Curated Stories January 25, 2011

“Formal education will make you a living; self education will make you a fortune,” entrepreneur and motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said. But where is one to start? Amazon returns 12,146 book results for…

If you asked most folks what NFC means they’d probably mumble something about the Giants and wave you off. However, Near Field Communication is here to stay and if Google and Apple’s current and potential i…

Google announced today that you can finally port your phone number to Google Voice.
This means you’ll be canceling your current number and adding it to Google Voice.
Porting only works with mobile numbers right…

Nothing ever goes away. The essential nature of a thing does not disappear. It changes. Evolves. That’s how nature rolls. It is through change that a thing makes itself timeless. It is through c…

Ideally, a simple Google search will give you exactly the results you need. When it doesn’t, here are the best ways to tweak your web searches to help you get…

UPDATE: One commenter is (and several at TechCrunch are) suggesting this isn’t actually a sneak peek at Google Offers, as TechCrunch had claimed, but an old coupon feature for Google Places.
We’ve reached out t…

PC Magazine – As Army Capt. Johnathan Springer geared up for a deployment to Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne, he scoured the Internet for a smartphone app that would help him in the field. There wasn’t one,…

A tony prep school in Knoxville, Tennessee has made it mandatory for every student between grades 4 and 12 to own an iPad. That might be a good idea, someday!…

It seems like the phone-owning world was holding their breath for this moment. Now that Verizons own iPhone is almost here, you might be thinking of switching…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been a boon for developers and organizations that need large-scale code-crunching power but can’t or won’t shell out for the server racks.

Remember when newspapers were king? How about the golden years of radio? Or when carrier pigeons ruled the roost? These content vessels often seem like bygone relics of a simpler time.
In a charmingly illust…

Teens’ text-messaging habits are legion. They send thousands upon thousands of texts per month, and every once in a while, some unfortunate parents make the headlines when they get a bill in the mail for thous…

Facebook Chief Technical Officer Bret Taylor says that mobile is the company’s top priority in 2011.
Speaking at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, Taylor said that mobile usage is the fastest…

(Cross-posted from LatLong)Back in October we announced Google Boost, a new advertising solution to help local businesses connect with potential customers in their area. Today we are excited to announce that B…

PC World – Apple’s next iPhone and iPad may be poised to include a near field communication payment system, but the payment option will still face some big challenges ahead.

Last month, Amazon invested $175 million in the number two online coupon site LivingSocial. True to form, Amazon is already using the platform to create enormous buzz: last week, they announced a coupon: $10 f…

A book by Linde Zingaro, Speaking Out: Storytelling for Social Change, provides a framework for how storytelling is employed in social-change efforts:

For some, the disclosure of their own stories of marginal…

The Internet is a big place. How big? Try gigantic. The infographic above, from the folks at Focus, attempts to visually represent some of the mind-boggling numbers that defined the Internet circa 2010…

Facebook has acquired hyperlocal mobile advertising service Rel8tion, a nine month-old stealth startup based in Seattle.
Facebook confirmed the acquisition in an e-mail to Mashable Tuesday afternooon. “We…

A social analytics startup claims it can isolate tweets that are potential sales leads.
Launching in beta on Tuesday, Viralheat‘s Human Intent simplifies lead generation by helping businesses pinpoint soc…

Last week, Starbucks updated its Starbucks Card app to handle payments through your iPhone and iPod touch at most Starbucks locations throughout the country. It was originally part of a pilot program when the…

Key points in this post..

There’s been a decline in trust in “a person like myself” and regular employees, arguably because of “over-friending”
Trust in credentialed experts (70%) and company technical spec…

You have your new Website up and running, and are ready to start bringing in sales.
Perhaps, you spent hours writing the copy yourself?
Or maybe you hired a big, Web company to design a site with all the bells…

Perhaps the one thing that unites SEOs, content marketers and anyone with a Web site is that we all want our content to go viral. And we all sometimes struggle with getting it to do so. While there are tons o…

Hi gang – Sorry for the light posting schedule. Truth is, I haven’t been at my desk for more than 2 days straight since the beginning of 2011, which puts a crimp in my creativity. I’ve got PLENTY of i…

Today the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District (SRVFPD) in California is launching an iPhone app that will dispatch trained citizens to help others in cardiac emergencies. The new app, available at firede…

We’ve noted that you can clean your dishwasher with Kool-Aid before, but home-centric blog Apartment Therapy notes that you can also use it to get stains out o…

At the beginning of December, Groupon announced two radical new features: Groupon Stores and the Deal Feed, the former a self-serve deal platform for merchants, the latter a Facebook-like experience for Groupo…

Adobe is best known for…you guessed it, Photoshop. As we can see below it’s not just anecdotal: there’s almost as most interest in the world for their Photoshop product as the brand itself:

And who is m…

Apple probably would have been better off if it had started selling the iPhone at Verizon a year ago, as it probably would have stifled Google Android from becoming such a strong competitor. (Verizon is respons…

Footers are one of the most often underused, misused and abused areas of a website. In this post, I’ll be taking a look at footers and passing on some tips to help you get more out of them.

Link Brothel
Hav…

Apple will add NFC (near-field communication) capabilities to its next generation iPhone and iPad, claims Richard Doherty, director of the consulting firm Envisioneering Group.
NFC is a form of wireless dat…

Walter Murch, in a letter to Roger Ebert:

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretica…

We recently noticed that our online press centre is in need of some serious love and attention, as a number of basic features are missing. With this in mind I thought I’d compile a post that we can use inter…

RunKeeper is a location-aware app that helps runners monitor and manage their exercise regimens. The overarching goal is to aggregate the world’s fitness data and use it to power a platform that drives healthie…

A site called Vid.ly this week is debuting its answer to the emerging battle between Google, Microsoft, and others over the future of HTML5 video standards.

When I discuss social media marketing I sometimes call it digital word-of-mouth. It’s apt. Digital word-of-mouth could someday become as powerful at growing brands as its off-line namesake. Bu…

Like most technical endeavors, sending email is a lot harder than it looks! The simple solutions that are entirely adequate when you have to send a couple of dozen daily emails simply dont work when you need to…

Editor’s note: Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, the consumer Internet, and social networks. This is the third and final in a series of articles on Quora (here are the f…

Every Monday evening we’ll be looking at the latest in new media trends. The series is named after the title of one of my favorite books, The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. In that book, published in 1999, Lew…

Video artist Ze Frank used to say that it would take him all day long to produce each of his five to ten minute long pieces. That’s not unusual: creation of multi-media content is incredibly time and resource…

[Download the printable version here etc.]
“”South-By” is almost upon us, and so here I am thinking up new SXSW Interactive ideas for my client, Rackspace, who will have a presence there.
We have a basic…

John Cook / TechFlash:
Report: Amazon plans to expand grocery delivery service — Amazon.com is looking to expand its home delivery service, with The Financial Times reporting (subscription required) tha…

Snapr is a mobile application for sharing geo-tagged images. Its goal is to create a “live map of the world’s photos.” It also has an API that enables developers to add location information and Instagram-like…

Facebook is rolling out Sponsored Stories, a new ad format that turns your friends’ actions into promoted content.
Sponsored Stories is “a way for marketers to sponsor activities that happen throughout t…

The second-most popular activity on the Internet (ego stroking) just got yet another site. Silicon Valley’s latest flame, Quora, the increasingly popular question and answer site founded by a team of former Fac…

The map of profanity on Twitter, across America.Join the conversation about this story »

He bootstrapped himself. A scrawny little kid at 15, he decided to change who he was and how he was perceived, and then he did. The deciding was as important as the doing.
He went to the edges. He didn’t mer…

Jason Calacanis started Mahalo four years ago as a “human powered search engine,” but the latest version of the site moves completely away from the original idea, and much deeper into web video and “how to” con…

Details matter.

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Tomorrow morning, I will be on stage at the Belvedere Hotel in Davos, releasing the results of our latest 23-country Edelman Trust Barometer study. The lead of the story must be that trust is transformed. In th…

Your content can educate, inform, entertain, and even inspire. There are more than 50 ways to create genuine buzz — connecting with people by making their lives easier or by evoking strong emotions in them,…

Taco Bell “beef” pseudo-Mexican delicacies are really made of a gross mixture called “Taco Meat Filling” as shown on their big container’s labels, like the one…

It’s fantastic enough that a british engineer designed his own heart textile implant in 2004 when he realized it was better than an aortic valve replacement. B…

A visionary founder steps down after leading his company to unprecedented success, and hands the reins to his most trusted lieutenant. That’s what happened last week with Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.
It also happen…

One of the tenets of marketing on Twitter is to find and connect with the most influential users in your industry. There are several sites and directories that claim to offer an easy way to find those users. Bu…

Google today gave both Android and iPhone users a second bonus today with a real-time, web-based weather app. A search for weather in the mobile browser will show the current weather, including based on the us…

LinkedIn, the career-minded social network, unveiled a new feature today that helps users to visualize and interact with their professional network. Called “InMaps”, the feature provides an interactive visual r…

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service today unveiled IRS2Go, its first iPhone app… Android users can visit the Android Marketplace to download the free IRS2Go app.