Want To Meet Justin Bieber? Try Building a School

Original: Want To Meet Justin Bieber? Try Building a School




You want to meet Justin Bieber? Well, you’re going to have to do some good first. The Canadian pop prince has teamed up with Pencils of Promise to launch Schools 4 All, a project to provide an education to some 75 million children across the world who don’t have access to it.
The site has set up a platform — much like Crowdrise — where anyone can set up a personal fundraising page to build a school in a developing country. Pencils of Promise enlisted the help of Stayclass.org to build a custom platform. Users can customize their pages, add videos, create widgets and share updates through their social networks.
The goal was to reach a younger generation of digitally savvy users without making the process too complex — but having Justin Bieber as a prize doesn’t hurt either. The page that raises the most money will get to choose which school gets a visit from Bieber and Adam Braun, Pencils of Promise’s founder.
Having Bieber on board automatically meant a spike in participation from younger fans, the kind of people that can most relate to education issues. Schools 4 All is an example of kids helping kids and using celebrity in a smart way. Of course, anyone can start a fundraising page — parents, teachers, education enthusiasts, Bieber enthusiasts — but the demographic clearly skews young.

 

The homepage also does a great of tracking the overall progress of the project, which ends June 30. So far, Schools 4 All has raised more than $145,000, which will pay for about seven new schools to be built. A leaderboard shows which pages have raised the most money. And it isn’t a vicious fight between 13-year-olds — Pencils of Promise is encouraging participation from families, and even entire schools.
What do you think? Did Pencils of Promise and Schools 4 All get it right? Let us know in the comments.

Evernote for iOS Lets You Post Notes to Facebook & Twitter

Original: Evernote for iOS Lets You Post Notes to Facebook & Twitter

 

Note-taking platform Evernote, fresh off a splashy release of Evernote Peek, has finally updated its iPhone, iPod touch and iPad apps to support sharing notes to Facebook and Twitter.
Version 4.0.4 of Evernote’s iOS application now includes social sharing, new sorting options for notebooks and tags, landscape snippets on iPhone and iPod touch, as well as some under-the-hood tuneups to improve search speed and application performance.
Application users can now share notes to Facebook and Twitter via the iOS app by clicking the share button. By choosing to share a note, the user is making the contents of the note publicly accessible. It’s a small but important update that furthers Evernote’s new-found social direction.
Evernote has previously upgraded its note-taking apps for Android, Windows, Mac and the web with social sharing. Unfortunately, iOS users will still have to wait a bit longer to get shared notebooks and Stacks, Evernote’s folder-like feature for grouping collections of notebooks.

Facebook Collaborates With Social Browser RockMelt

Original: Facebook Collaborates With Social Browser RockMelt

 

Facebook has collaborated with RockMelt on a new version of the socially savvy web browser.
The browser, which is available for download Tuesday, includes more customizable Facebook chat integration and a built-in manager for friend requests, messages and notifications.
Facebook has also made a slight change to its site. When RockMelt users are on Facebook.com, friend requests, messages, notifications and chats will show up directly in RockMelt instead of on Facebook itself. When a user initiates a Facebook chat while on Facebook.com, it will open a RockMelt chat window.
“We give people a way to share and communicate with their friends wherever they are,” Eric Vishria, RockMelt’s co-founder and CEO, told The New York Times. “Over time, you will see a lot of product innovation come out of the partnership with Facebook.”
But product innovation, the Times points out, is not what RockMelt needs the most. The browser has only a minuscule percentage of marketshare. Could the world’s largest social network help with that?
Ethan Beard, director of platform partnerships for Facebook, said there are no plans for helping RockMelt’s distribution.
“We’re committed to working with startups like RockMelt that are transforming their industries by designing products to be social from day one,” he said in a statement.