Curated Stories January 19, 201

The word “open” is rarely far from a Google executives lips when describing new products, strategies, and decisions. The problem is that open isnt necessarily better.
In practice, Google could actually offer b…

Broadcastr, a Brooklyn-based mobile start-up, has struck an agreement with National September 11 Memorial and Museum to make 2,000 oral histories of first-responders available via smart phone and online.

When…

Apparently our parent AOL has this super-secret iPad app they’ve been working on for a few months. Like everyone else on the web today, the only thing we know about it is its name, Editions, and that it’s …

Industry insiders say the lifetime value for a Groupon or LivingSocial subscriber is $25-$35 on average.Join the conversation about this story »

We wish the speediest recovery to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who announced his second medical leave in 2 years on Monday. His absence is a big loss for Apple.
But here’s the only silver lining we can think of.
By re…

Yesterday, Microsoft launched its first Office app for iOS, a mobile version of the digital notebook application OneNote. If you’ve never heard of it, it may be because you’re using the Mac version of Offi…

After a few years of buzz in mobile marketing circles, QR – or “quick response” – codes are finally starting to pop up in the United States, thanks in large part to the proliferation of smart phones.

While t…

If you haven’t been under a rock for the past few months, you’ve likely heard of Groupon. If you are a frequent user of day spas, you’ve probably even tried out their service: a daily opportunity to pur…

It’s no secret that Yahoo is in a troubled place. And has been for awhile. We just learned of the news that Yahoo is looking to sell bookmarking service Delicious and “sunsetting” a number of other web se…

So many of my early adopter friends have embraced certain kinds of location-based services [LBS] such as FourSquare, Gowalla and BrightKite. I have not joined them. I do not enjoy their frequent location update…

You’ve read Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying stories. You can quote “The Raven.” How well do you know the writer’s quirky sense of humor and code-cracking abilities, though? Let’s take a look at five…

This guest post is by Celestine Chua of The Personal Excellence Blog.
Earlier this year, I launched a challenge called 30 Days To Live a Better Life (30DLBL) on my blog. This is a 30-day challenge where partic…

I’ve been lucky to work with some awesome employees in their twenties. While that formative decade is long and dynamic for each person; in a companion post I’ve offered some observations on the differences bet…

One of the most difficult decisions that a CEO ever makes is whether or not to sell her company. Logically, determining whether selling a company will be better in the long term than continuing to run it stand…

Remember those pieces of paper with handwritten words on them that you used to post to people? “Letters” I think they’re called. To be honest though, I wouldn’t have a clue, as I’ve neither sent nor received on…

Mike talks a lot about disruptive innovation, about how — despite all outward appearances — newcomers can compete and even usurp the establishment (which are also called “entrants” and “incumbents” by Clayton…

When Hugh Hefner tweeted last night that Playboys entire back catalog was en route to the iPad—even the naughty bits!—it got the internet tittering about t…

I’d like to ask a favor — This week I am working with a special group of teenagers attending a class on Media Literacy. Isn’t that cool? With your help, I want to demonstrate in a very living and pow…

Apple sold almost 15 million iPads last year. It is outselling Macs in units, and closing in on revenues. The 7.3 million iPads sold just in the December quarter represented a 75 percent increase from the…

Update: It’s 6:13 pm eastern, and LivingSocial is about to crash through 1 million sign ups. It has 906,000 people according to its site.
When it gets 1 million, it will be a $10 million day, as measured by gr…

WileyDogg says:

The ubiquitous key fob is convenient and now proven to be less than secure. This Technology Review article describes researchers successfully attacking cars from eight different manufacturers…

Charlottesville, Virginia – Learning the difficult task of writing has become much easier thanks to the new mobile app, Essay Czar, by Niles Technology Group. Essay Czar is an eBook with step-by-step instruct…

One of the topics that has gotten a lot of attention from forward thinking marketers in the last year is the potential for geolocation and geosocial marketing. This year, there will be more devices with built…

There is little recognition that the operating profile of IT leaders can vastly differ from organization to organization. This is most pronounced when studying how technology vendors sell to this audience. It…

Groupon may have gotten the lion’s share of the attention in the group-buying market lately, thanks in large part to its chutzpah in turning down a $6-billion acquisition offer from Google and reports of a p…

For every freedom and convenience we enjoy in our digital lives, there are countless cyber do-badders looking for ways to exploit them. Fight back with these 3…

A landing page is a place you send traffic when you really want some action. And no, this has nothing to do with Craig’s List personals.
It can be a sales page, an email opt-in page, a video landing page, or…

A screenshot from Watchitoo, an inventive and powerful new addition to the Web conferencing field.

Here are our top choices for live streaming tools, webinars employee collaboration on…

Back in December, we were disappointed to find out that the author of an “unauthorized sequel” to Catcher in the Rye had settled the lawsuit brought by the estate of JD Salinger, such that the book was permanen…

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Here’s some interesting charts from Nielsen on what consumers think about when they hear the phrase “4G.”
N…

If you’re running a PPC campaign but you’re not continually tinkering with the performance of your landing pages–also known as conversion rate optimization (CRO)–then you’re probably missing some m…

It’s been quite some time since I shared some tools on researching trends and hot content on Twitter. Today we’ll look at a few tools that allow to discover and keep an eye on hot content shared on Facebook…

Note: This article was originally published on October 27, 2010, but with Jobs’ newly announced leave of absence, we thought it was appropriate to revisit what he’s helped Apple accomplish.
Just 13 years ago, A…

Are you in the blog design business? Do you want to learn how you can improve your business?
Look no further…
I’ll show you why I focus exclusively on the Thesis Theme Framework.

Theme Frameworks are a De…

The debate about gating valuable content (such as ebooks, white papers, research reports and the like) behind a registration requirement comes up again and again.

Readers of my books and blog know that I come…

Facebook’s privacy options are inconsistent to say the least.
When Mark Zuckerberg announced the simplified privacy options in May of last year, many options like removing your profile from search engines or pr…

Emboldened by the improving economic picture, advertisers are buying media like it’s 1999 with an uptick in TV and radio at the expense of digital, according to a new survey.
Strata, a Chicago-based custom…

You may love social media, but even the biggest fans of the social web will find some sources of frustration. What is your social media pain point? I thought I’d explore some of the main ones I’ve identifie…

Today looks to be a record-breaking day for the daily deal site LivingSocial. It’s offering a nationwide deal: a $20 Amazon gift card for $10. In just the first few hours of the sale, users have already purc…

Michael Scott points us to a discussion highlighting a recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that suggests companies cannot fire employees for things like complaining about their boss on Facebook….

Now that Facebook has officially passed Google as the most visited site on the web, their advertising platform becomes more attractive than ever. However, even with their steady climb to the top, many online…

Listening to Apple’s quarterly conference calls these days is like watching a once-in-a-generation sports team demolish every other team in the league.
As Microsoft, Google, Cisco and other tech companies once…

Following news of Apple’s dictat to publishers that they cannot offer content for free to existing subscribers via iPhone apps, the UK’s Guardian newspaper has moved to a subscription basis for its app.
…

I have reviewed several RSS feed readers for the iPad and iPhone, but if I lined them all up for a contest, I would vote hands down for the latest 1.1 upgrade of Flipboard as the best RSS feed reader for…

Becoming a freelance consultant or service provider is easy, but turning a profit can be difficult.
One of the lessons learned through experience: profitability often has a lot more to do with avoiding the wro…

Referral Generation Requires Both Strategy and TacticsThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
In my book The Referral Engine I point out that referral generation must be a foundational mindset that runs througho…

Content Marketing is a hot, hot topic right now as are social media, mobile and local. Along with being a popular focus for marketers, there’s really a deluge of information being published and it’s not a…

Appolicious – Apps are booming. But just wait. They’re getting even bigger.

Yesterday we looked at the latest “social magazine” app to hit the iPad, called NewsMix. It’s very similar to Flipboard, the innovator and leader in this small but rapidly evolving market. Social magazines is a…

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Na…

Seattle-based coffee chain Starbucks is taking its mobile payments plan nationwide. The company started testing mobile payments in September 2009 and now it is expanding the program to 6,800 stores across the c…

The Creative Penn is for writers, authors, publishers and marketing people i.e. those involved in the creation and distribution of books in physical or digital format. It’s not primarily aime…

Twitter engineer Dustin Diaz tweeted this evening “Turns out #NewTwitter has some major slowness due to upgrading from jQuery 1.4.2 to 1.4.4 – We will be downgrading.” According to Diaz, users have been compla…

Here’s a synthesis of lots of terrific thought from the past several months on telling your business’s story:

Humanize your ownership story. In Turning Business Owners Into Stars of Their Own Stories in…

Illustration by Joan Vincent Canto, licensed from istockphoto
The most popular things I’ve every written here on Wishful Thinking have been my free ebooks. So I’ve written you another one.
It’s called…

“Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it,” said some wise old bird. It certainly felt like that when I was at school, anyway. But I ended up studying history at university and loving…

Facebook is creeping into every nook and cranny of our personal online experiences so it’s no surprise they’re taking a crack at the professional market. My friend Brad Lovett has been looking at this issu…

Budget hotel brand Premier Inn launched a mobile booking app last week, which is available on iPhone, Android, Nokia and BlackBerry devices.
I interviewed Steve Conway, Head of Marketing at Premier Inn, about…

Path, the startup that seeks to create a “personal network,” is out with an update to its iPhone app that finally lets users react in-app to photos and 10-second videos shared by friends.
The startup ha…

We all like our apps, right? We especially like some of those beautifully designed OS X icons that Apple has created through the years. But did you know that a few of those very same icons have some secret mean…

Here’s an interesting little note from Apple’s record-breaking Q1 2011 financial sales call: according to CFO Peter Oppenheimer and acting CEO / COO Tim Cook, the company’s made a two-year, $3.9 billion deal w…

During the earnings call following Apple’s blockbuster Q1 2011 results, a questions was asked about Apple’s Mac business as it relates to the iPad business. The iPad business, after all, is growing much fas…

Predictive analytics is a subject we’re keeping an eye on this year. Today we’re taking a look at some of the ways predictive analytics are being used by businesses: to predict customer attrition rates, monito…

Apparently the enterprise is not just sitting around, waiting for the BlackBerry PlayBook to come out.
On Apple’s earnings call tonight, COO Tim Cook said that 80% of the Fortune 100 has deployed or is testing…

Interviewing is the most important part of the employee selection process. You want to ask questions that let you know if candidates can do the job, how they function under pressure, and how well they will fit…

Wilson A. Bentley was one of the first known photographers of snowflakes. He adapted a microscope to a bellows camera, and with this device — after much trial and error — became the first person to photograp…

Interesting new revenue breakdown for Apple. Macs are growing like crazy but are just 20% of revenue.
Products that didn’t exist a few years ago? iPhone 39%. iPads? 17%. iPods (The lion’s share is i…

EightBit.me is a fun little service that makes it easy for users to create avatars for themselves in 8-bit graphics, the old-fashioned looking video-game type imagery. The site has allowed a limited number of…

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YouTube is serving up more than 200 million videos daily to smartphones and other internet linked mobile devices according to a recent news announcement.

YouTube is a great way to introd…

The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Keep up with Oneupweb through it…

There are many, many reasons not to use your work email address for anything remotely personal. Here’s one more: a California appellate court has ruled that ev…

Facebook has started coaxing users to add their location to profiles, by asking whether they live in the city most frequently listed in friends’ profiles.

The prompt seems ironic given that the social networ…

Earlier last week we asked you to share your favorite iOS newsreader, and then we gathered the top five responses. Now we’re back with your favorite: Reeder…

In a long-winded bit about components and the future during Apples earnings call, Apple COO (and acting head honcho) Tim Cook talked about how, in 2005, they invested a lot in securing agreements…