Content Generator

Bundled services to alter call charging mechanism in UAE - Zawya

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The charging mechanism for local calls on fixed lines will change as UAE-based telecom operators offer more bundled or converged services based on voice, TV and the internet, says the head of the industry's regulator.

, told Emirates Business. "This will also change the charging mechanism in terms of the bundling of services based on TV, voice and the internet. Prices for consumers will follow a downward trend once there is competition and more packages." Al Ghanim expects to see mobile broadband prices fall as competition heats up among operators and they compete over quality of service. "When competition is created, there is an opportunity for consumers and the pipe for connectivity is already there. This will push content that is fairly consumer-centric. Again it depends on the type of content and speed of delivery to the customer," he said.

At present, the UAE networks are based on the 3G and HSPA+ standards, which are available to broadband users. LTE is intended to be the next generation of technology.

Full Story: Bundled services to alter call charging mechanism in UAE - Zawya

Google: Here to help - Newspapers and Technology

1 comment A Google News exec said the search engine wants to helpnewspapers get more value from their content and is ready to offertools such as Google Checkout and other technologies to helppublishers monetize their online content.

"We are talking to publishers as they assess paywalls, but thereare other ways that we can support the industry for paid content,"he said. "The technology is very complicated, but we have toolslike the Google Checkout service that we might be able to modify tohelp publishers. We are happy to serve as a go-between forpublishers and consumers." Gaither also said that Google has no intentions of becoming acontent generator, and that it remains committed to ensuring thatjournalism and newspapers remain vital.

"We are not a content company; we are a technology company and anad platform company to help other publishers make money. As aconnector, we would much rather help people find content than tocreate it ourselves. (Creating content is) not something that webelieve fits into our core competency.

"What we are doing is focusing on journalism as one of the primesources that Google users want to find. And we have a vestedinterest" in supporting good Web journalism, he said.

Full Story: Google: Here to help - Newspapers and Technology

Follow the Tale: The Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival - Southeast Missourian (blog)

, Film Festivals, Quinceaños , one-man-shows and all manner of cultural events. If it was "different", I drove to it, paid for it, watched it, attended it or experienced it. Heck, let's be honest, your average Midwesterner might have considered many of these events--wacky--or maybe even a little bit strange. But, I was always on a quest to find something wonderful--something I could carry around in my head with me--something that would make those 50 hour work weeks in the cubicle a little more bearable.

Flash forward to April 2008, a time when I had the opportunity to attend Cape Girardeau's very own unique cultural event of the year--the Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival: Where the River Turns a Thousand Tales . After attending, I realized that I had hit the mother lode. I had found the Holy Grail of events--the most memorable and fantastic--and, not in Denver or Tucson or Rio--but right here in my own home town.

So, some of you might be saying to yourself, maybe this is a great event for you, but is this the event for me? Just, what is a Storytelling Festival and why would I want to attend? A storytelling festival is a combination of a little bit of stand-up comedy, a little bit of tear-jerking drama, and a little bit of the best-story-you-ever-heard. Basically, if your Uncle Joe had a tent revival (minus the religion), and added some of the greatest stories he ever told you (minus the bottle of whiskey), and then asked some of his friends to tell tales (plus a microphone), you would find yourself attending a storytelling festival.

Storytellers are more than just tellers of stories. They are trained to tell tales based upon their own unique life encounters and experiences. Storytellers are entertainers passionate about "keeping the story alive" by re-telling it, and their creative tales often focus on the communities in which they live. Basically, before radio, television, the Internet, e-mail, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, and iPhone apps, we relied on storytellers. And, let's face it folks--without the storyteller--that multimedia "glue" that connects us to other people, to ourselves, and to the world would never have been created in the first place. To put it bluntly, the storyteller is the ultimate content generator. There just wouldn't be anything to watch, see, or talk about without them! Today, life comes at us at a fast and furious pace, and the demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We often find ourselves so busy making a living that we fail to take the time to fully and richly live life itself. Storytelling helps those of us who live in the fast-lane connect by creating an event that everyone will be talking about for weeks to come.

Full Story: Follow the Tale: The Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival - Southeast Missourian (blog)

News Reporters Use Social Media - OfficialWire (press release)

According the a US survey conducted by Cision and the George Washington University, majority of the news reporters and editors that were surveyed used social media for doing research on news stories.  According to the results of the survey 56% of the people surveyed said social media are important when it comes to reporting and producing new stories. But even if majority agreed that social media are important sources of news and information, 84% of journalists still said they were cautious when it came to information gathered from social media because they think social media are less reliable than traditional ones.

What do all these mean for your business? If you are a content generator with valuable information to share, using social media to disseminate this information can also get you into traditional media.  This has happened many times already.  Because news producers are constantly on the look-out for stories and information to share with readers and viewers, they use all available tools to search for interesting and valuable stories.  If you have an innovative product, news and other information that you would want to share with the world, it would do your business good if you choose social media as channels to communicate with people.

According to the survey all of those surveyed use Google for research.  Wikipedia is used by 61% of the people surveyed.  Majority of the survey respondents also made use of corporate websites for doing research and 87% of the journalists said they used blogs for conducting research.

Take note, doing your SEO and ensuring that people will stumble in your blog or website can help you reach more people with your messages.  Having a corporate website can also help you become a source of information for traditional news agencies.  Being online really matters in this day and age when everyone is really relying on information shared online.  Journalists and editors still do best practices when using the internet for their research work and still rely on primary sources and do fact-checking.  But being online will still work to your advantage if you have information that is worth sharing to people and if you are an expert in your field.

Full Story: News Reporters Use Social Media - OfficialWire (press release)

WarioWare DIY Has Made Me A User Generated Content Convert [Nintendo DS] - Zergwatch

Game programming may come to the masses in the most micro of forms with Nintendo’s upcoming do-it-yourself mini-game collection WarioWare D.I.Y., one of a handful of new titles we got to go hands-on with this week. I’ve been a longtime fan of the WarioWare series of seconds-long games since the original WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! for the Game Boy Advance. But I’ve never been a fan of creating my own content in titles like LittleBigPlanet or Forza Motorsport, in part due to my limited attention span. But the addition of a game editor to the next WarioWare game for the Nintendo DS —and the accompanying WarioWare D.I.Y. Showcase player for WiiWare—has changed that, turning me into an excited fan eager to start creating by offering a simple micro-game editor on top of the built-in 90 new WarioWare games. While I didn’t get to edit any games myself, I did get a chance to play some of the user generated micro-games already created for a demo version of WarioWare D.I.Y. and had the opportunity to see a game—one as simple and built from scratch. The creation process is split into digestible chunks. The first is creating the art for a game, painting backgrounds then dropping sprites (aka “stamps”) on top of them to lay out the game’s interface. In the creation process demonstrated to us, in which a Nintendo game evaluator constructed a game that involved launching a rocket, the background was built with a grass texture in the bottom half of the screen, a star-filled night sky above the horizon. A pair of moai heads from the game’s clip art… sorry, stamps library, and a few trees were deposited on the ground. Then came the rocket, custom drawn with the game’s Mario Paint-like sketching program. It’s about as fully featured of a drawing tool as you’d expect from a Nintendo DS game, with a not-too-deep color palette, erasers, copy and paste tools, fill buckets and a mirroring clone tool that made creating a symmetrical rocket (and its accompanying flames) a breeze. WarioWare D.I.Y. also lets players add a few frames of animation to their sprites or lets them pick from a handful of appropriate classic sprites and patterns from games like Metroid, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. The drawing tool also offers a grid overlay, should players want to draw and animate more precise sprites. After sketching out and arranging that rocket and its animated flames on the playfield, the Nintendo rep steering our demo defined the simple rules for the game in the “Assembly” section of WarioWare D.I.Y.’s game editor—tap the rocket, the rocket takes off, the player wins. That’s par for the WarioWare course in terms of micro-game complexity, rules which take far more time to set up than to execute during play. But it wasn’t daunting, thanks to helpful descriptions and a clean, concise editor for adding objects and triggers to a game’s AI, firing off animations and sound effects. Speaking of sound, WarioWare D.I.Y. also comes with an equally capable sound editor. There is a selection of songs already built in to the game, which players can edit or tweak. Players can also create their own tunes from scratch using one of WarioWare D.I.Y.’s coolest features, which lets song writers hum into the Nintendo DS microphone, leaving the digitizing of notes up to the software. WarioWare D.I.Y. lets players share, remix and upload their creations to the WiiWare version known as WarioWare D.I.Y. Showcase, which also adds another 70 games designed by Nintendo to the DS version. Nintendo also plans to add new micro-games through the in-game NinSoft store after the two games launch. Micro-game sharing can be done from DS to DS or from Wii to Wii, provided everyone has the required software and Friend Codes in place. WarioWare D.I.Y. may be the last game in the series I purchase—at least until Nintendo ships new hardware and a WarioWare game designed around it—due to the near limitless amount of micro-games it will bring the player. That the games are so short and the editor appears to have been so smartly designed—and that WarioWare’s distinctive art style(s) is so non-threateningly amateur in appearance—has almost assuredly made me into a future content generator. Nintendo plans to release WarioWare D.I.Y. in North America on March 28 for the Nintendo DS. Won’t you join me in micro-generating then? Until then, here are some helpful screen shots to go with that description.

Full Story: WarioWare DIY Has Made Me A User Generated Content Convert [Nintendo DS] - Zergwatch