Think Context Not Platforms, Says Google’s Tim Reis

While 2012 may have been mobile’s breakout year,The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics and listellos. Tim Reis, head of mobile and social solutions at Google, urged marketers to move this year beyond platforms and instead focus on context during a morning keynote at the Street Fight Summit on Wednesday.

“Consumers are very comfortable across [multiple] platforms; they don’t silo these activities,” Reis said. “ We as marketers need to adapt and reshape how we talk to consumers” about these habits.

For Reis and Google, context is key. Inasmuch as constant connectivity has fragmented the environment in which users engage with the web, identifying and understanding context will drive value both for consumers and advertisers. Think Google Now.

With the evolution toward small “m” mobile comes more immediacy — more decision-making happening via connected devices in real time. Take local commerce: Seventy-four percent of smartphone owners have purchased as a result of use of their device while shopping, according to Reis. Or hospitality: Priceline, said Reis, found that 82% of people booking on their smartphone made reservations for the same day, and more than a third were within a mile of the location.

So how do marketers identify and engage consumers during these moments? Reis pointed to a recent program by eMart, in which the Korean retailer planted structures across the city that projected a QR code with an attached discount at about noon, typically a downtime. “It’s a marketer taking the digital world and allowing it to empower the physical world,” said Reis about the campaign. “Part of this is understand[ing] location as a way to engage with consumers on a personal level.”

Reis also stressed that marketers and brands need to rethink the way in which marketers define success as users move beyond, and between, platforms. “We do not have a conversion prob[lem] in mobile, said Reis. “We have an attribution problem.” Capturing the right rewards — say foot traffic into a store rather than clicks on a screen — requires marketers to move between platforms and bring metrics from one to the other.

The key here is for marketers to measure as much as possible — the clicks, bricks, and everything in between. “Are you gathering enough data and are you using that information to think in terms of contexts instead of platforms?” Reis asked. “The more data you have, the more patterns you’ll see emerge.”

By far, beyond and away my favorite spot to hangout at CES this year was not the main Las Vegas Convention Center — where the majority of the buzz went down — but instead, inside the gorgeous Venetian hotel. It’s massive third floor ballrooms became known as ‘Eureka Park’ — a line show within the colossal line show, comprised of small, startup tech and gadget companies from around the world. Here, these early-stage companies had an opportunity to display their innovations and express their passion to viewers.Want to find howo concrete mixer?

Perusing and chatting with company representatives at the Eureka Park tech zone was inspiring and profound. That’s because many of these teams, on average no greater than three people in a given booth, were the designers,Find Complete Details about howo tractor Truck. CEOs and founders of these companies. No one else could be so enthusiastic and heartfelt about a specific product than these individuals. These are our modern grass-roots innovators and I have to say, their excitement was contagious.

LiveTalk is a new solution for companies in need of interacting directly with their clients. The application provides an environment where customers can connect with a company in real time via video calls (think Skype,) text chat (think chatrooms) and even exchange custom messages and forms or transfer files. Made with intuition in mind, the app requires little IT knowledge — just register and get started.

Culling from social media sites: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, customers can use their already existing accounts to connect with enrolled businesses. Using the ‘click-to-talk’ tool, making the call has never been simpler.

“Change the way people communicate with your business.The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics and listellos. Connect with your website visitors face-to-face,” professes an information flyer passed out at the LiveTalk booth. At the time of CES, the company was a week old and already attracting clients.

Pervasive Group Inc.You can buy mosaic Moon yarns and fibers right here as instock. is a new company that creates mobile software to help parents be good parents. Today’s parents know that monitoring a child’s smartphone use is a contemporary issue, nearly impossible to fully execute. The company’s MMGuardian application software makes it easy with essential monitoring and control features to keep children out of trouble, regardless of the distance between the parent and their kin.

Using just your Google smartphone or tablet, you can monitor your child’s phone remotely. Firstly and most importantly, the app lets you locate and track the child via SMS text location commands. You can also schedule an alert to appear on your phone at a certain time to make sure your kid is where they should be. There is a text messaging prevention feature that detects if the phone is moving ten miles per hour or more, deactivating the use of text messaging; keeping your young driver safer behind the wheel.

You can set time limits for overall cellphone use, monitor and control applications on their device and even oversee their text messages. Be weary however, as you may learn something that you may not want to uncover!

Lost on a location tour

IN THE next 24 hours,All our plastic moulds are vacuum formed using food safe plastic. a tour group will genially amble through the sumptuous English castle that provides the visual backdrop to Downton Abbey. Diehard comedy fans and celebrity sycophants will huddle impatiently in the frigid cold outside the Ed Sullivan Theatre on Broadway. A busload of visor-wearing, bumbag-toting middle Americans will trudge around Hollywood in grey minivans.

Closer to home, in suburban Melbourne, a bus packed with British tourists will drop in on Pin Oak Court, or, as it is better known, Ramsay Street. And lest we forget those Sex and the City tours.

Don't scoff - overseas pilgrimages are as common to television fans as they are to sporting nuts and literary buffs. And for many television fans (OK, maybe just me), the series Lost and the Oahu island of Hawaii is the holy grail.

Locally, Lost began airing in 2005 with a plane crashing on a mysterious island somewhere in the Pacific between Sydney and Los Angeles. Over six enthralling seasons, it told the story of the survivors and the island. The chief storytelling device was flashbacks,Add depth and style to your home with these large format polished tiles. which were cannily used to etch out the castaways' backgrounds and,Our team of consultants are skilled in project management and delivery of large scale rtls projects. most controversially, the flashforwards where viewers learnt the fate of characters after they had escaped and returned ''home''.
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In the final season, time travel was prominent. The series told two stories, one focusing on the destinies of the characters on the island, the other via a scenario where the plane didn't crash and what became of those characters once they landed unharmed in LA.

As a diehard Lost fan, I've often been forced to defend how the show ended (both moving and fulfilling, which we have neither the time nor energy to explain here), whether it became too convoluted (no) and why a polar bear was there. Regardless of where the show's trademark flashbacks (or forwards) were set, be it Africa, Australia, Korea or Thailand, all were shot in Hawaii, the great majority on Oahu, the tourist-friendly island where you'll also find Honolulu.

After booking a flight last year, I began searching out Lost tours. The most prominent online was a group specialising in Hummer tours. It offered five-hour trips,The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics and listellos. or a more substantial $220-a-person eight-hour jaunt. You know which one I went for.

The price eliminates casual fans. As we pulled out of downtown Honolulu, our group, comprising Hummer driver Scott, a Californian lawyer, an academic from New Mexico and me, began to get to know each other through our TV watching.

Every few minutes we would arrive at a building used in Lost - here was an apartment building from season three, there was Hurley's house in LA after he won the lottery, that's a cliff Jack jumped off - all the while discussing characters and plotlines. At each location, our guide would pull out a folder containing an image from the show depicting it.

The blockbuster sequel to The Hunger Games and CBS's Hawaii Five-0 reboot were shooting in the Aloha state that day and the tour, basically a loop of the entire island, demonstrated the significant part its spectacular landscape has played onscreen. We were shown everything from the beach where that kiss happened on From Here to Eternity to the locales for 50 First Dates to Magnum, P.I.'s HQ and Russell Brand's hotel from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But what we really wanted was the survivors' beach, Hurley's golf course, the Dharma Initiative's settlement barracks, and where the plane crashed.

The main claim to fame of our tour guide, Scott, was that he once appeared as an extra in a funeral scene in Lost.He was enthusiastic and encyclopaedic in his knowledge of Lost. As we were shown the Hawaiian road that stood in for the Aussie outback, he told us the crew were unable to source right-side-drive cars for the show's Australian scenes. They shot with a camera that reversed the angle. All number plates and signs featured in the scenes had to be written backwards to counter the cameras.

Did the producers get Australia right? Their only real mistake was the sign at a fish market that said ''Shrimp''.

Most of the action from Lost took place on the island's North Shore. Here we visited the key beaches and jungle locations. The survivors' beach camp is at the end of a tiny footpath that veers from an unsigned road full of million-dollar homes. The undeveloped scrub behind the beach belongs to a mysterious landowner who leased the area to the production.

The beach itself is instantly evocative for fans. The grave Benjamin Linus dug late in the last season remains. Our group sits half buried in it and poses for pictures. The tree in which Sawyer would while away his days reading is obvious, too. And aesthetically, the beach itself is something close to spectacular.

Instantly notable is the amount of CGI the show used. Most locations provided the visual tech crew with something to digitally erase. The beach, with its posh houses to the right side,Panasonic ventilation system fans are energy efficient and whisper quiet. was no exception.

The beach used as the site of the plane crash was clearly similarly tricky. Some surrounding mountains were erased, as was an inconvenient car park.

Most intriguing, though, were the eerie Dharma barracks, which, according to Lost folklore, was a secure residential compound on the island. Today, it is a YMCA children's camp. As we gazed in the windows of what was the home of Benjamin Linus, we saw not secret compartments and/or weapons, but rather children's sporting equipment and bunk beds. The camp is adjacent to the beach and would have required a lot of sound and picture editing.

Trash can art sweeping Oakland

You name it and Roberto Costa has probably turned it into a mosaic: his kitchen sink, his garage floor, a community garden display. He even helped mosaic every wall of a public restroom.

But the one initiative that has taken on a life of its own is the transformation of Oakland's public trash bins into colorful works of art.

What began two years ago as a beautification project in Costa's neighborhood, the Allendale Park section of East Oakland, has spread from High Street and 35th Avenue to Seminary Avenue, Foothill Boulevard, Grand Avenue and Telegraph Avenue.

By the city's count, 63 public trash bins have become mosaic pallets with the help of volunteer artists like Costa and Daud Abdullah and more than $1,100 in grants from the nonprofit Keep Oakland Beautiful.

More mosaic trash cans are in the works for Oakland's Laurel district and the city of Richmond.

"I love those trash cans,Find detailed product information for Low price howo tipper truck and other products." said Councilwoman Libby Schaaf, who has handed out "Local Hero" awards to several of the volunteer artists. Her favorite trash can design, a peace sign made out of daisies, adorns her district newsletter. "To me they're like flowers growing around High Street," she said.

Costa, an amateur artist and full-time analyst for the city of Oakland's Rent Adjustment Program, decided to bring decorative trash bins to Oakland after seeing them in Arcata.

Originally the artists planned to do just one design, but more volunteers came on board with their own vision for the garbage bins of Allendale Park.

"It was a great community organizing tool," said Beverly Shalom, a social worker who helped design several bins. "We deal with crime and blight, and some of us felt that instead of only focusing on the negative, we would focus on something positive that would make people care more about their neighborhood."

From Allendale Park, the mosaic trash cans quickly spread to nearby Maxwell Park, where many of the same volunteers participated in a four-year community project to transform the local park's public restroom into a mosaic.

"When I saw what they were doing, I knew I had to figure out a way to do them too," said Daud Abdullah, an electrician and artist who helped out on the bathroom mosaic.

"I had done a lot of community cleanup projects," Abdullah said. "I liked the idea of making a trash can look so pretty that nobody could miss it."

Through Oakland's Adopt a Spot volunteer program, Abdullah has single-handedly decorated more mosaic trash bins than anyone in city -- mostly in deeper East Oakland, where he said public art was most needed.

"A lot of my cans have peace and love on them because that's what I'm trying to convey," he said.

When Latin musician Apolinar Andrade saw Abdullah getting ready to work on a trash bin near his home at High Street and Santa Rita Avenue, he asked for a music theme. Abdullah and fellow volunteer artist Karen Difrummolo came up with a guitar, maracas and a design that read "Oakland 'hearts' Musica."

While Abdullah branched out on his own, Costa has been working with neighborhood groups interested in decorating their bins. This year he taught residents in the Adams Point neighborhood to do the mosaics that have been popping up along Grand Avenue next to Lake Merritt.

"He was very inspiring and encouraging throughout the project," said Vivian Romero, who contacted Costa after seeing the decorated trash cans on High Street.

Costa said the goal of all his mosaic projects is to strengthen neighborhoods. "It's a community building effort," he said. "You get to know neighbors that you otherwise wouldn't know."

Volunteers say the decorated trash bins have mushroomed around town in part because Oakland is home to a lot of mosaic artists and the Institute of Mosaic Art in the Jingletown neighborhood. Several volunteers have taken classes at the institute or gotten supplies from it.

Abduallah says he often gets donated tiles. He applies the cement mortar, tile and grout onto a fiberglass mesh that he then affixes to the cement trash bin. Costa does his work directly on the bin, which he first grades to create an even surface. Each trash can takes about 20 hours to completely decorate.

The Fairmont Copley Plaza, Back Bay’s grande dame hotel, celebrated its centennial this year with a $20 million restoration. But certain things never change: Catie Copley, the genial black Labrador retriever, still meanders around the reception area, thumping her tail and greeting guests. When she needs a break from her hospitality duties, she can curl up on her new padded (but tastefully restrained) dog bed,We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs.Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing, her reward for enduring a stream of renovators for almost a year. With its brushed fabric and rolled arms, that canine cushion signals the hotel’s renovation strategy of melding comfortable modern style with grand surroundings.

For the full Copley Plaza experience,We are pleased to offer the following list of professional mold maker and casters. enter through the St. James Avenue door flanked by stone lions and proceed down the mosaic-tiled walkway of “Peacock Alley” into the vast, barrel-vaulted main lobby. The word “lavish” comes to mind. So does “opulent.” The public areas are as overwhelming today as when the hotel opened in 1912, five years after its Manhattan big sister, the Plaza.

The Copley Plaza represents the stylistic apogee of its age: a display of wealth and glamour meant to wow all who see it. It was brash and nouveau riche, yet nonetheless stunning. Time has erased the nouveau, leaving behind only the riche, and ornamentation that might have seemed gauche in 1912 seems adroit today. In renovating and restoring this bejeweled grande dame, Fairmont has burnished the beauty of the public spaces, and redone the rooms in a less showy but no less luxurious style appropriate to a new century.The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag.

Eight of the suites got an upgraded treatment themed to what the hotel calls “an iconic Boston institution.” They include the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Pops, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Freedom Trail, the JFK Library and Museum, the Boston Public Library, the Museum of Science — and Catie Copley. (She’s a sweet Lab, but an “iconic institution”?) Marvelous photos and memorabilia strike each theme.

One new addition is the 3,000-square-foot health club at the roof level, which opens to an outdoor observation deck on the west side of the building. The club is mainly accessed by stairs (hey — you’re going for a workout!), but an elevator from the sixth floor also accommodates wheelchair users. State-of-the-art TechnoGym machines fill the space. Chilled washcloths are a nice touch.

Fairmont did make some changes to the ground-level public areas, most notably installing a snazzy, vaguely Deco-styled lobby lounge so guests have a place to sit while awaiting dinner companions or business associates. The Oak Long Bar + Kitchen has replaced the old Oak Room and Oak Bar. The more modernized, breezier venue can be entered from the main lobby as well as from St. James Avenue. Only open since summer, the Oak Long Bar has the kind of timeless styling that makes it seem as if it’s been around since 1912.

As you might expect from a hotel with a doggie ambassador,the Fairmont Copley Plaza is extremely dog friendly, hosting at least two guest canines each week. Doubles from $289; check for specials; $25 per day surcharge for dogs.

Abacon snapped up by Bibielle

Bibielle (UK), based in Leicester, has bought coated abrasives business Abacon. Italy-headquartered Bibielle also specialises in abrasives.

The corporate team of law firm Taylor&Emmet advised Sheffield-based Abacon on the disposal.

Established in 1986, Abacon supplies both the metal working and woodworking industries with its finishing products.

Bibielle, a research and development-driven business, was established in 1965.

The legal work by Taylor&Emmet was led by Peter Crawford and Lisa Wallis, with support from Taylor&Emmet's commercial property and employment teams.

Crawford said: "Abacon is an important player within its industry sector. Their knowledge, experience and customer base ensued that they were an ideal acquisition target and I am certain that the business will go from strength to strength as part of the Bibielle group."