Digital Signatures Can Save Ya a TON of $$$: #ARX #ebooks

A well known journalist friend of mine recently tweeted that he had to go out and buy a fax machine because a new client expected invoices via fax. At first I thought he was joking, either that or was working with a small company in the third world or the U.S. government. But no, they expected fax. How is this possible in 2010 you ask? What a productivity waste for both sides.

The only time I ever use a fax machine is for contracts and yet even then, a digital signature is now valid. Digital signatures capture signatures without the expenses of paper while leveraging a degree of security, reliability and simplicity that is unmatched by other signing technologies.

Integrating digital signatures in your business workflow helps to secure, automate and expedite business processes, reducing operational costs and increasing the efficiency of internal operations.

Onto the dark ages. The other scenario is paper-based documents and signatures, which can cost an organization over $600,000 annually in printing, scanning, archiving, routing and lost document replacement costs.

By enabling a fully automated workflow, digital signatures can reduce expenses and time allocation that paper-based signatures require.

A few more interesting stats:

*The average signing employee costs your organization more than $3,000 a year in paper related expenditures. Investing in automating business processes will in turn affect your organization’s ROI.

*Research shows that 80% of all business processes rely on forms – and most of these need to be signed, initiation an expensive “cost cascade.”

*Digital signatures can cut over $600,000 from your business’s annual operation costs.

There's a new eBook out from Arx titled: “Think twice before you sign anything again: 12 Business Cases for Digital Signatures.” Take a look. It covers a number of great reasons why companies should convert to digital signatures and is a great guide. Check it out.

The Sages & the Scientists: Spirit Meets Manifestation

This weekend, the Deepak Chopra, the Sages & Scientists Symposium event kicks off in San Diego, which is focused on the intersection of perennial wisdom with cutting-edge science…......where consciousness makes the impossible possible… where Spirit meets manifestation.

For Those Where Video Games ARE their Reality: #video games #gamers

Michael Highland gives us a glimpse of his world growing up with video games and how for him, video games ARE his reality. I saw this as part of a mind consciousness seminar I attended about a week ago in Los Angeles.

Media Post's OMMA Behavioral: #answers @answersdotcom

Media Post's OMMA Behavioral series kicks off 2010 with a hands-on exploration of best practices.

Panel topics include:

Offline and Online Data: Match Made in Heaven

Which Data Finds the Right Audience

Thoughts on Agency Operations in a Exploded Media World

Building the Better Attribution Model

Make Behavioral Targeting Drive Sales and Revenue for Your Brands

Today in New York, client Answers.com Bruce Smith is on a panel titled: When Data Drives Publishing, together with Saul Hansell with AOL's seed.com, Patrick Keane from Associated Content, DemandMedia's and Josh Stinchcomb with Conde Nast Digital.

Other questions the event will address include: How are media buyers judging its effectiveness and using it in concert with online data? How are planners actually triaging the data to find the right audiences this year? Where are we seeing and how are we measuring real-world ROI?

“Attribution” has become the new holy grail of marketing mixes, but how are planners actually modeling effectiveness now? We talked a lot about privacy in recent months, but now real policies and plans for speaking with consumers about their won data finally are in the field.

Fotobabble Turns BILLIONS of Photos into TALKING Ones

There are tens of billions of static photos on the web, all without a voice or a sound. The Fotobabble guys think that's a crying shame.

Within seconds, you can voice-enable any photo -- on a PC, a Mac or your iPhone and instantaneously send out via Facebook, Twitter, email and more. MEET Fotobabble and be prepared to have some fun.

Client Fotobabble went live this morning which means you can try it out in a number of different situations. For example:

*How cool and fun would it be to have talking photo status updates within Twitter and Facebook?

*You can use Fotobabble to add life to photos you upload on Facebook – at home or while you’re on the road traveling.

*You can send talking greetings to Grandma from your kids at a birthday party she is missing, in real-time.

*Snap a picture and add your voice to tell your spouse about the perfect couch for the living room you just saw.

*Include your voice to a greeting card to give it personality and life.

*Send talking postcards or digital hellos from your iPhone taken on vacation.

*You could also become a citizen journalist and add commentary to a car accident you just witnessed.

*Add voice to an image taken in an emergency zone such as Haiti, to communicate the situation on the ground.

*You could add voice to images to provide instant scoop from a local news or sporting event.

*Imagine being on a safari and sending a photo to a friend - captioned with your voice - that truly captures the excitement you felt the moment you first saw a lion?

*Snap a picture while buying the perfect pair or shoes or handbag while in Paris and get out to friends around the world instantly.

Whether you want to add your voice to a photo stored on your computer, or on one just snapped with your iPhone, Fotobabble brings images to life that can be shared immediately with friends and family.

A quick data point: there are tens of billions of static photos on the web without a voice or sound. Three billion photos are uploaded to Facebook each month alone. Now, you can add some spice to them quickly and easily.

Free to use, it only takes seconds to create and share a “Fotobabble.” Simply upload a photo and record your voice directly through your computer’s microphone to create a talking photo. On your iPhone, after downloading the free Fotobabble app, select an existing photo or a snap a new one, hit record and you’re done. Whether using a computer or your iPhone, you can share talking photos via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or embed them into a blog or website.

And then, there's business uses and benefits. Businesses can create a talking photo to market or advertise a product, to more effectively engage with customers online, or to increase the number of visitors to their website, blog or Facebook page.

Since there is no software to download, Fotobabble supports PCs and Macs, as well as the iPhone, and makes it easy for people to create talking photos and to share them with a few close friends or with the whole world, in just a few button clicks.

Download the free iPhone App now and give it a whirl. They and I welcome your feedback and seeing your voice-enabled Fotobabbles all over the web. Let's collectively convert some of those billions of static photos into something fun, interesting, humorous, energizing, educational and of news value.

Pearltrees Delivers Real-Time Human Curation of the Web: Feature Updates

Pearltrees, the first human-organized network of interests on the web, unveiled a number of new features today, to manage your own web - instantaneously, in just two clicks.

Users organize their interests and passions on the web using intuitive drag and drop functionality, while discovering new information from people who share common interests.

Client Pearltrees now offers users an experience closer to how humans manage items in real life. For example, the “pearls” in Pearltrees represent the Web content a user finds interesting.

Below is a search that I did on consciousness. The window pop-up on the left shows my results and I can dive deeper into a user's pearls depending on the number of hits they received or more importantly, where my interest interjects with theirs. By clicking on a pearltree, a whole new world opens up for me to devour. I can add some of this user's content to my own, or create new content from what I learn by exploring his pearls and so on.

Much more than just bookmarks, pearls are Web objects that can be manipulated. I find this feature addictive. I can organize pearls by dragging and dropping in just a few clicks and suddenly I have created a "new story." Users also can organize and reorganize accounts instantly without the need to tag and re-tag to keep and retrieve new content.

When users pearl online content, it appears instantly on their pearltree and is visible to all other Pearltrees users. A key component to Pearltrees is that users organize their own web of interests in real time, similar to how we organize information outside of the digital world.

Unlike a traditional social network, users can connect through specific interests, not friends. When users share the same pearl, there is a connection that ensures users have a common interest. By adding another user’s Pearltree or branch to their own Pearltree, a user can follow the topic as curated specifically by that user. AND, continue to follow along or not, depending on the degree of interest.

A few new updates:

**Pearltrees has updated its Firefox and Internet Explorer toolbar plugins to more easily organize the Web directly from the toolbar. Now users can see a hierarchical text image of their pearltree and immediately add a new pearl in its correct place.

**On Pearltrees, everyone’s interests are constantly changing within their own online worlds. To monitor activity and continually discover new content, Pearltrees has established a reporting system that simplifies access to news. This access is now a single click, regardless of the location of new pearls.

**Pearltrees has updated the user interface of the site to make management more visual and ergonomic, creating a smoother and richer experience.

**Updated TwitterSync, allowing for further synchronization and intuitive capabilities with Twitter. TwitterSync automatically pearls URLs tweeted to a user’s pearltree. Now with TwitterSync, users can directly add a tweeted URL to a specific Pearltree branch by adding a hashtag that denotes the correct branch, i.e., #exactnameofthepearltree. The feature also now catches common mistakes such as spaces and spelling and will retrieve the correct pearltree.

Daniel Siegel on Consciousness: Part III

Rigidity versus fluidity versus integration of the mind and what constitutes a healthy mind. What moves us towards consciousness? What can we do? Daniel Siegel continues to talk about what he learned from writing his book Mindsight, which just came out.

Daniel Siegel on Consciousness: Part II

How do you define the mind? What is a healthy mind? A healthy mind comes from something he refers to as integration. Hear Daniel Siegel's perspective.

Daniel Siegel on Consciousness: Relational Nature of our Minds, our Brains: Part I

Dr. Daniel Siegel meets with a small group of us for lunch in Santa Monica last week to discuss the relational nature of our minds and our brains.....body/relational and how all of it connects to consciousness. His new book Mindsight explores it in further depth.

Continue to scroll down for part I of the interactive video.

Early Glimpse of Countdown to Zero: #countdowntozero #nuclear

At Long Beach last week, film producer Lawrence Bender gave an early preview of his latest movie Countdown to Zero about nuclear weapons threat. Following the eye-opening film, he takes questions from the audience. While the footage is extremely dark, you can hear the dialogue.

A snippet from a Hollywood Reporter review below and below it, a video shot of the preview Q&A in an extremely dark room.