Curated Stories January 27, 2011

Microsoft Research has made available for download a developer preview of its Windows Phone 7 + Cloud Services Software Development Kit.

Apple has just released iTunes 10.1.2 and it is available via Apple’s iTunes download page and the Mac and PC software update application. The update is required for iTunes to function with the Verizon iPhon…

Amazon included a few tidbits about its Kindle business in its Q4 earnings report (a revenue miss).
Notably, the world’s biggest bookstore is now selling more Kindle e-books than paperbacks.
And Amazon says it…

LinkedIn just filed its S-1 to go public.
We’re going through it now.
OF NOTE:
Net revenue $161 million for nine months ended September 30 – doubled year-over-year.
$10 million profit over those first nine mo…

Social QA startup Quora recently hired an iOS developer, so chances are we’ll soon see an official iPhone (and iPad?) application emerge, even if its website already functions quite well on smartphones.
Whil…

Dear Lifehacker,I’m not a huge nerd, but everyone’s talking about switching to HTTPS on Facebook because it’s so much better. Why is it better and why should…

Let’s face it: even during the economic downturn we’ve faced in the last couple of years, expenses haven’t stopped going up. So in order to survive, at some point, we web workers, business owners and mana…

It’s often said that services like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter – you name it – are not the product, you are. Each and every bit of information you share and action you take is used to create a profile of user…

If you haven’t yet, set aside some time to read the NY Times’ executive editor Bill Keller’s account of the paper’s association with Julian Assange. It gives some interesting (and not too surprising) backgroun…

Tweet20 Social Media Business Trends in 2011
View more presentations from Dave Fleet.

One of the great things about working in the digital space right now is observing the many changes constantly occurring. Th…

Jan. 27 marks one year since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad at a special event held at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. At the event, Jobs repeatedly referred to the device as both magical and revolution…

Wondering when — if ever — the federal government is going to get your tax refund back to you? IRS2Go, a new iPhone app from the Internal Revenue Service, means the days of checking your bank balance every 1…

A year after presenting a webinar on Telling a Story with Social Media, Ann Treacy writes, she found that story was all she was hearing about. Indeed, 2010 seems to have been the year of social-media storytelli…

There are a lot of posts out there attempting to give search engine optimization (SEO) a bad rap. Posts that declare SEO is dead, that it’s a scam or that it’s made up of equal parts black magic and bad in…

While I’ve always considered this as much a personal as a business blog, I do realize that most people who read it have landed here randomly from to a link that shows up on Google or Techmeme or more likely t…

Here, O’Reilly is quoting Karl Fogel from an email:

Independently of operator billing, using phones should massively
cut down on credit-card fraud. If your credit card is a
fully-functional computer that…

Greg Sterling / Search Engine Land:
Google Testing Display Ads In Gmail — Google appears to be testing display ads in Gmail. I have not spoken to anyone at the company but discovered the following ima…

Did you come to the Crunchies? If so, did you use Instagram to take a picture? If so, did you hashtag it with anything? If you did, you helped create something cool, you just didn’t realize it.
One of the thi…

Microsoft sheds executives like a snake sheds its skin.
As a former Microsoft executive recruiter says, the standard cycle for outside hires is two or three years before rotating out for a better job.
But Micro…

Here’s a good fit for your emergency kit: Get double-duty from a few cans of tuna. Sure you get the food, but not so fast with the eating! You also get an oil…

Colin Firth as poor Bertie at his moment of truth.The much-Oscar-nominated movie, The King’s Speech, has a scene near the beginning that beautifully captures the anxiety many feel when required to speak in pu…

A few weeks ago we wrote about the Android app TweetCaster that lets you temporarily block people on Twitter.
Now Gizmodo has found something better.
There’s a Google Chrome extension called Proxlet that gives…

Much of what Jumio is building is still very unclear, but chances are this will become one of the hottest startups in 2011, and not just because they hire opera singers to tease their upcoming mobile payments…

Geoff Livingston co-founded Zoetica to focus on cause-related work, and released an award-winning book on new media, Now is Gone, in 2007.
Social fundraising is becoming a buzzword within the cause space. Th…

Everyone thinks President Obama is a great orator. I think he has moments of greatness but often misses important opportunities — and by that I mean opportunities to build and wield his power.

People gain o…

I was on a Social Media Club panel in San Francisco when I ad libbed a forecast that “2011 will be the year in which the word ‘social’ is inserted in front of all other words.” It became my most retweeted comme…

TweetDeck is turning the tables on Twitter.
While Twitter has been “filling holes” in its service over the last year, creating products that threaten third party applications, TweetDeck is now going to fill a h…

Four Big Projects Facebook Should Launch, and Probably Will–Even Though It Says It Won’tJoin the conversation about this story »

Qwiki is a new webapp that helps you learn about virtually anything, but aims to inform you quickly by reading the articles to you while showing you a slidesho…

In this handy video, a team of editors from Scientific American offers some context and outside perspective on all the science that was name-dropped in the State of the Union address Tuesday.

One key referen…

I have a 3rd grader at home, and he’s learning multiplication. Struggling with memorizing these currently unimportant numbers (in his mind), we’re doing some extra things at home. As an example, I’ve been…

There is some talk over at NMA about the battle for control of social media. In one corner we have the PR agencies, and in the other there are ad agencies.
Personally I can’t see any value in allowing either…

I originally wrote this as a guest post for MarketingProfs.com.
There is no law that says small firms can only do business with other small firms. If you can get your foot in the door, working for Fortune 500 c…

Want to know when you’ve lost the PR battle? When you get headlines like this:
Taco Bell Defends Beef, Calls Suit ‘Bogus’
Taco Bell’s real problem is that this lawsuit doesn’t sound that outlandish. I…

One of the questions that I keep hearing from small business owners every year is this: How can a small business like me afford SEO/SEM? It’s a fair question coming from budget-conscious business owners. Not…

I’m a guest author for Contracting Business magazine, which focuses on business solutions for heating and air conditioning contractors. My latest article was entitled, “20 Things I’d Do Right Now if I W…

Most New Year’s Eve texts are of the drunken “eyhehyyy happy nye yearrr!” variety—incoherent and maybe a little annoying. But they dont blow you apart, as ha…

Verizon is reportedly trying to entice corporate customers with a trade-in option to switch iPhone carriers. Plus, details for pre-ordering are announced.

A new online application from geospatial mapping giant ESRI applies trend analysis to help responders to Australia’s recent floods create relevance and context from social media reporting. A screenshot of the…

IBM’s LotusLive on-demand collaboration suite is getting a boost via integration with SugarCRM and Ariba’s Discovery Service supplier database, the companies announced Thursday. The SugarCRM integration feature…

News Corp. and Apple have finally scheduled the announcement of The Daily, which is expected to be the long-rumored iPad subscription system for periodicals. The event will take pla…

When Facebook bought stealth startup Walletin back in November, nobody was quite sure what it meant. The tiny, secretive company had a high-profile boss in Cory Ondrejka, the former CTO of Second Life maker Lin…

The high comedy of web hypocrisy
Macworld When Google yanked the royalty-encumbered H.264 video codec from its Chrome browser, saying its goal was to “enable open innovation”, John Gruber promptly convinced an…

Apple outshines Dell and HP in customer satisfaction for phone tech support, though the problem-resolution numbers fell a bit, study finds.

In last week’s post, we began brainstorming possibilities for marketing your small business. This week, we’re going to discuss a couple of tools that can help you create, implement and maintain a marketing…

Occasional flurries of great advice and wisdom break out on Reddit. This happened recently when a user asked about getting nice clothes for work—clothes that…

Yesterday we gave you the most important social media sites to be using for your small business.
But how do small business owners use sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to their fullest potential?
Ad-ol…

ABC has “quietly” built an online subscription product for its shows that would serve up much of the programming that it currently offers to Hulu, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The subscription site might no…

Demand Media, the controversial content farm company, just had a successful IPO.
BusinessWeek’s Felix Gillette just wrote up a great profile of the company, in particular their interesting CIO Byron Reese, whom…

We’re on the verge of hearing how Microsoft performed in the last quarter of 2010 – the general consensus seems to be that the world’s largest software maker is set to report a dip in earnings.
We’ll…

According to eMarketer, Apple is to pass Research In Motion as the leader of the US smartphone market this year, only to be overtaken by Android in 2012.
eMarketer, which bases its forecasts on analysis of res…

IBM’s Watson is gearing up for a championship round of Jeopardy against brainiacs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter next month.
To prep, the supercomputer has sparred against dozens of former Jeopardy Tournament o…

What happens when the CEO promises 5,400 employees a new iPad? Here’s one company’s story.

A new study by Econsultancy explores the opportunities and challenges in media and publishing using feedback from nearly 500 media company CEOs and senior executives. The Media Growth Trends report was produce…

Remarkably savvy social sellers like Avaya are converting
individual tweets into $250,000 in sales. The company realises that the answer to selling with Twitter is rooted in discovering
conversations that are…

Social media marketing presents challenges for every company in defining the appropriate voice for the brand and how to engage. However, some companies are forced to work within much stricter guidelines such as…

This is a guest post by Devesh of Blokube.
What is “blogmarking”? Many of us already use and understand social media, but very few of us tap into the great and growing potential of social blogmarking sites….

Creating Customer BlissThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing podcast with Jeanne Bliss (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other…

A Tools Review by
Rohail Muzafar

Top 5 Facebook Apps for Business users
Facebook is becoming of more and more assistance for both normal users, and more importantly, the businesses. Myriad of opportunit…

Amazon has launched Kindle Singles, one-off pieces of non-fiction and journalism which are typically much shorter than a novel, but longer than a magazine article. The Singles can be read on any of the many Ki…

Sometimes a picture is the best way to see what a service offers.

That’s certainly the case with an infographic that shows Google’s APIs as a periodic table.

The different APIs are organized by color categor…

Formerly priced at $9.99, fitness-tracker RunKeeper was one of the first 200 apps in the iTunes app store and became one of the store’s top sellers. After a month of free downloads, the company announced today…

A month ago, Polaris Ventures principal Ryan Spoon wrote up a quick blog post looking for a developer with Chrome extension/app experience. He had a pretty simple idea for something to help him with his job. Ma…

Hate writing regular expressions? Of course you do. That’s why txt2re exists.

Billed as “headache relief for programmers,” txt2re let’s you input a string and and then use a simple wizard that generates a reg…

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…

Want Google APIs? We list 84 Google APIs in our directory. But that’s not the only way to look at its developer landscape. The search giant has come up with a visualization that uses a periodic table metaphor…

Before, during and after U.S. President Barack Obama‘s 2011 State of the Union address last night, the social web was abuzz with political commentary. But what were we all talking about, and how do our twe…

January 27, 2010 brought the launch of Apple’s iPad tablet device — Thursday marks its first year.
Leading up to its launch, the world was all atwitter with a number of rumors — Would it be called the iSl…

Years ago, I put together a really cool plan to get into the artisinal kimchi business (with a tofu sideline, of course). What, you didn’t know there was an artisinal kimchi business?
Here’s the first draft o…

If there’s one thing every publishing professional hates, it’s a title meeting. Why? Because coming up with compelling book titles is arduous, time-consuming work. The same is true for bloggers and their bl…

“Demand Media worth more than the New York Times? Zynga worth more than Electronic Arts? Key takeaway: the internets came to visit and decided to stay.” VC Eghosa Omoigui hits the nail on the head on Twitter.Jo…

Last year at Davos, I said I was among the disrupted when I preferred to be among the disruptors.
The disruptor arrived last night. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, former spokesman for Wikileaks and founder of the comp…

An interesting part of the letter to shareholders Netflix released along with their earnings yesterday are their social plans (via AllThingsD).
As Netflix goes from being a DVD-by-mail service to an online vide…

Facebook has finally added the ability to access the site via a HTTP Secure (HTTPS) connection, which should drastically increase security for users.
HTTPS provides a combination of the HTTP and SSL protoco…

Because I work with a number of PR firms, and have worked for a PR agency in the past, I’m well aware of the difference in pitching bloggers vs. journalists. The problem is, most PR people a…

For most companies, running a business from an iPad isn’t yet possible, but the Apple tablet is still taking an unprecedented and rapid hold on enterprise IT.

I’m a little freaked about this post. I’m afraid people will read only the blog headline and get out their pitchforks and torches. So please glance at least a few more sentences before hitting the com…

What constitutes a crisis? Discovering that someone has left a review saying they saw a mouse at your restaurant is certainly disconcerting. But is it a crisis? No. The social media monitors in your organizatio…

Mobile applications have taken off in the past several years. Thanks in large part to the rise of the iPhone, millions upon millions of consumers treat their mobiles like computing devices. It’s a trend that no…

You can’t see black holes. They absorb everything, even light. But you can see how things looks around them. In fact, you are looking at one right now: The sup…

What follows is a very intense trip to the Genius Bar. More »

Fresh off its IPO, Demand Media is blanketing the Web with answers to millions of questions you didn’t know you had. Is that a business?

Your LCD or plasma has a great, great grandfather. And its not the chunky CRT that preceded it in the 90s. No. Eighty five years ago, public eyes first hit TV…

The company co-founder and his star deputies are trying to root out bureaucracy and rediscover the nimble moves of youth

An anonymous reader writes Game designer and all-around interesting person Jane McGonigal just published a book arguing that playing games will help solve the urgent problems of the real world. To mark the publ…

In the 1970s, before Twitter, Facebook or Friendster, two men electronically arranged to transport a helicopter motor using an Apple computer and modem Steve J…

Facebook is currently testing a new feature called “Buy With Friends,” which allows users to get discounts on virtual goods purchased by their friends.
Here’s how it works: A user makes an in-app purch…

As more and more inmates are finding ways to update their profiles from Facebook, the social media site is being asked to pull down the profiles of these criminals.

The Virginia Department of Corrections figur…

CardMunch, the iPhone app that helps import business cards into a digital format, has announced that it has been bought by LinkedIn.

While that’s good news for CardMunch, its even better news for you, its pot…

LinkedIn is now allowing advertisers to target users based on job title, company name and LinkedIn group level. Previously, advertisers could only target users based on geography and industry.
Social networ…

It the past few days Google has been on the warpath against spam sites showing up in search results and they are also rumored to be setting their sights on content farm types of sights alá Demand Media (you m…

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The chief executives and owners of companies are often asked to participate in conferences or seminars because of their influence and insights into their industry as thought leaders and e…

No sooner do rumors start flying about Apple’s plans for near-field communications (NFC) and mobile payments systems in iPhone 5 and iPad 2 than job listings appear to back up the claim. Apple is now advertis…

Better go check your Facebook profile pic to make sure it’s suitable for advertising—the company has begun using real users’ postings in ads being shown to their friends. The effort is eerily similar…

The most exciting part of President Obama’s State of the Union last night was the articulation of the importance of clean energy in restoring America’s competitiveness. Obama was specific — as a good leader s…

Dear Mr. President,

Your State of the Union address last night offered hope to a nation made weary by an economy stubbornly resistant to job growth. But I must take issue with your claim that “None of us can p…

Google’s calculator feature is useful for all sorts of things, and blogger Phil shows us one particularly helpful use: figuring out how long that big download…

“We need to make a tablet version of Facebook. It’s something we’re working on right now.”
That was Facebook CTO Bret Taylor speaking to me yesterday in a sit down following his one-on-one interview on…

Facebook is not only a Web service with more than 500 million users, and it’s not only going to make money by selling advertisements against those users.
Facebook is a platform on which hundreds, if not thousan…

In its Q4 earnings call last week, Google said that it will be more aggressive about getting rid of experiments and products that aren’t working.
As CFO Patrick Pichette said, the company will let Google busine…

There was nothing whatsoever metaphorical in that headline. This isn’t an app that lets a soldier make on-the-go journal entries, write poems about his or her feelings or check vitals ala a mood ring. Tactical…

“The Social Network Addiction” was the topic of discussion at a panel in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting.
The panel, which was moderated by Loïc Le Meur, the founder and C…

Twitter has just quietly pushed out a new feature called Connections that shows you what users you have in common with other users. Namely, Connections displays what users follow you both and what users you…

Microsoft, I’d like to introduce you to reality…

Every week, Miss Kathleen provides links to a variety of stories about libraries, authors, and books. If there’s something fun going on in your local library, leave us a comment!
This made the Internet rounds…