Plants. That’s going to be the secret weapon for Amazon if they get their way in Seattle as their plans (pdf) include three massive biodomes in the front yard of their proposed skyscraper offices in the downtown area at 7th Avenue and Westlake. In essence, it would be their own miniature version of an Amazon rain forest, only the rain would be left on the outside of the domes.

According to the proposal which is being reviewed by the Design Review Board, “In addition to a variety of workplace environments, the facility will incorporate dining, meeting and lounge spaces, as well as a variety of botanical zones modeled on montane ecologies found around the globe. The building will be anchored at either end by publicly accessible retail spaces entered from 6th and 7th Avenues.”

If approved, the move won’t be difficult. They’re only transferring from a few blocks away. Behind the biodomes will be their primary campus, three 37-story towers with 3.3 million square feet of office space.

Here are some images from their proposal:

A social media study conducted by Pew (pdf) reveals some interesting facts about social media use by teenagers. One of the most interesting takeaways is that Tumblr just isn’t as popular as many people believe in the youngest demographic.

Twitter is. It’s growing substantially with 24% of teens microblogging their 140-characters regularly in 2012 compared to 16% in 2011. Instagram is also growing in popularity with 11% of teens using Facebook‘s mobile image darling. Compare this to Tumblr, a much older service and one that is wrongly associated by many to be a teen haven, is sitting at only 5% adoption. This perception is not too far off – most Tumblr users are in their 20s.

Facebook is still the dominant force with 94% of teens on the king of social networking. Buzzworthy social site Pinterest is low on the teen radar, wrapping up the bottom of the list with 1% usage.

Here is how it breaks down:

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“Teen Social” image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Fans of the extremely popular Call of Duty video game series have experienced many emotional premises that dominate the game play and drive the story lines. Pride. Revenge. Hope. With the upcoming release from Infinity Ward, there is an overwhelming sense of a different kind of emotion, one that CoD fans haven’t seen in previous titles.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is already being depicted as bringing despair to gamers, at least those who are used to America being a superpower. In this game, America will be broken. The government will have failed. The economy will have collapsed. Cities will be overrun and dilapidated. The military will be splintered.

That’s just the beginning of the story.

Here’s everything you need to know, starting from the reveal trailer and working down into interviews and behind the scenes videos. Once you’ve watched them, let us know how you feel about the game. Is it a good idea to depict an American landscape that has been devastated, a country that has been weakened?

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yahoo is finally tossing its hat into the social media ring. Recently, Yahoo announced that it would be incorporating tweets into its newsfeed on Yahoo.com. This signals a serious shift, since Yahoo is giving equal weight to tweets and ‘bona fide news.’

Anyone who’s paying attention will have noticed that Twitter is one of the largest growing companies in the world. With over half a billion users and over $250 million in advertising revenue just last year, Twitter is also one of the most valuable brand strategy tools available to a company. However, Yahoo is now using Twitter as a news outlet, providing users instant access to any tweets deemed newsworthy.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer shared this news in a company blog post, stating that Yahoo sees tweets “as [an] important information source for many of our users.” But just what makes a tweet ‘newsworthy’? According to Mayer, the tweets that would be displayed would come directly from celebrities, politicians and major news outlets.

What makes this partnership especially intriguing is that it came shortly after a falling-out between Twitter and Google – Mayer’s former employer. The move comes hot on the heels of Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Tumblr. Now that Yahoo has Twitter under its wing, too (or perhaps that little blue bird has Yahoo under its wing), the company is showing that it intends to offer serious competition to Google and Facebook.

And Yahoo is showing no signs of slowing down. Mayer said the “integration will roll out to all U.S. desktop and mobile web users over the next few days.” Mayer has showed nothing but ambition since becoming Yahoo’s new CEO, having already snatched up 10 startups in just a year – that’s 9 more acquisitions than the company had last year. Expect to see more acquisitions by Yahoo in the near future, as Mayer is trying to mold Yahoo into part of our everyday lives.

We’ll see if Yahoo is able to amp up their presence enough to compete seriously with Big Brothers Google and Facebook. But by making Yahoo more mobile- and social media-friendly, Mayer has put the company well on its way to greater digital domination.

Nikola Tesla was ahead of his time. In many ways, he is still ahead of our time. Some of his inventions and discoveries are still baffling scientists today (notwithstanding the conspiracy theory that his technology has always been understood but was suppressed, but that’s a different story).

If he were around today trying to raise funds for his wireless energy concept, there’s a good chance that he would be met with insurmountable obstacles. The money is controlled by people who are not adequate in their understanding of how such amazing inventions can operate in this world and are driven by the desire to go to market and sell out in as little time and at as high of a profit as possible. That’s the concept of the video below, at least, and it’s delivered in a funny that strikes a little too close to reality to be dismissed as pure fiction.

The video was produced to help promote the Kickstarter project to build a Tesla statue that emits free WiFi in Silicon Valley. The only drawback to the concept is that Silicon Valley isn’t exactly a place that has challenges with WiFi signals, but with nearly $25,000 pledged to date, we might be the only ones thinking along those lines.

Kudos to Northern Imagination for coming up with this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are food shortages around the world. People die from hunger in all countries and regions. Keeping the seven billion residence of the world fed has been a problem since the dawn of humanity.

What will happen when there are 12 billion mouths to feed? According to Anjan Contractor, the human population will not be sustainable once we reach “peak” population, which is one reason why NASA is granting him the money to explore using 3D printers as a way to produce food and minimize waste?

It doesn’t sound appetizing, but it may be necessary according to Contractor, who received a 6-month, $125,000 grant to create a prototype for his universal food synthesizer. It won’t be as nifty as the replicator that Captain Picard used to get his Earl Grey tea in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but with people starving, does it really matter?

A combination of powders and oils will the the basic building blocks for the 3D printed food. This will allow for long-term storage and nearly no waste through processing of food products that can have a shelf life of decades. It isn’t just to combat hunger and increased population. Food sources like these will be required if we ever attempt deep space exploration.

Here’s the video that Contractor gave NASA as a proof of concept for his project. It’s chocolate on a cracker – not exactly a meal – but it’s the start of something that may be in kitchens across the world a decade or two from now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There was a time when high school science projects involved baking soda volcanoes dropping egg-filled containers from helicopters. That may actually still be the case, but not for a batch of 1,600 high school students at this year’s 2013 Intel International Science.

18-year-old Eesha Khare developed a super-capacitor with a special nano-structure that allows more energy within a lower volume. It is able to deliver the energy more efficiently and stores it for up to 10,000 cycles (compared to most batteries that last around 1000 cycles). It can charge cellphone batteries in 30 seconds and the technology could be applied to other storage units such as car batteries.

Her prize: $50,000 that she’ll be applying to her education this fall at Harvard. Leave it to a teen girl to figure out how to charge cell phones more efficiently.

Here she is describing her project:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Facebook and other social networks are employing keyword-sniffing programs that monitor our private communications such as chats and direct messages. When a potential criminal activity is found, the communication is presented to human auditors who determine whether or not to inform law enforcement. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

This was one of the most thought provoking questions I’ve ever explored before writing an editorial. The conspiracy-theory-loving, “leave my internet alone” part of me was absolutely outraged (albeit not a bit surprised) once I heard about this practice. The fatherly part of me felt pretty good about it. Then, the journalist part of me started asking the real question: is it conceivable to have a program that knows enough about the communication patterns of sexual predators, stalkers, or terrorists to make it effective without exposing private conversations to humans that turned out to be false-positives?

Is my conversation going to be monitored if I say, “I’m going to blow up your house,” in a private chat? Can I be flagged for talking to the wrong people through social media? If so, is a permanent record of my conversations being stored somewhere and potentially accessed by hidden watchdogs?

The investigation got nowhere. Nobody’s saying much. There’s a well-publicized case of an alleged sexual predator who was captured in March for trying to meet up with a 13-year-old girl to have sex, but other than bits and pieces here and there, the reality behind the software that Facebook and other companies use is still a mystery. It’s not one of those things that you’d want to keep hidden for the sake of effectiveness. You wouldn’t want the software to be effective, not because you don’t want it to work, but because you don’t want it to have to work.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to publicize it? Wouldn’t we want criminals to know that they can’t start looking for young teens on Facebook to exploit? Some would argue that you would want to keep it relatively hidden so that criminals would have a false sense of security, but estimates show that a mere 10% of the actual criminal activities happening on these sites are being discovered. It’s not a good percentage. One might even be willing to roll the dice considering the massive popularity of social media.

Instead, publicizing it would probably make more sense. If you were able to discourage  half of the activity, they’ll have to seek out different venues. Criminals will find a way to be criminals – there’s no doubt about that – but the more doors that we close on them, the more likely it will be that they’ll be unable to fulfill their goals, unwilling to risk their lives and reputations. The goal isn’t to catch them in this case. It’s to stop them.

Then, there’s the issue of privacy. After much deliberation, I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re going to be on social media, you have to assume that everything is public. Even if your privacy settings are strong, there are too many hackers, too many security programs, and too much potential for a mistake being made to ever assume that anything is private online. In short, if it’s private, say it in person. The phones aren’t even a safe venue.

The original question was whether or not our social media privacy was being breached by having software listening to our conversations. The real question is this: is social media privacy a realistic expectation anymore?

The answer: no. Perhaps it never was.

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“Robots at Computer” image courtesy of Shutterstock.

You better start swimmin’

or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin’!

Yep, times are still changing, as more public company boards are lending their ears to digital directors who can develop their online marketing, social media and mobile device strategies.  “Content marketing” is the new buzzword on everyone’s lips, and C-suite execs are finding themselves “increasingly ill-equipped in the boardroom” and, in many cases, digitally illiterate. This may be enough to scare many into hurriedly making a Facebook or Twitter page – but it’s not the whole story.

We operate in the “always-on” world where it’s becoming a requirement to be everywhere at all times. It doesn’t take newbies very long to figure out that it’s nearly impossible for a neophyte to keep tabs on what is trending across all social media platforms. High-level executives for industry giants such as Walt Disney, Monster Worldwide Inc., and ValueClick Inc. are finding that the digital domain is governed by a younger crowd. The 41-year-old digital strategist Mark Vadon, Chairman of zulily and Blue Nile, is younger than the rest of the members of Home Depot’s board, but has been lauded as a valuable asset since he joined the company last fall. The board’s independent lead director called him an “incredible addition.”

Startups tend to lack an established hierarchy; ideas can bubble up from anyone irrespective of their title or age. It’s part of their creative heritage – a stark contrast to the suit-and-tie standard of the corporate world. The fact that corporate boards demand the digital expertise of (often younger) strategists suggests that they too understand the need to become more hip and technologically trendy.

This shift in corporate thinking proves that you can’t afford to not pay attention to social media. It’s imperative to develop and maintain a profile and more importantly, create a presence in order to showcase your services, products, explain your purpose and engage with your fans and clients.

Think of it your social media presence as a living entity – in order to fully develop this ‘person’ it’s important to nurse and nurture it. It’s not enough just to be on social media (Facebook and Twitter presences are fast becoming the digital equivalent to having a pulse). Without constant attention and adaptation, no personal growth will take place. If you want to get the greatest return on your social media investment, treat your digital brand as if it were your baby.

Corporations have to learn to swim the waters of social media, or risk drowning in the digital sea. According to the Wall Street Journal, “thirty-seven of the 100 biggest U.S. companies lack directors with digital expertise, and only 16 have at least three such members comprising 20% of the board.” This opens up the field for online marketing companies looking to direct big name corporate boards. The relationship between corporate boards and digital directors is symbiotic – each needs the other. With the right care, these brands can thrive better online than offline. Because the times, they have changed.

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“Brand” image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is cited as 82% of today’s cloud investments, and is the deployment model for 84% of new applications, so what is SaaS? SaaS is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider, and made available to customers over a network. SaaS provides the most visible value to end users of the cloud models.

SalesForce was created in 1999, and was the first SaaS platform built from scratch to achieve rapid growth. The products and services of SalesForce included customer relationship management, the sales cloud, and the service cloud, among others. Today, the list of SaaS applications is very large, including analytics, business intelligence, accounting, customer service, and Ecommerce. One of the key drivers of SaaS growth are API’s. Out of 1000 API’s surveyed; SaaS API’s were number one.

Analysts are seeing SaaS as the primary type of cloud investment, and SaaS valuations are off the charts, far exceeding Software, NASDAQ, and IT Supply Chain Services. Media and entertainment, mobile location and GPS location data, E-Commerce, and the benefits of big data and analytics are all different forms and benefits of cloud computing that are being engrained in our daily lives. To learn more about SaaS and the future of applications in the cloud, check out the infographic below presented by ProfitBricks.

As Tumblr users cope with news of a new overlord, many are voicing both concern and annoyance at the $1.1 billion deal. The most vocal are getting their message heard and it’s spreading across Tumblr as well as other social networks, but it’s not enough to make Yahoo or Tumblr concerned.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg noticed something Sunday after the rumors of a done deal started surfacing:

“Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.”

While some are saying this is just the beginning of the end, the reality is that it’s such a minor blip on their radar that they probably didn’t even notice. If they did notice, they were probably pleased that the spike wasn’t bigger. With around 75 million posts per day, they aren’t in any danger of becoming irrelevant as a result of defections.

More importantly, the news has rejuvenated both companies. Despite the growth that Tumblr has seen in the past three years, it has not stayed at the top-of-mind buzz level of other social sites like Pinterest and Instagram. This obviously brings them back to where they were when they were the next big thing. .For Yahoo, it’s a sign that they have the clout to make stuff happen (there’s a reason why it was a cash deal) and the foresight to go after the youthful crowd, something that Tumblr dominates.

As the smoke clears, the most important thing both companies should do is to keep the status quo for as long as possible, perhaps indefinitely. They have promised that they won’t make major changes. If anything, they should make changes to other services to make them fall more in line with Tumblr, including mail and Flickr. If they can keep this momentum going, both companies have the opportunity to make out like bandits through this, the biggest deal with a social site so far this year.

Small businesses need websites. But not just any old website will work.

Try to avoid these 10 Web design mistakes so your site will help your business succeed instead of slowing it down.

1. Poor navigation tools

Your site’s visitors need to know how to find information. Without good navigation tools, that’s nearly impossible.

Make sure that you divide your content into sections that visitors can identify easily. Ideally, you want a site that branches from big ideas to small ideas. Your homepage identifies your business and who you are. Then links within the page take the visitor to departments within the company. Then links within departments take visitors to specific products.

This kind of layered approach works very well for most people.

Letting users search for specific content also helps.

2. Leaving old content on the site

Old content will hurt your site’s success in many ways.

When people see content posted months or years ago, they often assume that you’ve gone out of business.

Stale content can also negatively affect your Google ranking. That makes it harder for people to find your site when they don’t already know your address.

Update content frequently so people know you’re in business and have access to relevant information.

3. Crowded images and content

When you crowd images and content onto a page, you will confuse visitors.

If your site has a bunch of pictures scattered throughout the page, along with a bunch of links and blog posts, then visitors have no idea what they’re looking at.

This mistake offends on so many levels:

• It impacts navigation
• Makes the site hard to read
• Distracts from your site’s goal

It also makes your business look amateurish. Would you rather buy from an online store with an attractive website or one that looks like a mess?

Remember, simpler is better.

4. Dead links that lead nowhere

Dead links take your site’s visitors to places on the Internet that don’t exist. Perhaps you accidentally wrote the link incorrectly, so it directs the user’s browser to a random URL without a purpose. Dead links can also occur when companies go out of business or change their websites.

Either way, this is a big flaw that will annoy visitors.

When a visitor reads a blog post that contains a link to other information, you’d better make sure that link actually goes to the right place. Otherwise, the visitor will stop reading. You’ve lost all credibility, so why should she give you more of her time.

Dead links are the worst when they’re supposed to lead to pages on your own site. If you can’t even keep up with your own content, visitors will see that as sign that you’re unorganized. No one wants to do business with an unorganized person.

Want to solve this problem? Check your links more often to remove dead ones.

5. Trying to do everything on their own

You might own the best car dealership in the state, but that doesn’t mean you know how to make a good video for your website.

A lot of small businesses mistakenly think that they can do everything on their own. Unless you have a staff dedicated to marketing and making Web content, though, you’ll probably have to hire help from professionals.

It’s not just videos (although amateur videos tend to look especially bad). You should also consider whether you have the right skills to create and choose images for your site. If you’re not a photographer, then you probably shouldn’t spend your time uploading your own pictures to your business’s website.

The same often goes for written content. Just because you can sweet-talk customers doesn’t mean that you know how to write effective content for the Web. Do you know how to use SEO? Do you know how to build links that will improve your Google ranking? Do you know how to motivate visitors into becoming buyers? If not, consider hiring a professional who has a lot of experience in these areas.

6. Including music without a mute button

People listen to music while using their computers, often while using headphones. They don’t need (or want) your site to blast their eardrums with your favorite song.

If you don’t have a video, you shouldn’t have audio. If you must have audio, give your visitors a way to mute it. Otherwise, they’ll leave your site as quickly as possible.

7. Content that loads slowly

The faster computers get, the less patience people have. The average person will give your page about seven seconds to load. After that, they’re gone to one of your competitors.

You can solve this by using simple images and texts that load quickly. Don’t fall for gimmicky fads that take forever to load.

Also, invest in a server that guarantees faster load times.

8. Untrustworthy shopping carts

If you sell items online, you need a shopping cart that works perfectly.

Buyers won’t tolerate sketchy shopping carts that don’t meet their expectations. With all the talk of online computer fraud, someone would have to be crazy to buy something from a site that doesn’t seem 100 percent legitimate.

9. Not using web analytics tools

Without Web analytics, you don’t know how people are using your site. Find useful tools that show you how long visitors stay on certain pages and where they move their mouse cursors. That way, you can tweak your site to match their expectations.

10. Making it difficult to get answers or contact the business

Your website should have a few pages that try to answer frequently asked questions. That will save your business time and give visitors a better experience.

Some companies, however, don’t answer questions that they’d rather avoid. A credit card company, for instance, might conveniently fail to tell members how they can cancel their accounts. This is a frustrating experience that will earn you a bad reputation.

You should also make your contact information easy to find. Your site can’t answer every question. Give your buyers a simple way to call, email, or write when they want.

What other mistakes do you commonly find on small business websites? Have you been guilty of them?

Coffee isn’t exactly a technology topic that we would normally cover, but when it’s the subject of an infographic that was creatively placed on a Starbucks sleeve, it qualifies as something interesting enough to post.

Visual.ly desiger Raj Kamal put this little graphic together. This isn’t an official Starbucks infographic, but it should be. As the designer said, “I am an infographist who has nothing better to do, but to annoy everyone around me.”

We’re definitely not annoyed. In fact, we’re pretty impressed. Here’s the original graphic as it was put together followed by an enlarged and vertical version to make it easier to read. Be sure to have a cup handy before checking it out.

No.

Go ahead and mark this one down as one of those nifty features that Google puts out there without telling many people that sits around until they decide that it failed and they shutter it. In this case, it won’t necessarily ever be shuttered, but it will likely sit there as an obscure menu item like The Flying Dutchman at In ‘n Out.

The concept is this. Send money by “attaching” it through Gmail. It connects directly with Google Wallet and allows the receiver to do so without even having a Gmail account. It’s simple, elegant, and very easy to implement. It’s arguably easier to get going than Western Union or PayPal, but this is Google. They’re the masters of creating things that would be cool if they were willing to promote them to the world. Unfortunately, they normally do not. There’s simply too many initiatives out there right now in social and mobile. They don’t have the bandwidth despite thousands of employees and billions of dollars.

Will anyone use it? Watch the video below and decide if it’s right for you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s a digital age. The worlds of advertising, branding, and art are all flooded with creative people trying to make their mark in the realm of graphic design. How can one tell whether they have what it takes to join this world?

In the flowchart below by Sikich, the answer to that question becomes a little more clear. It’s the type of profession that requires many small decisions to be made before one can make an accurate big decision. Can you visually translate a concept or idea? Do you manage your time well? Do you even like people? These are just some of the questions that you should answer before making the choice.

Take a gander and tell us what conclusion you came to in the comments.