Mediaboss Marketing

By Paul Schott

The Board of Education has a new status update: It has approved revisions to the Westport school district's social-networking policy.

The changes do not alter the scope of the district's policy. Instead, they essentially revise some of the policy's structure and wording, with the intention of making the district's social media regulations clearer and more specific for Westport educators. The new version, for instance, updates the policy's list of regulated social media to include Instagram, a photo-editing and sharing app whose popularity has exploded since the board approved the original social networking policy in April 2011. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and MySpace were already covered in the first version.

"There was no intent to change the scope of the policy; it is to be more specific," acting Board of Education Chairman Jim Marpe told the Westport News on Tuesday, a day after the board approved the revisions. "It's an attempt, I believe, to make it easier for our employees to read and see what we're talking about."

The approved changes constitute the first update to the school district's social-networking policy since it was adopted last year. Superintendent of Schools Elliott Landon recommended updating the policy in an Aug. 13 letter to the board to "address the changing landscape with regard to social networking."

Landon expressed satisfaction Monday with the adopted version of the updated policy approved by the school board.

"This will probably become a policy that is recommended to districts throughout the state," Landon said. "Its message is clear. It protects the rights of the individuals who exercises their First Amendment rights and it also protects kids.

Education board members said they expect the district's policy to be periodically updated in the future.

"We're going to have to see where society and technology goes," said board member Mark Mathias. "It's better than it was. I think it improves and clarifies it."

No audience members commented on the policy at Monday's meeting.

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Schools' social-networking policy tweaked

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Sep 13, 2012) - ON24, Inc., the global leader in webcasting and virtual event solutions, today announced a new family of enterprise social networking widgets.Integrated within ON24 Platform 10, the new Salesforce.com Chatter, VMware Socialcast and Microsoft Yammer widgets significantly enhance the social networking capabilities of online events powered by ON24, including webcasts, virtual shows and virtual briefing centers.

"Social media is playing an increasingly important role in enhancing the effectiveness of enterprise webcasting," said Steve Vonder Haar, senior analyst with Wainhouse Research. "By providing tools that enable the integration of enterprise social media applications, such as Chatter, Socialcast and Yammer, ON24 is supplying solutions that make it easier for employees to be engaged with virtual events and corporate webcasts."

In addition, ON24 is releasing a Cover Flow widget designed especially for virtual training. It enables the addition of a playlist of on-demand videos to a webcast and features a carousel-style presentation that creates a visual content library. The widget allows the audience to browse thumbnail images of the videos and then play them immediately within the webcast environment, increasing engagement and helping to deliver a cohesive story by providing relevant background and/or refresher information.

"With these new widgets, we are enhancing the power of virtual communications solutions for enterprise business applications," said Tom Masotto, vice president of product management at ON24. "Our focus is on building widgets to support employee training and collaboration specifically."

The new widgets join an existing widget line-up of more than 30 application widgets that support ON24's "One Widget, Any Platform" architecture, designed and built to extend virtual event reach and engagement. ON24 offers widgets for applications ranging from breakout sessions and collaborative idea brainstorming to integration with social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. ON24 widgets are based on Flash technology, and ON24's open architecture means that third-party developers can create and add their own application widgets for the ON24 platform.

Specific features and functions of ON24's new widgets include:

"The depth and breadth of the ON24 solution continue to define the virtual communications market," commented Masotto. "No other company can deliver the scalability and performance of ON24, and no other provider has ON24's suite of products and the open Platform 10 widget architecture. This combination delivers a unique set of tools designed to empower our customers -- enabling them to create engaging virtual events and environments that deliver maximum value and ROI."

About ON24, Inc. ON24, the virtual communications platform for the global enterprise, provides interactive, impactful cloud-based solutions that drive outstanding results. ON24 offers a broad and innovative product portfolio, including webcasting, virtual events and virtual environments, accessible from any device and supported by robust reporting and analytics. Applications for the ON24 platform include demand generation, partner enablement, training, product launches, company town hall meetings and user conferences. More than 700 organizations, including IBM, CA Technologies, Merck, Unilever, JPMorgan Chase, Deloitte, Credit Suisse, Ernst & Young, Amazon and New York Life, rely on ON24. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices throughout the world. For more information, visit http://www.ON24.com.

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ON24 Announces Enterprise Social Networking Widget Family

12-09-2012 23:21 Highlights of this day in history: Israel and the Palestinians sign a major accord; President George W. Bush takes responsibility for the federal response to Hurricane Katrina; Attica prison uprising ends; Rapper Tupac Shakur dies. (Sept. 13)

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Today in History for September 13th - Video

The social networking of wild birds has been mapped in unprecedented detail, using cutting-edge technology.

(Phys.org)A team, led by researchers at the Universities of St Andrews and Washington, used novel radio-transmitters to study the social networks of New Caledonian crows, a species renowned for using sophisticated foraging tools.

Data downloaded from the miniature tracking devices, which were attached to the birds as back-packs, enabled the researchers to infer their birds' social relationships, revealing a surprising amount of contacts.

Unlike conventional wildlife radio-tags, these new devices can both transmit and receive radio-signals.

Crucially, at the analysis stage, this allows the researchers to infer from the data how close two birds were to each other, based on the basic premise that close tags should exchange stronger radio-signals than tags that are farther apart.

The study is a crucial step towards understanding how tool-related information may diffuse in wild crow populations. A report of the research is published this week in Current Biology.

New Caledonian crows are the most prolic avian tool users. In the wild, they use at least three distinct tool types to extract invertebrate prey from deadwood and vegetation, with some of their tools requiring complex manufacture, modication and/or deployment.

Some scientists have suggested that certain aspects of these crows' sophisticated tool-use behaviour may be the outcome of social transmission processes, where birds observe, and learn from, other individuals.

The study, which was funded by the UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), examined whether such 'tool cultures' could exist in wild crow societies.

Dr Christian Rutz, a world-leading expert in the use of miniature electronic devices for studying the behaviour of wild animals (known as biologging) led the project.

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Mapping the social networking of birds

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Sept.12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Stockr, the industry's most advanced social network for investors, today announced that it has closed a $1.5 million seed round. Participants included Personal Capital, The Doyle Investment Group, and Adam Townsend. The company also announced that its sitestockr.comwill go live at the Finovate Conference in New York on September 13th, where Stockr's co-founders Vinny Jindal and Tim Symington will present at 11am EDT.

In addition, Stockr has named seven members to its advisory board, including executives from the financial services, digital media, and investor relations industries (see below for full list).

Stockr is led by CEO Vinny Jindal, a former Wall Street analyst; Tim Symington, a technology entrepreneur; and Brendon Crawford, the company's CTO. Its platform connects investors to each other, to public companies, and to trustworthy sources of tradable information. Unlike other investor networks, Stockr is free to join and uses Facebook authentication to create the highest quality community possible, without the rumor-mongering prevalent on existing message boards. In addition, Stockr provides users with the best available content from across the web, pulling in content from over 400 trustworthy publishers of market-facing information.

"Since the advent of the stock message boards, no finance platform has kept pace with the recent and rapid evolution of social technologies.We built Stockr to help investors everywhere form real relationships with the people, publishers and companies that help them make better investment decisions," said Mr. Jindal. "The best investment ideas are based on credible information and refined through conversations with knowledgeable and trusted contacts. With Stockr, all investorsnot just Wall Street traderscan access the broadest swath of financial news and the insights of a high-quality social network in real-time."

Bill Harris, CEO of Personal Capital, added, "Stockr is a big idea whose time has come. As CEO of several financial services companies -- PayPal, Intuit, and now Personal Capital -- I'm familiar with the kind of product, team and vision that's needed to thrive in this arena. I'm confident that the team at Stockr will continue innovating to bring the company to its fullest, and truly disruptive, potential."

In addition to Mr. Harris, Stockr's Advisory Board consists of:

Starting Thursday, prospective users are welcome to sign up for a free account at http://www.stockr.com.

About Stockr

Stockr is the world's most advanced social network for the investment community. Led by Co-Founders Vinny Jindal, Tim Symington and Brendon Crawford, Stockr provides a specialized platform where investors, analysts, and public companies can communicate transparently and directly about financial news, stocks, market trends, investment ideas, and more. The platform enables users to create and develop social communities of trustworthy sources in order to compile the most comprehensive set of information available to make informed investment decisions. Stockr is a privately held company and is headquartered in Santa Monica, CA. For more information on Stockr please visit http://www.stockr.com.

Contact: Stephanie Dressler, Douglas Hesney Dukas Public Relations (646) 808-3701 // (646) 808-3664 stephanie@dukaspr.com // doug@dukaspr.com

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Stockr Closes $1.5 Million Seed Round to Bring Social Networking to the Investment Community