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Ash trees in the UK are in big troubles. They estimated 80 million ash trees are under threat. The ash die back disease (i.e. the Chalara fungus) could kill millions of trees as scientists think trees are genetically susceptible to this type of disease. However, some trees end up being immune, and the why and how of this happening is what the scientists want to discover. Hope comes from an unexpected form: a Facebook game.

 (click on the picture to to read it)

Scientists need to analyse the genetic code of both the trees and the fungus. This is a huge task, as it ivolves 60 million nucleotides for the fungus and around 1 billion for the trees. Researches sequenced the DNA from infected trees and, via the Facebook Game, called Fraxinus, they let the human brain recognize patterns. The hope is that by sorting this information into genetic sequences through gameplay, players will help scientists find genetic variations to better understand how the disease works on a genetic level.

Competition is also part of the game. It is actually what keeps players engaged, together with the addictiveness of the game. The player who has the hishest score on any given pattern can claim that pattern and hold it until his score is still the highest. The advantage is that each pattern theft also serves to make the data more accurate.

Top players will actually see their names in public databases and publications in recognition for their help.

That is another beautiful example of crowdsourcing, hope you guys liked the idea and go ahead and play the game, it’s free and anyone with a Facebook account can join in: https://apps.facebook.com/fraxinusgame/

References:
(1) http://www.cnet.com/au/news/play-facebook-game-sequence-genomes/
(2) http://blog.mendeley.com/highlighting-research/facebook-game-uses-crowdsourcing-to-tackle-ash-die-back-disease/

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Social media will probably change a lot in the next couple of years, we have already seen a lot of different social media sites come and go. In the Netherlands for most people it started with MSN and Hyves, nowadays both do not even exist anymore. And even though Twitter still is one of the biggest social media sites you see a big decline in the Netherlands. Last year 1.5 million people used Twitter every day, now this is only 1 million, a decline of 33%. Every year you have one or more new social media hype, as you can see in the table below, Pinterest really grew last year. So what will happen to social media in the future?

In the article by AJ Agrawal, he says that the thinks social media will be a lot more personal in the future, a lot more people will complete their profiles as much as possible. They add more pictures and put a lot of information about themselves online. This does not only help companies with targeting the right people, but also keeps the users focused and engaged with the respective social media platform.

In a different article by Jason Falls, he talks about the future of social media, he thinks it will probably be good in the long term, but on the short term not so much. A lot of businesses right now are rushing into social media, if you don’t have social media as a company already you need to make it now. The problem with this is that most businesses don’t do it right. And the results will not be as clearly visible or be as fast as with normal ads on the television or the radio. With those ads you get immediate payoff, but with social media you have to think long term, this will be new and too much for most companies according to Jason Falls.

This is mostly short term, but how do people think social media will look like 10 years from now? In an article on the site of the Webber University, they talk about the battle for the share of engagement. Existing social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter will try to make the content more engaging, instead of just looking on the sites. Also the ads will be a lot more valuable on the internet instead of the old fashioned advertisements on television and radio.

So there are a lot of different opinions about what social media will look like in the future. Will it grow until we live our lives mostly online and with social media, or will it completely disappear? What do you think will happen to social media in the future?

References

(2015), In the Netherlands, Pinterest Gains, but Facebook Still Reigns, http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Netherlands-Pinterest-Gains-Facebook-Still-Reigns/1012345.

A.J. Agrawal (2014),  5 Predictions for the Future of Social Media,        http://www.inc.com/aj-agrawal/5-predictions-of-the-future-of-social-media.html.

J. Falls (2008), The Future of Social Media: Hope Or Hype https://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/the-future-of-social-media-hope-or-hype/.

Weber, Social Media in 2025 http://webber.edu/social-media-in-2025/.

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Ello is a social network, developed by Paul Budnitz in March 2014, that was dubbed by the media as the “anti-facebook”. Ello was released in the September of 2014, with just 90 users, and prides itself on its ad-free philosophies, that extend to maintaining user anonymity and refusing to use or distribute their data. The company committed to these philosophies legally in October 2014, establishing itself as a benefit corporation. Instead of sourcing revenue from data opportunities, Ello has established brand partnerships to pursue creative solutions such as partnership with t-shirt manufacturer Threadless to produce branded merchandise (Lopez, 2014).

The platform operated with an unusual acquisition strategy upon launch, allowing users only with specific invites to join the platform. Once accepted, a user can invite ten friends to the network, which is perhaps more reflective of our real social networks. The exclusive strategy proved to be highly successful, obtaining over 1 million users and 100,000 invite requests per day in its first month after launch (Arthur, 2014). This buzz translated in to wide-spread media coverage, as journalists reported the launch of Facebook’s potential successor. As i’m sure you’re aware, this is a big label to live up to. And this, I believe, is Ello’s main problem.

When I started writing the blog, the piece was titled “Saying Goodbye To Ello”, and was a personal review on my experience with the site and my reasons for writing it off. The site is buggy, fails to incorporate media from URL links, has a complex friend system and even fails to offer private messaging functionality (Pearl, 2015). Furthermore, it’s a pretty lonely place. The sign-up initiative is great for creating an exclusive community, but it means it’s difficult – if not impossible – to find your friends on there and interact with them.

Despite all of this, I’m prepared to give it another chance. Hearing of the anti-facebook, i signed up for the site with the assumption of a social network that does things a little differently, perhaps similar to switching from Microsoft to Apple. I’m sure i’m not alone in these assumptions. The issue, however, is that this isn’t what Ello is intended to be, nor is it what it functions as.

Ello’s founders described the site as being “built specifically with creative people in mind, people who value content, with a good bit of discussion and dialogue happening around that content”. Upon reading this quote, I started to see this differently. It’s true – Ello isn’t a place where you are drowned in meme’s and selfies, it’s far more focused on creative content, which has huge implications. Ello’s “friends” aren’t supposed to reflect those that you see day to day, more it is an expression of appreciating somebodies work and interacting with them to say this. Budnitz notes this, saying that the “most remarkable thing is how positive it is” (Pearl, 2015).

Ultimately, this is a platform that is meant with a very specific type of content and people in mind, that may have received a kiss of death from the media. There are issues with the site – for example an inability to filter content according to your creative interests such as featured on Pinterest. Ello has, however, created something unique, and may become highly successful as the “beta” network adds more functionality.

If this sounds like something that interests you, comment below to ask for an invite code.

References

Arthur, C. (2014). Goodbye, Ello? Searches for new social network collapse. the Guardian. Retrieved 29 October 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/14/goodbye-ello-google-seacrhes-social-network

Lopez, N. (2014). Ad-Free Social Network Ello Turns to T-shirts for Revenue. The Next Web. Retrieved 29 October 2015, from http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/11/18/ad-free-social-network-ello-turns-branded-t-shirts-revenue/

Pearl, M. (2015). Who’s Still Using Ello?. VICE. Retrieved 29 October 2015, from http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/people-are-still-using-ello-535

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The power of Youtube is not a new thing. Everybody uses it, to post and watch vlogs, random videos or music covers. To have an idea, every minute 300 hours of video is uploaded at the website. However, to be a success you need more than just a beautiful voice, as there are already many and different kinds of it at Youtube. You can be really lucky or you need to have a special talent.

One of these successful channels is Pentatonix, a band without instruments that got more than a billion views at youtube and over 9.1 million subscribers. Besides this they won a Grammy and participated in the Hollywood movie “Pitch Perfect 2”. This week they are number one at the Billboard 200 charts, beating the ex Disney Channel star Demi Lovato, this example just shows the power of social media and the legion of fans it brings around the World.

“This is perhaps the first time in history that an a capella group has topped the all-encompassing albums chart” (FORBES) This is not the first time it happened in the band’s History. Their first album was the 4th most sold cd in U.S.A last year.

You are wrong if you think they stopped to post youtube videos and even more if u think the cover days are over, because this is what makes them famous and relevant. Social media has the power to make a person or a band popular in one second, but stay in fame is even harder. Do you think it is hard for artists to survive on a platform like Youtube?

 

Sources:
http://hypebot.com/hypebot/2014/11/how-pentatonix-built-a-social-media-powerhouse.html

By the Numbers: 135 Amazing YouTube Statistics

http://www.foxla.com/good-day/good-day-la-features/37239133-story
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2015/10/26/pentatonix-debuts-at-number-one-with-their-new-self-titled-album/

 

 

 

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Businesses can now take advantage of Instagram’s advanced advertising game, which was launched globally on 30 September 2015. Instagram has made three major changes to its advertising program which mainly consists of the following:
– New markets for the ads
– Opening up Ad-Buying
– Introducing 30 seconds video ads in Landscape mode

Instagram introduced ads nearly two years ago and since then it has made conscious efforts to ensure protection of its customer experience. Advancing its ad game includes allowing both large and small brands to run campaigns on the service and expansion of this ad viewership in more than 30 new countries including Italy, Spain, Mexico, India, and South Korea.

Along with rolling out ads broadly, Instagram has launched new key tools for marketers. Earlier the video ads were limited to just 15 seconds, but now advertisers publish video ads of up to 30 seconds. It is almost the length of an average television commercial, which allows company’s to adequately tell their story. Instagram is also enabling advertisers to use landscape format in order to give a more cinematic feel to the ads along with new delivery and optimisation tools, which could help, enhance brand campaigns.

Additionally, Instagram introduced a new premium ad tool called Marquee, that helps drive mass awareness and expanded reach in a short time frame. Instagram says it’s a new way to push mass recognition and is a perfect advertising platform for movie premieres and new product launches.

These adverts have definitely benefited Instagram by ramping up its revenue. Instagram’s ad revenue is projected to reach $1.5 billion in 2016, according to eMarketer, a research firm, and nearly double by 2017 to $2.8 billion.

This leads us to a few questions concerning these ads, Would you watch an entire 30 seconds ad while looking through your Instagram? Would it cause any interference in your user experience? How much of an impact do you think these video ads have on companies?

Sources:
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/instagram-debuts-30-second-video-ads-its-latest-pitch-big-brands-166767

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/08/finally-here-comes-instagrams-big-ad-push.html

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/instagram-steps-up-advertising-effort-adds-30-markets/articleshow/48879569.cms

http://www.ibnlive.com/news/tech/goodbye-ad-free-instagram-hello-sponsored-photos-1088975.html

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The article by (Malone, Laubacher, & Dellarocas, 2010) discusses how companies can achieve collective intelligence through the use of building blocks by using four main questions, what is being done, who is doing it, why are they doing it and how is it being done. The answer to one of the key questions is called a gene. This article focuses on the 16 principle genes and the factors involved in selecting them. This article enables companies to get answers for these questions, which can help systematically design their collective intelligence system. A weak point is that companies could have a problem identifying useful genes that are suitable for the situation.

The article by (Pisano & Verganti, 2008) discusses the four ways to collaborate namely; elite circle (closed and hierarchical network), innovation mall (open and hierarchical network), innovation community (open and flat network) and consortium (closed and flat network). This article develops a framework, outlining the advantages, challenges and enablers of the different collaborations, which can be useful for companies to make better decisions. On the negative side, this article does not take into consideration the difference in opinion/working styles of individuals within a group. It also fails to mention limitations related to openness, such as reluctance in sharing unknown information to the person, hoarding etc.

The third article by (Borison and Hamm, 2010), proposes judgment driven techniques based on assessing individual experts opinions (probability encoding), combination of such individual opinions (expert aggregation) and by placing bets on a specific outcome of interest (prediction markets). This article emphasizes on each process and outlines the problems, which decision makers could use to improve their assessment of judgmental uncertainty in decision-making. However, the techniques seem complex for a small size company to incorporate and the problem of undesirability, uncertainty and inaccuracy persists, which can lead to distorting market probabilities.

Additional articles include further research on how these crowdsourcing techniques could help accelerate new product development/innovation and the nascent market for labor crowdsourcing. An article by (Aitamurto, Leiponen, & Tee, 2011) claims that combination of user innovation and crowdsourcing is done by directly engaging individuals in the innovation process to gain fresh, fast and creative ideas, accelerating new product development. Since these inputs are from the end-users, there will be higher market acceptance and lower risk of failure. Starbucks crowdsourcing platform, MyStarbucksIdea is a great example of this.

Labor crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower, pay intelligent workers to perform simple macro tasks such as image recognition, sentiment analysis etc. These platforms have created a shift from full time employment to part-time employment (Shaughnessy, 2012).

Mini-case study on crowdsourcing and new product develop include P&G’s Connect + Develop program which lists the problems P&G is trying to solve as well as an open submission where innovators can suggest original ideas for review. P&G also partnered with InnoCentive by rewarding innovative ideas with prizes. This helped P&G introduce more than 100 new lines across various markets, resulting in 60% increase in productivity (Confino, 2012). The strength of this case is definitely P&G’s external collaboration with partners through which the company was able to achieve successful crowdsourcing. The efficient use of the innovative ideas and solutions has also contributed to its success.

Second case study is on Threadless, an online community, which consists of more than 500,000 members, who actively participate in creating and selecting t-shirt designs. The company produces and ships over 1.5 million t-shirts per year, which accounts for an excess of $23 million in revenue (Lakhani & Kanji, 2008). Crowdsourcing has been a success for Threadless mainly due to the relationship established with the community members who feel a sense of ownership towards the company due to their contributions, which is the case in many crowdsourcing projects.

Sources:

Aitamurto, T., Leiponen, A., & Tee, R. (2011). The Promise of Idea Crowdsourcing – Benefits, Contexts,Limitations. Nokia Ideasproject White Paper .
Borison, A., & Hamm, G. (2010). Prediction markets: A new tool for strategic decision making. California Management Review , 52 (4), 125-141.
Confino, J. (2012, September 26). Procter & Gamble CEO on solving the world’s sustainability challenges. Retrieved from TheGuardian.com: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/procter-gamble-ceo-solving-worlds-sustainability-challenges
Lakhani, R. K., & Kanji, Z. (2008, June 30). Threadless: The Business of Community.
Malone, T., Laubacher, R., & Dellarocas, C. (2010). The collective intelligence genome. MIT Sloan Management Review , 51 (3), 21-31.
Pisano, G., & Verganti, R. (2008). Which kind of collaboration is right for you? Harvard Business Review , 86 (12), 78-86.
Shaughnessy, H. (2012, March 10). Work Without Jobs: A Trend For The Educated Elite. Retrieved from Forbes.com: http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2012/03/10/a-little-more-on-work-without-jobs-for-the-educated-elite/

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A facebook friendship request from your grandmother or a like on instagram from the old lady next door, it is all normal nowadays. We are all used to the fact that ninetysix percent of the young adults actively uses at least one social media platform. But research shows that eight out of ten of the people of sixtyfive and over, are now using social media. Last year their were only three quarters of that certain type of group active users. So this type of group has increased a lot over the year.

The reason why they stayed behind past years is, because they had the feeling that not everybody needed to see every aspect of their lives. But right now they admit that social media is really useful. The main reason for becoming an active users is, staying in contact with family and friends, but elderly also have the feeling that they are more independent.

The programs that are being used the most are Facebook and Google plus. As you can see on the infographics below, there has been a big change over the couple of years. All the social media platforms, that are represented in the picture, grew a lot. The first picture shows the users in 2011 and the second picture shows the users in 2015.

Another point being made in the research is, that elderly also have found the mobile chatprograms, like Whatsapp and Facebook messenger. They are starting to use mobile devices instead of computers. The mobile devices make it easier to connect with the chatprograms and use it. Right now the chatprograms are not as popular as Facebook, but we will also see an increase in the use of these programs the next couple of years.

Elderly are not only becoming more modern and in touch with younger people, they are also more careful when it comes to sharing personal information. Elderly are very aware of the dangers that can occure, when you provide the wrong information on social media.

It might seem a little bit weird to see your grandmothers beach photo’s on instagram and accept your friends grandmothers Facebook request, but it also has a lot of advantages to connect elderly with social media. What do you think about older people on social media platforms?

References

• FrankWatching (2015) De online opmars van de 65-plusser: verstand komt met de jaren http://www.frankwatching.com/archive/2015/10/20/online-opmars-65-plusser-verstand-komt-met-de-jaren-onderzoek/

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It all started with an accident of a teacher sending his genitals to his students in a group chat on Whatsapp. Afterwards, numerous different cases of teachers being to intimate with their students were discovered. According to a Dutch labour union for teachers, there are annually 25 teacher fired, because they are to intimate with their students. This stirred up a lot of attention to the topic of where the line is between teachers and students, considering that social media makes it much easier to have contact outside class (Van Der Wal 2015).

Nowadays, a lot of teachers communicate with their students through social media. They might be friends on Facebook, they might follow each other on Twitter and there is even a possibility to contact each other through Whatsapp. Some teachers also use social media as teaching tools, as they give assignments that can be made via social media in order to engage the students (Grisham 2014).

There are different opinions on this matter. Some say that there is nothing wrong with communicating with students through social media. They belief that it is a convenient way to contact students, for example reminding them for deadlines. Also social media is something that interests students and therefore, it makes students more willing to interact. Teachers also belief that students should learn how to communicate differently when talking professionally or personally (Fleming 2014).

On the other side, some people think it is not appropriate to communicate in such a way. They do not see the reason why teacher would want to connect on such level with their students. Furthermore, this way of communicating has led to blurred boundaries and sexual impropriety (which could be seen in the example given above), as teachers dare to say more online than face-to-face (Fleming 2014).

However, as it is impossible to exclude or prohibit this from their lives, it is important to know how teachers and students should handle and behave. Therefore, a few recommendations were given. First of all, the school should have a policy outlining what teacher are and are not allowed to do on social media (Fleming 2014). Secondly, it is advisable for the teacher to think about creating a separate account for personal use and professional use. This could make drawing a line easier for the teacher. Furthermore, teachers should also be transparent about how social media is used in class. Parents, for example, can then see how the communication happens between teachers and students (Pannoni 2015).

What do you guys think? Should teachers use social media to contact with their students or not? Should teachers friend and/or follow students? What about if the student is already graduated? Is it then more appropriate?

Van der Wal, C. (2015). Docenten worstelen met leerlingcontact social media Available at http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/1012/Nederland/article/detail/4167769/2015/10/21/Docenten-worstelen-met-leerlingcontact-social-media.dhtml [Accessed on 23 Oct. 2015]

Grisham, L. (2014) Teachers, students and social media: where is the line? Available at http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/04/09/facebook-teachers-twitter-students-schools/7472051/ [Accessed on 23 Oct. 2015]

Pannoni, A. (2015) 3 tips for high school teachers to use social media responsibly in class. Available at http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2015/09/14/3-tips-for-high-school-teachers-to-use-social-media-responsibly-in-class [Accessed on 23 Oct. 2015]

Fleming, A.R. (2014). Social media boundaries: Should teachers and students be friends? Available at http://www.today.com/parents/social-media-boundaries-should-teachers-students-be-friends-1D80156546 [Accessed on 23 Oct. 2015]