Quick Tour Around The World: Hewlett-Packard

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Where Twitter Trending Topics Really Come From [STATS]

HP‘s Social Computing Research Group has released the results of a new study that dives into the anatomy of Twitter’s Trending Topics.
For its research, HP analyzed 16.32 million tweets on 3,361 different trending topics between September and October 2010. To get its data, it queried Twitter’s search API every 20 minutes.
HP discovered that Twitter’s Trending Topics algorithm cares more about the specific subject and reach of a tweet than who tweets it or how often it’s tweeted. Around 31% of trending topics are retweets. More importantly, 72% of those retweets come from mainstream media outlet like @cnnbrk or @nytimes. The Telegraph, ESPN, @breakingnews and The Huffington Post all made the list of top retweeted users in at least 50 different trending topics.
“What proves to be more important in determining trends is the retweets by other users, which is more related to the content that is being shared than the attributes of the users,” HP concludes in its research report. “Furthermore, we found that the content that trended was largely news from traditional media sources, which are then ampliﬁed by repeated retweets on Twitter to generate trends.”
Tweets from “influencers” have little effect on trending topics. Instead, trending topics often come from news stories tweeted from major news outlets. HP concludes that traditional media still starts the conversation around the most-discussed topics in social media, not the other way around.
HP’s researchers (led by HP Senior Fellow Bernardo Huberman) also analyzed the factors impacting the length of a trending topic on Twitter. It found that the very few trending topics stay at the top longer than 40 minutes. “We showed that the distribution of long-time trends is predictable, as is as the total number of tweets and their growth over time,” Huberman said in the company’s blog post.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

HP Unveils the Palm Pre 3, TouchPad Tablet and More [LIVE]

by Ben Parr

HP is about to launch a wave of new webOS devices, including the Palm Pre 3 and its answer to the Apple iPad.
We’re here live at HP’s webOS event in San Francisco, where the company is expected to unveil a series of new phones and a tablet called the TouchPad. HP has decked out the Herbst Pavilion in San Francisco for the main event, and the room is filled with journalists, analysts, partners, staff and guests.
HP acquired Palm last year for $1.2 billion, and now the company is looking to cash in on its investment. Can the hardware giant help Palm make a comeback in a market dominated by Android and iOS? Will the TouchPad be a viable competitor to the iPad or will it simply flop? What else does HP have up its sleeve?
We’re about to get some answers. Here are my live notes from today’s event:

HP’s WebOS event: Live Notes

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All times are in Pacific Time
9:55 AM: After waiting in line for 20 minutes, I’m finally in the Herbst Pavilion. There is HP blue everywhere.
9:58: We’re being ushered into the room now. There’s a giant screen with HP’s logo and at least 200 people packed in this room. I hear there won’t be any “special guests,” so don’t expect some type of surprise partnership announcement.
10:05: Event still hasn’t started yet. So, who wants a TouchPad? I wonder how much it will cost.
10:10: Still no event. It’s been leaked that one of the phones it’s launching today is incredibly small, like pebble-sized. At least that’s what tech blogger Robert Scoble says.
10:14: The techies are still working on the podium. And I just spotted a photographer that looks just like Justin Bieber. As you can tell, I’m getting bored waiting for HP. Show us some tablets already!
10:15: Lights are dimming, here we go.
10:15: Todd Bradley, the EVP of HP’s Personal Systems Group is on stage. he’s speaking about “firsts” — first experiences, breakthroughs, etc. He’s goign to argue that what they’ve done with webOS is a “first.”
10:18: HP made the first portable PC, the first inkjet printer, the first pocket calculator, Bradley brags.
10:21: More on HP: it ships 120 PCs per minute and 120 printers per minute.
10:22: Bradley is talking about his relationship with the Palm team. He assigned hundreds of extra engineers to an “already talented team” to take webOS to the next level.
10:23: It’s a connected world with Facebook, YouTube, Pandora, etc. But nobody has created a solution for effortless access to “that digital universe, no matter which HP device you access it on.”
10:24: We’re making something unique, that will engage and get people excited, Bradley says.
10:25: Bradley is introducing John Rubinstein, the former CEO of Palm and Senior Vice President and GM of the webOS division.
10:26: “Synergy” — Rubinstein is talking about the webOS feature…but nothing revealed quite yet.
10:28: Rubinstein just quoted one of my articles! Kind of exciting. Will upload a picture.