Curated Stories July 20, 2010

Chris Cameron / ReadWriteWeb:
iPhone 4 Gyroscope Brings Silky Smooth Augmented Reality — When the iPhone 4 was unveiled in early June of this year, many were surprised by things like the antennae design…

Get out your magnifying glass (the text is small) and take a read of this great presentation by the team at Soap Creative.

Pay particular attention to Myth #6 – Promotions are a Winning Strategy. Changes ove…

Apple surpassed Microsoft two months ago as the world’s most highly-valued tech company, and is now challenging the Redmond giant on another key metric: In a blowout third quarter it posted record revenue of…

Josh Clark is a designer, developer, and author specializing in iPhone user experience. Josh’s outfit, Global Moxie, helps creative companies build tapworthy iPhone apps and effective websites. Follow Josh on…

Foursquare scored its 100 millionth check-in yesterday, bizdev boss Tristan Walker tweets.
A nice milestone for the NYC-based startup, which recently raised a $20 million round of financing at a $95 million val…

Is it okay if I admit that I love today’s post? Because I do.
Maybe because I’ve been tinkering with it for weeks.
I write about things that lurk in all corners of the writing room, some hidden and lur…

During Apple’s Q3 2010 earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer fielded a question about the massive data center Apple is currently building in Maiden, North Carolina. The reporter wanted to know how it was comin…

Rupert Murdoch is just getting started with Newcorp.’s digital paywalls. After the (compartively) great success that The Wall Street Journal has had charging for its website, Murdoch is looking to get more reve…

Facebook’s recent privacy issues haven’t put a dent in the social network’s traffic or user levels, but if a new study from ForeSee Results and the American Customer Satisfaction Index has anything to do with i…

Around the time Apple released the iPad to the market I wrote an article on April 14 titled ‘What 3 Industries Is The Apple iPad Threatening To Decimate“. One prediction was that the traditional publishing…

At its search event today, Google launched a new product that’s a part of Google Images: Google Image Search Ads. Basically, this allows anyone to advertise alongside Google Image searches in a new, more vis…

Law.com has an article highlighting how incredibly devastating a bogus patent infringement lawsuit can be to small businesses. In this case, someone hiding behind a series of shell companies is using a ridicul…

Did you know that the average person is lied to 25-200 times per day? One study discovered that lies were detected in 37% of phone calls, 27% of face to face meetings, 21 percent of IM chats and 14% of emails….

The ceremony is over. Now comes the hard part for Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.

HP is now the primary supplier of hardware for Microsoft’s private-cloud initiative. The $250 million partnership calls for the…

FileMaker has just released FileMaker Go for the iPhone and iPad, giving FileMaker Pro users the ability to work remotely and interface with their databases from their favorite iOS device.These apps allow users…

Pete Warden is many things to many people. To Facebook corporate headquarters, he’s a pest to manage with legal pressure. To nerdish bloggers around the web, he’s a thoughtful guy who stops by and drops smart…

They should just stop advertising it on alteration-friendly marquees at this point.
[ROFLD]

Google just published a response to some ideas recently floated by the FTC on how to rescue journalism.
Google’s message: “business problems require business solutions rather than regulatory ones.”
The FTC docu…

Filed under: Apple, iPhoneApple had to do some explaining recently — after a House of Representatives probe into the company’s privacy policy came up, the company sent a twelve-page letter to the members of Co…

When he was working at Twelve Horses Interactive (now part of One to One Interactive) in Reno in 2007-08, Dean McBeth (@evilspinmeister) participated in some of the very first GameChangers workshops.
Dean has s…

The connection between businesses and social media is growing noticeably stronger every day. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and various blogging sites are hosting accounts for big, and small,…

It’s not the first investment Google has made in wind power, but anyone wondering about its commitment needn’t look any further than the company’s just-announced deal with NextEra Energy. It’s agreed to buy wi…

adeelarshad82 writes “American Customer Satisfaction Index recently conducted a survey in which they found that even though Facebook is gaining popularity, they are doing a miserable job of keeping their users…

Talk about bad timing. Yesterday, I received the unsolicited e-mail (spam) on the right for a webinar that promises to teach me how to be insanely great in front of any audience, just like Steve Jobs.
Yet at t…

FreshBooks announced today that its popular online invoicing platform will integrate with SalesForce’s cloud-based CRM portal, allowing companies to manage their billing and CRM from one interface.

Starting t…

The mobile app market has come out of nowhere to become a multi-billion dollar industry over the past few years.
Apple accounts for over 90% of that market, despite representing only a small and shrinking perce…

In honor of Mashable’s five-year anniversary, this series is supported by IDG. Customers are talking about your brand and products — find out what they are saying with IDG Social Scout.Five years ago, YouTu…

This is part 5 in a 12 part series.
:: conscious awareness ::
A recent article in the New York Times, Building One Big Brain, prompted me to write up the next skill in this 12 part series. The piece quotes N…

I tweeted something last night and I wanted to get your collective take on it. I think I’m right, but I also know that there are nuances and exceptions to this.
“The newer the customer relationship is with…

It’s always been disappointing that Google Apps accounts (those with custom domains) haven’t had access to as many services as accounts with addresses @gmail.com. That is now changing.

As was reported a fe…

Experts debunk some common myths about the stomach, including misconceptions about where digestion actually takes place and whether eating at a certain time of day can boost weight gain.

When Amazon announced that it was selling more e-books than hardcovers, the numbers it provided were designed tell a story. But what numbers did it leave out?

Last week, Comcast’s Twitter man Frank Eliason (better known as @comcastcares) announced that he would be leaving his post at the nation’s biggest cable provider for a similar social media job at Citigrou…

I’m a big fan of the super-fast note-taking combination of Notational Velocity on my Mac plus Simplenote on my iPhone. If you’re an Android user and want a similarly snappy note-taking experience, you might…

Apple is working on a new video codec, one which could make it an important party in the TV and overall video industries, a source claims. The company is said to be switching away from H.264, a codec it curren…

What do you do when a client wants “the truth?”
What do you do when the client wants to know what you really think about how their in-house PR manager is doing, or howcum their story isn’t getting more in…

Last week local search expert Matt McGee had a quick post about the state of small businesses in social media. His post cited a recent eMarketer survey that showed small businesses were not only keeping up wit…

Miio is a new microblogging service which is a bit like a mashup between Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and an RSS reader. Now typically, we don’t like describing services as a “it’s like a this plus a that,” bu…

According to a recent survey put out by AskMen.com, dudes are a nosy bunch — more than a few admitted to snooping around their partners’ inboxes.AskMen’s “Great Male Survey” — which is currently liv…

Eric James Wolf of The Art of Storytelling Show has been on my radar for a long time and was one of the first people I invited to participate in a QA. Because he has dyslexia (see his comments about dyslexia…

Foursquare may be helpful for seeing what your friends are up to, but the act of checking in — standing in a bar, face buried in your phone’s screen as you hunt for the right venue — is anything but soci…

SCVNGR — the location-based challenge service that made the creative, city-themed treks of the Boston Globe and the New England Patriots possible — is ready to completely change the way we check in when out…

Waste Management and its subsidiary Greenopolis are diving into social gaming with a new Facebook app called Oceanopolis. The game will launch in beta, with a full rollout expected in the coming weeks.
In the…

In the last week two links have gone viral in my social media circles. There was that video with the Old Spice guy in a library and then a nifty little website called I Write Like. The latter sounds simple. You…

Making the move from Windows to Mac? One of the trickier transitions might involve your Outlook email. To make the switch smoothly and transfer all your mail a…

Fwix, a news site that offers a stream of hyperlocal, realtime news by location, is launching a new portal today that aims to give anyone a real time view of what’s happening in a location. You can access th…

Did you ever wonder why some blogs attract tons of readers and others don’t?
Of course you’ve wondered. We all have. Because if you’re reading this blog, you almost certainly have a blo…

Filemaker, an Apple subsidiary, has now brought its signature database solution to iOS devices. Filemaker Go, a new app for the iPhone, and Filemaker Go for iPad can run databases locally or act as a client to…

There’s no doubt that there’s plenty of job competition in the online space. Slow economic recovery in many of the countries where so-called “information jobs” are offered means more people competing fo…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.In a world where small businesses w…

Google is the internet’s 800 pound gorilla when it comes to advertising, but that doesn’t mean that it has exploited all of the areas for growth potential. A significant one: small, local businesses.
While many…

If you’re not familiar with this online network, you might want to take a look. Just to give you an idea of its actual reach, the slide deck you see in the snapshot I took of the home page two days ago, dep…

There are many tactics companies can implement as part of a smart Twitter Marketing strategy. Growing the initial following is important as is providing the budding community you’re building with something of…

Is Foursquare about to go ‘mainstream’ like Twitter before it? The Telegraph thinks so.
In terms of size, Foursquare is still just a baby. Its growth is impressive and it just surpassed 2m registered users, but…

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Here’s an income-boosting strategy my dentist taught me.
When I visit his office for my twice-yearly appointment, his dental assistant typically spen…

There are around 1.1 billion Internet users. 55 million people (5 percent) have blogs but only 0.1 percent of users post on a daily basis.
The participation gap
In most online communities, 90 percent of users…

The “scent of information” is an important concept for anyone who wants to optimize their online conversion rate. It’s important enough that we’ve been writing about scent on this blog since at least 2006! We r…

itwbennett writes “In a 13-page reply (PDF) to questions from Congressmen Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Joe Barton of Texas, Apple said iPhones running OS 3.2 or iOS 4 collect GPS data and encrypt it before se…

Rackspace and NASA have teamed up to create an open cloud computing system that could rival services from Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft and others.

As if waiting around until fall to get iOS 4 weren’t enough of a downer for iPad owners, the latest rumor we’re hearing is that they’ll have to pay a fee in order to do so. That’s right, for the privilege of wa…

Email marketers’ lives just got even tougher with the recent changes to the Windows Live Hotmail user experience, which enables users to better organise their inbox.
The changes include the addition of a trust…

Too much has already been written about the recent Old Spice foray into social media. However, one aspect of the campaign has escaped most commentary – the firm – Wieden + Kennedy – is an…

When it comes to content farms, companies that churn out hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content every day, Demand Media has harvested most of the headlines over the past year. But it’s not the only comp…

Today, Google has announced the launch of the Google Buzz firehose, which will give developers access to all public activity published on Buzz via a single feed with real-time PubSubHubBub syndication.Google sa…

With millions of mobile apps out there, and (it seems) a decreasing number of mobile pre-load opportunities, it’s getting increasingly difficult for independent software vendors (ISVs) and web companies to ga…

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is going to Twitter and Facebook to ask for feedback about some new ads.

This is what makes Benioff different from almost any other CEO at a billion dollar company – he gets the…

One constant that has stood the test of time in new media/technology projects has been the tension between designers and developers. There have been very few places I have worked where this tension was not one…

We communicate with other people every day. Over the course of our lives we’ve developed verbal, written and visual communication skills that help us convey our thoughts. From time to time, we find ourselves…

Smartphones are one of the most talked-about and hotly debated consumer electronics on the block these days, and manufacturers are pumping out more of these devices each month.So, how are these devices measurin…

I watched with growing dismay and disbelief as Steve Jobs struggled through his press conference last week about the iPhone 4 dropped calls. Jobs has a rightly earned reputation as a remarkable communicator; i…

The best investors are learners rather than teachers. Micro venture capitalist Chris Sacca is one of Silicon Valley’s most thoughtful learners – a former lawyer and failed entrepreneur, once Head of Speci…

Mashable’s Spark of Genius series highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, see details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark…

Who remembers the utter gold rush that was the Facebook Platform back in 2007, back when everyone, and honestly, really, EVERYONE, in the industry was busy answering the question “What’s Your Facebook Platfor…

A new study by ForeSee Results and the American Customer Satisfaction Index finds that U.S. consumers regard social media sites Facebook and Myspace as lowly as they regard cable providers, airlines and the I.R…

Fred Vogelstein’s Wired story on Apple, the iPhone, and ATT is a terrific read.

Every time I’ve looked at the contagiousness of ideas, be it online or off, one of the most frequent characteristics I come across is novelty. I’ve found that ReTweets tend to contain less common words than…

On Wednesday, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will sit across from ABC News’ Diane Sawyer in his most high-profile interview since 2008, when Leslie Stahl interviewed him on 60 Minutes.Facebook’s well-known CE…

The best investors are learners rather than teachers. Micro venture
capitalist Chris Sacca is one of Silicon
Valley’s most thoughtful learners – a former lawyer and failed
entrepreneur, once Head of S…

With sponsored trending topics and tweets becoming more accepted and mainstream within the popular microblogging service, it’s no surprise Twitter is expanding its sales ranks to drive more business. After year…

I think there comes a point when you reach a certain amount of followers that some people start asking you “Well, why do you only follow less than x% of those who follow you?”
I try and explain that if I fo…

When I hear the name UltraViolet as it pertains to Hollywood, good things don’t come to mind. Namely, I think about the 2006 Kurt Wimmer film of the same name that was awful. But that apparently isn’t stopp…

Everyone you know is on Facebook, and most people have added their resume information. But you can’t search by companies and even searching within your friends for company names is virtually impossible. So i…

Chris Voss gave me the idea for this post. He was talking about his blog as a loss leader, meaning, something that doesn’t exactly earn revenue, but that is a lead in towards other things that make money. St…

About three weeks ago, my blog was dropped from Google’s search index. It had a significant negative impact on my site’s traffic and on my Google PageRank. I thought it might be helpful to document what I h…

On a recent airplane flight, I happened to catch the movie Groundhog Day. Again.

If you aren’t familiar with this classic film, the premise is simple: Bill Murray, somehow, gets stuck reliving the same day…

If you are looking for information, tips and insights into finding and maintaining creative energy, you need look no farther than Thoughtwrestling and the many posts on creativity. Almost every…

Word of mouth is generated by surprise and delight (or anger). This is a function of the difference between what you promise and what you deliver (see clever MBA chart to the right—).The thing is, if you p…

Apple owned subsidiary Filemaker has released Filemaker Go ($19.99) for iPhone and Filemaker Go for iPad ($39.99). From the description:View, edit and search your FileMaker Pro records on your iPhone with File…

San Francisco Chronicle, July 19, 2010 — What stage are you in? 1. Confusion, 2. Discovery, 3. Utility, 4. Embarrassment, and 5. Withdrawal. And what does this mean for the future of social networks and…

After the recent social media brandjackings by Greenpeace of Nestle’s Facebook page, this was an important area that required more research. Below, you’ll find an exclusive interview with Greenepeace’s…

While many companies are now seeing the social light and jumping on
board with Twitter, Facebook et al, there’s still a temptation to set up
your account and start pumping out updates straight away.
While…

2010 is showing huge client-side demand for more accountable and effective cross channel measurement, looking at the interplay between PPC, SEO, display, email and affiliates.
Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) can…

Guest post by Mike Corak, Vice President of Strategy at digital consultancy Tallwave, and blogger at Digital Marketing Strategy. About a year ago, I wrote a guest post here titled “Use Online Listening for Co…

When you’re embarking on a social media campaign, one of the most
important goals is finding influencers. If you can get respected and well known market voices behind, then you can give your campaign an
inv…

When Apple’s latest privacy policy revealed the company could track any iPhone’s location in real time, it threw some for a loop… including a pair of gentlemen from the US House of Representatives, who asked…

We now live in a knowledge economy where the skills,experience and expertise of the executives and staff within organisations are what continues to make corporate brands successful.
I remember starting work in…