWC saw the biggest drop on the ACSI survey, going from 63 down to 60 in a single year.

Industry-wide, customers were reasonably happy with picture quality, ease-of-use, and signal reliability. In fact, the only customer experience category in which the subscription TV industry scored poor marks was “call center satisfaction,” which had a score of 70 — four points below the average score of 74 for all industries.

For the first time, ACSI looked at customer satisfaction with Internet service providers, and… the top and bottom scorers are very similar to what we saw in the subscription TV rankings, with Verizon FiOS the top scorer (71), while Time Warner Cable (63) and Comcast (62) brought up the rear.

And once again, call center satisfaction in this industry was dismal, with a low, low score of 65 — a full nine points below the ACSI average of 74.

So, basically, this all but confirms that next year’s Worst Company In America bracket will once again be chock full of cable and Internet providers.

ultrace:

In addition to being a historic symbol of the Cold War, The Berlin Wall is an arcade game, released by Kaneko (a company probably most well known—dubiously—for the Gals Panic series) in 1991. The game itself is fairly mediocre, best described as the what would happen if Bubble Bobble and Lode Runner had a child, but didn’t give it any prenatal care. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the mother smoked and drank during the pregnancy, but the game successfully manages to merge the gameplay elements of both those games while capturing the charm and addictiveness of neither.

An interesting aspect of the game—the one I’ve chosen to actually show here—is that the background for each stage is a photo, presumably taken in or near the Berlin Wall at the time the game was made. The title screen credits these photos to Kyodo Photo Service, a Japanese news company. Since the game has you digging pits and dropping cutesy monsters into them, the backdrop of the Berlin Wall coming down near the end of the Cold War is a surreal choice of imagery and a stark reminder of an event that many gamers today are too young to understand the significance of.

Game Boy Game Boy Game Boy

I doubt anyone cares what we post here this afternoon, given that everyone’s eyes are on the next Xbox reveal, so here’s a fun GIF from Pedro Miranda Filho. He has a lot of great GIFs on his Tumblr, so follow him.

BUY Game Boy games, upcoming releases

In anticipation of the Webby Awards, comedian Patton Oswalt worked with Funny or Die to make “They Surf,” a parody of the sci-fi classic They Live where he “learns that the Internet is taking over the world” after “donning a pair of special sunglasses.” Oswalt is set to host the Webbys for the second consecutive year on May 21, 2013.

EUGENE, Ore. (KOIN ) — Oregon residents use their bikes to carry a lot of things: from household contents to produce deliveries.

Now a funeral home in Eugene is offering what may be the only bicycle hearse in the country.

The owner of Sunset Hills Funeral Home said he built this bicycle hearse as a way to give the deceased “one last ride” through the scenic bike paths of Eugene, Ore.

The ride and casket together cost about $3,500.

The funeral owner said he so far has bicycled five bodies to their final destination. And, he said, there is now a waiting list.

jeanniefeegle:

Well then, it seems the 8th Doctor/Paul McGann is angry at Steven Moffat

New York Daily News

Manchester City and Yankees to Own MLS Club in New York New York Times The New York metropolitan area, already packed with professional sports teams, will soon get another: a Major League Soccer team owned by Manchester City of the English Premier League and the Yankees. Enlarge This Image ... Yankees, Man City to Co-Own NYC MLS TeamABC News Manchester City and New York Yankees join forces to create new MLS teamThe Guardian Yankees Invest in NY Soccer Team Controlled by Manchester CityBloomberg The Star-Ledger - NJ.com -Philly.com all 60 news articles »

Rialto, CA – A man who was rejected by a stripper after a private lap dance shot and wounded the woman before committing suicide, police said Thursday.

Map of the Great Siberian Route (1903)

Fillipov's map of the great Siberian route, from 1903. Map of the Great Siberian Route Date: 1903 Author: Filippov Dwnld: Full Size (8mb) Print Availability: See our Prints Page for more details pff This map isn't part of any series, but we have other railroad maps that you might want to check out. A map of the Trans-Siberian Railway which spans an awesome 5,753 mi (9,259 km) in connecting its...

the BIG Map Blog - Interesting maps, historical maps, BIG maps.

mckelvie:

We’ve all been there, Astrid.

(Sequence from my 2008 book Suburban Glamour, currently getting a second printing.)

Love.

“We’re pretty opposed to advertising,” David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, said three years ago. “It really turns our stomachs.” So today he’s turning over the six-year-old blogging startup to a company that can stomach it.

Yahoo, which currently generates 76% of its revenue from advertising, made clear that it intends to make money from its $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr in the best way it knows how, with plenty of ads. Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo who personally negotiated the deal, described two types of advertising that will make its way to the site.

The first type is the least interesting: display ads on Tumblr blogs that opt to put them there. Yahoo would split the revenue with the blogger in a way similar to Yahoo Bing Network Contextual Ads and Google AdSense. Karp has made clear what he thinks of that: “We could very easily throw Google AdSense on and be profitable tomorrow, ” he said last year. “That’s so far down the list, I mean, we’re selling our desks to avoid that. It’s a complete last resort.”

Karp, who will remain in charge of Tumblr, is right to be skeptical. The price associated with such ads has been dropping steadily across the web, and Yahoo’s display ad revenue fell 11% last quarter from the same period a year earlier. Advertisers, meanwhile, are increasingly dismissive of the value of display ads in familiar boxes that people have been trained to ignore.

Observing those trends, Yahoo has already been experimenting with new types of ads, including much larger “billboards” on its popular homepage and “stream ads” that look like news updates but are written and paid for by a sponsor.

That second type of advertising is coming to Tumblr, too, Mayer said. In the ad business, the trendy name for it is “native advertising.” Native ads tend to make people’s heads hurt, but that’s generally because they’re thinking about it too hard.

On a platform like Tumblr, native ads are just regular old posts, except that they’re authored by a brand that pays for the privilege. Comedy Central, for instance, has one of the most popular blogs on Tumblr. Every time the television network posts something, that’s an ad for the brand, even if it’s not paying and most Tumblr users wouldn’t consider it advertising.

Platforms where anyone can post anything—like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks—have a much easier time with native advertising than publishers like the Washington Post or Quartz, which feel an ethical obligation to distinguish between material written by their journalists and content produced by advertisers. (Quartz runs native ads labeled “Sponsor Content.”) On platforms, the distinction is already pretty muddled, there’s no professional content to privilege, and frankly users don’t care as long as the stuff is good.

Money comes into the picture when brands pay to get their stuff in front of people who aren’t already following them. That describes a lot of the advertising on Facebook and Twitter, and it’s exactly what Mayer said is coming to Tumblr, as well. Tumblr users will start to see blog posts on their “dashboards” from brands that are paying to be there.

Here’s a slide from the presentation Tumblr has been giving to advertisers it wants to the attract to the launch of these native “In-Stream Ads,” which will cost $200,000 for broad exposure on the site for about a month:

As with all other native advertising, Tumblr’s will succeed or fail based on whether users actually want to see it, which is another way of saying that the posts need to feel like they belong on Tumblr. Notice how Yahoo’s post on Tumblr announcing the acquisition made use of an animated GIF, a somewhat clumsy attempt to fit in on a service where animated GIFs are popular, but certainly better than a press release.

Creating high-quality native advertising is hard, which is why it wouldn’t be surprising if Tumblr also began to fashion itself as an ad agency, charging brands for advice on how to become the next Comedy Central on Tumblr. Indeed, the presentation to advertisers promises “best practices and content strategy support from the Tumblr team.” And there’s an animated GIF among the ad examples in Tumblr’s presentation:

Another advantage of native advertising is that it translates well onto mobile devices, where there’s little room for display ads but plenty of room for actual content. (In-Stream ads begin on June 1 but won’t appear in Tumblr’s mobile apps to start.) But the downside there is similar: With less room to work with, mobile native ads that are perceived as advertising will quickly grow tiresome, which is a problem Facebook has encountered. That makes it all the more important that Tumblr’s ads actually appeal to its users, and why the future of Yahoo’s advertising business—on Tumblr, at least—may be cats and animated GIFs.

A well-designed office is a happy office. As facilities managers strive to save space and cash, they’re reshuffling desks and fiddling with temperature gauges. All of which has an impact on workers’ performance. Open-plan offices may make some kinds of collaboration easier, but are they more conducive to productivity? What’s the most irritating workplace distraction? And are those state-of-the-art workstations actually more comfortable? Here’s the Quartz complete guide to open-plan offices:

Nearly three quarters of Americans work in open-plan offices

According to the International Management Facility Association, 70% of American employees work in open-plan offices.

The world’s largest open-plan office

Mark Zuckerberg hired Frank Gehry to design Facebook’s office expansion in Menlo Park in California. Once completed—its planning application has been approved and work is set to start imminently—the social network’s new digs will be the world’s largest open-plan office.

Workers in open-plan offices get sick more often

Workers who share an office take more sick days than those who work in their own closed spaces. A study in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health found that open office setups reported 62% more sick days on average than one-occupant layouts. It was the first national population study conducted in Denmark to find such a linkage. One suggested explanation, unsurprisingly, was that viruses and bacteria spread more easily in open offices. Another was that open offices are more stressful to work in because of the lack of privacy, and that the stress makes sickness more likely.

Workers don’t like noise

Researchers from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University wanted to study which aspects of office design had the biggest impact on workers’ productivity. CK Mak and YP Lui questioned 259 office workers about the importance of sound, temperature, office layout, air quality and lighting for productivity; they found that sound and temperature mattered the most. The most irritating noises were conversations, ringing phones and machines.

Older workers really don’t like noise

Mak and Lui also found that the environment mattered least to the younger participants in their study. Those over 45 were more sensitive to it, and factors like noise and temperature had a bigger effect on their productivity.

Open-plan offices are less productive

In a literature review of studies on open-plan offices, researchers from Virginia State University and North Carolina State University found evidence to suggest that they’re linked to lower productivity. Scanning work from the Journal of Human Ecology, Academy of Management Journal and Administrative Science Quarterly, Tonya Smith-Jackson and Katherine Klein identified reduced motivation, decreased job satisfaction and lower perceived privacy as factors negatively affecting productivity in open-plan environments. Similar to Mak and Lui findings, the resounding message in the research is that overhearing conversations in the office is very intrusive and distracting for workers.

Making offices open-plan isn’t a popular move

People work less well when they move from a personal office to an open-plan layout, according to a longitudinal study carried out by Calgary University. Writing in the Journal of Environment and Behavior, Aoife Brennan, Jasdeep Chugh and Theresa Kline found that such workers reported more stress, less satisfaction with their environment and less productivity. Brennan et al went back to survey the participants six months after the move and found not only that they were still unhappy with their new office, but that their team relations had broken down even further.

Fancy workstations don’t make much difference

Cornell researcher Alan Hedge wanted to find out what happened if offices provided employees with smaller, ergonomically designed desks. He concluded that they couldn’t be relied on as a space-saver because the workers couldn’t figure how to use them. Workers in the study were split down the middle as to whether the specially designed workstations were more comfortable and easier to work at than traditional (and larger) alternatives. Hedge did find that the employees who had been trained to use their equipment were more comfortable and productive than those who hadn’t. Turns out “ergonomic” doesn’t equate to “intuitive”.

Bad office conditions cost employers two and a half days a year

Writing in the Journal of Facilities Management, Dutch researcher Paul Roelofsen examined the effect of comfort levels in offices on productivity. Roelofsen knew from previous research that poor office conditions were causing absenteeism among Dutch employees. A survey of 7,000 Dutch workers found that they were absent for 2.5 days a year on average because of complaints about their office environment, most commonly related to temperature. Roelofsen also noted in his work that even among the workers who are present, if the environment isn’t ideal for them they won’t work as hard. He estimated that quality improvements yield between a 5% and 15% increase in productivity.

Biostatistics PhD candidate Hilary Parker dived into the most poisoned names in US history. Her own name topped the list. There were several fad names such as Deneen, Catina, and Farrah that saw a quick spike and then a plummet, but the trend for Hilary is different.

"Hilary", though, was clearly different than these flash-in-the-pan names. The name was growing in popularity (albeit not monotonically) for years. So to remove all of the fad names from the list, I chose only the names that were in the top 1000 for over 20 years, and updated the graph (note that I changed the range on the y-axis).

I think it's pretty safe to say that, among the names that were once stable and then had a sudden drop, "Hilary" is clearly the most poisoned.

There it is minding its own business, enjoying a steady rise in popularity over a few decades, and then boom, Bill Clinton is elected, and the name dies a quick death.

Be sure to check out the rest of the analysis. Good stuff. [Thanks, @hspter]

Buttersafe by Raynato Castro and Alex Culang [website | twitter]

walterbyrd writes "In 2012, IBM started retiring the Lotus brand. Now 1-2-3, the core product that brought Lotus its fame, takes its turn on the chopping block. IBM stated, 'Effective on the dates listed below, [June 11, 2013] IBM will withdraw from marketing part numbers from the following product release(s) licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement:' IBM Lotus 123 Millennium Edition V9.x, IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.x V9.8.0, and Organizer V6.1.0. Further, IBM stated, 'Customers will no longer be able to receive support for these offerings after September 30, 2014. No service extensions will be offered. There will be no replacement programs.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this clip from Dutch television series De Nieuwe Wildernis (The New Wilderness), a fox chews on and runs off with a video camera hidden in an animal carcass. Previously, we wrote about a young grizzly bear chewing on a GoPro video camera that was recording footage for the BBC’s Great Bear Stakeout.

via Tastefully Offensive

When you finally get to see the graphic sexual content of cinematic auteur Lars von Trier's upcoming film Nymphomaniac, you need to know that's not really Shia La Boeuf graphically fucking Charlotte Gainsbourg. It's half of him, thanks to some completely insane VFX.

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