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Steps closer to world peace: CAPTCHAs replaced by Cats and Games


You may have never heard the word “CAPTCHA” but you have certainly attempted (and possibly failed) to fill one out while accomplishing various online tasks. CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” It is the squiggly words (or letters and numbers) that you replicate when making purchases or comments to prove you’re not a spam bot. But people hate them: they’re hard to read and frustrating, and despite this it seems that they are universally awful. But several companies are innovating the CAPTCHA to be not only more affective but more user-friendly as well. 

Solve Media is one new company on the case. It claims that 280 million CAPTCHAS are filled out every day. If the average person takes 14 seconds to fill one out, that’s 124 years of human attention every day. Its solution was to create a platform where sites using CAPTCHAs can instead sell that space to a brand. Instead of typing in some indistinguishable scribble you can type in an easily understood campaign slogan or brand name in the ad. The site you are reading gets paid for the ad, the company advertising gets your eyeballs, and you get to make your  humanness known with less difficulty and confusion — everybody wins. 

Another solution combines everyone’s two favorite things: the Internet and cats. It’s called, naturally, CATCHA. Developed by Syd Lawrence and Rich Halliwell, Catcha is based on the theory that only humans will recognize a cat in a series of photos. When you need to prove you are not a bot, you will be presented with three Instagram photos, one of which is a cat. Choose correctly and you are on your way. The creators have distributed Catcha’s open source code to develop further or use for web security. 

Other innovations against daily CAPTCHAstrophies are CAPTCHArt and the aptly named Are You a Human. CAPTCHArt associates a funny photo with the hard-to-read CAPTCHA, illustrating them and making them easier to decipher. Are You a Human was created after developer Tyler Paxton tried to buy Miley Cyrus tickets for the daughter of a friend. A spam bot was able to bypass the standard CAPTCHA intended to stop it on the ticket merchant’s site, buying up all the Hannah Montana tickets for a scalper before Paxton could get one (Miley Cyrus and tech innovation — who knew?). The experience inspired him to create the Are You a Human CAPTCHA, which requires you to play a quick game where you drag and drop images into their correct place (sort of like digital Mr. Potato Head), and therefore prove that you are an actual human.  The game is lighthearted and a quick solution for those using the site legitimately, and increases security for websites by requiring the basic human logic spam bots lack. 

While annoying CAPTCHAs are not an online deal-breaker, consider these as quality of life innovations. It also makes the internet more fair, and more secure for publishers and distributors trying to keep spam out. And an internet with more cat photos and games, is a happier safer Internet - no head scratching required. 

The best new startups at SXSW 2012

Blame it on the rain, but unlike past conferences, there was no break-out-gotta-have-it app at SXSW Interactive 2012 like Twitter and Foursquare in years past.

What did gain a lot of attention were location-based apps that take the Foursquare model a step further, including Highlight, Glancee, Banjo, andSonar; all which help you find people you may know around you through various social networks. According to Mashable analysis, Highlight dominated social media conversations throughout the conference. 

Highlight founder and CEO Paul Davison told the AP that finding and learning about the people that surround you has always been “horribly random and inefficient.” He continued, “we don’t realize how bad it is because it’s always been that way, and we just accept it.” 

Highlight, much like the “other” location-based apps featured at the conference, tracks your location with permissions and looks out for friends or friends-of-friends from various social networks. 

Localmind is another location based app that came up again and again across social media and tech blogs. It is a Q&A platform to get you answers regarding a specific location in real time. How long is the line for that show? How good is the party? Localmind offers this kind of “social information” by asking these questions to people who have already checked in at the location or event in question. Despite the hype, only 200,000 questions have been asked since the app launched last year. The company intends to monetize by offering targeted, location-based ads.

Pixable, described as “Pinterest for Twitter and Instagram,” by AllThingsD, seemed to ride Pinterest’s wave of popularity right into the hearts of the SXSW crowd. Pixable uses hashtags, aggregation, social networks, and targeted search to find the pictures they think are most important to you. It can also track and notify you of new pictures from friends. Think of it more of a photo consumption app instead of a photo sharing app – it organizes photos from your social media networks into piles the way you might if you were sorting through an old box of photos. The company added to their hype by creating a special #SXSW feed for the best photos from the conference.

Another social-media aggregating app to receive accolades at SXSW isJust.me, a mobile-exclusive social network that is somewhat of a hybrid: you can use it to share with your social networks (with careful controls over who sees what), or as a private journal (where you only see what you choose to share in a timeline fashion), or as a  messaging platform. CEO and cofounderKeith Teare (who is also a cofounder of TechCrunch) has been presenting the app with the idea that “the address book was stolen by web 2.0,” and that the smart phone gives users the ability to regain control. The business model is really clever and symbiotic in that users can add brands they love to Just.me and receive private offers and messages from just those brands.

Tech bloggers were quick to note that some of the most successful recent startups, like Square, Path and Instagram, did not launch at SXSW (although Instagram did announce its Android platform at the conference). Perhaps buzz-worthy startups are following the advice of many VCs and investors, who suggest that entrepreneurs avoid launching at SXSW as to not get lost in the noise. The New York Times noted that popular photo sharing site Pinterest, which was the topic of many conversations at SXSW, “charmed the heartland before Silicon Valley knew it existed.” 

Highlight CEO Paul Davison told Reuters that he was just, “thrilled by the crowd’s reaction,” but is aware that SXSW isn’t always a sturdy litmus test of real-world success. “My hope is people go back to their hometowns and start telling more and more people about it,” he said.

The rise of BuzzFeed and the new state of news.

Internet sites offer high-brow news, low-brow fluff and everything in between. When Huffington Post co-founder and SEO wunderkind Jonah Peretti started BuzzFeed, it was best known for cute animals, “can-you-believe-that?” pop culture scoops, and a devoted community of “WTF” and “LOL” taggers. But he has since set his goals higher, seeking to create a hybrid model that incorporates everything from cat picture slideshows to political scoops. 

The recent naming of Ben Smith, formerly of Politico, as editor-in-chief, heralds the transition to a news diet that involves more hard journalism, but still enough LOLs and Courtney Stodden news to keep page views high. 

Whitney Jefferson, an alumna of Gawker Media was one of those recent hires, working in the verticals of pop culture and television; and feels she has joined a team with a forward-thinking business model.

“Whether it’s a follow on Twitter or subscribing to someone’s updates on Facebook, I tend to get my information from those who I value and trust on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook,” she says in an email. “I feel like it’s only a matter of time until my parent’s generation stops getting their news from crappy local papers and the evening news and decides to seek it elsewhere, even if that means it’s via their favorite local writer or anchor’s tweets or updates, but in real time.”

Jefferson notes that BuzzFeed’s strategy focuses on community engagement — its staff in this department is four times the size of her previous employers — and variety of content. “Sometimes after a downer of a story you NEED a funny cat video for some kind of catharsis. So I think BuzzFeed will excel in that kind of coverage since we clearly have the silly side down,” she says. Her bosses, Mr. Smith and Peretti agree. 

“As the world has realigned from being about portals and then search and now social, how do you build a media company for a social world?” Smith told David Carr at The New York Times. “And a big part of that is scoops and exclusives and original content, and it’s also about cute kittens in an entertaining cultural context.” Peretti explained to Carr that, “People are now used to having everything mixed together in a Facebook newsfeed. A story about the Arab Spring will be next to a picture of your sister’s new baby. Why not have a publishing site that embraces those colliding worlds?”

So far the model is working, as consumers become creators and distributors of content. BuzzFeed’s 10.8 million unique visitors in December 2011 was more than twice the number from December 2010. 

Matt Stopera, a BuzzFeed editor who started at the company as an intern in 2008 feels the company’s traction with readers is its willingness to try everything. “We’ve worked really hard for the past four years, we knows what works and what doesn’t,” Stopera says in an email. 

There is also an element of teamwork, where all employees, editorial or elsewhere, are encouraged to post as well as comment on each other’s work. ”People from the Community, Creative, and Sales departments post on the site — as does Jonah and our President Jon Steinberg,” Jefferson says. “So not only is everyone in the office posting their own buzz, but everyone is also reacting and I cannot tell you how nice it is to see your co-workers responding to your work.”  

Many other publications are taking note of Buzzfeed’s hybrid model, bringing readers a mix of silly and essential news to where they are - on Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms. 

In Capital Tom McGeveran writes, “The number of people who rely on… [social] feeds to tell them what to view on the web—to use it as not just their main but really their only portal to the wide web—is constantly increasing. Right now is the time to kick everyone else out of there. That, I believe, is what BuzzFeed is being built to do.”

The Media Council: GENERATOR: "Page One: Inside the New York Times" Screening & Panel with David Carr, Brian Stelter & David Folkenflik

paleymediacouncil:

Thursday night, the Paley Center hosted a Generator screening of “Page One: Inside the New York Times,” followed by a panel with the “stars” of the journalism doc, NYT media reporters David Carr and Brian Stelter, moderated by David Folkenflik, NPR media correspondent and editor of the companion…

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