#Fail

Technology. We’ve come to depend on it so much, and yet it’s not always dependable. Thursday morning, Twitter went down for over an hour, wreaking havoc in the Twitteverse and the world.

Mazan Rawashdeh, vice president of engineering posted the following apology on his blog:

“We are sorry. Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around [11:20am and Noon EST], users around the world got zilch from us. By about [1:25pm EST], people who came to Twitter finally got what they expected: Twitter.”

The outage was apparently cause by a “cascading bug” –

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July 31st, 2012 | Tags: , , , | Category: Business, eNews, News, Social Media, Social Networking, Technology | Leave a comment

Social Media’s Killing English?! Or, is it?

Social media can be an easy target, but is it really killing the English language?

 

Three points to ponder:

A 2010 report by Clarion University says social media and text messages are “consistently associated with the use of particularly informal written communication techniques, along with formatting problems, nonstandard orthography, and grammatical errors.” According to the Orlando Sentinel, English professor Terry Thaxton says “Social media has certainly brought attention to the poor and declining writing, communication, and critical-thinking skills that teachers have seen for a long time. But it’s also helping writers develop experimental ways of writing narrative

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July 24th, 2012 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Business, Computers, Education, Social Media, Social Networking, Technology | Leave a comment

Exiled by Your “Fans”

Social media often requires a brand or organization to open up and take risks. And sometimes those risks can backfire.

Walmart learned that the hard way when Facebook fans took over their contest to promoting Energy Sheets. The contest asked users to like their local Walmart store and the store with the most new likes would receive a visit from American rapper, Pitbull.

All seemed fine until the people behind Something Awful hijacked the contest with a campaign to #ExilePitbull to the most remote Walmart in the country. Their campaign helped Walmart #2711 located in Kodiak Island in Alaska

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July 17th, 2012 | Category: Social Media, Social Networking | Leave a comment

Medical Records On the Go!

 

You never know when an emergency might arise and you’re going to need your full medical history. Code D’Urgence a French company, is making it easy to have your medical records at your fingertips. Your records are uploaded and a secure QR code is created to access them. The QR codes are then placed on stickers that people can attach to bike helmets, the back of their phones, etc. The QR codes are only accessible by regulated doctors and firefighters. This could help medical personal obtain your information speedily and could make a huge difference in life

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July 10th, 2012 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

What Happens When The Cloud Goes Down?

This past Friday, lightning in Virginia took out part of Amazon’s cloud computing service. Hundreds of companies use the Amazon Web Services for data storage and computation. This includes Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram. Friday’s storm knocked these sites off the grid for several hours. According to the New York Times, there is still little information for customers about what had happened, or even whether user data was safe.

One thing is for sure, the recent outage has people second guessing the security of using the cloud for themselves and their customers. According to the NY Times:

The interruption underlined

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July 3rd, 2012 | Tags: , , , | Category: Business, Computers, Technology | Leave a comment