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Tech

SXSWi: Mashery is Back with its Circus Mashimus

by Miiko Mentz on March 15, 2010

Mashery Circus Mashimus at SXSW

If you’re at the South By Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival this year and you haven’t had a chance to swing by the Circus Mashimus lounge, I suggest you do. It was a smash hit at last year’s SXSWi and I’m happy to see Mashery CEO Oren Michels and team are back at this year’s SXSWi.

The Circus Mashimus lounge is not only a great place to grab free coffee in the morning while you check your email, and then beer and popcorn in the afternoon; but it’s the place to be to talk mashups and visit with the Mashery team and its customers and sponsors to learn how to get more from your data by opening it up to developers.

Mashery offers customers a flexible, secure and effective way to manage their application programming interface (API) programs. Offering developers open APIs is an ongoing process from performance and security to registration and provisioning, so having a way to manage it all is critical to the success of an API developer program. And nowadays it’s all about the apps and giving information to customers in new and creative ways, and in the manner and places that they want it, so having an efficient API management platform, such as Mashery, can greatly contribute to the success of an API developer program.

Mashery has an impressive list of customers from Best Buy, Netflix and Etsy to CafePress, among many others. Best Buy, with its Best Buy Remix, and CafePress are sponsors of this year’s Circus Mashimus lounge, so swing by and grab a coffee or beer (depending on time of day) and check out the cool mashups being created by developers and how it’s all managed easily through Mashery.

The Circus Mashimus lounge is open from 9:30AM-6:00PM through tomorrow and is located on the first floor in room three near the Screenburn Arcade in the Austin Convention Center where SXSW is being held.

And check out Bubblicious Reporter Alison McNeill interviews with Oren Michels and Best Buy’s Michele Azar from last year’s Circus Mashimus at SXSWi 2009.

SXSW: Interview with Best Buy’s Michele Azar

SXSW: Interview with Mashery CEO Oren Michels

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Twitter Upgrades Happening Fast

by Michelle Lentz on March 9, 2010

TechCrunch just reported that Twitter’s geolocation features are finally turned on, just in time for you to find everyone at SXSW. My own geolocation features on my Twitter account don’t seem to be active yet, forcing me to borrow a screenshot from TechCrunch (thanks guys!). As you can see, there’s a tiny blue marker that, when clicked, expands into the tweet-location.

Ok, I find geolocation on my Tweets a little creepy, but it’s the sort of thing I can see turning on for big events (like SXSW) and conferences. But for me, it certainly won’t be an everyday occurrence (or so I say now).

How do you turn on geolocation? For quite some time, there’s been a geolocation option in your profile settings. I imagine you just tick the On box. As TechCrunch said, “While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since late last year, there was no sign of integration into the main twitter.com site until now.”  It’s worth mentioning that Facebook just announced it will start rolling out its own location features next month as well (via Mashable).

Additionally, Twitter has made a subtle but fun change to its user interface. (Come to think of it, it’s also a change that means I need to update every screenshot in a lot of my course offerings.)  We’re no longer Updating, now we’re truly Tweeting!

Update: Well, apparently Twitter changed it back to Update. :( Come on, Twitter – we liked Tweet!

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THE NEW DORK – Entrepreneur State of Mind

by Alison McNeill on March 8, 2010

Mondays are rough. Here’s a little something to help you make it through the rest of the day. Enjoy!

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A Belated CES Wrap-UP

by Michelle Lentz on February 28, 2010

Back in early January, I went to CES and was completely overwhelmed. My constant joke was (and still is) that the so-called booths are big enough to have their own zip code. I took a ton of video footage, convinced I would return home and turn that into a montage that really showed everyone the absolute strangeness of CES.

I failed. I came home, switched out suitcases, and headed back out on the road again pretty soon after returning. However, I discovered a video today from my CES partner-in-crime. I spent most of the event with my friend Jason Griffey, who is Head of Library IT at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. He’s in the midst of planning a new library building, and the place is going uber-digital. (Someday I should get him to write a post here on digital libraries.) Jason managed to put his own CES montage together and that’s what I’m dropping here.

Enjoy the oddness, the hugeness, and the just plain silly at CES 2010:

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

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Sweet Tweets: TwitGift

by Michelle Lentz on February 25, 2010

Launched, I believe, only a few days ago, Twitgift.me, a product of the LAC Project, is a new way to send a real gift to your Twitter friends.

You simply choose a gift (which currently consists of chocolate chip, sugar, or peanut butter cookies), enter your own Twitter ID and credit card information, as well as the Twitter ID of the recipient. That’s it. The recipient gets a tweet notifying them of the Twitgift and they enter their own shipping information and can be waiting eagerly for the cookie arrival.

It’s a great concept. After all, sometimes you’ll discover wonderful people on Twitter, but you may rarely see them and never ask for their mailing address. Now you don’t have to; you can just send a Twitgift when that wonderful person has a birthday, needs a pick-me-up, or is celebrating something.

The cookies cost $19 and it looks like there is around $10 in shipping. Twitgift is looking for more vendors to add, so they won’t be an all-baked-goods type of place (not that I have any issues with cookies!).

UPDATE: The nice folks over at TwitGift sent me my own box of cookies after this post. I love chocolate chip cookies, so I couldn’t have been happier. The entire unboxing can be found in a post on my personal blog.

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

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