Freelance Projects, Design and Programming Tutorials
I need an application that can do the following. Look at one directory of logged .ts files. Each .ts file has 26 program streams in it. Each program stream can have from 1 video and 2 audio streams, up to 1 video and 8 audio streams… (Budget: $250-$750 USD, Jobs: Microsoft, Video Services, Visual Basic, Windows Desktop, Windows Server)
Tennis website needs 10 original tennis articles I’m looking for writers for 10 tennis instruction articles. If you are a enthusiast of Tennis then you the person I’m looking for. Project Details: a) You have to write tennis articles on the following topics… (Budget: $30-$250 USD, Jobs: Articles, Copywriting)
Need a 6 to 8 page high quality catalog ready to be printed. Please visit www.boragegrill.com to get the pictures etc. (Budget: $30-$250 USD, Jobs: Copy Typing, Editing, Product Descriptions, Proofreading, Publishing)
Task Description: 1. Call 3000 individuals in the US to gather data. 2. You have to ask 12 questions to gather 12 data points. (Most (~8) are yes or no questions) 3. Enter data in to the web based form (form will be provided)… (Budget: $250-$750 USD, Jobs: Customer Support, Data Entry)
I need a person to harvest from the internet lots of rss feeds. (Budget: $30-$250 USD, Jobs: Data Entry, Data Processing, Excel, Research)
I am looking for a person to combine this existing script called TRSM and allow it to work with Simple Machines Forums Software. I would like the forum software to show up when a person clicks on Forum and show the external parts of the website basically inside the index area… (Budget: $30-$250 USD, Jobs: MySQL, PHP)
Hi, We have a very successful website which we would like converted to Joomla, with a few functionality additions and designs tweaks. Full Job Specifications are attached. Please do take the time to read the spec before bidding… (Budget: $250-$750 USD, Jobs: Facebook, Graphic Design, HTML, PHP, Website Design)
Im looking for someone who has worked with both Volusion and also Bigcommerce. I want a very clean website. I need the siteto have style and design. They have bunch of templates to work with, so if I wanted something free I would just do that… (Budget: $250-$750 USD, Jobs: Graphic Design, HTML, Photoshop, User Interface / IA, Website Design)
Hello, We are looking for someone to create an e-commerce site, now we have a site www.Elislamy.com we want to improve it through an open source, thus we we need someone responsible for a beautiful presentation and original design, a slide or flash banner, a new logo has the image of our company… (Budget: $30-$250 USD, Jobs: Graphic Design, HTML, Photoshop, PHP, Zen Cart)
After being nominated for a number of awards at this year’s Golden Globe awards ceremony, ‘The Social Network’ nabbed Best Picture (in the drama category), Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin), Score (Trent Reznor), and Director (David Fincher).
Those are all significant categories for the awards ceremony, with the movie garnering more awards than most of the films nominated this year. Interestingly, Sorkin and the film’s producer Scott Rudin both thanked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in their acceptance speeches.
The movie had a fairlyBox Office run and received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics.
The Golden Globes are known as an accurate reflection of what could come at the Oscars, so this is a big win for the movie, which was released by Sony Pictures. We’ll see soon if the movie will grab any Academy Award nominations.
You can read our review of the movie here.
Photo Credit/IMDB
Blog fights happen. Sometimes for attention, but most of the time because someone is really pissed off about something. And don’t count out big media, they jump right in too when they feel it.
No one’s ever written down any rules for blog fights that I know of. But there are some unspoken rules and guidelines.
Here are a few core strategies:
That’s not it though. There are also unspoken rules of engagement. An ethical guide to a clean blog fight, if you will.
Last week I threw a few punches at Engadget, our sister site at AOL. They’ve been on our ass for a couple of years now. They have a major attribution problem, for example, and tend to just steal stories. They also get extremely petty, as evidenced by how they covered the CrunchPad story. More recently Engadget editor in chief Joshua Topolsky tried to kill our acquisition by AOL. And for some strange reason Engadget writers and editors tend to troll our comments pointlessly.
All of these things are facts. It’s a big pile of petty. I was going to let this all go, but now the NY Times says they’re going to write a story about the fight and want my comments.
After our acquisition by AOL I tried to bury the hatchet with them. I put on my big boy pants and I went out of my way to link to them, retweet them and generally say the past is the past. I suggested we work together on an internal call. We even invited them to participate in the Crunchies. Dead silence on their end, and the trolling continued.
So I took my shot. And then they fired back.
Not directly, though. They spoke off record to another blog. They denied ever doing anything to poke at us. They released parts of private emails out of context. Worst of all they brought “civilians” (non bloggers) into the fight. Etc.
In other words, Engadget is really good at being passive aggressive, but they really suck at a good clean blog fight. So here are some suggestions for the next time they find themselves in the middle of some mess they started. Basically this comes down to fighting your own battles, not using human shields, and generally making sure to play by some basic ethical rules so that when the fight is over, you can move on.
To sum up this section – if someone starts a knife fight with you, then walk away or pull out a knife and fight. Don’t just hire someone else to show up with a gun and call it a win. Truth matters. How you fight matters. Whether you win or lose is far less important.
That’s all I’m going to say about this particular fight for now. Hope this helped people understand how we approach these things, and what kind of behavior we expect from the other side.
After four weeks of civil unrest, the fall of the Tunisian president Ben Ali played out for all the world on Twitter this Friday, some dubbing it a “Twitter Revolution” like the election protests in Iran and Moldovia. Increasingly, collective events from TV shows to the World Cup to #lessambitiousmovies to the fall of dictatorships cause spikes in related conversation on the microblogging network which, with its broad media influencer adoption, has become the world’s eminent news amplifier.
Christopher Golda of Backtype (which does Twitter analysis) provided us with snapshot of Tunisa mentions on Friday January 14th. Not surprisingly the hashtag peaked at 28 tweets per second at 21:27:56 Tunisian time (20:27:56 GMT, 12:27:56 PT), a couple hours after the first reports that Tunisan president had left the country at around 9:30 PT. At the end of the cycle, total tweets mentioning Tunisia (including those using the #Tunisia hastag) were over 196K. Total tweets for #sidibouzid (the province where the protests started) were over 103K.
The total number of people mentioning Tunisia in tweets was over 50K, which was less than the 81K boasted by the recent #Lessambitious movies Twitter trend. Golda says this is probably because the latter was “more engaging, more participatory.”
According to Backtype, the top ten Tunisian related tweets were:
@Voiceoftunisia
@monaeltahawy
@alfarhan
@twitter
@BBCBreaking
@SultanAlQassemi
@Dima_Khatib
@BreakingNews@BBCBreaking
@cnnbrkIt’s interesting to note that only three of the top tweets are from a mainstream media source (only one from the US), four (including @alfarhan’s) are breaking the news of Ben Ali’s departure and two are breaking the news of the dissolution of Parliament. The most retweeted account, @VoiceofTunisa with its 496 followers, was retweeted over 400 times.
The top sites being shared on Twitter relating to Tunisia were:
1. facebook.com
2. bbc.co.uk
3. guardian.co.uk
4. youtube.com
5. english.aljazeera.net
6. liveword.ca
7. nytimes.com
8. cnn.com
9. twitpic.com
10. news.yahoo.com
The fact that Facebook, like Twitter, sees an increase of activity around times of political change and facilitated communication between activists this time around explains its appearance at the top of the leaderboard here. More active international media like the Guardian, the BBC and Al Jazeera round out the top five. The first US-based traditional media source, The New York Times comes after the Liveword.ca blog at number seven.
Since we spend so much time on the sites ourselves, there is a tendency for bloggers and reporters to be myopic when it comes to the use of Twitter in mediating significant events. Because news about Tunisia saturated our Twitter streams, it can seem like Twitter played a crucial role in instigating the news itself.
And while the jury is still out on just how much tweets can influence something as monumental as the fall of a government, it is worth noting that the critical mass of Tunisia related activity on Twitter happened after Ben Ali fled.
Word cloud: Backtype
There seem to be a lot of Yahoo properties that no one pays any attention to at all. We noted that Yahoo kept their Halloween content up past that holiday, for example. There was the Delicious snafu where a blog post saying the site wasn’t going offline was offline because the site had been taken down. Now, we’ve noticed, Yahoo’s Academy Awards site hasn’t been updated since March 2010.
This is despite the fact that Yahoo had a press push earlier this year: “Yahoo is doubling down on its awards show content this year,” says the article. It’s not just that the content has been pushed to Yahoo’s OMG site. There’s little on this year’s Academy Awards there, either.
Not a big deal. Not the end of the world. But this is a sign that there are Yahoo properties that have no staff assigned to them. Or worse, there are staff but they just don’t care at all about their jobs. And Chrysler, Yahoo’s exclusive advertising partner for the season’s awards show, must be wondering what’s going on.
The good news is that after this post Yahoo will quickly update their Oscars site. Well, tomorrow, after the weekend’s over. I mean Tuesday, after the holiday. Certainly sometime before next year.
On the face of things, I don’t have a huge amount in common with Stieg Larsson. For a start I’m not Swedish; and I’m not dead. Also, in the time it took you to read those last two sentences, Stieg Larsson sold more books than I did in the whole of last year.
And yet, if Larsson were still around, I feel sure there’s at least one area on which we’d agree (two if you count on the importance of training female Eritrean People’s Liberation Front guerrillas in the use of grenade launchers). And that’s the pain and frustration of trying to sell international rights to our books.
Back in 2008, Larsson was already a big success in his native Sweden. His debut novel, published in 2005, had already sold three million copies: a number made all the more impressive (or understandable, depending on your point of view) by the fact that he’d died the previous year. And yet despite this local acclaim – including several movie adaptations – the wider world remained blissfully unaware of his work.
Not that his publisher wasn’t doing its best to spread the word globally; it’s just that no-one outside the Nordic countries gave a damn: eight US publishers, and an equal number in the UK had turned down the opportunity to translate the work. In the end it was only after film companies started showing interest in a translation of the material that the English language rights were picked up by struggling London-based indie publisher Quercus for next to nothing.
[Disclosure: back in my days as a book publisher, we shared a lead investor and founding chairman with Quercus. He is no longer involved in either company. Also: he hates me.]
After a hasty editing job, Quercus went on to sell 2.3 million copies of the three books in the first 18 months, saving the company from bankruptcy and turning mounting losses into profits of around $5 million in 2010. US rights were subsequently bought by Knopf who have since sold over 14 million copies, including a record number of electronic copies (Larsson was the first author to achieve over one million Kindle sales).
And yet all that success makes it all the more remarkable how close Larsson’s work came to never being published in the UK or the US (and missing out on maybe 20 million sales, and counting). Sixteen is a lot of publishers to be rejected by, and even Quercus’ founder recently admitted they probably wouldn’t have bothered buying the rights had Larsson been alive. Such is the crapshoot of international rights.
Again, I am no Stieg Larsson – but I can certainly grok how narrowly he snatched victory from the jaws of defeat (his untimely death notwithstanding). Later this year, readers in the UK, Australia, Hong Kong and almost any other country on the planet will be able to buy my new book: The Upgrade. Readers in the US: not so much.
Like Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, by my reckoning The Upgrade has been turned down by eight publishers in the U.S. Larsson’s publisher was warned by one British bookseller that “people don’t buy books by authors with funny names”; similarly I’ve grown accustomed to hearing the refrain from New York: “it’s a little too British for American readers”.
Back in 2009, I shared similar frustrations about my previous book; how despite having decent UK and International sales and a growing potential readership in the US, I’d failed dismally to find a US publisher. In the end I gave away the US edition of the book here on TechCrunch. Since then over 100,000 people have read or downloaded that edition it in its various forms.
I’ll be honest, I was expecting a slightly easier ride this time. Unlike its London-centric predecessor, the new book is basically a love letter to American women America with over half of it set in this country, across six states. Given all that, surely someone would pick up the US rights this time? But no. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one failed attempt to get published in the US may be regarded as a misfortune, two looks like carelessness. Maybe it’s just a crappy book.
So, what to do? Satisfy myself with the book being available everywhere except the country where I live? Perhaps. Wait patiently for an American equivalent of Quercus to come along and scoop up the rights for a pittance? Not going to happen; at least not while I remain alive.
No, surely there must be some clever technological solution to the problem? After all, technology is disrupting EVERYTHING, right?
Digital self-publishing seems an obvious avenue, especially with self-published authors like J. A. Konrath claiming five-figure monthly revenues from Kindle and iPad sales alone. I could even take a leaf – no pun intended – out of Cory Doctorow’s book and self-publish in print, particularly the kind of high-value special editions which Doctorow says provide the bulk of his profits. And yet, as I’ve written before, self publishing holds no real appeal for me: I love having a publisher, I love having an editor and I love having a publicist and marketing department working on my behalf (Quercus spent hundreds of thousands of dollars kick-starting sales of the Millennium Trilogy, including giving away hundreds of copies to London commuters to build word of mouth.) Cory Doctorow’s experiment in self-publishing has managed to produce a book that is stunningly beautiful, and has been hailed for various marketing innovations that put traditional publishers to shame. But Doctorow admits that the process has been exhausting, to the point where his health is suffering. I get a migraine just trying to complete a manuscript, without having to consider paper stock and cover art.
Similarly, giving away the book for free worked last time, but it seriously strained my relationship with my publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It also doubtlessly dented UK and International sales, which is unfair given the financial commitment W&N has made in those areas.
So what options does that leave? After several weeks kicking the problem around in my head – oscillating between frustration and determination – I’ve alighted on two possible disruptive solutions. As far as I can tell, neither of them already exists.
Disruptive solution number one: An online marketplace for the disposal of unsold international rights.
The truth is I’d gladly give my US rights away for free in return for a decent royalty upside and a promise of a reasonable marketing/promotional spend – but there’s currently no place for me to advertise that fact. A platform for unsold rights – a kind of eBay for intellectual property – would solve that problem at a stroke, for me and for countless thousand other authors in my position. Authors or agents could pay a small fee to post a synopsis of their book, along with details of who has already bought the rights to other territories (a useful quality filter for publishers) and a summary of what price/guarantees they’d like in return for handing them over. Publishers looking for the next Steig Larsson could quickly scan the titles available for their territory, then snap them up for a pittance and the promise of a generous upside. Perhaps publishers could even pay a premium to view new titles before anyone else. In addition to territorial rights, the service could easily be expanded to sell rights according to media: ebook rights, print rights, even film or television rights. Given how many first time authors are choosing the self-publish electronically, the service could help successful ebook authors find print publishers for their work, and vice versa.
Disruptive solution number two: A traditional publishing / Kickstarter hybrid
Another solution would be for an established publisher to create a new hybrid imprint, aimed at giving established authors who remain unpublished in a particular market an alternative to self-publishing. What I have in mind is a blend of traditional publishing and Kickstarter. The publisher would acquire the ebook rights to a title for free, in exchange for a promise to publish and promote the book on the Kindle and iPad. Furthermore they would give a conditional commitment to publish a print edition of the title, based on a certain number of readers sign up in advance to purchase it. Again, I would gladly hand over the rights to my book for free knowing at least it would be professionally published and promoted as an ebook in the US. I would then move heaven and earth to encourage my various US-centric readerships (here on TechCrunch, on my blog, and in other publications) to commit to ordering an advance copy of a print edition. Once, say, 2000 people had made that commitment, the publisher would be obliged to print and distribute it, at very little risk to their bottom line. They would also commit to selling the print edition through Amazon and, if sales reach a certain point, through bricks and mortar book stores.
So there you go. If you’re a publishing entrepreneur and you see any potential in either of those ideas, feel free to run with them – you have my eager blessing. Just promise that if you build the rights selling platform you’ll let me know so I can put my own book on there. And if you’re a US publisher who thinks the second idea seems appealing then give me a call and… well… I’d be happy to recommend a brilliant forthcoming title with available US rights which could help you prove the concept.
I warn you though, apart from all the American stuff, it’s very British.
Asmyco, the Helsinki-based app developer / industry analysis advisory firm founded and led by a longtime Nokia manager, has just published a new report on its blog with notewrthy data on the increase in iOS downloads by device.
The company reports that more than 60 apps have been downloaded for every iOS device sold. That’s up from 10 apps downloaded for every iPhone/iPod touch in 2008, says Asmyco. So how did the firm get to that number? As the Apple App Store approaches 10 billion total downloads, App downloads are increasing at a faster rate that iTunes music downloads (of course, not all iTunes users are getting their music from iTunes).
Asmyco then determined that around 30 million Apps are currently being downloaded per day. The firm then divided the cumulative apps downloaded by the cumulative number of iOS devices sold, which includes iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. Asmyco says that from that equation, each iOS device sold has downloaded more than 60 apps.
Of course, much of this information is subjective, considering Apple doesn’t publicly update its total number of iPhones, iPads and iPod touches very often. And as more devices are sold, more Apps will be downloaded.
But the Asymco does raise an interesting trend-App downloads are growing at an alarmingly fast rate, overtaking digital music along the way. Last fall, Asmyco reported that iOS App download were set to pass the total number of music downloads by the end of 2010. The firm says that this happened yet, but it’s coming close. And Apps will reach 10 billion downloads in less than half the time it took songs (31 vs 67 months for Apps, says Asmyco.)
