New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The best part about the scooter shares is that you can use your smart phone as a key (remember having to search for your Zipcar key card?). Your phone app works as a dashboard with a map, speedometer, and payment system.  Speaking of money, scooter parking is much cheaper on the wallet.

Ethical riders will be happy to know that the scooters operate with electric power, so just unplug the scooter before you ride and charge it when you drop it off.  The scooters are intended for inner city strips and a fully charged scooter can travel up to 25 miles.  Licensed drivers do not need a motorcycle license to start zipping around the city.

Scoots get the equivalent of 850 MPG. When you are riding one, it uses about half the power of your toaster to carry you around the city at 25 MPH. Even when you factor in the emissions from the power plants that make the electricity that goes into a scoot’s battery, the scoot still emits less than 2% of what a car emits when driving in the city. Nearly every part of the scoot is recyclable, including the battery.

Via Gigaom

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tommy uses Siri in order to access the touch-enabled buttons on his iPhone and voice dictation in order to add captions to his images. Like other Instagram users, Tommy also applies a filter to his images.

I don’t think I’d ever take pictures if I ask anybody what they looked like, you know, if they were any good or not.

 

Watch Tommy’s Video on how to use Instagram by clicking below. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Simon & Schuster has signed an agreement with Bookshare, a nonprofit that supplies reading materials to people with print disabilities, to provide the organization with its frontlist titles in EPub format. Every month, S&S will send Bookshare its new books from all imprints for distribution to its members.

Bookshare has 90,000 members. In a press release, Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, the non-profit organization behind Bookshare, said, “this substantial commitment brings the world one step closer to the vision of equal access to print materials for individuals with print disabilities.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

When Kindle came out with Amazon touting its accessibility features–text-to-speech for books and magazines, which was swiftly turned off by publishers fearful of losing Audiobook revenue–there was a huge backlash from the visually impaired community. According to an article from Forbes.com, “Amazon failed to fully consider what would be required for a blind person to successfully navigate the Kindle’s menus without assistance.” Basically, Amazon set it up so a blind user would need to the help of a sighted user to choose and open a book. Ugh.

It looks like Apple won’t make the same mistake. iPad comes with VoiceOver, the company’s standard accessibility feature, which is also packed into Macs. It reads text aloud and also speaks a description of menu choices and other onscreen items.

This is not a way for sneaky and cheap audiobook addicts to avoid paying for their audiobooks; it’s an important way into reading for the visually impaired. Remember that, publishers.

To check out another amazing reading device for the visually impaired, click over to our video review of the Intel Reader.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Flat World Knowledge, publisher of digital college textbooks, and Bookshare, the accessible online library for people with print disabilities, have announced a content partnership for college textbooks. Flat World, which was founded in February, publishes open college textbooks, meaning they can be custom tailored online for particular classes; so far the company has 480 participating colleges. The online books themselves are free, and Flat World’s makes money by selling things like black and white or color versions of the custom books.

The agreement initially covers eleven titles, with an additional fifty in the works to be released over the next two years. Flat World will provide XML files of their textbooks directly to Bookshare, which will make them available to its 75,000 members through its online system.

Eric Frank, co-founder of Flat World, told eBookNewser his company sees three major advantages of this deal: first, said Frank, “it’s morally the right thing to do.” Second, it’s in sync with national accessibility goals; finally, “we do believe if all other things are equal, if a faculty member is evaluating our book and someone else’s, this can be a decisive factor–this can be read by everybody.”

The usual method for providing textbooks to visually impaired students is to hand-scan them, which, according to Betsy Burgess, director of marketing for Bookshare,”introduces errors into students’ textbooks, and can cost anywhere from 11 to 1,000 dollars per book. Flatworld are the first to provide digital files from the beginning, so this means that all those kids who have print disabilities and are dropping out will have better chances at an eduction.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.