Check out these six winter weather tips that will help ensure your gadgets see the light of spring this year.

• Keep them out of the trunk. Keep your laptops, cellphones and tablets out of the trunk for extended periods during cold days to prevent damage to screens and to keep your hard drive from freezing.
• If you must trunk it, keep it bundled up. If you absolutely must leave your gear in your car in freezing temps, wrap it up in layers – like a jacket or sweater – to keep it warm. You can also find laptop warmers (which are specifically made for laptops) to keep them from getting icy if you live in cold conditions.
• Turn them off. Letting your laptop or tablet remain in sleep mode may keep it warmer (since it is still working), but it also increases your chances of damage if you’re on the move. Be sure to power down all the way to keep your data safe.
• Warm up before booting up. If your machine is on the cold side, let it warm up to room temps slowly before turning it on. This will keep condensation and dew at bay, which can ruin your computer’s sensitive guts.
• Carry a charger. Cold weather sucks the life out of your batteries, so be sure to carry extra chargers in your car for emergencies.
• Watch out for sensitive screens. Cold weather makes a smartphone screen extra sensitive, so be sure to keep it close to your bod if you’re out in the snow, or consider a warm accessory – like a smartphone wallet, sock, or sleeve – to keep it cozy.

This article originally published at GeekSugar here .

Erasmus, the world’s most successful student exchange programme, celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. Nearly three million students have benefited from a study period or work placement abroad since the creation of the Erasmus programme in 1987.

Under the slogan, ‘Erasmus: changing lives, opening minds for 25 years‘, the silver anniversary celebrations will be launched today by Androulla Vassiliou, the European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth. Erasmus mobility is at the heart of the Commission’s strategy to combat youth unemployment by focusing more on skills development – an issue which will be discussed by heads of state and government at today’s Informal European Council.

“The impact of Erasmus has been tremendous, not only for individual students, but for the European economy as a whole. Through its support for high-quality teaching and a modern higher education system, with closer links between academia and employers, it is helping us to tackle the skills mismatch. It also gives young people the confidence and ability to work in other countries, where the right jobs might be available, and not to be trapped by a geographic mismatch,”said President Barroso.

Commissioner Vassiliou added: ”Erasmus is one of the great success stories of the European Union: it is our best known and most popular programme. Erasmus exchanges enable students to improve their knowledge of foreign languages and to develop skills such as adaptability which improve their job prospects. It also provides opportunities for teachers and other staff to see how higher education works in other countries and to bring the best ideas home. Demand for places strongly exceeds the resources available in many countries – one of the reasons why we plan to expand opportunities for study and training abroad under our proposed new education, training and youth programme, Erasmus for All.”

In the 2011/2012 academic year, more than 250 000 students will benefit from the Erasmus programme. The most popular destinations for students are expected to be Spain, France, United Kingdom, Germany and Italy, while the countries sending the most students abroad are expected to be Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Poland. The EU has allocated around € 3 billion for Erasmus for the period 2007-13.

Erasmus for All would bring together all the current EU and international schemes for education, training, youth and sport, replacing seven existing programmes¹with one. This will increase efficiency, make it easier to apply for grants, as well as reducing duplication and fragmentation. Under the new programme, the aim is for up to 5 million people, almost twice as many as now, to get the chance to study, train or teach abroad. The Commission’s proposal is currently being discussed by the Member States and the European Parliament, which decide the future budget.

Events marking the celebration

The celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the Erasmus programme will be launched in Brussels today with a conference which will evaluate the programme’s impact and discuss its future. Denmark, which holds the EU Presidency in the first half of 2012, together with the European Commission, will also organise a follow-up conference in Copenhagen on 9 May. The anniversary will also be celebrated at events organised in the Member States.

“Erasmus ambassadors” from the 33 countries participating in the scheme will be present at many of these events. The ambassadors, one student and one staff member, have been chosen to represent each country, based on the impact that Erasmus has had on their professional and private lives; their role is to encourage other students and staff to take advantage of the opportunities it offers to change lives and open minds. During the conference in Copenhagen in May, they will present the ‘Erasmus Manifesto’ which will set out their vision of how the scheme can develop in future.

Background Erasmus

The Erasmus programme was launched in 1987 with 3 244 young, adventurous students who took part in learning experiences in one of the 11 countries which initially participated in the programme. Now, 33 countries take part in the scheme – the 27 EU member states, Croatia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey.

In the past 25 years, the programme has seen a constant rise in both the number of students and in the quality and diversity of the proposed activities. Teachers and other staff, such as university international relations officers who are often the first point of contact for potential Erasmus students, can also benefit from EU support to teach or train abroad – nearly 40 000 did so in 2010/2011.

Work placements in companies abroad have been supported through Erasmus since 2007 and are increasingly popular. Up to now, grants have already been awarded to nearly 150 000 students for this purpose. In 2009/10, 35 000 students (one in six of the total) chose a work placement, which was a 17% increase on the previous year.

Proposals would introduce a single set of rules giving individuals more control over how their personal data is managed and used.

A recent survey on attitudes on data protection in the EU  has found that:

• 2 out of 3 Europeans are worried that companies share their personal data without their permission

• 9 out of 10 want the same data protection rights across Europe.

To address these concerns, the Commission is proposing to update the EU’sdata protection law. The changes would introduce a single set of rules on data protection, valid across the EU.

Protecting people

The proposals  include:

• increasing responsibility and accountability – companies would have to notify their clients of any theft or accidental release of personal data

• clarifying that where someone’s consent is required before a company reuses their personal data, they need to give that consent explicitly – people would also have access to their own private data and be able to transfer it to another service provider more easily

• reinforcing the ‘right to be forgotten’ – people will be able to have their personal data deleted if a business or other organisation has no legitimate reasons for keeping it

• applying EU rules when personal data is processed outside Europe – people would be able to involve the national data protection authority in their country, even when their data is processed by a company based outside the EU.

Good for business

A single set of rules would encourage a more consistent application of the law across the EU. Businesses would have clear rules on how to treat private information.

And red tape would be cut, saving businesses an estimated €2.3bn a year. For example, companies would only have to deal with a single national data protection authority in the EU country where they have their main operations.

Better enforcement

The new rules would give national data protection authorities powers to enforce the EU rules more rigorously.

For crime investigations, a separate law would apply to the exchange of data.

Next steps

The proposals complement the EU’s drive to encourage more online commerce by improving consumer trust – contributing to economic growth and job creation. They must be approved by EU governments and the European Parliament before becoming law.

Having content that goes viral can seem like the luck of the draw, but there are a number of steps you can take to improve your odds. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, we will show you a few things you can do to increase your chances of having that well crafted content spread through the internet like a wildfire. Thanks for watching and don’t forget to leave your comments below.

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about how to give your content a better chance of going viral, and from virality, what I really mean here is not just getting links, which are obviously very helpful from an SEO perspective, but getting social shares, getting mentions on other blogs, getting talked about, getting emailed around. The virality of content determines how successful that content is going to be in the broader Web, in the scheme of all things that are inbound, not just SEO, not just social, not just community stuff, but overall. There are a few things that you can do that will significantly help your efforts to earn that content virality. So let’s talk about a few of them.

Number one, the right format or the right UI or UX, user experience. What I’m talking about here is a lot of people think that they can take the same way that they produce content normally, keep on doing that, and sometimes that works, especially if you have a very, very clean site, maybe it’s in a blog format and it’s got nice width. It’s not too hampered by advertising and surrounded by that kind of stuff. But oftentimes you will see that content can perform better when it’s in a separate type of format. So let’s say you’ve got a traditional page layout that has content section here but a big header up here and a top ad and a bottom ad and a bunch of sidebar stuff. And maybe you think, “You know what? I’m actually going to clean that up to something that has branding but minimal branding, got a great headline, got the content right in there, and that’s the focus of the page.” So the users who come to it can easily, above the fold, find the content that they’re looking for, that there’s compelling visuals.

These visuals are particularly important because both Google+ and Facebook, if you do any sharing on either of those platforms, remember that they’ll automatically insert an image from the post, and oftentimes the user can select which image. If you’ve got a couple compelling images that look great when scaled down, that look great when you’re going to share them on Facebook or on Google+ or that somebody else who is going to copy those images and put them on their site, oh man, much, much more successful.

Even if you have literally just a piece of writing, if you can have some sort of a visual element that is compelling, that’s interesting, that draws in the reader, that’s relevant, you’re going to do much, much better. Flickr Creative Commons is great for this. Drawing your own stuff is great for this. Charts and graphs are great for this. Even licensing out someone to do a tiny amount of work for a few hundred dollars around building a visual for you, taking some of the data or some of the insight that you’ve learned that you’re putting into that content can be really helpful to help it go more viral.

Then doing things like, you know, you’ve got to have the design look and feel professional. It has to be modern and updated. Clean is very, very good for getting that sharing principle. You can see this happen all the time with content that’s shared on major media websites, where it’s the print friendly version that gets emailed around, that makes its way around Twitter and around Google+ and Facebook and goes on LinkedIn. It’s almost always the one that people will link to in a Reddit or a Hacker News or on Stumble Upon. Print friendly versions, just make that the default for content that you want to have virality.

Then finally I’d also be looking at the title friendliness itself, and the URL actually matters a lot now too. So if you’ve got a pre-existing CMS, when you go to bit.ly or you to goo.gl or whatever your URL shortener is, you might want to try something like this, getting the customized one. So for example, you’ll see that when I have content that I like to share a lot, I might say for example, “Oh, let’s make this content say inbound startups, and that’ll be my slide share presentation.” So now you don’t have to remember some long URL. It’s just bit.ly/inboundstartups, and that will take you right to my presentation here, that URL functions. Customizing this portion of the shared URL can be very helpful if you can’t control it. If you can though, go with something easy, simple, short, not too many parameters in there. This will also help you. I might even, for some things, recommend dropping the slash articles or the slash blog and going just with /catchy-subject, whatever that subject line is. You ‘re going to shrink down the title so that it’s easily understandable so if somebody ever sees that URL or hovers on it, they think, “Oh, that sounds interesting. I should click that link. That might be cool.”

Number two, great, fantastic way to make sure that your content is going to at least perform decently on the Web is to get buy-in from your influencers, the influencers in a community, before, not after, not during, but before you ever publish it. So I’ll give you a great example. I got an email last Friday from a guy in the search world and he said, “Hey Rand, my company, we produce this big report. We’ve got this cool infographic, lots of interesting data about stuff that’s happening in the world. Would you take a look at this? Tell me what you think. Do you think your community would like it?” And I wrote back and said, “Yeah, I really love this. I think it’s excellent. I don’t even have any changes. I think this is going to do great, and I’d be happy to share it.” This person didn’t specifically ask me for a share and I think that’s why. What they asked me for was feedback.

That feedback, coming from people who have a powerful forum, 6,000 RSS readers, 500 people following them on Google+, you can find these people. You probably already know about them in your niche or your sphere, who they are, the key bloggers, the key Twitter accounts, the key Google+ accounts, the key people on LinkedIn, the people who run popular websites, the influencers. Then you can essentially draw them back to whatever it is that’s your content in here, and they will be much more likely to share if you ping them about it beforehand. They’ll also give you feedback like, “I don’t really think this is going to play well,” or “If you did this, it’d be very interesting, but I don’t see what you’ve done as particularly unique or valuable. I probably wouldn’t share it.” Or no response at all. If you get lots of those, you know that you’re not hitting it out of the park with this content. You’re going to have to do something else, try something else. That’s great to know before you hit that publish button.

There’s a bunch of things you can get from them. So if you’re thinking, boy, I just can’t get these people to share what I’m producing. I don’t know what I can do, get them involved in the actual content itself. So rather than you writing an opinion blog post saying I like this particular thing and that particular thing, you can instead go and gather. Hey, can I solicit your review and opinion on a subject, and then I’m going to gather that from several experts and publish that. I’m going to run a survey of you and 20 other people who are influencers in the field about particular things, about some data from your sites, your projects, your experiences, your businesses, whatever it is, or your opinions on this matter. I’m going to interview you or do some lessons learned stuff. I shared a great link last week that was a bunch of video interviews of entrepreneurs, and this type of stuff performs tremendously well because all of those people who are involved in the project, from an interviewee perspective, they are all going to share it after it’s produced because you write back to them and you say, “Hey, the interview is now live. The data is now live. The review is now live.”

You can request input from their communities. For example, when SEOmoz does the SEO Industry Survey every two years, we always ask, hey, would you share this with your community so that we can get the input of people who read Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch or SEO Book or Search Engine Journal, a variety of these places. HubSpot, etc.

If you can’t directly reach out, you can always mention these people. So if you, for example, gather things that they’ve tweeted, said on their own blogs, you’re getting quotes from them, you’re getting data they’ve shared, you’re using numbers from them, anything like that, you can say, “Oh, by the way, we mentioned you or we’re going to be mentioning you in an upcoming piece, would you like to take a look at it and review and let us know if it’s appropriate or okay, if this is accurate?” That process of interacting in an authentic way, both to confirm that you do have accurate data and that you’re doing the right thing with them, gives them a buy-in to, “Oh, I’m going to go check out this article. Huh, this is interesting. Yeah, this looks great, thanks very much.” Or, “Oh I have this little bit of feedback for you.” Then when you publish, you can say, “Hey, we hit publish. It’s now live. Thanks again for reviewing. If you would share with your community, that’d be great. Here’s the shortened link or here’s a tweet you could retweet.” This kind of stuff works phenomenally well. This process of getting that early buy-in ahead of time is so powerful, and it just makes sure that the content does much better than it normally would.

The third and final thing that I’m going to mention here – topic, timing, and seeding. So this is essentially the process of figuring out what works best in your community, and that’s from a topical perspective. Copyblogger has a lot of good posts about how to write a compelling headline and what’s going to be popular right now. But I would think about it this way. If it’s being mentioned in the news, so for example if I go to, let’s say this is Google Insights or Google Trends or the news timeline, and I see mentions it is at the steady state point but has a spike here, this is where I want to be writing about that topic. Or maybe right after, when there’s usually that second bump of people having a discussion about it. If you can, you might even want to catch it here, before it goes hot, and then you’ll have a chance to appear in things like Google News and you’ll have a chance to be mentioned in all the articles that talk about that subject thereafter. This is great for anytime you have a timely or trending type of topic.

You also want to, in addition to all these influencers you talk to, there are likely a few people, these are your buddies, your friends, people you connect with on a regular basis, you’re emailing with them, you follow each other on Twitter. Do them a favor. Start sharing some of their content. When they tweet things, retweet them. Build up those relationships. Almost all of you probably have a few of those already. Leverage those. Email them in person and say, “Kenny, I know you’ve got a small Twitter account. It’d be awesome if you could share this. If you ever need the same favor from me, just ask.” Almost always, especially if those are close relationships, personal relationships, you’ve hung out in a bar before, you’ve bought each other dinner, you know each other well, you’re going to get that. I think that’s a great way to leverage the real world social network for online social networks. Obviously, you have to be careful not to abuse this. You want to be sharing stuff that these people would ordinarily want to share and be interested in.

Then finally timing stuff. I can tell you for B2B content, Saturday and Sunday are just straight out. However, the reverse is true for Facebook, where the most sharing and the most time spent on Facebook happens on the weekends. Now, not surprisingly, that’s not B2B Facebooking. That’s personal Facebooking. So it better be the kind of stuff that’s going to play well with your mom and your grandma and your brother and that kind of stuff. B2B, Tuesday through Thursday. Don’t do Monday. Don’t do Friday. With the exception of, it appears that some of the best content or most successful tweeting happens on Friday morning, sort of Thursday night going into Friday morning. That’s when people seem to be tweeting and retweeting a lot of stuff. This is from some research from Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. You can look into that. The timing of social media, I believe, is his presentation.

So don’t necessarily take my word for it. Test, test, test. If you’re sharing content and producing content on a regular basis, you will figure out the right times to share, who you can start seeding things with, who’s reliable and helps you get that content out there, what topics work well, what sorts of headlines work well for your audience. It’s going to be different for everyone. So don’t just trust these. But do test and observe and watch your click through rates, using something like a bit.ly, watching your analytics, seeing what works when you share things and how long it takes for them to go and what sources indicate. Sometimes you’re going to share with this one guy and he’s going to populate it to tons of places. One of my favorite features for this is Google+’s ripples, where you can actually see, it’s almost like this. It’ll actually show you a timeline of this person shared and then these 13 other people shared and 1 of them produced 10 more shares. That stuff is very powerful, and you can observe it on the regular Web, on the rest of the Web, across platforms if you’re carefully watching analytics or your bit.ly click throughs.

So hopefully, using this methodology, you can produce some content that has higher chances, better odds of going viral. I wish you luck. I hope to see lots of great stuff out there on the Web. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) Phil Dunstan has watched reefs deteriorate at an alarming rate. Recently he has found that the Landsat Satellite data offers a way to evaluate these changes globally. Using an innovative way to map how coral reefs are changing over time, Dustan now can find ‘hotspots’ where conservation efforts should be focused to protect these delicate communities.

(Texas A&M University) Discoveries made in some underwater caves by Texas &M University at Galveston researchers in the Bahamas could provide clues about how ocean life formed on Earth millions of years ago, and perhaps give hints of what types of marine life could be found on distant planets and moons.

Wide Wi-Fi® Support: Galaxy Nexus by Samsung supports multiple Wi-Fi® standards, including 802.11 a/b/g/n, to make it easier to connect almost anywhere.

Sharing with Android Beam™: The built-in near-field communications (NFC) capability allows zero-click sharing between NFC-capable devices. You can share contacts, websites, YouTube™ videos, apps and more without having to launch an application or click through a menu – simply place the two devices next to each other to share content with Android Beam™.

Today’s NASA Breaking News:

• Texas Students to Speak Live With Space Station Crew
  Fifth- through eighth-grade students at Asa Low Intermediate School in Mansfield, Texas, will speak with NASA’s Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineer Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station at 11:50 a.m. EST on Tuesday, Jan. 31.
• Astronaut Jerry Ross, First Seven-Time Flier, Retires
  Jerry Ross, the first person to launch into space seven times, has retired from NASA. In a career that spanned more than three decades, Ross spent almost 1,400 hours in space and conducted nine spacewalks to rank third on the list of most extravehicular activity time in space.

Spend on Visa cards in Europe grew 14% in 2011, totaling €1.16 trillion, according to results released by Visa Europe.  This growth now means that €1 in every €7 of consumer spending in Europe is on a Visa card, up from €1 in €8 in 2010 and €1 in €18 in 2000. 

Double digit growth of Visa Debit

The growth in debit, as the preferred payment card for Europeans, continued apace, registering 16% year-on-year growth in both value and volume of transactions made at point of sale. Nearly 80% of Visa spend is on debit cards in Europe.

Peter Ayliffe, Chief Executive, Visa Europe said: ”Despite the continuing economic challenges, spending on Visa cards by Europeans grew by 14% in 2011 as more consumers and retailers recognised the convenience, security and efficiency of electronic payments.  The strongest growth, once again, was on debit cards.

We expect this growth in electronic payments to continue during 2012 when we will be launching mobile payments and our digital wallet services.  These new services, that are a key part of our future of payments strategy, will revolutionise consumers’ everyday shopping experience to the extent that by 2020 we predict that over half of all Visa transactions in Europe will be on a mobile device.’

Visa Europe processing

Visa Europe processed nearly one billion transactions every month in 2011, registering a 19% year-on-year growth as the number of processed transactions reached 11.8 billion.  This growth in Visa Europe’s processing services has prompted investment in a new data centre, which is twice the size of the current primary processing centre.  This expanded operation will support anticipated future increases in processing, including growth in ecommerce transactions and mobile payments.

Managing risk: the success of chip

Fraud losses on Visa cards in Europe reached an all time low in 2011, with the fraud to sales ratio falling by 27% to 0.038%, meaning that fraud now accounts for less than four cents in every €100 spent. Much of this downward trend in the face-to-face environment can be attributed to the success of EMV chip technology, with more than 75% of all Visa cards in Europe now chip-enabled.  The increased uptake of Verified by Visa by card issuers and merchants, together with real time risk scoring introduced into Visa Europe’s processing capability, are contributing to the reduction in e-commerce fraud.

Future of Payments

Significant progress was made in payments innovation by Visa Europe in 2011 with a total of 30 million contactless cards issued and the first mobile payment services launched, with person-to-person payments and text alerts in October 2011.  Strategic investments were also made by Visa Europe in Monitise and Beyond Analysis¹ to assist in its delivery of its Future of Payments strategy

In 2012 Visa Europe expects to see contactless cards hit 50 million in circulation in Europe, and the first launches of mobile phones enabled to make point-of-sale transactions.  Visa Europe will also launch its new ecommerce digital wallet service in the latter half of the year.

Financials

Visa Europe, operating as a low cost, not for profit membership association, for the first time ever reported total revenues for the year of more than €1 billion.  Following major investments to ensure delivery of Visa Europe’s ‘Future of Payments’, this produced a pre-tax surplus of €241 million.  This sum was retained within the business to support capital and reserves which rose to €738 million.

(University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science) In a study published in the journal Geology, Dr. Peter Swart if the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science suggests that the large changes in the carbon isotopic composition of carbonates which occurred prior to the major climatic event more than 500 million years ago, known as “Snowball Earth,” are unrelated to worldwide glacial events.