Curated Stories January 24, 2011

Apple and Twitter have had an interesting but cautious relationship over the past couple of years. Early on, the only official Apple accounts belonged to various iTunes properties, which utilized the service fo…

President Obama’s appointment last week of GE Chairman Jeff Immelt as chairman of his board of outside economic advisers poses an interesting and fundamentally important question: Can the CEO of an American glo…

Google is the latest software outfit to release tools to help browser users keep advertisers from monitoring their Web surfing

As the saying goes, don’t quit your day job. Launching a part-time business can be just as rewarding—and potentially as profitable—as full-time entrepreneurship. It can also reduce many of the financial ris…

The Premiere Issue cover for CCO Magazine
We started our latest press release on the launch of Chief Content Officer magazine (view issue here, subscribe here) with:
“Print is Dead. Long live Print.“
Darn r…

The idea of “open government” got a boost last week with the launch of OpenGovernment.org, a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. Similar to sibling project OpenCo…

It was almost exactly two years ago this week that I did my presentation at Midem concerning Trent Reznor and his many fascinating experiments in reinventing the music business (for himself), and summarized it…

Java is binding IBM and Oracle more closely than ever before and are forming the core for a new Java oligarchy that also includes Red Hat and other providers.

Forrester Research issued a report today called “…

The New York Times has written a nice profile of Tim Cook, who is once again sliding into the driver’s seat at Apple while Steve Jobs takes medical leave. To hear the paper tell it, Cook is both a man well-pre…

Even the most bullish estimates for iPad sales were not bullish enough. In the holiday quarter (which is Apple’s first quarter for fiscal 2011), the company sold 7.3 million iPads, bringing the total to about…

by Brandon BetancourtThis past summer I got a chance to visit Washington DC. While I was there, I saw a Norman Rockwell exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As it turned out, the exhibition…

This guest post is by Tommy Walker, Online Marketing Strategist and owner of Tommy.ismy.name.
“Build a community.” You hear it all the time. “Comment on other people’s articles, guest post, and join the…

Google recently released Cloud Print, a web feature that allowed you to print documents on your home printer from anywhere. Today, they’re going to start rolli…

Recently, we asked people to fill out a job survey; the results were shocking.
More than half of the 200+ respondents said they quit a job in the last two years without another opportunity lined up. What’s more…

Dhar Mann, 26, and Derek Peterson, 36, are the owners of the weGrow marijuana superstore in Oakland, California. The 15,000 square-foot weGrow is just their first hit though. Mann and Peterson are also shooting…

Who is the best tennis player of all time? Connors? Borg? McEnroe? Nadal? Federer? As is the case in almost all sports, this is an almost impossible question to answer definitively. Is it the player why was mos…

Microsoft is handing out talking points to help its partners convince enterprises they should use Windows slates instead of the iPad.
This is a stunning development.
It’s one thing for the iPad — which launche…

With 2011 shaping up to be the Year of the Tablet, securing the display components for the looming army of tablets may be a key factor in determining success. Last year, we saw that the fast start for the iPad…

It was back in 2005, or perhaps 2004, when Chris Shipley walked onto the dais of a DEMOConference and introduced the term “social media” in her keynote address. She defined the term, “as spaces on the internet…

Googlers and ex-Googlers say the company’s new CEO, cofounder Larry Page, is an unpretentious, rude person who will find interacting with other people the most challenging part of his new job.
They say his next…

Foursquare said today that it signed up its 6 millionth user last week, and that the location-based network has grown by more than 3,400 percent over the past year. Meanwhile co-founder Naveen Selvadurai told…

Yobongo, an iPhone application for serendipitously connecting nearby people in mobile, chatroom-like environments, is launching in private beta Monday.
The previously stealth startup hails from Caleb Elston…

Siobhan Ambrose of wpmu.org examined the first 10 results from a Google search for “free WordPress themes” and discovered that the sites had themes that were loaded with malicious code designed to do things li…

Are books better as standalone, pristine works or as social objects to be modified and commented on by those who read them? We are about to find out. Today, Rethink Books is launching ist SocialBooks softwar…

Oracle is taking such lengths to control Java’s future that companies need to start looking at alternatives such as .NET, Platform-as-a-Service and the Open Web.

In a report issued today, John R. Rymer and Je…

Copycense points us to the news that the NFL apparently freaked out and pressured Toyota to edit a TV ad it was running during football games — a move many people noted was “unusual.” Apparently, the ad discu…

by Susan Giurleo, PhDIf you listen to the discussions in health care circles about social media, you get the idea that social media is complicated, time consuming and a liability nightmare.Nah.It’s not that…

Welcome back. Today is an important day. It’s Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD), an effort started by Jeremiah Owyang last year that asks us to take a minute to thank the people who fight on the front…

Small business owners want to dispel a myth about Groupon. The daily coupon site is not going to rake in huge piles of new revenue or give a big boost to your bottom line. Plenty of business owners from acros…

Sometimes the best thing retailers can do these days is hand over part of their store to someone else.

The implications of the Amazon flash sale go beyond 24 hours, proving the company is serious about its investment — and the competition.

When I turned 18, my father took me aside to talk about my future.
“I don’t care what you do for a living“, he said, “as long as you don’t go into education.”
I obeyed to a point. I never did go i…

Can a novelist write philosophically? Even some of those considered among the most philosophical have “answered with an emphatic no.” See also Percy Kierkegaard.

These are my notes from a panel on ‘Local Markets’ at the DLD Conference in Germany, which featured Groupon CEO Andrew Mason and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley.
Q: Two very exciting startups on stage. Denni…

Always a fun read: The Beast’s list of the 50 most loathsome Americans of 2010. The idiot Alaskan lady is a mere sixth on the list; #1 is “you”:

Your brain’s been cobbled together over millions of years of bli…

Foursquare has just announced some staggering growth stats via an infographic today. The company said that it has now hit 6 million registered users, grew 3400 percent in terms of check-ins and saw a total of 3…

A few folks passed along this amusing column by sports columnist (for SI.com) Jeff Pearlman, in which he talks about how he tracked down a couple of “online haters” who insulted him online (one sent him graphic…

I’ve been on both sides of the table, but there are seven hard questions I’d ask my deal lead at a firm from which I’m considering taking venture investment.
There are certainly more questions to ask, but…

Founder and CEO of Groupon Andrew Mason was reluctant to directly answer some questions from moderator Kara Swisher at the DLD conference today. But he still shared many of his views on what makes Groupon a…

There’s a remarkably easy and inexpensive way to create eye-catching graphics for your blog, and I’m going to show you how to do it. All you need to get started is Microsoft PowerPoint.
Wait, what? Powerpoi…

Dan Zarella, author of the new Facebook Marketing Book, recently published an interesting chart of five statistics about Facebook marketing.

While not completely new data, it provides an interesting summary of…

Details continue to trickle out about the New York Times paywall, which is expected to go live sometime next month.
Here’s what you need to know:

The NYT will have both an internet-only subscription for unlimi…

Melbourne, Australia – Serene IT Pty Ltd, the makers of Seretech iBlaster, today have released the 1.3.1 update to ‘Seretech Chronicler’. ‘Seretech Chronicler’ is an iOS geotagging journal application…

Think about the best article you read last year. The hard hitting, excellently researched, insightfully written article that you just couldn’t put down. Now think about how much money you spent to read it. Was…

Numerous companies start blogs to better connect with customers (but often through a narcissistic lens). In most cases, Public Relations departments manage social media and blogging for companies which is g…

We recently posted a rant about Quora that generated a lot of conversation. One of the comments was by Leslie Barry, the founder of Iphso. Leslie made the intriguing argument that Quora actually gets closer to…

Whether you know it or not, the path that social media follows within the organization is in your hands. But as we’re learning, mastery of the latest social tools does not guarantee a place in the ranks of…

When you want to know whether the restaurant down the street is worth
eating at, there’s a decent chance you’ll turn to online services like
Yelp to see what other diners in your area have to say about it. Th…

You know that thing people do, when they stick a right after a rude comment? Yeah, that’s just about the most annoying thing ever, huh? Over at McSweeney…

Accidentally hit that delete button? Having a hard drive failure? Help is here. Let us take you through the steps to get that data back in your hands. More�…

5 Ways to Make Your Website Scream LocalThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Search engines have become one of the primary ways that people find products and services right in their hometown. This growing rea…

Three more Microsoft executives left the company last week just days after CEO Steve Ballmer decided to replace Bob Muglia at the top of the Server and Tools Business.

With Twitter such an important social media platform and with so many Twitter tools available, we thought we’d highlight a few that could be valuable to the social media managers in your B2B organization. Her…

An excerpt from White Coat, Black Hat.by Carl ElliottMany of us have a relatively simple, commonsense view of the way that drug development and marketing work.People get diseases; scientists develop drugs to…

“Microsoft has tons of smart people who talk evocatively about the future of technology. Yet Microsoft isn’t the future of technology.” — Justin Fox of Harvard Business Review reacts to a presentation by Dan R…

The day an advertising agency’s creatives (art directors and copywriters) truly “get” social media and how to communicate ideas through social channels, is the day said agency becomes a re…

Miguel Helft / New York Times:
Tim Cook Is Running Apple, but Not Imitating Steve Jobs — On an 18-hour flight from California to Singapore a few years ago, Timothy D. Cook, Apples chief operating office…

When I wrote Identity and The Independent Web last Fall, I was sketching out the beginnings of what I sense was an important distinction in how we consume the web. This distinction turned on one simple concept:…

My friend Sean Buvala wrote a terrific post on his blog in response to my post yesterday,
Not Everyone Thinks Applied Storytelling Is a Good Idea. He has given me permissions to re-post it here, beginning with…

“If five years, credit cards won’t exist. The world is going to mobile payments.” — Rene Schuster, Telefonica Germany CEO, at DLD, via Jay MeydadJoin the conversation about this story »

“When did you become so paranoid?” “When they started chasing me.”
Ask any company who hasn’t yet dipped their toe into the social media cesspool ocean, and you’ll find that chances are, it’s not…

At the DLD conference in Munich yesterday, a panel of folks were asked to play a word-association game.
The moderator, Kara Swisher, threw out a stream of topics, and the panelists were asked to provide a one-w…

A friend sent me a copy of a new book about basketball coach Don Meyer. Don was one of the most successful college basketball coaches of all time, apparently. It’s quite a sad book—sad because of his tragic a…

Esther Dyson posts the following update from DLD, needling moderator David Kirkpatrick, who wrote (and hawked on stage), The Facebook Effect:
Join the conversation about this story »

A few months ago my friend Dr. Ben Hanna led an extensive statistical study to discover the optimal tweeting strategy by running matched tests of tweets over a period of weeks. He uncovered some very interesti…

When you talk about social business you can’t help but bring up the C-word. We all know what I’m talking about right? Yes, communities! Now, when most people or organizations think of communities they…

As consumers, techies and the media trade some of their infatuation with
Google for the latest crop of super-hot web upstarts like Facebook, the
world’s most dominant search engine is finding that more and mo…