By PromptBoston

June 23rd, 2011

Internet security forces cringe while others “Lulz”

Internet security forces cringe while others “Lulz”

Every week it seems you hear more about security breaches and hackers. What started as a shock to anyone watching what happened to Sony (“How could they let this happen??!!”) is now par for the course (“Citi just got hacked? Time to change my password again”). It seems to have happened so quickly. Where we once lived in fear of our personal information being let loose in the wilds known as the internet has turned to the rigmarole of making sure your various online profiles are constantly updated with new passwords.

At least it was. This week, one of the bigger hacking communities LulzSec– to echo my point above, this group is suddenly the new Anonymous, the team that terrorized Sony – has officially declared war on the governments of the world. Fortunately (for some) this is only cyber war, where Lulzsec has stated its intentions to expose government corruption “in the name of Anti-Security.” To make matters even more terrifying for those tasked with keeping the digital peace, Anonymous has been recruited to wreak havoc on those in power.

Not surprisingly, this is a polarizing event across the online universe. Many feel the dynamic hacking duo and all of their constituents are moving society forward by trying to expose the greed and corruption we all know is present but cannot prove. Others see it as a new form of terrorism. No matter where people fall on the subject, there’s no question that Lulzsec and Anonymous are serious. This week they’ve taken down Brazilian government sites as well as previous attacks on the FBI. I really have a hard time condemning them for what they’re doing if the end game is exposure of corruption and wrong doings by those who feel they’re invincible.

But like all revolutions and wars, not everything is going according to plan. Arrests are being made and the hacking community is fighting an internal civil war, raising questions about the longevity of this movement. For now though the ones who hack “for the Lulz” have left a lasting imprint on the internet world and seem they won’t stop until they’re completely taken down, whether that’s by external or internal forces.

By Max McConnell

June 19th, 2011

Automatic Jetpack

Automatic Jetpack

Automattic, the company started by Matt Mullenweg—he who leads the WordPress open source project—has recently released ‘Jetpack’. Jetpack is a sort of meta-plugin that contains about a dozen WordPress plugins and has the ability for the Automattic team to add more plugins to the pack over time. This Googlepack-equivalent for WordPress is pretty handy and it is a good place to start if you are new to WordPress or WordPress plugins.

The main purpose of Jetpack is to allow blogs not hosted on WordPress.com to access the services of WordPress.com blogs. The jewels in the crown here are access to the WordPress.com stats service and, if you like getting under the bonnet of your WordPress blog without getting your hands too dirty, the shortcode plugin gives you a simple way to integrate multimedia from Youtube, Fickr and more. Other notable plugins in the pack include a plugin that simplifies putting twitter feeds on your blog and another for adding social media sharing of your posts. And just for fun those whacky Automatic coders also included their Latex plugin which uses WorPress.com servers to generate a PNG image from Latex, the much loved ‘word processor for Geeks’, that is traditionallly used for typesetting mathematical and scientific formulae. Now if I can just find some excuse to write about Spectral Theory on Prompt’s blog…

By Media Team

June 15th, 2011

Prompt's newsletter turns heads at the International Academy of the Visual Arts

Prompt's newsletter turns heads at the International Academy of the Visual Arts

It’s official — Prompt’s weekly online newsletter, Impromptu, is award-winning! Check out the press release here.

After recently celebrating our 300th issue and Impromptu’s sixth birthday, we were thrilled to be recognized by the International Academy of the Visual Arts with an Award of Distinction in the academy’s 17th annual Communicator Awards where Impromptu was awarded for “exceeding industry standards in quality and achievement in interactive online advertising or marketing for a newsletter”. We couldn’t be more proud!

The Prompt team works together each week to produce a compelling read that goes out to subscribers each Friday. We like to think of it as a nice way to usher in the weekend with our views on the latest tech news, general goings-on and even different country perspectives from members of the company’s teams based in the UK and the US (think Morris Men, royal weddings, NASCAR, and tea drinking…).

If you already subscribe, then we hope our tone speaks for itself on just how much each member of our team enjoys contributing to the newsletter each week.

If you haven’t jumped on the Impromptu train quite yet, then why not subscribe today? Swing on over to http://www.prompt-the-crowd.com/newsletter-sign-up/ to sign up now!

Interested in learning how newsletters can add value to your company? Get in touch with us at info@prompt-communications.com to learn how the Prompt team can work with you to increase sales and marketing effectiveness while supporting lead generation and working to build and sustain rapport with your key audiences.

By Media Team

June 15th, 2011

Prompt weekly newsletter, Impromptu, wins Award of Distinction at the 17th Annual Interactive Design Award competition

Prompt weekly newsletter, Impromptu, wins Award of Distinction at the 17th Annual Interactive Design Award competition

— Free weekly online newsletter recognized for exceeding industry standards in quality and achievement —

Boston, MA – June 15, 2011 – Prompt Communications, a PR and communications agency specializing in innovative markets including sustainability, technology and healthcare, has received a 2011 Communicator Award from the International Academy of the Visual Arts. The Award of Distinction recognizes Prompt’s weekly newsletter, Impromptu, for “exceeding industry standards in quality and achievement in interactive online advertising or marketing for a newsletter”.

Prompt’s mission is to enable marketers and entrepreneurs to increase their sales and marketing effectiveness. The team works with a range of clients from start-ups to household technology names to ensure they communicate effectively and authentically with core audiences online and offline through PR, media relations, copywriting, webinars, market and industry analysis, social media, video content and customer reference programs.

Impromptu is a free weekly technology and marketing newsletter that recaps some of the week’s technology and marketing news stories, as well as country perspectives from members of the company’s team based in the UK and the US. These perspectives include personal views on Morris Men, royal weddings, NASCAR, and tea drinking; stark transatlantic differences in the meanings of words such as ‘quite’, ‘homely’, ‘boot’, and ‘hire’; and phrases that simply don’t translate well, from ‘wheelhouse’ to ‘I should coco’.

Circulated every Friday, the Prompt team has consistently delivered the newsletter to its subscribers for over six years. The Prompt team that produces Impromptu also designs, writes and produces email newsletters for Prompt’s client base, adding to lead generation efforts and supporting vendors’ sales cycle.

Hazel Butters, CEO of Prompt Communications explained: “Newsletters are a great way to stay front and center of prospects’ minds and to directly and authentically communicate the expertise, sense of culture, understanding of a market, and products and services offered to that market. Sometimes we speak to vendors who tell us they couldn’t possibly create a regular newsletter, which I think is nonsense – in technology there is so much happening that there are plenty of opportunities to offer opinion, demonstrate what your customers are doing, showcase partnerships, and talk about innovation. Whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, as long as the content is compelling, you track what people read and click on, review and use that feedback, then newsletters are a great way to build and sustain rapport with prospects, customers, employees, suppliers and business partners.”

Hazel concluded: “We’re extremely pleased that Impromptu has been recognized by the International Academy of the Visual Arts. We recently celebrated a milestone of six years and our 300th issue of the newsletter, and we look forward to covering all the technology changes that the next six years will bring. The Prompt team really enjoys working individually and collectively on creating the content for each issue, and we’re proud to see this work recognized as a model of how regular communications can help companies build and sustain rapport with key audiences.”

To subscribe to Prompt’s Impromptu newsletter visit http://www.prompt-the-crowd.com/newsletter-sign-up/.

For more information about Prompt, visit http://www.prompt-the-crowd.com today or email info@prompt-communications.com to schedule a free PR and comms consultation with members of its Pan-European or US-based teams today.

Twitter: @PromptLondon and @PromptBoston
Blog: http://www.prompt-the-crowd.com/blog

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About The Communicator Awards

The Communicator Awards is the leading international awards program honoring creative excellence for Communications Professionals. Founded by communication professionals over a decade ago, The Communicator Awards received over 6,000 entries from companies and agencies of all sizes, making it one of the largest awards of its kind in the world.

About Prompt Communications

Prompt is a communications agency that enables marketers and entrepreneurs to increase their sales and marketing effectiveness. Specializing in innovative markets including sustainability, technology and healthcare, Prompt helps its clients communicate effectively and authentically with core audiences online and offline through PR, media relations, copywriting, webinars, market and industry analysis, social media, video content and customer reference programs.

Founded in January 2002, Prompt Communications has European offices in Chiswick, London and US offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and San Francisco, California. Prompt’s current and former clients include Adeptra, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Aperture, Barros Technologies, Corizon, Dell Compellent, Foviance, Genesys Telecommunications, GenSight, Grouptree, IBM, jovoto, KANA, Oracle Corporation, smartFOCUS and Webtide.

For more information, visit www.prompt-communications.com

By PromptBoston

June 13th, 2011

Is the internet really your bag?

Is the internet really your bag?

In last week’s Impromptu newsletter (sign up for it now, it’s award-winning, don’t you know…) I wrote about a great blog that I’d started following called Sociological Images. After wasting a good chunk of Friday night paging back through old posts, I also stumbled upon another great blog under the umbrella of The Society Pages project, also headed up by the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota – Cyborgology.

Cyborgology was created by Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey around the theory that “individuals and social groups have always been cyborgs because we have always existed in tandem with technology”. Not bad – I might just have to use that quote one of these days. Anyway, the subject matter of Cyborgology is as broad as humanity and technology themselves, with story hooks ranging from augmented reality to zombification. Page back and again you’ll unearth some absolute gems to tell all your friends about – cyborg or otherwise.

One item in particular today caught my eye despite the fact I had already read about it on the New York Times website. Why? Because the NYT ran a four-page feature about it that I had to navigate across ads and behind a paywall. Whereas Cyborgology raided Engadget, cut to the chase and went with little more than a pic cap. The result? Cyborgs win (and gadgets too, actually).

Anyway, see for yourself. This is how my ‘Site Of The Moment’ covered the ‘Internet in a Suitcase’ story….

“In a sort of 21st century version of Radio Free Europe, the US State Department has sponsored a project that develops suitcase-sized kits that set up cell-phone based mesh networks. These private networks are to be deployed in countries that have totalitarian governments (with anti-American sentiment).”

…and that’s it.

Of course if you do have more time on your hands (urgh, cyborg!) and don’t mind paying with dollars and eyeballs (arg!), then here’s the more in-depth NYT version. It’s also very interesting, actually. And well written. As long as your cyborg implants have sufficient browsing capacity to compute it…

By PromptBoston

June 8th, 2011

Satellites and Doppler Radar: Fuel for Weather Junkies

Satellites and Doppler Radar: Fuel for Weather Junkies

I admit it…I’m a weather junkie.  I can even pinpoint the beginning of my obsession to a night in the early 1960s, when my dad brought Don Kent home for dinner.  Don Kent, Boston’s first TV weatherman, sitting right there at the dinner table!  Obviously, it made quite an impression.  If I could do ‘it’ all over again, I would have taken the proper set of college courses, joined the American Meteorological Society, and gone to work for NOAA or the Weather Channel.

But I didn’t take that path, so now I’m limited to being an amateur weather watcher.  And it’s been quite a year for weather watching, tragically highlighted by the tornado that caused tremendous damage in western Massachusetts last week.  The ground-level pictures of the damage are shocking, with houses turned into rubble and buildings leveled, just like in Tornado Alley in the central US.

Two images in particular have caught my weather-watcher eye, and neither one is a ground-level view.  The first is a Doppler radar image of the tornado – a classic comma-like shape – captured as the twister first hits the ground.

The second is an amazing satellite image that clearly shows the entire 25 km+ path of destruction, an uninterrupted swath of brown cutting across forests and farmlands, looking like someone ran a Photoshop paintbrush across a satellite picture.

In the ‘60s, Doppler radar and weather satellites were in the very early stages of development, so weathermen like Don Kent created their forecasts and reported storm totals from data collected the old-fashioned way – over the phone.  And more often than not, their forecasts were correct.  It would be fun to compare the accuracy of forecasts from the 1960s to the forecasts of today, but that’s a story for another day.  In the meantime, we can look forward to more accurate forecasts brought to us by a network of global weather satellites, constantly improving radar and yes, even phones – the smart kind.  Truly, it’s best of times for weather junkies.

By Media Team

June 2nd, 2011

"Digital Life: Today and Tomorrow" – The Internet in 2015

"Digital Life: Today and Tomorrow" – The Internet in 2015

An infographic video?! Sign us up!

NeoLabels and Mitsue Venture (via Fast Company) give a glimpse into what they believe we have to look forward to in 2015 with the video titled “Digital Life: Today and Tomorrow”. Thanks @cliffkuang for highlighting!

Enjoy!

Digital Life: Today & Tomorrow from Neo Labels on Vimeo.