Paris looks to Instagrammers to boost city museum visits

M

aybe you've heard of the term 'influencer.' It's the moniker marketers have given to the heavy hitters of social media with their considerable follower counts (often in the tens or hundreds of thousands). You know, the Kendall and Gigis currently dominating our modern world. Well, Paris Musées, the public institution that oversees 14 of the city's municipal museums, has cottoned on to this new media wave and is turning to Instagram as a platform to raise awareness and boost museum attendance. To promote its recently launched site, which houses a searchable digital collection of all the museums' works, Paris Musées has commissioned 10 Instagrammers from various art backgrounds to recreate or reinterpret some of these iconic works.

Gallery: Instagram art for Paris Musees' sake | 20 Photos

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The campaign, created in a partnership with digital agency Kindai, has hard data on social media influence to back it up. In 2014, the agency published a study which found that cultural institutions in France benefitted the most from an associated Instagram post -- accounting for about 53 percent of related Instagrammer visits. Philippe Rivière, the head of Digital Service at Paris Musées, said that while he hopes younger generations will be inspired by the campaign, the idea behind the collaborations was really "to reach a diverse audience while keeping the artistry and aesthetics" of the collections intact.

To do this, Paris Musées matched up its ten influential Instagrammers, culled from various artistic disciplines like fashion, humor, illustration, photography, with a notable work emblematic of a particular museum. This process, which Rivière said some museums found to be challenging, often resulted in several works being pulled for an artist's consideration. "Some museums like Cernuschi do not have [an] easy piece of art to remake," he says. "In this case, we had to find creative Instagrameurs, in this case Rafael Mantesso, to provide a completely different view."

The resulting collection of Instagrammer reinterpretations will be on display from May 11th to July 31st at Paris' Gare Saint-Lazare train station. And if you happen to swing by the exhibit, don't hesitate to pull out your smartphone and add your own twist to the Instagram installation. Paris Musées is encouraging passersby to contribute their own takes on the city of light's hallowed art and use the hashtag #ParallelesParisMusées.

"Paris is fortunate to be one of the cultural cities of the world," says Rivière. "That said, everyone does not have the opportunity to go there, even living in France ... This platform can be a way of preparing [for] the visit or even make you want to visit a particular museum."

Via Engadget

New DIY wearable teaches kids to code and be active

The Mover Kit can be assembled within 15 minutes and can be configured for several different purposes.

The Mover Kit aims to combine the fun of wearable tech for kids with important programming tools that'll help them later in life. It also has rainbow lights that you can program to flicker whenever you moonwalk. If either of those things sound palatable to you, there's a Kickstarter out there with your name on it.

You can thank Technology Will Save Us for the idea, an organization founded to foster creativity in youth through hands-on technology. The kit is aimed at children 8 and up, offering a piece of buildable, wearable tech that can be programmed to perform a wide variety of tasks using an online tool called Move.

The Mover Kit can be assembled in about 15 minutes and is comprised of a Mover board, 8 RGB LEDs, accelerometer, magnetometer, USB connector, rechargeable battery, snap band bracelet, and a lanyard. The device went through several different prototypes in tests with over 300 children, and it offers several different options for kids to repurpose it every single day if they choose to.

So far the Kickstarter has raised over $29,000 of its $50,000 goal with 28 days left to go. It's an interesting addition to the growing number of projects aimed at children with simple-to-understand code and assembly, and might even end up appealing to DIY beginners as well as kids if it hits production.

Via Engadget

And the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 is… Beam

The competition has been incredibly fierce, but we now have a winner. At the very beginning, there were 22 startups.

We hand-picked all these great companies from the wild world of startup land so they could compete in our highly competitive startup competition — theStartup Battlefield. They all presented in front of multiple groups of tech leaders serving as judges. The startups were competing for $50,000 and the highly coveted Disrupt Cup.

After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to six finalists: online kid safety service Bark, interactive Twitch alternativeBeam, Blockchain credit startup for emerging countries BitPagos, daily vitamin maker Ritual, ultra-affordable underwater drone SeaDrone and ultra-affordable water filtration system WaterO.

These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: John Borthwick (betaworks), Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures), Alfred Lin (Sequoia Capital), Susan Lyne (BBG Ventures), Alan Patricof (Greycroft Partners) and Matthew Panzarino(TechCrunch).

Applications for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco will open soon. Please check out our Startup Battlefield Hub, apply and email Battlefield Editor Sam O’Keefe with any questions (sam@techcrunch.com).

And now, meet the TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2016 Battlefield winner.

Winner: Beam

Beam is a platform that ties in with the growing world of e-sports to offer a low-latency chat platform for live streamed games. But beyond that, Beam lets viewers actually interact with the games by measuring the general intent of all of the comments to play along with the live streaming gamer. You can think of it as a Twitch WePlay that actually works.

Read more about Beam in our separate post.

Runner-Up: WaterO

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Startup Battlefield: Countertop Purity with Water-O #TCDisrupt

8:40 PM - 11 May 2016

 
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WaterO uses reverse osmosis, the gold standard in water filtration, to bring clean water to families. This normally costs an exorbitant amount, forces users to tear out their plumbing and wastes around 80 percent of water. Plus, renters can’t use it. But with WaterO, only around 20 percent of water is wasted, with no re-tooling of the plumbing at a $399 price point for the hardware.

Read more about WaterO in our separate post.

Via Techcrunch

Google launches Gboard, an iOS keyboard that lets you search without a browser

Google this morning launched a new application for iOS devices called Gboard that puts the power of Google search directly into your mobile device’s keyboard. This keyboard had been rumored to be in development earlier this year, and it appears the original reports were accurate. Not only does the app allow for an easy way to use Google search, it also offers swipe-based typing and access to GIFs, as previously reported. And it includes easy access to common keyboard functions, like emojis and word predictions.

Of course, the most interesting feature of this keyboard is its direct integration with Google’s services.

By tapping the included “G” icon, you’re able to immediately search Google without exiting your keyboard and launching a browser or the Google app.

This allows you to easily search for things like flight times, news articles, restaurant and business listings, weather and more right from your keyboard, then just tap to paste that information into your chat. (You’ll need to give the app access to your location the first time you launch this feature.)

This information is presented to you at the bottom of the screen in a card-style layout, where each listing has its own card.

When tapped, the information from the card immediately appears in your conversation, email, notepad or wherever else may be on your phone at the time. This is pasted as hyperlinked text, so you can do things like pull up the listing in Google Maps, phone a business or perform a web search for the item in question, among other things.

 

 

However, you can also just tap on the “Paste” button from iOS’s “Edit” menu in order to copy the actual card. While this is not hyperlinked (it’s an image), it presents the information in an attractive format, along with the included details, whether that’s a business’s open hours and address, today’s temperature, flight times or whatever else you may have searched.

“We wanted to bring the best of Google to Gboard, so you’ll see Maps, Translate, image and video search, News and others,” says Rajan Patel, the head of the product team that developed Gboard. “Initially, Gboard will not surface any information specific to you,” he added, hinting that a personalized keyboard is in the works for the future.

In addition, the app supports GIF search. Google partnered with Riffsy to improve predefined GIF categories, but GIF search is powered by Google search and will surface GIFs from a number of sources.

To find a relevant GIF, you tap the emoji icon on your keyboard (the smiley face icon). This lets you access common emojis, but a button at the bottom lets you switch over to the GIF search section instead.

From here, you’re offered a selection of reaction GIF categories, like “high five,” “thumbs up,” “hair flip,” “mic drop,” “shrug,” etc. You can also search for a GIF using keywords.

When you find one you like, you tap it and it automatically copies so you can paste it into the conversation.

Google made an interesting improvement to using emojis, too. Instead of having to manually scroll through the various emoji screens, you can search for a term like “dance” or “wine” and the app will return the matching emoji.

The new keyboard application also allows you to touch type or swipe, depending on your personal preference. To glide type, you just drag one finger between letters. You don’t even have to hit the spacebar.

This makes one-handed typing easier — and that’s a feature that Microsoft has been promoting with its popular iOS keyboard, Word Flow.

One big drawback to using Google’s keyboard over Apple’s default is that it can’t include a microphone for dictation — Apple doesn’t allow any third-party keyboard to offer this, in fact. That means you can’t use “OK Google” or even Siri or Apple’s own dictation mic, for example.

Gboard is an important launch for Google as today’s consumers spend the majority of thetime on their phone using native mobile applications. According to eMarketer, mobile device users this year will spend 3 hours 15 minutes per day using apps versus just 51 minutes using the browser.

Of course, allowing Google to become deeply integrated with your keyboard raises some questions around data retention and privacy. The app allows you to clear your search history and your personal dictionary, but this presumably only affects the locally installed app. (We’ve asked Google to clarify its data retention policies, and are waiting to hear back.)

The new app is available today in English only and is a free download on the iTunes App Store. More languages will arrive in the future, Google notes.

Samsung does its own Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge teardown

While iFixit is quick to tear apart new devices to gauge repairability, Samsung has its own look inside the new Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. The company offers a breakdown of the components that make up the two handsets rather than a step-by-step process. However, it does include a bit of an explanation on that cooling heat pipe. iFixit noted that the part was more like a "copper twig," and Samsung says the pipe condenses vapor to liquid in order to keep the temperature down. The feature is meant to lend a hand with processor-heavy tasks, like gaming, dissipating heat with that pipe and a thin thermal spreader. There's a close-up look at the rest of the device as well, if you're after a different perspective than the teardown earlier in the week.

Samsung also debuted a new version of its "Over the Horizon" jingle for this year's Galaxy line. The company tapped jazz/funk band Dirty Projectors for the remake, which certainly gives the tune a new spin. In an attempt to get the song stuck in your head, the Samsung theme has lyrics for the first time as well. Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge owners can opt for this to be their ringtone or alarm and the full version of the song will be available in the Music app.

via: Engadget