You’ve heard of colleges and universities offering online courses to students. The online class has even made it into high schools around the country. But there’s a new wave of online education breaking its way into this tech-driven era: free online education. That’s right, I said it, free. Some of the institutes and sources of this free education include Stanford and MIT. Others include the monster that is Apple and its new iTunes U and the breakthrough, YouTube heavy Khan Academy. There are even tools for educators to gather free lesson plans, tips, labs, and exercises for their students through TeacherTube.

In the 2011 fall semester, Stanford University took a test run of their free online courses. The pilot included 350,000 students in 190 countries, 43,000 of which completed a course. Just this past month, the university introduced five free online courses that included Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Natural Language Processing, Cryptography, Game Theory, and Probabilistic Graphical Models. These interactive online classes are taught by members of the Stanford faculty. The classes include video lessons followed by live quizzes and instant feedback for self-evaluation and assessment. The courses will be powered by the start-up company Coursera, which was founded by two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Although you won’t get Stanford credit for completing a course, you will receive a statement of accomplishment for your hard work. Who knows, that could stand out on a job application!

MITx is “MIT’s new online learning initiative.” Through this initiative, MIT is operating through an open-source, scalable software infrastructure. Not only is this infrastructure set up for their free online courses, but they are also testing the waters to provide the software to other universities and K-12 school systems. MIT opened enrollment for their first free online course, Circuits and Electronics (6.002x), on March 5. This course is described on the MITx website as “an on-line adaption of 6.002, MIT’s first undergraduate analog design course.” The course offers online labs, student-to-student and professor-to-student communication, individual assessment, and course material. Like the Stanford courses, displaying mastery of the subject will get you a certificate awarded by MITx.

Apple’s iTunes U has been around for quite some time; however the iTunes U app was released earlier this year to allow anyone with an iTunes account and an Apple mobile device (iPod, iPad, or iPhone) to install the iTunes app and begin downloading courses and getting their learn on. Courses available for download come from a wide range of disciplines: mathematics, science, language, business, communications, and basically any subject you would like to learn more about. The courses come from a pretty impressive lineup of institutions: Duke, Harvard, and Stanford to name a few.

With all of this free education in the world, it seems like there would be some schools taking advantage of it. Professors (if they’re OK with the course curriculum) could teach a class directly from an iTunes U course. Of course, this is not likely to happen, but then again, who knows. It will be interesting to see what the next step to tech-based education is going to be. Live streamed classes for major universities? We certainly have the technology for it.

All in all, it’s free education for those who want it. My advice… Go get it!

In March of 2012, Android users were greeted with a surprise when opening the Android Market to download content—it had been rebranded and renamed “Google Play.” A merging of the Android Market with the previously separate Google Music download application, Google Play is aimed to be Google’s one-stop-shop for applications, games, music, books, and videos.

Google Play is not an open source application—Google has included compatibility requirements limiting what Android systems can install it. Google has already reached agreements with six major movie studios, allowing for hundreds of titles to be rented through Play, and they’re working to get more to help them compete with iTunes and Netflix.

Competing with Apple’s iTunes seems to be the main factor for the switch in look and feel. Google already had music, books, and movies available in different locations, but the lack of consistent branding kept them from being identified as related entities. With the launch of Google Play, not only are they all tied thematically and deliver content that is accessible through one portal, but Google can promote one brand for increased recognition. One noteworthy change came soon after the launch when Google added “Play” to their navigation bar.

Google Play also uses cloud hosting, so a user will place all of his or her content on Google’s cloud servers, which makes it available to any browser or Android device. All purchased content is automatically saved to the cloud, so it requires no syncing. A challenge to Apple’s iCloud, Google is betting that people will prefer to use something browser based and more readily accessible than Apple’s answer, which requires installation of a desktop client.

Google Play is growing by leaps and bounds at this point. Only time will tell if it can compete with or overtake the popularity of iTunes and iCloud.

Today, we can send messages faster than we can write them. Facebook and Twitter have changed communication into a constant, global dialog. We’ve come a long way since April, 1860, when the new breakthrough in fast communication was a kid on a horse. What did high speed communication look like then? It looked something like this:

“Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.” –April 1860 Ad for Riders

Be a part of our team that will go down in the record books! Send mail cross country in only 10 days!

Our first rider has delivered mail from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California in a record 9 days and 23 hours! The route travels through Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada into the great state of California. That is about 1,900 miles of perilous territory, so how can one man and one horse cover that much ground in 10 days? Here is the answer, my friends: Relay stations are built and staffed 10-15 miles apart where riders change horses. Home stations are 90-120 miles apart where riders change and rest.

This is how we deliver the mail faster than anyone or anything has ever done before!

On April 25^th, Renaissance Executive Forums and Dynamic Advisory Solutions (DAS) are hosting the CEO Mastermind Event for business owners and top executives.

Keynote speaker Ren Carlton will present “Your CPA Is Not Your CFO! But Your Bookkeeper Is Closer Than You Think…” Carlton will discuss the importance of a qualified CFO to financial success.

This event, free to top executives, is an excellent opportunity for networking with other entrepreneurs. Attendees will receive a signed copy of Carlton’s book, Profitpreneurship: Creating a Business that Produces Outstanding Financial Results, and access to the Chief Executive Forum.

The CEO Mastermind Event will take place April 25^th, 2012, at Automation Alley, 2675 Bellingham, Troy, MI 48083. Registration and a continental breakfast will begin at 8:30 a.m. and the event will be from 9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.

You can contact Media Genesis for complimentary tickets. Limited quantities and first come first serve!

Media Genesis is a proud sponsor of the CEO Mastermind Event.

I remember before the internet (yes, there was once a time) when I’d rip out images that inspired me, either from a magazine or *gasp* a book… don’t judge! Now, I just save everything to my computer or phone. But all those inspiring, interesting, or inviting bits and pieces are distributed and don’t offer the satisfaction of that bulletin board with its dozens of ragged-edged artifacts externalizing and recombining my many interests.

Now, there’s Pinterest. It’s the hottest new social network, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen yet (unless you’re one of its 13 million users). Pinterest is a digital bulletin board that lets you organize and share all the things you stumble upon on the web in a uniquely visual way.

For example, if you come across a pair of great shoes or an unbelievable picture of a thunder storm, you don’t have to abstract it with a bookmark that you’ll never click. Instead, you pin it on Pinterest with the click of a button, and it’s saved for you there, nestled amongst all your other favorite things.

Not only can you ‘pin’ things from the web, but you can browse and ‘repin’ them from pinboards created by other people. People use pinboards to generate new ideas or share their love for web design, cooking, building, interior design, and more.

You can assemble a pinboard to plan an upcoming vacation, arrange your research statistics to get a new eye on the matter, create a vivid wish list, see if that sofa goes with that rug and the color of the walls, or create your altar to Hedy Lamarr.

With $37.5 M in funding raised since October 2011, Pinterest is growing fast. The number of daily users has increased by 145 percent in 2012. It’s one of the fastest growing social networks yet, and according to Lemon.ly, it’s “generating more referral traffic to websites than YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn combined.”

So, who uses Pinterest? In the US, 83 percent of users are women, but in the UK, only 44 percent of users are women. Most users are between the ages of 25 and 45. The diversity of these numbers tells us one fact: Pinterest has broad appeal.

It’s time to forget the saying, “A picture is worth a 1,000 words.” It’s more like, a picture is worth 1,000 ideas! I just learned how to make hot dog spaghetti spiders (use your imagination) from a picture on Pinterest! What will you be inspired to do?

Have I pinned your interest? Check out our pinboard at Pinterest.com/MediaG/Geekery

@TweetSmarter once tweeted, “Twitter is a place where one person can help another person anywhere in the world.” But does Twitter deliver on the promise of borderless communication?

It turns out, at least for now, that Twitter does not connect the people of the world regardless of geography. According to “Geography of Twitter Networks,” a study by Wellman, Gruzd, and Takhteyev, 39 percent of our Twitter ties are within 100 km (about 62 miles). And the best predictor of non-local connections between tweeters is the number of airline connections between their locations.

Apparently, the movement of human ideas follows the same pattern as the movement of human bodies. Speculation abounds about why Twitter doesn’t break down traditional boundaries to human connections. One reason may be that Twitter has only been around for six years and other social networks, like Facebook, are not much older. The generation of Twitter-using adults is still rooted in the old ways, not having grown up in this brave new world.

These geographic boundaries are not necessarily bad. Twitter users have not, for the most part, completely abandoned the real world. We still like to go out on the town, so we might follow users who can tell us where to find the good shows or the best happy hour or how to avoid the traffic jam on I-75.

As far as air travel is concerned, there are reasons that some cities are deeply connected. They share residents, industries, and interests, so it naturally follows that they’ll follow each other. Wellman, Gruzd, and Takhteyev consider that “flight connections themselves reflect the structure of the world city system, and that Twitter ties are influenced by this structure.”

In addition to physical distance and ease of travel, there are other factors that affect the connections we make, including a user’s language. Sharing a language does make it a little easier to share a thought.

The majority of connections seem to be rooted in the most ancient of human social networks, face-to-face communication. I predict that this will change and our connectivity will diversify as we gain generational distance from the world before instantaneous, multidirectional, worldwide communication.

In the U.S., 22 billion streaming videos are watched online each month. Netflix has almost 22 million subscribers to their streaming content and Hulu has more than 40 million. We love our online entertainment, but streaming is still only reaching one-third of TV’s audience.

There are a few reasons that online TV has not taken more of an audience segment. Not everyone is tech savvy, smart TVs have cumbersome interfaces (53 percent of smart TVs are never connected to the internet), and online viewing is a targeted search experience rather than one that lets the user browse and discover. Finally, there’s the unfulfilled demand for live TV.

TV isn’t just about entertainment; it’s about community. We want to watch the game or news or whatever when it’s happening. Most people still turn away from the internet and back to traditional television services when they want to watch something live because there is a limited amount of live content currently available. This will change, and early adopting content providers (who can deliver in a user friendly way) will be the winners.

Companies like NeuLion are tapping into this market by offering live and on-demand content that can be accessed on any internet-enabled device. They’re making deals with universities to deliver games over the internet for nearly 175 college athletic programs. They only have niche content, but they’re getting the right idea.

Unfortunately, live content is still rare enough that it makes news. Content providers will advertise that this game or that political event is going to be streamed live on the internet. And we still don’t have proper broadcast TV on the internet in the U.S. because of legal snares.

Our desire for live content will be the driving force for someone to deliver it over the internet in a user friendly way rather than the app piecemeal we have today. That future could be through a broadcast system or it could be a third party content aggregator, but it’s coming. Stay tuned.

(Southfield, Mich.) — Oakland Regional Hospital is celebrating the launch of its new website – www.oaklandregionalhospital.com.

Oakland Regional Hospital, located in Southfield, is a physician-owned hospital. Oakland Regional Hospital has two off-site provider-based locations in Warren, Oakland Regional Macomb Center, an outpatient surgery center, and Oakland Regional Imaging Center.

Oakland Regional Hospital teamed up with Media Genesis, a Troy Internet services firm, to design, build and program the new website.  Key elements of the site included physician profiles, patient resources, referring physician resources, information on each service they provide and an enhanced visual navigation named “Improve My Lifestyle.” The site was programmed to give patients the ability to easily find information on their procedure and make appointments with specific physicians. Also, the new Career Center section of the website has made prospective employees able to apply for open positions.

Media Genesis also incorporated a Drupal Content Management System (CMS), which has given Oakland Regional Hospital the ability to add content frequently and quickly. Outreach to existing patients and potential patients was also made easier with the new site through a News & Events section that highlights the hospital’s classes and events, stories in the news, press releases and newsletters.

The physicians of Oakland Regional Hospital specialize in orthopaedic surgeries including hand surgeries, total joint replacements, and work and sports injuries. Oakland Regional Hospital’s other service lines include vascular surgery, podiatry, ophthalmology, plastic surgery, GI, and Pain Management.

Media Genesis is one of the largest and oldest independent web development companies in Michigan, specializing in services ranging from consulting, interactive multimedia, audio/video, application development, E-learning, online promotion and hosting. For more information, visit www.mediaG.com.

(TROY, Mich.)—The National Chamber Program (NCP) and the National Commerce Group (NCG) partnered with Media Genesis Inc. to provide chambers of commerce with easy to use online marketing galleries to produce marketing collateral for their members.

By leveraging collective buying power, the NCP and NCG lower the cost of supplies and services for their partners and members. The online marketing galleries allow participating chambers to communicate these savings to their members by customizing promotional documentation and emails from within a single online tool.

“Working closely with the NCP and NCG teams, we collaboratively developed a tool that makes it easier for chambers and organizations to take control of their marketing assets,” Antoine Dubeauclard, President of Media Genesis, said. “The NCP and NCG supply the promotional material and the organizations customize it to fit their branding. It’s a win-win.”

Chambers and organizations can use these tools to customize PDF flyers and HTML emails with their organization’s logo and contact information. The co-branded marketing collateral allows diverse NCP or NCG participants to offer professional, consistent design.

Media Genesis created the marketing galleries as custom PHP developments to provide the NCP and NCG with dynamic asset repositories and digital asset management capabilities as well as a toolkit for developing consistent, co-branded documentation and email.

Media Genesis is a leading Internet services firm based in Troy, Michigan. Media Genesis serves more than 300 companies and nonprofit organizations. An in-house team provides a wide range of services including web design, search engine optimization, social networking and design and development of e-learning systems, mobile applications, intranets and content management systems. For web development consulting and online strategy, visit www.mediaG.com.

If you didn’t know about SOPA before January 18^th, you might not understand why your son failed his report on Edwin Vose Sumner. The internet was on strike, and he couldn’t look anything up on Wikipedia, which I assume is what you just did.

The largest online protest in history included, among its estimated 75,000 participating sites, Wikipedia, Google, Vimeo, Flickr, Mozilla, WordPress, Wired, Craigslist, MineCraft, reddit, and on and on. Some of the sites went completely dark, and others just censored their logo or something in between. They were protesting a couple bills that were coming up for discussion: SOPA and PIPA.

The full names of these bills are The Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA, and its mouthful of a sister bill, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). I wonder how long it took legislators to come up with that clever acronym (PROTECT Intellectual Property Act).

The stated purpose of these bills was to give more power to those who police the web in order to prevent copyrighted works from being stolen. When artists have their work stolen and profited on by those without the will or ability to create anything of value for themselves, we all lose. The world becomes a bleaker and less creative place. Supporters of the bills include the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

So, what’s wrong with a bill to stop online piracy and copyright violation? The online community didn’t blow up in opposition to the rights of media creators, but where the burden fell and what that meant for the internet. SOPA would punish the websites that host the material rather than just the people stealing it. Should Facebook be blocked when one of its 800,000 users uploads copyrighted material? If so, goodbye social networks.

The online world gives the average person the ability to create and distribute music, books, movies, designs, and more. SOPA and PIPA are not expressly intended to stop you from sharing user created content, but the devil, as they say, is in the details. The platforms we use to share our content (YouTube, Tumblr, Wikipedia) would need to police their users, millions or billions of us, at their expense unless they want to risk being shut down when some dip uploads this summer’s blockbuster romantic comedy.

It would become easier for video and audio distributing sites to only distribute content from safe organizations like the studios and labels associated with the MPAA and RIAA. If this nightmare scenario played out, it would reduce the participatory nature of the internet, making it another way for companies to distribute content. A generation of individual content producers would revert back to being consumers. Mind you, the bill’s supporters say that this is just paranoia, and that may be true, but the bill does provide a level of power that would make such a scenario possible, and it’s therefore not thought to be right for the internet that is.

While SOPA and PIPA have been shelved, it’s not over. Other countries are passing SOPA-like legislation, and there will likely be similar bills popping up here in the near future.

I don’t want people making millions off of other people’s hard work, because I’m a producer of content. I also want the internet to remain a place where I can share, promote, or sell my content. I want to ensure that people stay motivated to make cool stuff. We may need better protection for content creators to make sure their copyrights are not violated and they have a platform to distribute the cool stuff they make, but we need these protections for all content creators rather than just those backed by millions of dollars.