Curated Stories December 8, 2010

Each and every Groupon board member stood to gain millions, hundreds of millions, or even more than a billion dollars by accepting Google’s $6 billion offer to acquire the company.
Groupon cofounders Brad Keywe…

Yahoo today launched a beta version of Yahoo Local, a service that provides neighborhood-specific news and other local content. Limited in this initial launch, Yahoo Local supports 30 neighborhoods and cities i…

I don’t know if you own an Apple iPhone or an iPad but you only have to pick them up and touch them to realize that they are designed with a genius that goes beyond the physical. They are intuitive and work w…

From one of the developers of Whereoscope, a previously iOS-only location-tracking app for parents, a very favorable look at Android development:

Somewhere inside Apple, there’s a guy who is receiving unt…

Facebook plans on rolling out more privacy management features to users who access the social network via their mobile devices.According to a blog post by Rose Yao, a mobile product manager at Facebook, mobile…

The Web Development Series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.Google officially unveiled its Chrome Web Store yesterday, and with it,…

I’m 16 and, unusually, I use Twitter quite a bit. I say unusually because perhaps you’ve heard that teens don’t tweet. This first came to light last year when a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern wrote a report…

Popularity isn’t the best judge of quality, but it’s not a bad place to start – especially in a pinch. Instapaper is a wonderful app that captures online articles and stores them for clean offline reading on…

Google claims that over 20 percent of all searches are for local businesses, places, etc. With the changes Google has made to their SERP’s they are clearly favoring local search results.

The Changes…

Nick Parish is the North American Editor of Contagious, a London-based intelligence resource for the global marketing community focusing on non-traditional media and emerging technologies. Whereas yesterday�…

Version 1.2 of Draft, 37signals’ basic sketch app for the iPad (with email and Campfire sharing built in), is now available in the App store. It includes bug fixes, faster response times, and smoother drawing…

by Susannah FoxTen years ago, I wrote the Pew Internet Project’s first report on the impact of the internet on health care, calling it “The Online Health Care Revolution.”Back then, the idea that people w…

Hub Spoke Content Social Media Publishing
While there’s plenty of great Search Engine Optimization advice being published daily on blogs and industry websites, there’s not as much from a content marketer�…

MY only excuse for failing to produce any Johnsonia during R.L.G.’s absence last week is that I’ve been very busy on a new business venture here at The Economist—of which I can say little, except that it in…

by Josh Bernoff
Boston has always been a center for technology, but for the last 15 years or so, our eyes have glanced furtively and enviously at Silicon Valley. Clearly, Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Ba…

Twitter is quietly improving its Places location feature, by allowing developers to access an expanded database of locations for tweets associated with a specific place. The company has allowed users to includ…

Do you need to bring in a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant or can you do it yourself? It’s a question a lot of small- and medium-sized business owners spend a lot of time asking themselves. Do it y…

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Getting high search engine rankings for your blog takes work. A lot of work. While we all know the benefits of SEO, sometimes there just isn’t enough time to focus on both SEO and developing a quality…

One refrain we keep hearing against Wikileaks is that the cable releases aren’t really “whistleblowing,” because they’re not really revealing anything. However, it seems like each day there’s another big revel…

Consider: Your mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” You thumbed your nose at Wall Street, and you proved them wrong. You’ve stood up to the entire media industry…

Version 1.2 of Draft, 37signals basic sketch app for the iPad (with email and Campfire sharing built in), is now available in the App store. It includes bug fixes, faster response times, and smoother drawing….

See a photo of Margaret, her bio, Part 1 of this QA, and Part 2.

QA with Margaret Parkin, Question 3:

Q: Do you find that people in business resist the concept of storytelling? I’m particularly wonderi…

One of my main investment theses over the past year or three, especially in private companies, has been that work is being rewired. As much fun as it has fun been to play in touch interfaces, cheap home videoco…

Evernote just announced the launch of sponsored business accounts for organizations and businesses. These new account types will give schools, businesses and other organizations the option to pay for their memb…

This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Note: Seth Kravitz of InsuranceAgents.com will respo…

“We become what we measure,” my friend KD Paine, the measurement queen, is fond of saying.
And there are so many things that people are trying to measure. There’s the questionably valuable numbers like, followe…

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, who ironically got lost on his way to Le Web, just broke some stats about the company on stage at the conference. Crowley said that despite the fact that many people have the per…

Author: Jessica Berta (@jeccaberta), Writer, BBH NYC

Certain artists are typecast, sometimes by choice. They capture a style so well that it comes to define them. Author Jonathan Safran Foer falls outside of…

We thought we’d give the PPC ads in LinkedIn a go to promote our B2B Marketing Manifesto. Here are our experiences…LinkedIn DirectAds are the online community’s approach to pay-per-click. At Velocity, we’ve d…

Wikileaks is a flawed endeavor represented publicly by a smug egotist. But it deserves the respect and support of anyone who prioritizes the privacy of individ…

What makes one website highly persuasive and engaging, while others are ignored or quickly abandoned?
If you took a poll asking your site visitors what’s missing from your site, they might not even be able…

Today at LeWeb ’10 in Paris, France, our own Michael Arrington took the stage to talk with Google’s Marissa Mayer. Mayer recently took a new job within Google. Technically, she’s now the head of consumer…

25 days ’til Christmas, 25 facts about your favorite Christmas movies. Makes sense to me! (Wait, there are only 17 days ’til Christmas? Shoot. I’ve got some shopping to do.) Anyway, enjoy these elf-sized…

Social Markup Language might sound like marketing spin on new software but Involver insists this is a bona fide programming lingo that the company is making available to the developer community today.

Unlike o…

I like to test out freemium services at the free level for a while, and if they are really critical to what I do, I move up a notch or two to the Pro or Premium level; I’ll willingly pay for additional capaci…

Google released its first version of the AdWords Editor long, long ago, but (as with anything Google does) improvement is consistent and frequent. Such is the case with the newest version of the AdWords Editor,…

Microsoft Corp. won a contract to provide Web-based e-mail and other services to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making headway in efforts to gain share in the growing market for cloud computing.

(followup to When Futures Thinking Meets Design Thinking post)

The last post outlined a general framework for “futures thinking.” Here, we look at three techniques for honing your ability to see beyond the…

Oh that Shift key. So normal, so overlooked, so simple … and yet so magical. TUAW reader Karan recently dropped us a note, reminding us about its slow-speed enchantment. “I don’t think a lot of Mac users know…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.The role of social media is expandi…

Metcalfe’s Law and Social Media: Size does matter
This will be an unpleasant post for some to read. If you are in the school of thought that says numbers don’t matter with regard to things like Twitter foll…

Sorry, Malcolm. You’re still on the hot seat. I was initially planning to call this An Apology To Malcolm Gladwell: Your Book Isn’t Crap After All. I was inspired by news of amazing work…

Email can be a burden. Whether you’re sitting at your desk obsessively checking your inbox for that special email while you should be doing other things or you’re surreptitiously glancing at your smartphone whi…

Milo Yannopoulos’ very first question on stage to PayPal’s VP of Platform Osama Bedier was about why PayPal blocked WikiLeaks payments and froze its account. The question was met with boos from the mostly…

This is why Jon Stewart is the most-respected journalist in America… Because every “serious news organization” in the country missed the fact that Fed Chairman Bernanke blatantly contradicted himself on Sunda…

More than twenty years ago, I had an experience with two very different leaders. Those experiences have dramatically shaped my own view of leadership. In the end, they represent two very different styles, leadi…

Between Network World and its sister publications we’ve produced a dizzying number of “How To” articles this year. Here’s a handy roundup of some of the most useful, featuring pieces on everything from Andr…

I’m often saying marketers are bombarded by too many statistics and metrics in the digital age and have a challenge to make sense of them all. But there is a new tracking measurement on the email marketi…

In an on-stage interview at Le Web 10 in Paris, Rovio CEO Mikael Hed talked about one of the most popular games ever to hit mobile phones all around the world: Angry Birds.
Our notes:
What’s the story behind…

While I doubt that the Noun Project, an effort to make a free library of icons representing every common concept out there, will have a profound impact on your everyday life, it’s a useful service they’re…

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who describes himself as a socialist, was the force behind legislative language which forced the Fed to divulge details of the many aid and subsidy programs it ran in response to…

The Google Chrome Web Store has only been open for a few hours, and already hundreds of apps are available to use.To be fair, not every app offers a new experience; some are merely bookmarks to existing web app…

Fundry.com is like KickStarter for web developers. The site was started by Stateless Systems, the company backing projects like CushyCMS and Droolr. Unlike Kickstarter, however, funders get to vote on whether…

Columbia University got some attention last week for telling students in its School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) that the Career Services office had heard from an alum in the State Department sugg…

(image) Consider: Your mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” You thumbed your nose at Wall Street, and you proved them wrong. You’ve stood up to the entire media…

CNBC released a brand new iPad app late Monday, delivering the first truly useful, real-time market updates dashboard for the device.The free app is cleverly organized for quick access to the latest information…

Here’s an interesting SEC filing I stumbled upon: a San Francisco startup called Kicktag has apparently raised $2 million in funding. The company has a website, but there’s not much on there for now apart…

A big part of Groupon’s success is its editorial voice. In a market where there are so few barriers to entry, it’s important for customers to trust and love Groupon’s brand, and a big way they do that is thanks…

Book publishing is changing. It’s changing faster than it has in a hundred years. I’ve been persistent enough to be part of that change, provoking and poking and wondering about what comes next.Today, I’m…

Countless articles have been written about Google’s recent overhaul of how it displays local search results; and I feel like I’ve read most of them. Along the way, I’ve come across a few of what I’d cal…

During his keynote interview TechCrunch’s editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb10 in Paris this morning, Facebook’s director for the company’s developer network Ethan Beard noted that “no other company in the world…

Here at Le Web in Paris, Facebook head of platform Ethan Beard told our very own Mike Arrington that 250 million people are now connecting via the Facebook Connect ecosystem monthly. Over 100 million of those…

Jason Goldman, Twitter’s vice president of product, just joined TechCrunch’s MG Siegler on stage at this year’s LeWeb in Paris. During this interview, he noted that Twitter will ramp up its integration with thi…

That needs to be the goal when you seek out a job.
Bob Dylan earned the right to make records, and instead of using it to create ever more commercial versions of his old stuff, he used it as a platform to do a…

Salesforce.com has just announced that it is acquiring Heroku, which provides a Ruby application platform-as-a-service, for approximately $212 million in cash.
That’s one hell of an exit for the startup, whi…

In case you haven’t been following the drama, on Saturday I lost my iPhone and on Monday I got it back. After successfully recovering my lost iPhone I wanted to share some tips on how to protect your iPhon…

Even if a customer has had an excellent experience with a retailer through the buying and delivery process, returns is one area where things can go wrong.
Making the returns process easy and free for customer…

Startups like Klout may have a hard time convincing brands they can prove how influential social media followers are. But dozens of studies
aim to figure out why consumers are mentioning, following, or
frie…

TweetI’m not really sure how all of these guys are going to make a living, but there sure as hell is no shortage of innovation in social media. The torrent of new digital tools and gadgets makes Sharper Image…

Image via CrunchBase

We’re all short on time, and one of the things that bugs me the most when I’m rushing to get a blog post out (and I blog for a fair few clients as well as myself…

The freemium mobile app movement is now a full-fledged trend among consumers. For developers, it’s a lucrative one. As I wrote about recently, one-third of the top-grossing iPhone apps are freemium programs…

Comcast says its average user consumes 2 GB to 4 GB of bandwidth per month — not even 2 to 3 iTunes movies worth.Join the conversation about this story »

While we haven’t 100 percent confirmed it yet (update: we’ve confirmed with a source), what you see above is what we do very much believe to be a picture of Google’s latest social foray. Yes, it’s the…

This fascinating image above is from the recently inaugurated Google Books’ Error Page and shows you just how far artist’s Yi Ying Lu’s Twitter Fail Whale image has come since it was first put into heavy…

We weren’t making a plan; I’ve never written a business plan. I’ve never written a business plan with any of my start-ups. With Meetup, I sketched, maybe wrote a few FAQs about how it would operate. We bu…

Mark McQueen (Wellington Financial) submits: I know that the New York Times is concerned about a private company technology bubble in Silicon Valley, but the U.S. VC industry has climbed a wall of worry over…

For the past few months, probably something close to half of my tweets have been links that take you off of the site. My bad. But tonight I have good news! If you too are addicted to Instagram — which it seem…

Over the last week I’ve gotten several pitches from companies taking a new twist on OpenTable’s business. One of two things has happened: Either there’s a new flurry of activity around the restaurant rese…

Google just unveiled the Chrome Web Store, making tons of highly optimized web apps available to users of Google Chrome (or the latest versions of Safari or Firefox 4 beta).One of the apps that was showcased at…

You can get TweetDeck, the popular realtime stream reader, as a desktop client, on your iPhone and iPad, or Android phone. But up until now, there was no Web browser version (unlike Seesmic, which is best kno…

On Sunday evening Facebook rolled out the new Facebook profiles, but as many people have noticed, there are clearly some remaining bugs primarily surrounding navigating friends lists and mutual friends. Howeve…

Facebook is becoming essential to market in a digital world and is vital as part of reaching out to your companies advocates. An important part of your marketing strategy is to spread your brands content and…

My iPad has been spending a huge amount of time in the kitchen in preparation for holiday festivities. In that time, I’ve worked out what the best apps and gear are to support my cooking and baking inclinatio…

Shawn Parr is the CEO of Bulldog Drummond, a design and innovation consultancy headquartered in San Diego whose clients include Starbucks, Adidas, MTV, Nestle, Pinkberry, Virgin, Disney, Nike and American Eagle…

Are your private Internet habits permanently burned into your hard drive? Tom Weber on what your IT department knows about you—and whether it’s possible to fully cover your tracks.
It’s been an eve…

While many may prefer eBooks for the convenience they offer (or prefer paper books for the sentimentality), finding out which is cheaper isn’t so black-and-whi…

Felix Salmon submits: Greg Mankiw discusses the economics of the payroll tax cut, and raises the question of whether it might have been better used to cut employers’ share of payroll taxes, rather than emp…

Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks.
Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “coun…