Curated Stories June 21, 2010

Social media has been the plaything for Business to Consumer (B2C) Marketers and they have always seemed to have grabbed the headlines because their products are funkier and sexier than a B2B service or product…

As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, iOS 4 is out and spreading across iPhones like wildfire. With it, comes the ability for third-party apps to run certain tasks in the background. One of those tasks is backg…

This Innovation Series is supported by Lexus.Let’s be honest, shopping isn’t always as fun as it should be. Between long lines, irate shoppers, communal fitting rooms (I’m looking at you Loehmann’s), d…

Mark Zuckerberg confirmed to press in London today that Facebook will indeed be launching location-based features in the near future.According to several reports, the young CEO told attendees at a local Facebo…

When Loopt first launched on the iPhone alongside the App Store in 2008, it looked to be an awesome new location-based service. Apple clearly agreed, as they gave the app plenty of face time: demo slots on stag…

After reading Steven Johnson’s wonderful essay on publicness, Mark Dery came to the conclusion that I should not talk about my cancer and my penis. He says I and so-called oversharers like me have a “diseas…

A mobile app that doesn’t take advantage of your location information is becoming a rare breed. But developers must create different geo apps for each different phone—Android, iPhone, Blackberry, you name…

It looks like the first runner has crossed the finish line in the race to bringing background location functionality to the iPhone, and the winner is Loopt, an early entry in the location-based services arena….

The Real Results series is supported by Gist, an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people and comp…

FourWhere = Gowalla + Foursquare + YelpJoin the conversation about this story »

Location-based gaming startup SCVNGR is continuing to flesh out its Foursquare competitor. Today, the service is launching online profile pages, giving users the ability to showcase all of the challenges they�…

Buyer’s remorse is a terrible thing, for brains and bank accounts alike. Before walking up to the sales counter or hitting the “Checkout” button, apply the HAL…

David Sarno / L.A. Times Tech Blog:
Apple collecting, sharing iPhone users’ precise locations — Satellite image of a Target store in New York. Credit: daiji / flickr — Apple Inc. is now collecti…

Apple just released iOS4 for the iPhone and iPod touch, and now that youve downloaded and upgraded to the much-hyped iDevice update, heres a look at the new sh…

Craig Hockenberry:

This sleight of hand makes it feel like you’re running many more applications than you actually are. It also explains how your iPhone can continue to have great battery life while you i…

Concurrent with the launch of iOS 4, Apple has altered the terms for the iTunes Store. A summary of changes simply mentions “material” differences in the privacy section; in detail these involve Apple’s iAd ne…

Microsoft has a lot of different businesses, but…

It should come as no surprise that social media links help people share and open emails more often. But marketers aren’t taking advantage of that option.
According to a new study from email marketing provider…

The Writing Success Resource Center is a joint venture between FWJ and Poewar, and sponsored by Demand Studios. Today’s addition to the series is by Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today and is…

ATT Wireless has millions of US customers, and it continues to boast the largest number of smartphone users. Despite this, we hear numerous complaints from readers and reporters that ATT 3G…

Andreessen Horowitz is undergoing a growth spurt and creating a new kind of venture capital firm.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said his office will lead a multistate investigation into Google Inc.’s unauthorized collection of personal data from wireless computer networks.

Apple’s iOS 4 has arrived, bringing multitasking and more to iPhones and iPod Touches everywhere (iTunes willing). Here are the apps that already take advantag…

iOS 4 is here for iPhone and iPod touch. You’re probably downloading right now. Here’s what you need to know to get the most out of iOS 4. More »…

It’s the first day of summer, and if you’re planning on exploring the world, you should start thinking about your wireless phone options now. You can get help from two sources: the Federal C…

Should you friend your doctor on Facebook? It’s a question that’s gaining increasing relevance as Facebook increases its social networking dominance. I’ve touched upon the issue in the past. So has the Ne…

My new O’Reilly book about iPhone user experience – Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps – hits bookshelves in the next few days (the ebook is already available). I thought it’d be fun to share a few of the b…

If you’ve run out of room on your current Time Machine backup, it’s not difficult to transfer that backup to a more expansive drive.

AdMob Mobile Metrics Report – April 2010
View more presentations from AdMob Inc.

Two things came together this weekend to get me thinking about direction. I’ll tell you the story, maybe it’ll work for you too.
Last week, my friend Justin and I suggested we trade books for a month, so t…

With the right commands, you can turn your favorite command-line text editor into a distraction-free Google Docs app, add new events to Google Calendar, upload…

Open Government is a growing field. The Obama Administration is taking the lead in the attempt to harness the wisdom of the crowd. But small cities like the City of Manor are shining with new innovations. All…

Great tips on deciding which key-phrases will provide the highest ROI – #SEO – http://bit.ly/cIRL07 (via @SEOMoz)

Some interesting thoughts on the evolution of location – http://tcrn.ch/btRbEl (by @Scobleizer)

How ATT plans to improve its image via #socialmedia customer service – http://bit.ly/dvgT6t (via @adage)

Looking to better compete with cable, Verizon has announced that users will be able to sign up on month-to-month plans for its FiOS Internet, cable, and phone service. A contracted option would still be availab…

Display ads on Facebook come with the familiar — and now ubiquitous — Like button. But there are two very different things that clicking that Like button can mean — and the distinction is not at all clear to…

ONE of the questions asked most of journalists at The Economist, after Why dont you have by-lines?, is Where does the writing style come from? The newspaper is written by dozens of people every week, but to m…

Investments gone wrong and excessive fees are just some.

In a significant step toward reigning in the largely unpoliced world of anonymous online commenting, The Buffalo News said that it will require all people who leave comments on its website to identify themselve…

Is Google ready to launch Newspass, a portable way for consumers to pay for content all over the Web?

I learned of Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg indirectly through Yvette Hyater-Adams, who completed the Transformative Language Arts that Caryn co-founded at Goddard College. I find the TLA program fascinating, and I�…

Larry Dignan (ZDNet) submits: ATT (T) has had a dreadful few weeks. It has taken flack for going with tiered data plans, an iPad security breach and the inability to field overwhelming demand for Apple’s iP…

You probably don’t think of Rubio’s (the fish taco fast food chain) as a leader in web / mobile innovation… but the below example is well done and really should be more widely adopted.
Background: after s…

About a year ago Clay Shirky wrote a brilliant article called Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, which is probably the best analysis I have read of the problems facing newspapers. (This is something I h…

Google continues to improve its Gmail interface for Apple’s iPad, even despite the growing distance between the two companies.
We suppose it’ll be valuable experience for Google’s own tablets, coming eventually…

Selling candy bars or applying for a bank loan is so 20th century. Now, there are more ways than ever to raise money thanks the to Internet. A huge market of do-it-yourself crowdsourcing websites has made fund…

Several years ago, I sat in a meeting and listened to some entrepreneurs discuss their new venture. They talked about all the things they were going to do as soon as they received their funding. They had big pl…

Blog is the best way to start an online business because of its simplicity and powerful features. And wordpress is considered the best among blogging platforms. But the problem for most of the blogggers, speci…

Information Wants To Be Worth Paying ForThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
The web has spawned an incredible flood of free information. Business portals and even individuals now publish and give away educat…

Some apps with support for Apple’s iAd format have already begun appearing at the App Store, observers point out. In particular placements are said to be showing up in titles from Avantar, including Munch, Sho…

Surprise is the foundation of delight and the beginning of persuasion.

–Roy Williams, the Wizard of Ads
Today’s post is about how the element of surprise can be leveraged to optimize the conversion rate of y…

The attorney general of the state of Utah, Mark Shurtleff, posted a tweet on Friday morning that triggered a storm of outrage, which stretched through the weekend and continues today. What did he say? That he…

The third installment of Wonkette’s Ayn Rand journalism comic is here! Vomit along with Ayn, by catching up with our first and second installments … only then will you be prepared for Chapter III.

One of the challenges that I write about in Good Boss, Bad Boss and that Jeff Pfeffer and I discuss in Hard Facts is that leaders walk a fine line between exuding confidence while simultaneously making decision…

This Innovation Series post is brought to you by Lexus

Google’s Android software is coming to tablet computers in the near future, but unless Google and its hardware partners do somethi…

I am not the same worker I was last year. Too many things have happened in both my personal and professional lives that the strategies I had in the past are no longer working for me.

As we change over time, ou…

Over on the ProBlogger Facebook page Alix Spurlock asked:
How do I get inspired to write when I have 5 readers? It seem kind of futile.
Image by -nathan
This is one of the hardest parts of starting a new blog…

FourWhere, the neat FourSquare/Google Maps mashup that lets everyone benefit from FourSquare’s over-sharing users, has added reviews and recommendations from reviews site Yelp and location-based…

Admit it … you’ve wondered.
You’re writing and writing and writing, and a few people say they like it, but you’re just not getting results. Traffic is coming in at a trickle, links are hard to come by,…

Welcome to the future, or at least like the first five minutes of it. iOS 4.0 should be available now for iPhone 3GS and newer (post 2009) iPod Touches. Do you have an iPhone 3G or (shudder) the first iPhone? Y…

Mobile Web usage continues to grow by leaps and bounds as smartphones with large touch screens become the new normal. One quick data point comes from the United States Golf Association and IBM, which runs its…

Ahead of Thursday’s release of the new and improved iPhone 4, Apple is today launching a series of software improvements collectively known as iOS 4 to owners of older generation iPhones and iPod Touch devices….

There are a number of online destinations to find recipes, including Epicurious, All Recipes, Bing and FoodNetwork.com. But a new company is trying to disrupt this arena with a powerful semantic food search por…

When we took over the Facebook Fan page for Weekly World News , they had 3,244 fans. 4 days later, we had 40,310 fans– 10 times larger. We’re going explain exactly how we did it in this exclusive article fo…

As iOS 4 is being released for upgrading today (you’ll need iTunes 9.2 to do so), a lot of new features will be introduced. Many are brand new, but some resemble features introduced with the iPad and iPhone OS…

Did you know that if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world after China and India? Facebook’s global growth is explosive and for many professionals, it’s difficult to find a b…

Steve Jobs’ description of Apple’s culture as that of a startup gives an important insight into the company’s ongoing success
BusinessWeek, June 14, 2010 — At the recent All Things D conference, Steve Jobs…

More than 1.5 million businesses have a presence within Facebook, mostly through the use of Fan Pages. A recent SmartBrief on Social Media poll reported that over 73% of respondents had a fan page, and another…

googlePLEXS writes Wave open sign-ups, Google Wave is open to all users at wave.google.com, as a Google Labs product — no invitation needed. Google Apps administrators will also have the option to add Wave as…

Arien Malec is coordinator of NHIN Direct, a new open-source effort sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to improve health care through the secure exchange of patient data. Malec, a sp…

Back in 2007, I had a vision of creating a “personal branding world.” A world in which everyone would have the opportunity to stand out and achieve success through the internet. The blue lo…

It’s Good for Both Bottom Line and the Soul
Advertising Age, June 21, 2010 — As marketing professionals, we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about our respective brands — how to build, strengthen…

Web video is hot. Some say your chance to be a pioneer.
How hot, and how much of an opportunity? Recent reports from comScore, consistently say more than 80% of the total U.S. Internet audience views online…

This app offers a simple way to upload and view your photos stored on Google’s Web-based Picasa service from your mobile device.

Based on the positive feedback from the first 7 B2B Social Media Tools You Haven’t Heard Of article, we felt we’d highlight several more tools that may be helpful for B2B social media marketers.
1. Spredfas…

As any good copywriter will tell you, nothing’s more essential than knowing your audience. Yes, accurate spelling and a half-decent grasp of grammar are important, but a mastery of the semicolon isn’t going…

One of the most sought after answers in Social Media is whether or not engagement in social networks such as Twitter or Facebook directly correlates to customer acquisition, retention, and advocacy. Before we…

Starbucks’ Chris Abruzzo, VP of Brand, Content and Online, did double duty during Internet Week NY speaking at CM Summit and the Mashable/CNN event. As you’ll see in this video, Starbucks is using social…

Is there an industry better suited for success in social media than the travel industry? Social sites are almost always geared toward, or naturally gravitate toward recommendations and referrals…

John Naughton / Guardian:
The internet: All you need to know — In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the…

Apple is as open as a Soviet Gulag, ATT is acting as if customers had no other option than to accept whatever theyre offered. ATT and Apple: birds of a featherBoth companies tell us exactly what we want and wha…

Upgrading to a new iPhone 4 this week? Here are tips on places to recoup at least some of what you paid for your earlier model iPhone.

“Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his…

It’s not always the same thing, but for many of us something happens and it changes our status quo. We want to be better.
Better is a subjective term but in this context we’re referring t…

At roughly 8am-10am PDT Monday, Apple will release the latest iPhone OS, now called iOS 4. We’ve got our hands on the last beta release (dubbed GM, which we believe means final version) and here’s our first…

“People who don’t care, selling products to people who care less.”I was at a conference recently where the senior executives spent the entire day talking about profits, market share and growth… they never onc…

Apple is celebrating the summer solstice this year by making the next major reference release of its mobile operating system available, for free, on Monday June 21st. The new iOS 4 will provide existing iPhone…

Underneath his fright wig and his goofy screen persona, Harpo Marx was one beautiful human being. In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, he lists his family’s rules. It’s some of the wisest advice a father…

A recent tweet from Jay Rosen reminded me of another social media paradox.Rosen’s tweet leads to a Yahoo! Finance job description that requires an interesting set of skills.”We’re looking for a natural le…

First off, an admission – this isnt MY post. Its from the fab Chris Brogan, and hes said that it can be reposted as long as hes given credit. Heres the original post: 50 Power Twitter Tips
Ra…

Web analytics has lagged behind traditional business analysis methods for many years. IBM, a new/old player in the web analytics world, is now in the position to change that and move the two disciplines closer…

From the Definitely Worth Subscribing department comes The Economist’s Johnson blog which resurrects the column of the same name that used to appear in the magazine. It’s what Bad Language wants to be when…

Look up the phrase “search engine marketing” in the dictionary and you’ll see a photo of Heather Lloyd Martin.
Okay, not really. But her photo ought to be there since she’s a pioneer in SEO Copywriting….

You can manipulate a website’s rank on Google during
a social media campaign using conversations that do not contain links. Whether
this is an intentional ranking factor by Google, or just a quirk, it moves
s…

One of the most powerful ways of engaging people, creating change and yes, transforming the world in which we live, is to tell stories. From Homer to Perez Hilton, from the Bible to the Simpsons, stories contin…

Social Media Marketing has moved from an interesting idea to an essential part of the marketing arsenal in the last couple of years.
It was nearly a year ago that I wrote an article on why the CEO Is afraid…

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.According to the U.S. Bureau of La…

Editor’s note: Guest author Steve Cheney is an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies.
On the heels of the latest Android phone, the Sprint HTC EVO, an…

Professional social network LinkedIn now has 70 million members, according to the company’s home page. The company hit 60 million users in February, and has been growing fast, especially in international mark…

I have a very embarrassing confession, especially as a former business professor. Three alliterative business concepts — strategy, sustainability, and scalability — elude my total comprehension. I basically…

Quick quiz: Who are the three largest Internet companies in the world by market capitalization?
If you guessed Google and Amazon you got two right, but I’m betting few of our American readers guessed the th…