Browsing articles from "April, 2012"

Facebook to acquire mobile app Instagram and its 30 million members for $1 billion

Apr 9, 2012   //   by admin   //   Blog  //  No Comments

by Kesavan Unnikrishnan (Guest contributor/Digital Journalist)

Facebook says it will spend $1 billion to buy Instagram, a photo-sharing start-up which recently passed 30 million members.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the purchase on his Facebook page. Facebook will be spending approximately $1 billion in stock and cash to make its largest acquisition to date.Instagram, available for iOS and Android devices, lets users upload photos and share them with “followers”, also giving them the ability to add filters and comments to pics. Many news outlets have joined Instagram, and the company has attracted the likes of the Obama administration, NBA star Dwayne Wade and actor Zooey Deschanel.

Zuckerberg posted in his Timeline that Instagram will not be swallowed up by Facebook, but will keep it up and running as a separate service for the time being. He wrote:

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

Instagram started as a social network built around cellphone photos allowing people add quirky filters and effects to their photos and share them with friends. The service has acquired more than 30 million members in a short span of two years.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom wrote about the acquisition on the company blog, saying, “The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love. You’ll still have all the same people you follow and that follow you.You’ll still be able to share to other social networks.”

TechCrunch writes Instagram closed a $50 million Series B round from Sequoia, Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, Greylock and Benchmark at a $500 million valuation.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/322686#ixzz1rZLxUiEq

This article originally appeared in Digital Journal [Link]

New York Times online article includes video game letting you destroy everything on page

Apr 4, 2012   //   by admin   //   Media blog  //  No Comments

by David Silverberg

If you notice something strangely arcade-like on this online New York Times article, you’re not going through video game withdrawal. A New York Times magazine article on gaming includes a simple video game you can play on the screen, allowing you to shoot any of the boxes and widgets surrounding the text.

Adapted by Jon Huang, a multimedia producer at The Times, the game is based on a two-year-old game called Kick Ass. It lets you to blow up websites, to put it simply, using only cursors and the spacebar.

“I wanted to share a joke with the reader,” Huang said about bringing the open-source code to the New York Times website.

The Times writes “even the ad sales department was O.K. with letting the ads on the page be blown up.”

The article in question looks at what the author calls “stupid games” to reflect each generation’s obsession with simple yet addictive video games, from Tetris to Angry Birds.

Despite being known as the “Grey Lady” and having a legacy as old-school mainstream media, The Times has experimented with its web page before, Mashable notes.  A homepage ad in February for Met Life, for instance, let you play piano like Schroeder, the Peanuts character

 

Digital Journal publishes March ‘Power User’ list in ongoing crowdsourcing project

Apr 3, 2012   //   by admin   //   Media blog  //  1 Comment

Digital Journal today published a list of the 20 most active contributors on its network in March. The Top 20 list is published each month to report how Digital Journalists, bloggers and citizen journalists interact in an online media network.

“Gamification is going to be a pillar in the future for media organizations,” said Digital Journal CEO, Chris Hogg. “Having and using data in conjunction with a media offering positions a company like Digital Journal to be able to do things that have never before been possible. We can measure, track and report very granular data that has never before been accessible, and we are proud to be able to use that data to show off some of most talented media people in the world.”

Digital Journal publishes a Top 20 list in recognition of top performers from the company’s massive gamification project that tracks and reports activity of contributors across the Digital Journal network. Recording actions such as quantity of articles published, frequency of visit and how engaged members are, Digital Journal rewards points and badges to individual contributors based on the amount of their activity. The members who stay the most active in the month are then rewarded with a “Power Users” badge.

In addition to creating incentive for contributors to participate in the social news network, Digital Journal aims to showcase talent and create a level of transparency that gives an open look at how people interact with a news organization and how user-generated content is valuable in the wider news ecosystem.

“Digital Journal is seeing continued growth from contributors making their mark in social news media,” said David Silverberg, Managing Editor of Digital Journal. “Our focus on gamification has produced another excellent crop of informative journalism gaining attention with readers and publishers across the world.”

In no particular order, Digital Journal’s March 2012 Power Users include:

Digital Journal compiles data on a monthly basis and resets the points at the beginning of each month when a new competition begins. More info on Digital Journal’s gamification project can be found here.

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