Headline May 10, 2015/ '''SILICON VALLEY!"' SAID THE GREAT STUDENTS ON !WOW!

'''SILICON VALLEY!"' SAID 

THE GREAT STUDENTS ON !WOW!

FOR JOHN'S HIGH SCHOOL senior class photo, the broad shouldered, 165 pound, 6 foot 4 inch teen couldn't afford:

A jacket, dress shirt, and tie, so he borrowed them from his chemistry teacher. The sleeves were six inches too short. Graduating from Morningside High in 1955, Arrillaga attended:

Stanford on a basketball scholarship, juggling several jobs, from delivering campus mail to the odd-gardening gig, to cover expenses. 

So many unusal things unusual enough, there is one aspect to the man that runs counter to the tech industry's  star-centered ethos:

The  look-what-I-did mantra of founder-folk like Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison: John Arrillaga doesn't want to be known.

Famously private, the developor detests awards, won't do ribbon-cuttings, and never ever talks to the press.

Though his family name graces several buildings at Stanford, Arrillaga reportedly does the vast majority of his giving anonymously. Interviews with dozen of associates, relatives, and business partners:

Many of whom requested anonymity as well   -paint a portrait of a man who is so modest that he looks downright pained when receiving a compliment. He will listen with a kind of gentle frustration-

As two longtime friends who were classmates of Arrillaga's at Morningside High School in Inglewood, Calif. ''He just has no place in his life to put admiration,'' says one. 

For months it has been a popular parlor game among the tech cognoscenti: speculating on the identity of company X,-

The mysterious tenant slated to move into the 2-million-square-foot office park planned near Mineta San Jose International Airport. Some insist that it's Apple. spreading its cash-laden wings beyond Cupertino and Sunnyvale.

Did we mention the scale: 10 seven-story buildings, 7,000 plus parking spaces, a complex twice the size of Facebook's current quarters in Menlo Park?

Others say Samsung  -or Google. Note the Googley underground pool. the skyways, the soccer field sketched out in the blueprint. Still others claim Company X is Qualcomm, decamping at last from the outback San Diego  -or EMC, or SAP.

Hey, San Jose Mayor slipped that it's a Fortune 100 company..........Then Microsoft? Or Cisco, maybe?

Of all the names connected to the development, though, there is one that says more about the project, about the mystery surround it, about the history of Silicon Valley and perhaps even its future   -than any other.

And that, remarkably, is one that most people outside the Valley have never heard of: John Arrillaga Sr., the 77-year old co-founding partner of the site's developer, Perry Arrillaga.

Sure the modern tech industry was created by visionaries like Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, the semiconductor entrepreneurs who put the  ''Silicon'' in the Santa Clara Valley-

By like of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the computer whizzes  who burnished the romance of starting a company in a one-car garage.

By Steve Jobs, who, well, was Steve Jobs.

But Arrillaga   -who also, happens to be the father-in-law of the Valley's venture capitalists,  Marc Andreessen  -is the guy who built the tech corridor where it all happened.

He and business partner Richard Perry are the  real-estate developers who had the foresight in the 1960s to buy up the Valley's fruit-orchards and turn the farmland into thousands of acres of low-slung office parks and campuses that have come to house:

Intel, HP Apple, Google, and more. All told the duo has erected more than 12 million square feet office space and sold or leased tens of billions of dollars in property.

An effort that has made Arrillaga, worth more than  Dollar 2.5 billion. perhaps the richest man in Silicon Valley who  didn't make his money by starting a tech company. [Perry is also billionaire]

Seemingly in lockstep with these development projects, Arrillaga has remade, brick by brick, his Alma Mater Stanford University   -contributing millions of dollars to the school and donating-

An additional  160 buildings, including Stanford Stadium, which he demolished and rebuilt in 2005 and 2006. There are even those who credit Stanford's unprecedented run of championship NCAA teams 

In June, 2014, the school collected its 20th consecutive Legerfield Sports Directors Cup, awarded to the nation's best college athletic program overall  -in large part to Arrillaga's dutiful, hands patronage.

[The claim is hardly outlandish].

The Honour and Serving of the  ''Technology Operational Research'' continues.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Stanford University. See Ya all on !WOW!    -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless":

''' A Smarter Vision '''

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

Headline May 09, 2015/ ''' POSITIVELY WORLD CLASS : INSTAGRAM '''

''' POSITIVELY WORLD CLASS : 

INSTAGRAM '''

OVER ALL THESE MANY YEARS on the ecosystem,  - the main focused honour and objective of  the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless-

Lovingly called  !WOW!,   has been to believe in Students, and help make their ideas a reality; with  their support, their hard work, and their desire to get together to build a better world.

!WOW!, the world's honour, belongs to every single student in the world: One ''Share-Peace-Piece.''

 A HOST OF COMPANIES have sprung up to offer advertisers ways to reach Instagram's audiences.

Some, like the New-York based Mobile Media Lab, match big brands with popular Instagrammers, many of whom are amateur photographers who have amassed followings larger than 100,000.

Others, Like San Francisco's Pixlee, provide the data analytics to help brands like Ugg identify user-generated photographs that feature their clothing and determine which will portray their brand most positively.

And like Hawk, many brands have built successful Instagram feeds of their own. Erika Berman, senior vice president of communications for Oscar de la Renta, has a following of 345,000 fashion lovers.

And last summer the company released its fall ad campaign   -which typically makes its debut in the pages of Vogue or Elle   -on Instagram.

The company published seven images, and each amassed  1,000  likes within the first hour. In the caption of each image, Bearman prompted to preorder the collection Oscardelarenta.com.

Bearman says anecdotal evidence suggests the campaign was successful. The company went to repeat the process that fall.

Social Media Properties can  often be like nightclubs. They're cool while the trendy people are there, and they disappear without leaving a trace. The ones that last somehow transform themselves from:

A vehicle of entertainment to a utility. Even if users stop loving it, they still need it. 

Facebook, so far,  has managed to pull off that trick. But Zuckerberg is still hedging his bets, and Instagram isn't his only alternative.

Facebook has moved to a multi-app strategy. The company has launched several new-apps, none of which has become a hit. 

In February last, it agreed to pay the astronomical sum of $19 billion to buy the fast growing mobile messaging service Whatsapp, which already boasts  455 million plus global users.

And over last March, it agreed to pay $2 billion to buy Oculus Rift , a virtual-reality headset company.  If Instagram doesn't hit it big, perhaps one of the other bets will.

Systrom and Krieger are highly attuned to the peril of shifting tastes. Even as Instagram's user base continues to grow,they're sprinting to develop new products that broaden its appeal.

''I belive we are in the midst of a privtization phase,'' says Systrom. This shift can be seen in the rise of apps like Snapchat and Whatsapp, which let users manipulate and share images with smaller audiences.

''It's not a technological shift, but a sociological shift, and we're respoinding to it,'' he says.  

Instagram offers a feature that lets users make their accounts private, and as newer cohorts of people have signed on to the service, slightly more of them are using it.

And in last December, Instagram launched a private messaging product. Most of the tech press wrote it off quickly but the data suggest that momentum is building. 

According to Instagram, over the past month 45 million people, or roughly 25% of its users , sent or received a direct message on the service.

The company has had success with its 15-second videos, which launched shortly after Twitter's Vine videos becale popular. Though Systrom says Instagram has been happy with it-

The company won't release information about how many people are using the video, and two sources close to the company suggest it has been disappointing. In a sense the company's blessings may also be its curse:

It has built in reputation on letting its users do one thing extremely fast and incredibly well.

Despite his concerns, Systrom believes that if the company can maintain that standard of execution, it has tremendous growth ahead.

Meanwhile the allure of the core product continues to hook people like Skinny, who has checked it daily for three years and can't imagine stopping.

''It's a little bit like a peek into someone psyche,'' he says of the Instagram's appeal.

How much would an advertiser pay for that?

With respectful dedication to the Technology Press the world over. See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Talking Technology '''

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

Global CO2 levels break 400ppm milestone

Monthly Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have reached 400 parts per million across the entire globe for the first time.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) collects data from air samples taken from 40 sites around the world, reported the results.

According to Noaa the CO2 levels have increased 120 parts per million since pre-industrial times and that these levels haven't been seen for about two million years.

Headline May 08, 2015/ ''' BIG-BAD-READY TO MAKE MONEY : INSTAGRAM '''

''' BIG-BAD-READY TO MAKE MONEY :

 INSTAGRAM '''

FROM STAY-AT-HOME MOMS to full-time Instagrammers, many loyal followers, have parlayed their hobby into a lucrative career.

Today many professional photographers are finding that Instagram can be a good way to promote and complement their work.

One example is David Guttenfieder, a veteran photojournalist who has travelled the world for the Associated Press, winning a World Press Photo Award seven times.

In 2013, when he got access to North Korea to spend a year chronicling the lives of everyday citizens, he began publishing a portion of his work on Instagram. His feed, which now boasts 349,000 followers-

Became  a repository of for photos snapped quickly of small curiosities. Time named him the 2013 Instagram Photographer of the Year,

Systrom and Krieger think all of this cool, but they are mostly focused on making Instagram work really well and really fast. Systrom get visibly excited, says the author, when discussing things like latency -the time delay between when you summon your photo stream and when it appears.

Just later and for over three months the duo had cut the time it takes for an image to render by two-thirds. For a communications platform to work, it needs to be absolutely reliable all the time-

And dependability and ease of use were big reasons Instagram took off rather rather than early photo-app rivals such as PicPlz and Hipstamatic.

''It came down to a simple, clear product built for speed of sharing, and the laser focus on a single-use case, sharing photo with friends, allowed it to spread easily,'' says Taylor Davidson, a professional photographer who is a also a venture capitalist investing in photo-related startups. 

In a hotel lobby in downtown Austin, skateboarding legend Tony Hawk whips out his iPhone to display the photo he's just uploaded to Instagram.

In six hours the X Games will start, and he has captured a skate ramp set up in front of the Texas Capitol, perfectly framing the building. So far it has more than 25,000 likes.

Hawk was one of the first celebrities to embrace Instagram. He found it on his own in 2011 by checking out what the teenage skateboarders he coached were using. Hawk, 47, has 1.4 million followers.

Unlike many other celebrities, he controls his own profile and takes most of the photos himself. Instagram has become his primary marketing vehicle for his events and his announcements about Activision's line of Tony Hank videogames.

''Initially Activision would kind of get annoyed with me if I let it slip on Instagram before a games's launch was announced,'' says Hawk. But his accident marketing seemed to work. ''Now they encourage it,'' he says. 

As with most advertising on Instagram right now, the company doesn't profit Hawk's success directly. Despite significant advertiser demand, it has been slow to roll out advertising products.

Systrom says he and Krieger don't want to screw anything up by moving too fast. The company finally launched its first sponsored-ads product by testing 10 campaigns.

In Facebook's most recent earning call, COO Sandberg pointed to the success of one campaign for Levi's, which featured pictures of denim-clad people in gorgeous outdoor locations. 

The ad targeted 18 to 34 and reached some 7.4 million people, according to Facebook.

Sandberg held it up as success, saying that it  ''drove a 24-point lift in ad recall, which was three times the control group.''

Early marketing efforts often achieve outsize success on social media because the advertising takes  users by surprise, and they pay attention. But Systrom is putting unusual emphasis on quality so as not to alienate his users.

In choosing its first 10 advertisers, Instagram was careful to select brands that that would appeal naturally to Instagram's audience. Systrom personally reviews every ad designed for Instagram, and he isn't shy about offering critiques.

When Airbnb advertised on the site recently, Systrom initially sent the proposed photographs of exotic Airbnb location back to his team, asking them to make better use of the location feature on the caption- To indicate where a photo was taken.  

''I thought they could get more out of it,'' says Systrom.

The Honour and Serving of  ''technology operational research''   on this great company, Instagram, continues. Thank you for reading, and maybe -learning something.

With respectful dedication to all the Students of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Open To The World '''

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

Headline May 07, 2015/ ''' THE INSTAGRAM SHOT '''

''' THE INSTAGRAM SHOT '''

SOCIAL MEDIA PROPERTIES can often be like nightclubs. They are cool while the trendy people are there, and they disappear without leaving a trace. No trace then, whatsoever.

In fact, Facebook has tremendous value to Instagram, say Krieger and Systrom. The company leans heavily on Facebook's  spam-and fraud prevention team, for example.

And Krieger, who is thinking a good deal about management these days, calls regularly on an executive coach Facebook provides to help navigate the sorts of challenges that emerge when your workforce increases by factor of 10.

The first real test of Instagram's autonomy came three months after the acquisition. Facebook suggested that Istagram revise its terms of service, allowing the company to access users photos for advertising purposes without asking or notifying them.

Instagram went ahead with the policy change. The terms announced late on a Monday and Systrom and Krieger woke up to a storm of outrage the next morning. They watched as account deletions soared. ''That was a scary moment. I thought, Did we just kill Instagram?'' says Systrom.

Kriger immediately convened Instagram's executive team, while Systrome met with Zuckerberg, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and the legal team.

''Let's roll it back,'' Systrom urged them. They tried to persuade him to stick with the change, says Systrom. But he argued that with no immediate plans to add advertising to the platform, it wasn't worth alienating users. They could revisit the issue later.

''It took a while for people to get comfortable with it, but I was pretty adamant that would work,'' says Systrom. He published a blog post rolling back the terms of service, and the account-deletions stopped.

The users had spoken. Instagram had listened. And Facebook had, as promised, stayed out of the way.

Snapchart hired social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson to study why people take disappearing photos. Facebook works with researchers to inquire as to the psychology of status updates.

By contrast, Instagram hands out stickers. The company has a nine person team that encourages community. It maintains Instagram's corporate blog, which is as much an industry rag for people like Skinny as it is a vehicle for announcing the occasional business update.

When the global InstaMeet happened, the company sent kits to all the organizers it could identify. The kits included a massive red balloon as a prop and a bunch of stickers with the company's name on them.

So why, exactly, has Instagram become so popular so fast?  A survey of academics, photographers, and investors suggests its rise corresponds with a larger shift to a more visual style of communication.

People want to share photo to describe their life experiences. This became evident when Facebook bested Myspace, then the dominant social network, in part because its technology made it easier for users to upload and share photos.

In 2007 the launch of the iPhone made it substantially easier {and more fun} to take and share pictures. Systrom and Kreiger's service took the evolution a step further. 

Indeed, beyond the comparison to Kodak's popularization of photography decades ago  (which would apply to smartphones as well as to Instagram), the photo-sharing service has a second analogue, one that may be even more important: iTunes.

Where for decades the technical quality of a photo (or the sound quality of a song) gained ever more importance, all of a sudden, with the advent of iTunes and Instagram, the quality of  distribution trumped all. 

To audio purists {and anybody with good ears}, iTunes has second rate sound. But the the ease of distribution made it a global hit.

So it was with Instagram, with a twist: By adding simple editing tools like filters, Instagram let mainstream web users become  -or at least do an impression of  -good photographers.

Regular people were now able to manipulate their photographs to reflect ideas and feelings.

Many professional photographers were horrified. Suddenly anybody could be a photographer. What's more, Instagram helped take jobs from the professionals. Just over two years ago:

The Chicago Sun-Times fired its entire staff of photographers and trained its journalists to take and edit photos on their iPhones and upload them to the appropriate social feeds.

The Honour and Serving of the  ''technology operational research'' continues.

With respectful dedication to all the Social's Biggest Players : Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Google, Pinterest. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Users Of Media Services '''

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless