Curated Stories January 7, 2011

While organizing his closet, Nick Foster came up with a categorization scheme for his many t-shirts.

Tags: fashion

The Sina (SINA) Weibo phenomena continues in China. Sina revealed today some very impressive growth numbers according to Marbridge Consulting.
Ali Yong, a marketing head at Sina, revealed at the DCCI Adworld…

A few weeks back I met with Klout’s Joe Fernandez. I went in to the session skeptical and walked out respecting what the Klout team has achieved and where the company is trying to go.
That being said, I still h…

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Charles Evans said the central bank is “badly” falling short of its mandate to achieve full employment and the economy needs “substantial” monetary accommodatio…

Verizon is expected to announce the Verizon iPhone next week.
So how many are people going to buy? As we said last month…
At least 10 million iPhones in the first year, we estimate, generating $6 billion or m…

Wow. New York. And I am in SF. We had a hunch.
Also the unverified source that gave us that earlier info also told us

Release date time-frame window narrowed to Feb 9-16. The vacation blackout rumors…

DID that headline make you uncomfortable? Of course it did, and you’re not alone. As Publisher’s Weekly reports, NewSouth Books is releasing a new edition of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “T…

Who cares about enterprise software? Apparently you do. Even though I posted this solicitation for Ask a VC questions late on a Thursday, I woke up this morning to one of the better inboxes of questions since t…

Verizon Wireless has scheduled a press conference next Tuesday, Jan. 11, in New York, and the quick consensus is that this is finally when Verizon will announce the Verizon iPhone.
Quickly, people on Twitter ar…

We never cease to be astonished at the parallel universe that many PR folks inhabit, in which “doing a good job” apparently entails spamming journalists with emails headlined “Story Idea” and then laying out an…

Why do some people become extremely successful, while the rest of us work really hard and do fine but not great?
Robert Jordan interviewed 45 founders for his book, “How They Did It.”
Each entrepreneur starte…

As we’re all well aware by now, the QA service Quora is exploding with growth. And while that may seem like a good thing, there are two distinct downsides. First, Quora is a pretty complex site and so scaling…

Yury Lifshits is working on algorithms and prototypes of new services at Yahoo! Research. Before that he was teaching university courses in the U.S., Germany, Russia and Estonia. He blogs at yurylifshits.co…

Entertainment checkin service GetGlue and cable network Showtime have struck up a first-time promotional deal that could earn fans some free DVDs.GetGlue users will be able to check in to staple shows like C…

Bob Cringely is in full 2011 prediction mode…

Now that 2010 is in the books, I wanted to share the 25 top blog posts made on this blog this year. In the interest of transparency, these are not the 25 most viewed blog posts, but theyre close. I did some edi…

Amazon is no fan of collecting state sales taxes, and it’s ready to play hardball once again in its attempt to avoid the levy. An e-mail sent from the company to all of its Illinois affi…

Megan Berry is marketing manager for Klout, the standard for online influence. She also blogs at The Huffington Post and Brazen Careerist. You can follow her on Twitter at @meganberry.Twitter can sometimes crea…

Quora has started to catch quite the buzz lately thanks to posts from smart people like Louis Gray and the early adopter crowd. I’ve been an observer for awhile but not a participant other than creating a pag…

Karl Denninger submits: From today’s jobs report: The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 9.4 percent in December, and nonfarm payroll employment increased by 103,000, the U.S. Bureau of…

Quora — though launched in 2009 — has exploded in the past few weeks. And you know what happens when you reach a certain pinnacle of popularity? People start making fun of you.Enter “Cwora,” a faux s…

One of the big dreams of the tech set is the idea of internet television. Once your TV is connected to the internet, you’ll be able to get all your internet and TV content in one place. And, like the internet u…

I’ve recently written a couple of blog posts related to analytics: You Blog, But Does Anyone Care? and 5 Simple Ways to Get More out of Google Analytics . It appears (based on the analytics, of course) that…

Goldman Sachs has distributed a 100-page document to prospective investors in the Facebook deal. Whether you’re in on it or not, here’s everything you need to know about this transaction.

It’s too late t…

Mark Sunshine submits: On Sunday morning, I woke up just in time to hear Sen. Lindsey Graham announce on a TV talk show that he isn’t going to vote to increase the U.S. debt limit unless Social Security and…

Microsoft is considering replacing its longtime media-buying agency Universal McCann, according to a report in AdAge.
The company spends more than $1 billion on advertising every year, and McCann and its subsid…

Good news for the U.S. job market: The unemployment rate miraculously dropped from 9.8% to 9.4% in December, the biggest one-month drop in the official jobless rate since 1998! Coincidentally, this plunge in th…

Austrian-born Dr. Hermann Hauser, a co-founder of ARM, a rival chip designer…

The new Mac App Store offers convenience, but a few people have found that the one-click purchasing behavior can result in inadvertent purchases.

Remember the good old days? The good old days when people cried loads of foul over the inconsistency in the Windows user interface? You know, applications deviating from the norm – with even Microsoft seemingly…

The venerable computer isn’t going to disappear anytime soon but its glory days as a computing workhorse are fading with the rise of more nimble smartphones and tablets. The future is tilting toward mobile de…

Updated: The story of homeless radio announcer Ted Williams became an Internet sensation this week, as a video of him got passed around on Twitter and in the blogosphere, and quickly led to appearances on the…

We are only a week into the new year and already it has its Internet trend: curation. I’m particularly struck by this trend for both positive and negative reasons. I’ll get the negative one out of the way f…

With the cropping of its logo, Starbucks has elected to join the limited fraternity of nameless entities — meaning its now positioned to rely on a symbol-based logo without any text to serve as training wheel…

I’ve caught on to this SlideShare presentation fairly late, so there’s a chance you’ve already seen it (it’s garnered nearly 50,000 views so far), but it’s definitely worth sharing here. The presenta…

We’re probably behind the curve a bit with this, but we just learned about a cool feature for Google Voice.
When you receive a call on your Google Voice number, you can record the entire conversation simply by…

This guest post is by John Burnside of Money in 15 Minutes.
Those people who have been using the Internet as a business platform since it began will have noticed that there has been a significant drop in clickt…

Most traditional publishing executives have bought into the idea that digital is crucial to the success of their publications in the 21st century. But despite the fact that most of them are increasingly embraci…

Using Social Media to Drive Offline BehaviorThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
This Local Color video, featuring creative small businesses around the globe, is part of a marketing series sponsored by HP
I�…

Not exactly surprising, but there you have it—the 1,000 apps on the Mac App Store were downloaded one million times in the first day. The most popular? Another non-surprise: Angry Birds. Mor…

On Jan. 6, 2011 we hosted our 64th free One Million by One Million (1M/1M) strategy roundtable for entrepreneurs, and the first for this year.

We started this week’s roundtable with a discussion of all the…

The giant online publisher and aggregator Huffington Post began experimenting with a new content recommendation engine today, powered by Facebook and built by AdaptiveSemantics, the startup the company acquired…

It’s no secret that Google App Engine has suffered from reliability issues. Google is attempting to address some of its issues by making a new datastore option available: the High Replication Datastore.

“The…

Back in August, I first got to try out the Twitter Streaming API via the User Streams feature which was being beta tested on a new version on popular third-party client TweetDeck. “Twitter User Streams Is Cra…

As part of its Predicts 2011 series, Gartner has made four predictions for the near future of business intelligence and analytics. Also, Forrester analyst James Kobielus has written a lengthy article outlining…

Short Assignments, False Starts, and Index Cards – what do these three things have in common? They are all chapters in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. This book is a great reference whether youre writing a report…

Without question, 2010 was Groupon’s year to rise and shine.While it might not have reached Facebook-like ubiquity or become a household name in middle America, this startup certainly made huge waves in th…

See a photo of Peter, his bio, Part 1 of this QA, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

QA with Peter Guber, Question 5

Q: What makes your new book, Tell To Win, so special?

A: It can change your Monday. In fac…

Should you be on Quora, one of the most hyped startups recently?
Cwora, created by tech comedian and speaker Tom Scott, says no, for the following reasons (thanks to @renate for the tip):

Great overview of content marketing in this MarketingSherpa article. In it, I discuss the only difference between a media company and a non-media company. “The only difference,” Pulizzi says, “is that a…

It was more than thirty years ago since Pink Floyd released that album, and I can still remember it as if it were today. Yes, we were very, very young. Our developed appreciation of music came from spending ti…

It’s been a few years since Yelp launched, but despite proliferating competition, the user-generated business reviews site isn’t going anywhere. For some local businesses, it’s a blessing. For others, the ver…

(Updated with further information and clarification) Mere hours after the opening of the Mac App Store, software crackers have already found a method that could lead to pirating of Mac App Store software. The m…

Copy the App Store receipt from any legit Mac App Store download — including from any free app — and paste it into a bootleg download of Angry Birds, and it’ll run.

This isn’t true for all paid Mac App…

The Mac App Store is going to be huge. Sure, you look at it now and see that it’s largely populated with a lot of apps you don’t want and will never want. But there are already quite a few gems (namely som…

Great article offering evidence rational decisions are rare – #UX #Strategy – http://bit.ly/fuzGKm (via @uxmyths)

The Mac App Store has arrived and with it comes access to more than 1,000 different free and paid apps. While nearly identical in design to the iTunes App Store for iOS apps, the Mac App Store represents a b…

Apple today launched their “Mac App Store”, something I must admit I didn’t fully “get’ at first. Originally I assumed it was simply a dashboard-like interface for easily porting iO…

Lee Adler submits:First-time unemployment claims rose by 52,038 to 577,279 in the week that ended January 1. The Wall Street captive media is, as usual, fudging the reports by reporting that claims were at 4…

Rick Orr is the CEO and co-founder of TabbedOut, a service that enables patrons to open, review and pay tabs from their smartphone and offers a better payment experience for customers.Consumers want mobile p…

As the world’s biggest professional social network, with over 80 million executives as members, LinkedIn has a juicy audience. It seems, however, that its ads just perform horribly.
Since LinkedIn just sent us…

Photo from Leo LaPorte’s Flickr stream
If you’ve spent any time in the tech world, then you surely have run across Leo Laporte, who runs a podcasting empire from his home base in Petaluma…

We had just noted that the new Republican leadership in Congress had decided that investigating Wikileaks is a priority, as they’re upset that Attorney General Eric Holder has been “too slow” to bring legal act…

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So you want to excel at what you do, you want to be the best, then the famous quote ”If you want to fly like an eagle don’t hang out with the turkeys” is worth taking note of.
T…