On Monday, August 8, SXSW.com will announce the launch of the SXSW Interactive Scholarship 2012 program. While last year’s scholarship program was limited to nonprofits, this year’s iteration expands its focus to recognize individuals from all sectors and from anywhere in the world who are using new media to push the boundaries of tackling community problems. Nonprofit leaders, grassroots organizers, individual citizens, and civic-minded entrepreneurs are all eligible.

Individuals can begin to submit their essay anytime between Monday, August 8, and Friday, August 26. SXSW and CauseShift will lead the review and selection process with the five scholarship recipients to be announced on Monday, September 19. Each of the five recipients will receive a complimentary SXSW Interactive badge for the 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival.

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Since I’ve already been on a Google+ few weeks now (I had an invitation to try out the service the day before it launched – one of the small perks of writing a tech blog), and since I’ve already received an email invitation to try out the next brand new web service (the US rollout of Spotify),  I guess it’s about time I shared my impressions of Google’s planned Facebook-killer.

During the first day or two of Google+, you really had to “know a guy who knows a guy” to get an account, but if the recent escalation in the number of friends and family showing up there is any indication, they’re scaling up the service more aggressively than they did with Gmail a few years ago.

Although they’re keeping quiet about the numbers, some recent independent research estimates that about 20 million people have signed up as of this past weekend.  Just to put that in context, Facebook claims over 750 million active users.  On the surface, that would seem to represent some pretty substantial  inertia in Facebook’s favor – but the tipping point syndrome can be pretty brutal in the social networking world (imagine a cocktail party in which each guest can anonymously and painlessly bail out of if it turns out the cool kids are heading on over to the party down the street).

This point  is not lost on Facebook – in fact, Mark Zuckerberg is “keeping his enemies close” via a Google+ account of his own that’s ended up in over a quarter of a million Google+ user’s Circles – but has yet to contain a single post.

After playing around with it a bit, I think Google+ can objectively be said to have the edge over Facebook in terms of simplicity and transparency – and on a more subjective level, I believe there are a few other things to like about Google+, as well…

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I never really ‘got’ Facebook – so when someone at Google asked me yesterday to take part in the initial trial of their new Google + social media platform, I decided to read up on it a bit first to see whether it might be worth my time.

I have to say, after looking into it a bit, I was intrigued – intrigued enough to try it out over the next few weeks.

Why?  Because Google+ seems to address the one reason I’ve avoided Facebook: the list of things I would want to say socially in exactly the same way to every person I know is a pretty short list.

The folks behind the Google+ project seem to get it – Google’s new social media platform appears to be built upon the notion of groups, and it appears to be designed that way from the ground up.  This is in stark contrast to the opt-in, after-the-fact group-filtering mechanisms other social media platforms seem to have implemented reluctantly and seem to prefer you wouldn’t use.

And according to Bradley Horowitz (who along with Vic Gundotra is in charge of  the Google+ project), that’s just what’s wrong with today’s social media sites:  “In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world.”

Amen, brother.   So I’ve just logged into my trial account and had a quick look around – I think I’ll give this Google+ project a try.  As a confirmed social media skeptic, it’ll be interesting to see if it feels like there’s something worthwhile there… stay tuned.

We’ve recently written about National Teacher Appreciation Day in the US – in many other parts of the world, though, the big holiday of the month is May 1st, or ‘May Day‘ (aka Labor Day).

In the US, Labor Day happens in early September and is primarily about getting that one last long weekend in before the unofficial end of summer.  Elsewhere in the world, though, the concept of ‘Labor Day’ is a bit more politicized: also known as International Worker’s Day, the holiday has had a particularly rich history here in Berlin dating all the way back to the bad old GDR days (the still grandiose Karl Marx Allee boulevard was in fact built for the sole purpose of providing as impressive a backdrop as possible for the yearly parade).

As Berlin has gradually became more westernized in the years after the fall of the wall, the holiday has evolved into more of a day of protest – in fact, just last year, 10,000 protestors clashed with police on the streets.

With May Day all over the local news here for a couple of days last week, I thought it might be interesting to see whether the same was true out there on the internet as well: was May Day (or, rather, Tag der Arbeit) a ‘trending topic’ online over the weekend?

The fastest/easiest/best/cheapest (i.e. free) way to graph the frequency with which a given keyword or phrase is searched for on Google within a specified time window is Google Insights. (Google Trends, another Google site, offers much the same service – but the date and geographic region filtering is less powerful) .

Here’s what Google Trends shows for ‘Tag der Arbeit’ over the past few years:

A few things to note:  if Google’s data is correct, there was roughly 5 times the amount of interest in ‘Tag der Arbeit’ this year than in either of the previous two years (vertical values are scaled such that the number “100″ represents the maximum value returned, much as Google’s financial charts are scaled).   That’s a little hard to accept, and begs the question of whether what we’re looking at is being affected by some differences in Google’s methodology over the past few years.  Secondly, thanks to the site’s geographic functionality, it would appear that the German states of Nordrhein-Westfalen and Hessen are for more interested in ‘Tag der Arbeit’ than we are in Berlin – although, again, this assumes a normalized data  methodology across the whole of Germany.

Google Insights is a very useful service.  It understands the Google search operators (‘OR’, ‘+’, etc.), and it’s possible to compare (overlay) multiple results by keyword/phrase, location, or time span – which can lead to some pretty interesting graphs.  However, as noted above (and as is always the case), any results are only as good as the underlying data – in computer science/IT vernacular, it’s the ‘garbage in, garbage out‘ effect.

In any event, I’m happy to report ‘Tag der Arbiet’ 2011 was largely violence- and vandalism-free here in Berlin.

PS The Saturday before May 1, I read about a protest parade coming through my Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, so I decided to check it out (and as one of the area’s invading gentrifiers, to film it with my iPhone).  As protest marches go, it was relatively cozy neighborhood event:

…evidently der Polizei had heard about it too, and after last year’s troubles, they were not taking any chances – so immediately on the heels of the protest parade came the ‘Polizei parade’…

I’ve got a full work plate this morning, and my own set of feelings to process about the news of Osama bin Laden’s death (more on that will likely appear on my Tumblr later tonight), but wanted to get down a couple noteworthy bullets. If I have time, I’ll return and flesh these out into a coherent piece.

We all know that social media get the word out at lightning speed–but what struck me most about this news was not the speed of information, but the immediacy of community development. People are using Twitter and Facebook to work out what are, for many, complicated emotions. Relief, joy, anger, sadness are all appearing at once. This is in stark contrast to what we often see in traditional media soundbites (particularly video media), where broad strokes are painted when it comes to emotional content–i.e., those people are cheering, those people over there are not. Social media is creating a space where it’s acceptable, and useful, to express multiple feelings. This is also very different than, for example, the days following 9/11–when the war on Afghanistan was announced, it was largely extremely taboo in American public squares (online or off) to express concern, or disagreement. Part of that was the political climate, but part of that was that there weren’t necessary effective public spaces for people to be nuanced human beings.

I’m also struck by the speed with humor was employed as a tactic to process the news. Again, in contrast to 9/11, when we waited two weeks for the new issue of The Onion to come out–no one made any jokes before then. Not only was it taboo, but there just wasn’t a way to deal. (By the way, that issue of The Onion might be the best one ever–headlines like, “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule, “Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves in Hell,” and many more gems.) Last night, some of the immediate jokes, some in good taste, some not, clearly paved a way for people to express all kinds of reactions to this global news phenomenon. My personal favorites were @marcfaletti‘s “It was that f***ing iPad location history, wasn’t it?” and the newly created @OsamaInHell account tweeting, “Wait, what?”

More as time allows today…

This Tuesday (May 3rd) is “National Teacher Appreciation Day” in the US.

I know, it’s easy to feel a little cynical about these ‘National <insert your cause here> Week’ proclamations – it can sometimes seem that they’re primarily about safe uncontroversial camera time for the politicians proposing them.  On the other hand, “National Teacher Appreciation Day” has me taking a minute or two to reflect back on two of the best teachers I’ve had: one from my master’s degree studies, one from back in high school.

Here, by way of a belated ‘thank you’, is a little about them…

Navin Chopra, Economics My master’s degree curriculum was made up of equal parts Stern School of Business MBA courses and NYU graduate-level computer science courses.  At NYU, computer science is part the mathematics department, and although math is a  big deal there, the fact remains that computer science has less to do with mathematics than you’d think – so I always had the impression it was given short shrift at NYU.  Not so the Stern MBA courses I was spending the other half of my time in – while I was there, Financial Times had the school ranked 10th worldwide and 3rd worldwide in finance.  So as I sat surrounded by MBA students for Professor Chopra’s first ‘Foundations of Finance’ lecture, I was eager to see what all the fuss was about.

‘Foundations of Finance’ was part of the MBA core curriculum, and was viewed at Stern as something akin to ‘economics boot camp’.  The material was challenging, and the course moved quickly: NPV, IRR, PVIFA, yield curves, bond pricing, correlation coefficients…  I’ll be honest, I’ve half-forgotten many of those formulas, and I haven’t touched the scientific calculator I had to buy for the course since minutes after finishing my final exam.  To this day, though, I’m still struck by how rewarding (and enjoyable) Professor Chopra made the experience.  Granted, it was a self-selected, highly motivated room to begin with – but he had most of us wanting to learn this difficult material for its own sake - we were  into it.  And let’s be honest, that’s not often the case in business school (it appears Prof. Chopra has since moved on to Columbia Business School – NYU’s loss).

Given that half my courses met in the Institute of Mathematics building, it’s a little ironic that the math I was exposed to while at NYU happened down the street at the b-school, but that’s what ‘Foundations of Finance’ was – essentially, a math class.  What I particularly appreciated were the fleeting glimpses into the beauty of the math that Prof. Chopra seemed to get a kick out of showing us: more than once, we’d be taken up to a certain point with some new formula or chart, and then with a trace of a dry smile, he’d reveal it as another way of approaching the same concept expressed by an entirely different formula or chart we had covered a month and a half ago.  During those ‘eureka’ moments, I suddenly  understood (for the first time!) how a young person could become fascinated enough with math and/or economics to choose a career based upon it, as Prof. Chopra had clearly done (and as has I had done with music, back in high school).

Which brings me to…

Arthur Simeone Mr. Simeone was one of my high school’s three music teachers (I’m pretty confident that’s not so common anymore).   He taught chorus and music theory, and although chorus was not my thing, I did take his music theory classes – and in that laser-like way teenagers can become fascinated by things, I became fascinated by the harmonic architecture of music.

In addition to his teaching, Mr. Simeone was also a jazz piano player of some local renown.  To have a professional musician in my midst, the first I’d ever met – well, that made a big impression on me.  It wasn’t jazz harmony that he was teaching us, though – Mr. Simeone’s theory classes were based around the study of “figured bass” (“generalbass” in German), a type of chord notation used 350 years ago during the Baroque period.  As it happens, the study of this archaic notation makes for a great introduction to music theory, because it introduces into the relatively ‘vertical’ study of harmony some basic counterpoint (which deals with the relative ‘horizontal’ movement of notes) – but I digress.  The point is, although he was the ‘cool’ teacher with a mysterious and (to me, at least) glamorous musical life outside school, Arthur Simeone’s music theory classes were pretty rigorous.  Baroque music is all about structural and logical soundness, and so working with figured bass involves following some hard and fast rules – the teaching of which he took very seriously.  Like Prof. Chopra, he had great respect for the subject matter, which proved infectious in the classroom.

He also managed to approach the subject matter with a curiosity (and even a playfulness) students could identify with, and that proved infectious too.  Granted, by then I had just resolved to pursue music seriously, had little use for high school other than my music courses, and was about to graduate six months early to study music for a semester at a local state university – maybe it’s not surprising, then, that I was so impressed by a music teacher – maybe it was the subject matter itself.  Alas, for my own sake, I wish that was true: in my undergraduate studies I found it was possible, quite possible, in fact, to have some astoundingly bad music teachers – even at a ‘prestigious’ conservatory.

No, Mr. Simeone would have been a great teacher regardless of the subject.  He also would have had an equally great effect on his students regardless of whether he taught at a local high school or at a major conservatory – and since “National Teacher Appreciation Day” is primarily about the same public school teachers who are being made such political scapegoats of these days (cue Jon Stewart), this a point worth using the bold font for.

What makes a good teacher?  I think you’ve first got to have some innate talent for the simple ‘public speaking’ aspect of it, there’s no way around that (I’ve given just enough workshops to suspect that this might be a talent that, unlike my university professor brother, I might lack).  The more crucial quality, though, is intellectual generosity.  Although one taught at an internationally ranked business school and one taught in a suburban New York high school, both Prof. Chopra and Mr. Simeone both ‘got it’ – they both approached the job of teaching without bringing any ego-related baggage of their own to the table, and maybe that in itself was a lesson.

So, thanks Professor Chopra.

Thanks, Mr. Simeone.

And to our readers, I hope you’ve been lucky enough to have a teacher as good as either of these guys – happy National Teacher Appreciation Day.

Our collective clock is ticking. Before year’s end, we’ll be a record 7 billion people co-habitating planet earth. One way or another this presents all of us with unprecedented challenges and opportunities.

With that in mind, the United Nations Population Fund recently started looking to Social Media, to see what this new digital platform can do to help raise both general awareness and individual actions in response to our looming population crisis.

So what exactly can digital media add to this tremendous cause?

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#1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:
Sensors inside mobile devices create large amounts of data that can be useful to cause leaders.

A More Detailed Exploration:
While most people want to ignore this fact, the mobile devices in our pockets can be used to track our movements and gather other environmental data when properly outfitted. If you’re living in a blissful state of ignorance about mobile data, you will not want to explore this post by Ben Kunz that introduced me to a website detailing a mobile data experiment. If it doesn’t give you Big Brother nightmares, going to the original website will.

In reading the post and playing around the website, my mind went back to the ideas Ayesha Khanna shared at our Crisis and Media event about the Hybrid Reality and the rising role of sensors in our world. It certainly supports the ideas Robert Kirkpatrick shared at the UN Population Fund summit about data exhaust.

Let’s assume this mobile data is anonymized and made available on an open data platform. What insights and services could be built on top of them? Imagine how this data could help. A few I have seen mentioned elsewhere are:

• drive detection of radiation, toxic chemicals, viruses, and other dangerous things
• chart traffic patterns and migrations over time
• provide insight into human behavior in relationship to other data overlays

These don’t even scratch the surface of what’s possible. What are some ideas you can think of?

Another month, another European trade show.  This time it’s musikmesse, the world’s largest musical instrument and accessory trade event.  Held in Frankfurt every April, musikmesse covers everything from musical instruments to DJ equipment to audio software (which is why I was there).
Think of the largest music store on the planet, spread across 6 or 7 huge convention halls – in other words, heaven, hell, or a bit of both, depending on your point of view.

Last month I wrote about my trip to CeBIT – musikmesse is, as you might imagine, quite a different kind of trade show experience.  One thing both shows have in common, though, is their own iPhone app.  Driven by an app store model that’s made applications safe, easy to install/uninstall, and often free, the use of such disposable event-specific apps is on the rise.  In fact, a dedicated mobile app – complete with exhibitor lists, floor plans, GPS, and some degree of social networking functionality (usually twitter) – has become ‘de rigeuer’ for any self-respecting trade show these days.

So I decided to try musikmesse’s iPhone app out.

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