The Ultimate Convenience

Driving in India is quite often not a pleasant experience.

But would you mind it too much if you could catch up on your favourite book while being stuck in a jam? Or if you could, say, watch a movie? Or have an engaging conversation with a friend without having to worry about concentrating on the road? Let the car drive itself! Yes, it’s true! Have a look:

Credits: youtube.com, mashable.com

Pin it if you love it

Have you guys heard about Pinterest? What is Pinterest? The name definitely invites some interest. Oh look! It happened again.

At first glance, the home page of Pinterest looks like a tasteful collection of eye-catching images put up by users from all over the world. The images range from a picturesque location to a small piece of equipment, from pets or animals to works of art, from landmark events in history to latest trends in fashion, to name a few. Of course, a lot of these categories often tend to overlap one another, making it a more memorable experience.

Pinterest is a pin board style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme based collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Users have the option of browsing other pin boards for inspiration,’re-pin’ images to their own collections and/or ‘like’ photos. Pinterest’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the things they find interesting”. Obviously, once it gets put up, it’s not interesting anymore, its ‘Pinteresting’ now!

Founded by Ben Silbermann, the site is managed by Cold Brew Labs and funded by a small group of entrepreneurs and inventors. It draws our attention for the following reasons:

- It is one the fastest growing social services in the world.

- It drives more traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn, combined!

- It is extremely viral. Over 80% of pins are re-pins. This means your content goes on autopilot.

- You do not need to repost your articles over and over like on some social sites because your pins can be posted and re-shared over and over.

- It is driving more traffic back to websites than Twitter.

Here’s an info graphic, which will do the rest of the detailing. After all, the site is about images, and writing more about it will spoil the fun, honestly.

Credits: wikipedia.org, mashable.com, socialmediahelp4u.com

Its all about the Fans, now.

The recent headlines on a Sports news website –

“Kaka becomes first athlete to pass 10m fans on Twitter”

“The IOC’s ‘Olympic Athletes Hub’ – good idea or social media fail?”

“FIFA launches YouTube Channel”

“Arsenal advises young players on use of social media”

“Liverpool first Premier League club on Pinterest”

“Social Media & Sport – the importance of interacting with, not just talking at fans”

All this points to one, and only one thing: Social Media is big, and it cannot be ignored.

The fact is, social media does not require a big budget and you don’t need millions of fans to see a positive return from your social media efforts. If you could put a few more people in the stands at your games or sell more merchandise at your team store without it costing you anything, wouldn’t that be worth your time?

Every team has fans. Some are more loyal and engaging than others, but every team has a fan base that wants to see your program succeed. What social media does is give you the tools to engage with your fan base and turn them into advocates that will help you achieve your goals. The only thing you have to do is provide value. And, yes, value can be defined in a number of ways. It doesn’t mean you have to give away something that costs a lot of money. Value can simply be providing your fan base with something that they normally wouldn’t experience such as access to behind the scenes action, exclusive offers on tickets and merchandise and creative online contests that encourage participation.

Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms are having a tremendous impact on the sports world for fans, players, teams and sponsors alike.

Here’s an infographic to better depict the picture (too much reading gets boring, we know).

Floating Mines in Outer Space

The Earth’s resources are dwindling every day. The planet will soon dry up and sustenance of human life on earth may soon be questionable.

The conservation group WWF said on Wednesday that the Earth’s natural resources are being depleted so quickly that “two planets” would be required to sustain current lifestyles within a generation.

The world’s global environmental “footprint” or depletion rate now exceeds the planets capacity to regenerate by 30 percent.

But, wait a minute. We are only talking about the planet’s capacity here aren’t we? What if our natural resources were not limited to the ones obtained from the Earth? What if we found a rich supply of these natural resources elsewhere other than the Earth?

No, we are not talking about Mars. While possibilities of sustenance of life on the red planet continue to be examined vigorously, the focus this time is on NEA.

Near Earth Asteroids have orbits that lie partly between 0.983 and 1.3 astronomical units away from the sun. An astronomical unit is the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Planetary Resources: This is the name of a company that we may just hear a lot in time to come. The reason is that Planetary Resources is theasteroid mining company that was launched in Seattle, Washington, USA, on the 24^th of April, 2012 with backing from Google’s co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt, famed director James Cameron, Peter Diamandis (X Prize) and Microsoft billionaires.

A new brand of spacecraft, known as the Arkyd series will be used to launch new space telescopes that will in turn be used to identify Near Earth Asteroids that are particularly rich in water (for rocket-fuel) and precious metals such as Platinum.

Just to estimate the potential of this business venture, here’s an instance:

Below is an image of the asteroid Amun 3554. It’s a little more than a mile wide and is one of the smallest metal bearing asteroids yet discovered. But here’s the catch: It contains $8 trillion worth of platinum, another $8 trillion in iron and nickel, and a mere $6 trillion worth of cobalt. So that’s a total of $20 trillion. Numerically, that is 20,000,000,000,000 dollars!

Amun 3554

These estimates are based on observations by John S. Lewis, professor of planetary science, author of Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Planets, and Comets, and now a consultant to Planetary Resources.

And what’s more? Amun 3554 is just one of the few asteroids submitted for rigorous chemical analysis. Another mile-wide NEA, known as 1986 DA, is said to contain 100,000 tonnes of platinum and 10,000 tonnes of gold, making it worth another couple of trillion. Not bad, one would say.

We are aware of the existence of 9,000 NEAs. And a rough guess is that this is about 1% of the total. One thing surely seems to be certain now – we will never be out of money now!

The asteroid retrieval and mining process will be done by robotic aircraft. That much is obvious, given that the project is funded by all billionaires. However, after getting a whiff of the figures above, that does not sound like too much now.

Tweeting our way to a front page article

When a senior assistant editor from The Economic Times walked into the office of Bloggers’ Mind, he least expected it to be a small set-up of 15 employees. Considering the clients we handle & the amount of work we take care of, everyone is amazed to know that it is taken care by such a small team. And that is where the strength of this company lies, with such a close-knit team where everyone works together towards achieving their goals, and where efficiency and specialization of each team member is of utmost important.

The article in yeterday’s, 21^st February, 2012, The Economic Times talks about how firms like Nokia, Reckitt Benckiser and others outsource their social media activities to digital agencies like Bloggers Mind. The article, written by Shelly Singh, starts off by talking about Abhishek Guha Roy, the 25-year-old commerce graduate who tweets for a living, besides being a heavy metal addict. Bloggers’ Mind has been given the primary focus in the article, which is a great achievement for all. It goes on to prove that one does not need to have a huge workforce, but a smart and concise team to be the pioneers in an ever growing industry like Social Media.

It goes on and gives examples of kinds of tweets we make to engage our clients’ customers, answer their queries, et al. The article also mentions the account director for Nokia at Bloggers’ Mind, Aditya Vaidyanathan, who talks about the kind of work done at Bloggers’ Mind.

The ever changing world of marketing and advertising is being led by the revolution called social media. We all know that websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, among others are growing at a rapid pace and the way firms market their products have changed almost completely from what it was a few years back. Being with the times, Bloggers Mind has always focused what’s the ‘in’ thing and kept pace with the dynamic pace of the industry it deals with.

It is a proud moment for all of us here at Bloggers’ Mind and it is a well deserved and long due recognition we have received for our efforts. Being featured on the front page of India’s leading business daily is surely something everyone can look up to and take inspiration from. It surely motivates us to continue with our efforts and to reach for even higher goals. Here’s to more such big achievements in the future. And a big congrats to the whole team at Bloggers’ Mind.

Read the complete article here – http://bit.ly/zra8he

Google+ Hangouts introduces YouTube Live Video Viewing

While Google+ is getting the nods for its sleek features, there is one more reason to like it. The Hangouts group video chat platform on Google+, lets video-chatting groups of up to ten people watch live streaming videos together on YouTube.

Mashable.com reveals that tough the ability to watch recorded YouTube videos together has been possible in Hangouts from the start, lately, YouTube Live product manager Brandon Badger told GigaOM that Google‘s been quietly rolling out live video stream viewing while chatting in Hangouts.

While enabling a live video feed alongside a Hangout chat is not a cinch, Google plans to make it a simple task, by adding tools that will make it a lot easier to find those live video feeds on YouTube while using Hangouts.

YouTube plans to create tools that will tightly integrate the feature into its Google+ interface, as well as integrate Hangouts into YouTube Live.

While, there are plans to make the process easier. GigaOM claims it’s already possible to incorporate live feeds into hangouts using the following five-step manual method:

• Start a Hangouts session in Google+ and invite your contacts to join you.
• In a separate browser tab, head over toYouTube.com/Live and select a live stream of your choice
• Copy the YouTube video I.D. of the selected live stream. Not sure how to find it? Just click on the share link below the video. You’ll get to see a link like http://youtu.be/XXXXXXXX – the cryptic code after the slash is the video I.D.
• Switch back to hangouts, open the video tab and search for the I.D.
• Click play, and you’re all set.

Meanwhile Google+ is going all out to make Youtube video viewing an effortless technique in Hangouts.

Read about Us in this months’ Issue of the Careers 360 Magazine

Career 360, September 2010 issue talks about Social Media as a career option and we are in it. Our very own Songita B. Verma and Clinton Jeff talk about their daily routine and how Social Media, as a career option is beneficial.

Bloggers' Mind for Career 360

Starting the day with posting on Twitter and Facebook and ending it with Flickr and YouTube sounds really interesting and at the end of the month having a heavy pocket, what else one desire? And this is what we do at Bloggers’ Mind.

Social Media is growing at a high pace and big names want a stake in it. The  future sure does embrace Social Media with both its hands.

Our “Nokia N97 Search for N campaign” and our innovative “Ovi Music India: Tag your Music” also found a great view for itself in Career 360 magazine. We are much obliged to be placed at number four on the list of the Social Media agencies in India.

So it is celebration times yet again, come join us.