“He’s so authentic,” says Bing Gordon, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which led the $1 million series A funding round for Davis’ startup, Spare Ch@nge. “And I love that he’s removed all the complicated infrastructure and platforms around crowdfunding and taken it back to its essence: asking people directly for money.”

“This is the new wave in social,” says Mike Arrington, founder of Tech Crunch, which recently awarded Davis first prize in its Disrupt competition. Arrington is also an early stage investor in Spare Ch@nge, although he declined to disclose the amount of his investment.

When asked how he plans to enable that level of direct interaction between people Davis says: “You’re sort of salting my game here. No one’s gonna believe I really need change if I’m sitting here being interviewed by a chick in a suit.”

Authentic, indeed.

Photo credit

The post Homeless Guy Woos Silicon Valley VCs with Low-Tech Crowdfunding Startup appeared first on The Faster Times.

Hordes of interns left behind during the nine-day SXSW technology and music festival are still wandering the streets of Austin, attempting to hand out free sunglasses and stickers to passerby or find a couple of free tacos for their bosses. According to industry sources, most of the interns were left behind when their bosses abruptly realized that they were really fucking hungover and that their flight was leaving 90 minutes — although one executive at a major New York ad agency admitted that they simply hadn’t bothered to buy their interns return flights. “We carefully reviewed our trip budget, and it came down to paying for return flights for the interns or paying for our hotel bar tab,” admitted the executive. “Safe to say, I think we made the right decision. Although where the hell is my mail and coffee?”

The wandering interns have continued to follow the directions given to them on the first day of the festival by their bosses, before they started drinking for “biz-dev purposes” and forgot that the interns existed. “The same kid keeps trying to hand me sunglasses made by some stupid app every time I leave by bar,” complained Dan Franklin, a bartender at Maggie Mae’s. “I felt bad because the kid looked like he was in bad shape and needed a burger or something. But every time I asked him if he wanted to come in, he just responded by asking me to follow his app on Twitter.”

The post Interns Left Behind During SXSW Still Wandering Streets of Austin appeared first on The Faster Times.

Photo Credit: Orbitz

Target and Best Buy recently announced they’ll be matching online competitors’ prices this holiday season in their latest bid to draw back customers from leading online retailers.

Contrary to what some are predicting, brick and mortars may not be completely doomed. They’re on a mission to prove that “retail therapy” offers a more personalized experience that tops eBay’s. Word of advice: don’t ever lose your phone—mobile’s leading the way in this revolution.

Check out the top five reasons why you might actually leave the couch to go holiday shopping again someday soon:

1. The Age of Mobile Deals

“May I help you?” Um, probably not. One study revealed that, “45 percent of shoppers (up from 35 percent last year) said online peer reviews” play a major role in their decision to purchase a product. The good news for retailers (and snubbed sales associates) is that 43 percent of those people are pretty likely to snatch up promos and coupons. Expect too-good-to-pass-up deals on things you never knew you needed, and you’ll have to show up in store to get them.

2. Shopping is Personal

Back in the good old days, people went to local Mom-and-Pop shops where managers understood their customers. Today, shoppers can no longer expect to be greeted by name and shown a personalized suggestion from retailers. But that’s the experience we’ve grown to expect shopping online. How can retail compete? Through information gathering from social media, purchase history, and location-based marketing. Barnes and Noble and Starbucks are doing this now, with things like personalized book recommendations on receipts and mobile customer rewards.

3. Goodbye, Wallets

Fumbling around for exact change at the register and enduring death glares from those behind you, will be something from the retail stone age. Lines will be a lot shorter with everyone breezing through with nifty electronic “proximity payments.”

Again, you really don’t want to lose your phone. Ever.

4. A Shopper’s Testing Ground

Shopping trips shouldn’t require survival kits. According to Kevin Sterneckert, a Gartner analyst, “Retail stores will be there for a ‘touch and feel’ experience only.” This means long lines will be a thing of the past, and products will be shipped directly to customers. Now there’s something online doesn’t offer: the chance to test a product in person before you buy. Oh, and go ahead and wear those stylish-yet-incredibly-uncomfortable shoes out shopping—small store stock means less space, so you won’t have to trek through miles of women’s underwear and jewelry to find the electronics.

5. The Customer is Always Right…No, Really

Forrester analyst Nigel Fenwick recently told The Street, “Retail is becoming less about stacking boxes high and selling items at the right price and more about building an engaging experience for the customer.” The same article later suggests that stores are going to need to offer items,that are, “unique to the physical store.” Brick and mortar retailers might also start giving customers say in what they stock, a method called “crowdsourcing,” and it’s firmly rooted in social media’s “like” movement. According to Mashable, crowdsourcing is “the ultimate empowerment of the consumer,” and it’s one of the reasons why people love online shopping.

Might be time to take brick and mortar off the naughty list, shoppers.

The post Why In-Store Shopping Could Be Cool Again appeared first on The Faster Times.

The Siri I’m speaking with is a 24 year-old adult film actress who has been described as “the Christina Hendricks of porn.” She registered her stage name in June 2011, four months before Apple released its personal assistance app.

With a Tumblr blog (NSFW) and a flourishing Twitter account, Siri is one of many actors in the adult film industry using social media as a branding tool. CNN recently reported that 90% of porn stars are on Twitter. This combination of sex and tech is a social media geek’s wet dream.

Siri didn’t create an online presence overnight, but after her first year as an aspiring porn star, she has gained 18,600 Twitter followers, and her blog gets more than 100 questions and comments each month. There are a lot of upstart brands that would kill for those metrics.

With the help of her husband, Siri spends an estimated five hours each day updating her online profiles, and it has paid off. Because of her popularity with fans, Siri was voted Miss Freeones Best Newcomer for 2012.

You may think that building a social media following is easy when you’re selling sex, but aspiring porn stars trying to establish a buzz face plenty of challenges. The biggest hurdle: getting in front of a camera for a studio film. Siri created her Twitter account last summer and spent six months planning how to launch her career before moving from Texas to California. Her first scene wasn’t released until this past February.

“I would guess that I had less than 100 followers from the time I created the account until attending the AVN Awards in the last week of January,” Siri said. “Once I started shooting, fleshing out the blog, and posting photos of things, I was steadily gaining followers. A couple weeks into my first month of shooting, I remember waking up and realizing I’d hit 1,000 followers. That was the first big landmark.”

After the initial surge of support, Siri developed a social media strategy that provides her fans with what they care about the most.

“I don’t post a lot of random tweets. It’s usually a redirect link that goes to a blog post with a photo, an update about what I’m shooting, or a video clip. I almost always post actual content.”

On Siri’s blog, you’ll find naked photos mixed in with answers to fan questions and insightful opinion pieces. You can read about her support for gay marriage, her views on Internet piracy, and porn star karaoke nights.

Porn stars who moonlight as social media marketers are quickly changing the landscape of the industry. Adult videos used to be distributed only on VHS tapes and DVDs, but now, porn stars can market and distribute their own content, building a fan base that could lead to higher salaries from porn studios.

For porn stars who bare all on camera and then communicate individually with fans, social media can have its drawbacks regarding an invasion of privacy. Siri encountered plenty of “trolls” who made disrespectful remarks about her occupation or body just to upset her. The few instances genuine fans asked provocative questions, she politely declined to answer and set firm boundaries about what aspects of her personal life are off-limits. Surprisingly, it worked.

“The interesting things about these fans is that while they may not have realistic expectations of how well they can get to know me, they’re usually the most loyal fans,” Siri explained. “The last thing they want to do is annoy me or anger me, so when I do set a boundary, they’ve all been very respectful of that.”

Since Twitter and blogging are relatively new to the industry, porn stars are still figuring out how to best use the technology to carve out successful careers. Some have capitalized on social media to break into mainstream entertainment. Sasha Grey (370,000 followers) had a legion of fans before starring in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience and landing a role in “Entourage.” James Deen (80,000 followers) was recently featured in GQ and will appear alongside Lindsay Lohan in the upcoming Paul Schrader film, The Canyons.

Siri is open to acting in non-pornographic films, but she’s not looking to go “mainstream.”

“Ultimately I want to have my own membership site,” she said. “My greatest hope is [to have] my own production company, because I want to have a hand in everything at some point.”

With a rapidly growing social media presence, Siri can accomplish her goals sooner rather than later. According to Family Safe Media, 28,528 Internet users are viewing pornography every second. That number may devastate parents and stiff Republicans across the country, but it also shows how big the market is for this new, entrepreneurial breed of porn star.

Siri is giving “start-up” a whole new meaning.

The post Social Media Helps Legitimize the Porn Industry appeared first on The Faster Times.

David had the good fortune to marry a writer who willingly shares of herself for a living. Despite my protests, he insisted we not post our wedding photos, wanting to keep some semblance of the sacred to ourselves. Not sharing our pictures meant that strangers wouldn’t even get a glimpse—we had 15 people at the ceremony and no one but the photographer had a camera in hand.

As a compromise, I posted one photo of me in my dress. It was taken through a mirror from quite a distance, but two things are clear: I look very, very happy; and my left palm is resting delicately on my slightly protruding belly.

A few hours after the shot went live, a friend chatted me up: “Are you pregnant?”

I haven’t spoken to this person since the sixth grade, when we co-choreographed a dance to the New Kids on the Block and performed it at the school’s lip sync competition. We lost touch more than 20 years ago—until, like so many of my generation, we found each other again through the long tendrils of the Internet.

In typical chat form, the question appeared as is, without pleasantries. There was nothing to buffer the stark fact of it, which, at 34, even asked by the closest friends in the best of circumstances, is fraught. (Let me add that this friend has two beautiful kids I’ve only seen online and will surely never meet.)

Why I couldn’t ignore such an inquiry by a virtual stranger in a medium that demands nothing of me will give you a glimpse into my psyche, but I worried (I worried!) about being rude. After all, she had “liked” so many of my posts over the years, congratulated me on my engagement and wedding, reposted many of my essays. I felt tethered to her in some real way, as I do to so many of the hundreds of people I read about regularly but haven’t seen in decades. “No!” I wrote. “Just fat, I guess!”

“Noooooooooooo,” she insisted. “It’s the hand on the belly.”

I took a peek at the image in question: yes, the ever-so-slight roundness could be misconstrued as a three- or four-month-along pregnancy. I reassured her that it was just…my body.

“Is it in your plans?”

In a world where people post photos of their fetuses, keep us abreast of their labor (“already 2cm dilated!”), share news of their dying parents and ask for love and support in their surgery or mourning, isn’t it natural to ask someone—a person you once upon a time loved very much—whether they’re pregnant, or wanting to be? Why not, when you’ve “shared in” so many otherwise private happenings in their lives?

Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to walk away.

It isn’t news that in our increasingly public world many of us don’t know where to draw the line. Perhaps because I have recently moved abroad and feel my isolation more acutely, these online friendships have taken on a weightier significance—they have, at least temporarily, had to stand in for my complex flesh-and-bones relationships. Logging on once felt like checking in with a warm, extended family—fun, often informative, but basically innocuous. Now, the one-dimensionality of these connections feels bizarre and dangerous, like taking a slice off someone’s face and calling it a face. Whether this face is beautiful and successful, or failing and suffering is irrelevant—both are the distortions I falsely believe I am getting to know, one click and comment at a time.

Lately, when I hang out with friends I have had more contact with online than in our three-dimensional world, I feel myself pushing through a wall of information to get at the truth, the muck of it under the veneer, the actual person with a delicate heart. And I likewise find myself pulling back from commenting on acquaintances’ darkest troubles, reminding myself that it should never be that easy to insert yourself into a narrative that has more dimensions than the format could ever contain.

This pregnancy inquiry was, of course, a somewhat isolated incident—not everyone asks such things online, but increasingly they do. Because of what we publish about ourselves—and I am as guilty as anyone—we assume a level of comfort and familiarity that is not only potentially insulting, but misses the real point of connecting: to be privy to the intricacies and nuances of another’s life, the mess of trying to be a human being in a world with other human beings; to cultivate relationships where you earn the right to ask, and even seemingly simple answers can never simply be “liked.”

The post Facebook Knock-Up appeared first on The Faster Times.

Photo Credits: Dead Zone

When I was in elementary school, computers had their own room. By the time Facebook emerged in high school, it was banned. School before college had always seemed anti-social network, anti-tech, projector-obsessed, and hopelessly behind the times.

Well, that’s all about to change.

A recent survey of 883 parents and 812 K-12 teachers by the Leading Education by Advancing Digital Commission showed that 96 percent of teachers and 91 percent of parents think that technology is more important than ever in American classrooms. Parents and teachers aren’t as hostile to the idea of introducing technology into classrooms, and even elementary students seem to need tablets and iClickers to learn these days.

Some claim technology threatens a teacher’s role, is distracting, and an unwise expense. But in a tech-steeped world, how could archaic classrooms prepare children for a globally connected, tech savvy world? Technology may be the “new kid” in American class rooms, but here are some reasons why its here to stay:

1. Learning Isn’t Just About Gathering Information Anymore

According to Edutopia, there are four key components of learning: active engagement, participation in groups, frequent interaction and feedback, and connection to real-world experts.

Memorization and simple fact-based research aren’t on that list: our access to information, now just a click away, means students should use information instead of simply gathering it. One NY Times article emphasizes the pointlessness of students memorizing facts and figures they can “now answer with their phones.” Technology isn’t making study time easier. Students have to make connections to the material they’re learning. They’re being asked to employ “synthesis and critical thinking and creativity, not just memorization.” When I think about the long hours I spent compiling information about “state birds” and “past presidents,” I can’t help but think about how much more constructive those assignments would have been if I focused on whys and hows, instead of whats and whos. Technology begs a new question: what will you do with that information, now that everyone has access to it?

2. Tech Increases Student Engagement

Einsteins of the world aside, math and science have long been doomed as tortuous “this-is-pointless-when-will-I-use-this-in-the-real-world” subjects that struggle to capture students’ attention. With technologically savvy teaching, students can see where “science and math intersect with the real world careers they never thought about…[the subjects] can translate into an interest in careers in those fields, an area where the U.S. [has] been lagging behind,” according to Paulo Bliksten, an assistant professor of education at Stanford University. Las Vegas first grade teacher, Alissa Lindner, works at a school that has integrated several computer programs into its curriculum. She is quick to point out the benefits because, “Concepts become riveting and motivating when children can create graphic organizers with hyperlinks demonstrating what they have learned through video of their projects and links to solid sources,” Lindner says. “They can connect with other classrooms across the nation and learn together.”

3. Tech Is a “Tool,” Not A Teacher Replacement

Teachers aren’t just the “gatekeepers” of knowledge anymore—and it’s not a bad thing. A recent article in the Guardian points out that, “Students no longer need to learn things second hand, they can go straight to the expert, leaving classroom teachers more time to prepare follow-up material or embellish this learning in different ways.” Teachers don’t have to waste class time ensuring students learn facts they’ll forget by freshman year— instead, they can have students discuss these facts in a meaningful context. Such active engagement is preparation for higher education, where your professors expect your papers to exhibit comprehensive understanding of a subject, not just your ability to regurgitate information. In-class connections with experts and industry professionals, as well as with other students worldwide, are another bonus to technology-filled classrooms. Wired classrooms more adequately reflect the way the world works—greater connectivity and global collaboration are now the facts of everyday life. Technology also serves to aid students in ways traditional teaching, working as the great “equalizer” by enabling children with learning disabilities to work in “learning paths” at a pace specifically tailored for them. Lindner sees technology as another “tool” to meet student needs, and that the power of technology lies in knowing its limitations:

A computer only knows how a child did on a particular assignment on a particular day. They cannot diagnose learning disabilities. They do not know the child may have missed breakfast and was kicked out of their apartment with their family the night before. [Computers] cannot account for the long-term effects of being verbally or physically abused at home…I have seen the greatest results by working one-on-one with a child who realized I truly valued their success, and [they] began to respect their own insight. Self-motivation and respect of a [child’s] contributions cannot be “programmed,” only nurtured through human interaction.

What’s The Holdup?

With all of the benefits, why are some American schools still lagging behind? Simple: cost and training.

Although technology integration can mean long-term savings for schools and families (greater online class offerings, for example), it’s difficult for many cash-strapped schools to come up with money to fund tablets/iPads/electronic whiteboards. In fact, according to a recent report by MSNBC, cost is the “primary limiting factor, more than learning how to use the new tools or any shortcomings in the tools themselves.” While offering technology in schools that serve low-income families—a group unlikely to have broadband access at home— is vital, limited resources mean they are often the last institutions to see upgraded technology. Not only is the equipment expensive, but when teachers do get new tech, they need to know how to use it. This requires more funding and time investments for training and support. The MSNBC report highlights the fact that, although teachers agree that technology makes their “job easier and [improves] the students experience,” a recent PBS-funded VeraQuest survey of K-12 teachers showed that only “21 percent felt they had the right level of technology in the classroom.”

The bottom line? Tech will (and should) come to American schools. Schools must prepare their students for current world realities, and let’s face it—computers, social media, and google aren’t going anywhere soon.

The post The iClassroom: Ready or Not, Here It Comes appeared first on The Faster Times.

Fact-checking and Paul Ryan, BFFs by accident?

News media taking fact checking seriously?

The Paddy Chayefsky classic, Network. Which includes both the immortal “mad as hell” line, but also… “I’m a man without a corporation.”

Okay, there’s been a slow build to a possible rebirth of fact-checking in the news. That had been kept alive quietly by a few news outlets, mostly notably The Daily Show and the Colbert Report and media commentators including Jeff Jarvis, Arianna Huffington, and Jay Rosen in #presspushback.

(Seriously, Stewart’s work, in particular, has been highly professional; note CNN leaves it there and an unedited interview with Chris Wallace.)

Recently, we saw Soledad O’Brien possibly risking her job, check out CNN Actually Fact-Checks A Politician; Hilarity Ensues.

The Paul Ryan speech has now triggered a spasm of fact-checking; perhaps the best summary was recently done by Ari Melber.

What happened?

I’ve been speaking to news publishers, editors, and reporters for years.

They’re concerned that people don’t generally trust news outlets anymore, and want help restoring trustworthiness. (I guess it’s a source of desperation that they ask me.)

They’re doing it quietly, since they’re fighting factions that regard fact-checking and journalistic ethics as quaint relics.

However, they feel that Paul Ryan just went too far at the RNC convention. Check out: Why Paul Ryan thought he could get away with lying: 6 theories.

And Media Shift does a real good job explaining Why Fact-Checking Has Taken Root in This Year’s Election:

Take Paul Ryan’s convention address last week. Ryan offered several misleading statements and a few obvious lies — falsehoods that he had to know were false — although there’s nothing new about politicians lying.

Just look at Ryan’s fellow running mates: Sarah Palin lied about the Bridge to Nowhere in her convention address, for example, while during a nationally televised debate, Dick Cheney falsely said he had never met John Edwards, and Edwards falsely charged that the Bush administration lobbied to cut combat pay. They faced mild corrections and very little collateral damage for those high-profile statements.

This time, however, reporters did not let Ryan off the hook by noncommittally airing criticism (“opponents disagreed with his claims”), or reducing corrections to one of those stand-alone sidebars evaluating distortions (“three Pinocchios for the deficit commission history”).

Instead, several authoritative accounts of Ryan’s address decided that his falsehoods were a key part of the news Ryan made…

So, maybe what’s changed is that surviving serious professional news people are “as mad as hell and not taking it anymore.”

Beside Paul Ryan’s speech, we’ve seen this building among the most professional people in news media, including Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, and Will McAvoy. (Yes, the latter’s a fictional character, but he’s been a seriously inspirational force.)

It also helps that Poynter Institute, which is all about professional journalism, will be holding a conference about the restoration of journalistic ethics this fall. (Disclaimer: I’m sponsoring it.)

So the deal is that a minority of news people are risking a lot to get serious about their job.

This could be doomed, or a rebirth of news media. They need our help.

If you think it matters, tell me, and do stuff like Sharing and Retweeting the best of fact-checking. Maybe start with the links above?

The post Paul Ryan and the Rise of the Fact-Checker appeared first on The Faster Times.

The new phone is 20% lighter than the iPhone 4S, crafted out of glass and aluminum. It also includes a boosted 4-inch Retina Display, “the most accurate display in the industry” according to Phil Schiller. The new display has 44% more color saturation than the 4S display and touch sensors have now been integrated into the display itself. Impressive, but hardly surprising.

Perhaps the greatest improvement on the iPhone 5 is its battery life: 8 hours of 3G talk time, and 8 hours of 3G and LTE web browsing. Improvements have also been made to the iPhone’s audio system, with a smaller but more powerful speaker, and microphones on the front, back and bottom of the device. The Dock Connector that has had rumors flying around the net is here — it’s all digital and called “Lightning.” Maybe the only surprise is that the device does not include an integrated NFC chip, as was rumored. As expected, the iPhone 5 will support Sprint, Verizon and AT&T’s LTE networks. The new chipset — the A6 — is purportedly two times faster than the iPhone 4S’s A5 chip.

Small advances were made to the iPhone’s camera — it is still an 8-megapixel camera, but it reportedly has improved low-light performance and features 1080p video capture. Users can also now take snapshots while shooting video.

As expected, the iPhone 5 will support Sprint, Verizon and AT&T’s LTE networks. The new chipset — the A6 — is purportedly two times faster than the iPhone 4S’s A5 chip.

Pre-orders for the iPhone 5 will begin this Friday, and the device will ship to customers starting on September 21st.

But the new iPhone wasn’t the only product Apple unveiled today, they also revealed several new iPods.

As Chris Taylor of Mashable put it, “Basically, the new iPod Touch is the iPhone 5 — without the phone, a slightly slower chip, and a slightly smaller megapixel camera.” You can also attach a camera strap to the back of the touch, and it shoots 1080p video. The battery on the iPod touch has 40 hours of music playback, 8 hours of video. It’s 6.1mm thin, approaching Nano territory.

Speaking of the Nano, Apple also unveiled the latest in their diminutive iPod model, which is 40% thinner than its predecessor. The new Nano has 30 hours of playback in its battery, widescreen video, and what Chris Taylor calls “TiVo-like functionality” — meaning you can pause live radio. Its 2.5 inch display is the biggest ever for the Nano.

Apple also announced their changes to iTunes, which includes built-in cloud features and Facebook integration. Concerts will also now appear on artist pages in the iTunes store.

Another Apple event is rumored for October, so surprises could yet be in store. It’s likely the much-rumored iPad Mini could be announced then.

Image: TechCrunch

The post Apple Unveils iPhone 5, New iPod Models appeared first on The Faster Times.

Indeed, the quarterback of the new lineup has been stocked with the usual Kindle features: large screen HD with 8.9” display, Dolby audio, dual stereo speakers, “the fastest Wi-Fi,” 4G LTE wireless, and a one-year 4G data package for $49.99. The Kindle Fire’s glory doesn’t just rest on what it can do—it lies in the shiny new hardware and blinding speed.

Amazon has some more budget-friendly alternatives available– the Kindle Fire HD 8.9”, a Wi-Fi only model with no 4G, rings up at $299; the Kindle Fire HD, the smaller, “world’s most-advanced 7-inch” tablet,” is only $199.

The upcoming holiday season bears tidings of the new e-readers: the Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Paperwhite 3G. As the sleek name implies, these e-readers show off higher contrast and 62% more pixels, with a built-in front light for easy reading everywhere (by Michelle Branch). The Kindle Paperwhite starts at $119, and the Kindle Paperwhite 3G at $179.

If you’re feeling nostalgic, the standard Kindle (the lightest and smallest e-reader) has been re-released, and updated with improved fonts and faster page turns. This Kindle starts at only $69.

The classic standard Kindle may be available for shipment now, but all Fires and Paperwhites are currently only available for pre-order. They’ll certainly arrive in time for the holidays; the Fire HD 8.9” and HD 8.9” 3G (the real money makers), are expected to ship November 20th. This is big news from Amazon, whose branding of the Kindle Fire as “the best tablet,” is perhaps the most straightforward way of earning that reputation.

Come winter, will you be curling up to the Fire?

The post The Kindle Fire’s Superior 4G appeared first on The Faster Times.

Photo Credit: Postcard Junky WordPress

According to the U.S. Conference of Mayor’s 2008 report, “12 of the 25 [US] cities surveyed reported an increase in homelessness due to foreclosures…” And it’s not slowing down. A 2012 report by the National Alliance to End Homelessness found that “foreclosure activity continued to increase with nearly 50,000 more homes in foreclosure in 2010 than in 2009.”

“Homelessness” is difficult to quantify, but there’s no denying that this problem, temporary or long-term, is on the rise–and today’s homeless need access to technology more than ever.

After basic necessities like food, water, hygienic supplies, and shelter; connection to technology is becoming increasingly important for the less fortunate. It might seem bizarre to think of a homeless man browsing the web or making calls from a personal cell phone, but the potential benefits: access to food stamps, housing applications, connection with family and friends, medical appointments, access to news or information–make sense. Jahmeilah Roberson and Bonnie Nardi, researchers at the University of California (Irvine) Department of Informatics, emphasized this in a recent study. They noted that “cell phones were important to survival because of the connections they provided in securing jobs and adhering to requirements of funding and rehabilitation programs.”

A recent government-sponsored Project REACH’s mobile app contest was designed to address the issue. They asked contestants to create an app that gives volunteers and homeless people the power to locate food, shelter, and bed availability at those shelters. It’s a way for them to find help for themselves–empowering, to say the least–but it requires access to a smartphone, a dim prospect.

If 88% of American adults have cell phones, why are they still viewed as a luxury item? Why does technology seem superfluous for a homeless man or woman? The enormous benefits of being connected don’t just at access to food, shelter, or a job (in fact, according to this article, 40% of homeless adults are employed).

There’s another important function for the connective power of tech: getting heard.

As far as sharing stories and dispelling prejudice goes, the effectiveness of social media can’t be denied. Just check AnnMarie Walsh’s inspiring story of Twitter success courtesy of Mashable:

Tweets came pouring in from people who wanted to help her. She received two free laptops from people she met through Twitter. People offered to pay her cell phone bill and others sent her bus passes. A documentary filmmaker also reached out to her via Twitter and asked her to be part of his project documenting homelessness. Through that filmmaker, she was invited to speak at Twitter’s 140 Characters Conference, being held in Los Angeles in 2009.

True, not every homeless person who tells his or her story online can expect an instant outpouring of support. But every blog and every post can help to abolish homeless stereotypes. Mark Horvath, the creator of the Invisible People website, was once homeless himself. He saw the negative effects of homeless stereotyping, and began interviewing the homeless, one by one–and posts them online. His goal is to educate and give the homeless an identity that goes beyond “that guy with the cardboard sign that’s at the street corner.” How often might we refuse to help the homeless because we harbor that secret (or not-so-secret) belief that they’re “lazy,” “insane,” or just want money for drugs and booze?

What would happen if we logged on to Invisible People and discovered that “50% of the homeless population are women and children,” and that “39% are below the age of 18?”

If that didn’t change our perspective, perhaps these facts would. According to a report by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, these four groups are most likely to find themselves homeless:

-people living in “doubled up” situations

-people discharged from prison

-young adults leaving foster care

-people without health insurance

In combination with facts like these, how much more of an impact could a homeless individual have by using Facebook, Twitter, Vlogs, and Blogs to gain support? Organizations like this one in St. Paul, Minnesota, have already begun distributing cell phones to the homeless.

The rest of us should probably get used to the fact that connectivity is becoming a necessity–for everyone.

The post #HomelessAndTweetingAboutIt: What Today’s Homeless Really Need appeared first on The Faster Times.