Target to sell Facebook Credits gift cards

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is coming to a Target (TGT) store near you.

The social-network giant is getting into the gift card business, starting Sunday, with Facebook Credits cards.

The new Facebook gift cards will be available in values of $15, $25 and $50 at all of Target's 1,750 retail stores and at Target.com. Two or three more national retailers will start selling the cards in coming months.

This will be the first time Facebook has had any presence in a retail store. Facebook already has an arrangement with online-payment services PayPal and MOL to purchase Facebook Credits.

Facebook is banking that a sizable chunk of its 500 million members will purchase the cards and use them on their favorite social games, applications and virtual goods.

The gift cards, which look and work like Apple's iTunes cards, were created by GMG Entertainment, which also produced iTunes cards. Target carries iTunes cards, too.

More than 200 million people play free social games on Facebook each month, according to Facebook. And many of them are beginning to spend money on premium goods and services associated with those games.

"We think (the cards) will be incredibly popular as a holiday gift," says Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook.

The cards can initially be used on more than 150 social games and applications, including titles from gamemakers such as Zynga (FarmVille, FrontierVille), CrowdStar (Happy Aquarium, HelloCity) and PopCap Games (Bejeweled Blitz). Facebook gift cards do not replace Zynga's existing game cards.

Target — which already sells more than 30 gift cards for online games, such as FarmVille — expects the markets for online gaming and digital music to continue to grow, says Mark Schindele, senior vice president of merchandising at Target. He also noted that Target has more than 1.5 million fans on its Facebook page.

By year's end, Facebook expects to have gift card credits available for its thousands of games. At least 19 games on Facebook have more than 10 million active users a month.

Facebook is expected to rake in an estimated $1.3 billion in online advertising revenue worldwide this year, up 92% from 2009, eMarketer says.

Facebook's entry into the growing prepaid gift card market could prove lucrative. The domestic prepaid gift card market is expected to reach $86.2billion this year, compared with $80.6billion in 2009, according to Mercator Advisory Group.

/// Donna asks?

So, will you purchase facebook credits?

How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from CIO.com. Visit CIO’s Macs in the Enterprise page.

...What Jobs did next, according to Carmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, was vintage Jobs (and a model for how presenters should deal with stage crises): He did not panic. He did not look hot under the collar of his trademark turtleneck. Hishours of practice and intimate knowledge of every inch of every slide made him comfortable enough so that he could jump around to another part of the presentation (in this case, to look at photos). Jobs “trouble shooted” his problem by asking the audience (and, presumably, his back-stage engineers) for a little networking assistance. “You know, you could help me out. If you're on Wi-Fi, if you could just get off,” he pleaded, to roaring audience laughter. “I’d appreciate it. We're having a little problem here.”

And he sprinkled in several more bits of humor to diffuse any audience insecurity. “I’ve got time,” he joked, while waiting for the audience to “police each other.”

/// My comment:

Live demonstrations do NOT always go as well as rehearsed, so it's critical for the presenter to be prepared to work around these types of issues. They must be able to retain the audiences attention and get the message across. We all know technology isn't 100% perfect all the time.

Data congestion thwarts Steve Jobs' iPhone demo By Jordan Robertson, AP Technology Writer | June 7, 2010 SAN FRANCISCO --Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs was thwarted Monday in his attempt to show off how clearly the newest iPhone displays Web pages, apparently because too many people were clogging the airwaves at the conference where he was on stage. Jobs tried three times during his keynote to do a side-by-side comparison of the iPhone 4's screen resolution versus its predecessor's. He was trying to call up The New York Times' Web page, but it wouldn't load because too many devices in the room were operating over Wi-Fi, swamping the frequency. Jobs switched to backup phones for the demonstration, but he was still stymied. "Well jeez, I don't like this," Jobs groused. He abandoned the demo while staffers investigated. Technological glitches at technology conferences are common, but less so at Apple's carefully choreographed events. Last month at a demonstration of Google Inc.'sInternet television technology, Google representatives had trouble showing how easy it was supposed to be to switch back and forth between browsing Web content and TV programming. Google pleaded with attendees to shut off their wireless connections, as did Jobs on Monday. He asked bloggers and other people in the room to turn off their wireless connections and put their computers on the floor. "I think bloggers have a right to blog, but if we want to see the demos we're going to have to do it," he said. The demos immediately after that went smoothly. But a later demo of a video-calling feature that requires a wireless Internet connection was sluggish at times.

FCC's broadband reclassification: What's next?

The U.S. Federal Communications will move quickly to claim some regulatory authority over broadband after Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the agency would reclassify broadband as a regulated service.

The FCC will vote on an item to start the process of reclassifying broadband transmission as a regulated, common-carrier service in the next month or so, Bruce Liang Gottlieb chief counsel to Genachowski said Thursday.

FCC statement on "Third Way" for broadband policy

The FCC announced Wednesday that it would move to reclassify broadband from a largely unregulated information service to a regulated common-carrier service in response to an appeals court decision in April. The court ruled that the agency does not have the authority to enforce informal network neutrality rules in a case involving Comcast's throttling of peer-to-peer traffic.

Follow link for rest of article.

But does this really ensure an open Internet w/ net neutrality rules?

MIT admissions as easy as pi

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff

Last Sunday afternoon, at precisely 1:59, every MIT applicant worth their salt logged on to a special admissions website to check their fates. Just 1,611 students got in, a record low admit rate of 9.7 percent. But a weightier number filled students’ minds: 3.14159…, or pi, the Greek letter symbolizing the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.

Yes, in true Geek fashion, MIT released its admissions decisions at a time that would hold a deeper meaning for only those mathematically inclined enough to apply – on Pi Day, March 14, 1:59, as an homage to the mathematical constant.
"We thought it was pretty neat and fitting,'' said Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions and a 1986 MIT graduate. "Pi is a special number. And this is one way for us, as a science and technology centered place, to celebrate it."

Call it MIT’s version of March Madness.
Applicants were e-mailed a clever note last Thursday, instructing them how to check the status of their applications “a minute before 2 p.m.” “Receiving your decision online is as easy as pi,” the message said.
Though there was no explicit reference to Pi Day, Schmill said, "Most of our applicants are clued in."
This is the second year in a row that the university has been able to release its decisions on Pi Day (coincidentally the birthday of Albert Einstein). But MIT is not making Pi Day admissions -- and rejections -- a tradition just yet. It lands on a Monday next year. And, Schmill said, "We won’t release decisions when our applicants are in school."

NBC OlympicsTaps Cisco for IP Video Network

NBC is partnering with Cicso to provide a “media-aware” IP video network infrastructure during the network’s all HD broadcast of the Winter Olympic Games from Vancouver, Feb. 12-28. The combined solution, which consists of or a private network, Cisco IP video infrastructure and medianet “media aware” technology (Cisco’s brand name for its technology to optimize video over IP), will enable real-time editing NBC content in multiple international and domestic locations and will allow GB-sized files to be transmitted between locations and then delivered to video screens. A high-bandwidth, high performance connection between Vancouver and NBC studios in New York will give shot selectors and editors the ability to edit video as it is being captured in Vancouver.

Cisco Flip Video cameras will also be used by NBC correspondents for shooting on-the-fly video during the Games. NBC will also test the Cisco Media Data Center and Cisco’s Unified Computing System to support production and video archiving. “Cisco is providing all our local data routers for our LAN in and around Vancouver, and for our WAN on the international AT&T data circuits to NY, NJ, Burbank, and Las Vegas,” said Dave Mazza, NBC Olympics’ senior vice president of engineering. “Those circuits are carrying a number of file-based workflow from EVS, Omneon, and Avid and also a large amount of IP-based video from Tandberg.”

Love the media aware IP networking, because yes, we all know that video signals can require very high bandwidths, typically up to 8 Mbits per sec for MPEG 2 encoded HDTV channels and approximately 3 Mbps for MPEG 4. It is imperative that the IP network be optimized so it will deliver the quality of experience (QoE) needed for great picture quality, without degradation.
We all know viewing pixilated images is like being on a cell call with poor quality. I know many of cell phones that learned how to fly & swim because of this, though this might be a bit tougher to toss a 50" flat panel TV into your swimming pool, or out your window. lol!

Raytheon BBN to create 'largest network research center in U.S.'

Raytheon BBN Technologies has won an $81 million deal from the Army Research Laboratory to establish a collaborative alliance and what the company calls “the nation’s largest network science research center.”The company will create the Interdisciplinary Research Center at its headquarters in Cambridge, which will host network research, as well as Department of Defense technology developments.Called the ARL Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance, the consortium will use the five-year contract to pull together more than 30 university and industrial labs to address the commone features of communication, information, social and cognitive networks.Raytheon BBN is a Cambridge-based subsidiary of Waltham-based Raytheon Co., which completed its $350 million purchase of BBN in October.Raytheon reported a net income of $490 million on revenue of $6.2 billion for the quarter ended Sept. 27.

Well now, very interesting given BBN was home of the ARPAnet years ago. This sounds like an awesome project. I will be sure to be on the look out for jobs at Raytheon BBN!