After Sandy, disaster recovery is on everyone’s minds. But for companies who can’t find the budget for a full-on business continuity plan, here’s a way to start small by focusing on your post-disaster communications plan. this ensures you keep in touch with customers and employees. Read more »
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said Hurricane Sandy was probably the company’s biggest moment, with users tagging 800,000 photos with the “#Sandy” hashtag, compared to about 85,000 photos tagged with the Super Bowl hashtag this year. He said they embraced the participatory nature. Read more »
I took two big trips in October — one fun one to Europe, and one Hurricane Sandy-induced road trip. Here are the digital tools I found most useful on the road — and the ones that were more of a hindrance. Read more »
Services like Instagram provide a huge trove of photos for traditional news outlets to enrich their coverage of major events like the election or Hurricane Sandy. A novel approach by NBC shows the opportunities and challenges of user photos. Read more »
What Sandy is teaching us about the relationship between the physical and digital worlds. Once again our digital expectations can’t keep up with the reality of physical fulfillment. Read more »
Foursquare has released a heat-map of check-ins showing how Hurricane Sandy affected local traffic in Manhattan. The southern half of the city, which suffered blackouts and flooding, took the brunt of it the impacts. Read more »
As large parts of New York City remain in a power blackout, local bars and stores are offering up their generators to help people stay connected. Here are some scenes. Read more »
In this week’s episode, we look at the Hurricane Sandy’s impact on social media and the damage caused to the web’s infrastructure as well as the big changes that happened in Apple’s executive ranks. Read more »
What should be done with Twitter prankster @ComfortablySmug? The topic sparked quite a discussion among GigaOM staffers this morning, and we decided to share it with you all, thinking you might want a glimpse into how we think about our world. Read more »
A Twitter user named @ComfortablySmug has been held up as a villain for posting fake news reports to Twitter, and his identity has been forcibly revealed by BuzzFeed — but is that, and all that it implies, an appropriate punishment for his alleged crimes? Read more »
AT&T and T-Mobile have signed a roaming deal that lets their customers in New York and New Jersey make calls on which ever network is strongest in their area. The deal helps customers who are struggling with poor service in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Read more »
New York co-working spaces and startups are opening their doors to workers who are either displaced from their offices or can’t get to work because of the crippled transit system. Read more »
Peer 1 Hosting’s small Manhattan-based staff, along with friends and customers, managed to keep the company’s generators at 75 Broad Street going with good-old fashioned brute labor. For two days they’ve hand-carried buckets of diesel fuel up 17 flights. Talk about above and beyond… Read more »
A New York man who used Twitter to send fake news reports during Hurricane Sandy is one of the city’s biggest jerks. But should he also face criminal charges? Read more »
The power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy on the east coast highlight the needs for a much greater investment in smart grid technology, energy storage systems, clean power, and ultimately a move to a more decentralized power grid architecture. Read more »
Data center sites and colocation centers in and around New York City are struggling to stay online with varying degrees of success. And there are reports of intermittent issues with undersea cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Read more »
Critics of social media like to focus on how much fake news gets circulated during events like Hurricane Sandy, but Twitter and other services are also quick to correct those kinds of reports, and have become part of an expanding ecosystem of real-time news. Read more »
Streaming media powerhouse Netflix says its experience with Amazon Web Services outages led to best practices and technology that can insulate Netflix — and potentially other companies — from the impact of weather-related and other events. Read more »
Sandy is certainly living up to its promise as a destructive force, but it’s also serving as a teaching tool for companies whose business is big data. They’re releasing new dashboards, products and case studies demonstrating how data analysis before can save lives and money later. Read more »
Hurricane Sandy’s impact made itself felt on major media properties including the Huffington Post, Gawker, and Buzzfeed. All of those sites reported outages around 7 p.m. EDT. Read more »
Tthe New York Times and the Wall Street Journal lowered their paywalls in advance of the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, and a discussion about their motivation for doing so highlights the tension between the newspaper as a vehicle for public information and as a commercial entity. Read more »
For those of us wired around the clock through digital devices, it’s ironic to realize that our parents and grandparents are the ones who have the best communication tools for a major disaster. Read more »
Data centers up and down the eastern seaboard went into emergency mode to keep up and running as Hurricane Sandy churned northwards. But the key to survivabilty is not last-minute prep but long-running practices. Read more »
