Curated Stories May 21, 2010

Google’s made some big moves into the enterprise. Will traditional software vendors keep up or be left behind?

There’s the good kind of follow-the-leader, and then there’s this. While the world cheered as all four major US wireless carriers implemented prorated early termination fees, we can all hang our heads accordin…

Why, thanks Google! Just a day after wrapping up a rather monumental Google I/O event in Northern California, the company’s official show Twitter account has belted out a tidbit that just about every attendee…

Facebook has been in the news a lot lately, but unfortunately for them that’s not a good thing. Users have been up in arms over recent changes to Facebook’s privacy policy – which is only…

A new study out from Sophos, an IT security firm, suggests that 60 percent of Facebook users are considering quitting. However it’s extremely questionable how the data from this study was collected. The pol…

Google just announced that it is rolling out a new beta feature that will allow users to enable Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption when using Google’s Web search. Currently, whenever you search on Google, you…

Update on Google’s threat to disrupt Microsoft’s huge cash-cow Office business…
We recently spoke to the CEO of a public company with 500 employees who just unplugged Microsoft Outlook for Gmail.
We asked why…

The #966#178 project at Stockholm University is actively exploring different procedures for physical Foursquare checkins. #966#178 Scanner for Android is the first result of their labors and simplifies the che…

In a recent Inc Magazine live chat, I found myself, somewhat surprisingly even to me defending Facebook regarding their ongoing and evolving privacy policy. Here’s what I said:

The essence of my argument is…

Since its initial launch on the T-Mobile G1 in October of 2008, Google’s Android operating system has evolved rapidly — perhaps more rapidly than any other operating system in recent memory — to become one o…

Picture this: Apple as a punching bag, or as Apple as a Google’s whipping boy. It sounds link an unlikely role for the Cupertino titan of tech, but it fit like a glove yesterday during Google’s IO Conferenc…

OpenTable may have some competition.

Have you ever noticed that your Facebook profile page looks like one of those horrible qualification forms that we make our customers fill out? If you go to Facebook and look at your profile, your i…

Fine, I’m a sucker for UI, Stats, and quirky changes to the aforementioned features on websites. I always want to know what they mean, why they were moved/touched/changed. Because you know somewhere…

Earlier this month, Google announced the addition of biking directions to Google Maps. Today, Google is also enhancing its maps by adding more data about local public transit options. Whenever you search for a…

Early last week I wrote a long-ish piece on the iAd – in which I both criticized and praised Apple for “re-gifting” a mobile ad format that already existed. Since then I’ve spoke with Apple’s head o…

Thanks to some handy tricks in the Google Labs bag you can easily add an HTML signature complete with images and save it for future use without plugins or outs…

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp drizzly November of my soul, whenever I find myself barking at Brian Williams on the evening news, whenever I feel certain that civili…

We missed this last week when ReadWriteWeb reported it, but maybe you did, too. So here’s something we’ve just discovered.

A small but very handy change at Twitter’s search engine, search.twi…

Have you written your eBook yet?
One of the most common things I’m hearing back from bloggers who are looking to make money from their blogs is that they’re planning to write and sell an eBook off the back…

My name is not Johnny B. Truant.
This isn’t meant to be any kind of a coming out. Based on my informal survey (so informal that no questions have been asked), most people rightly assume the moniker is too pr…

The TV advertising market is still bigger than the online advertising market, even though people spend an enormous, constantly growing amount of time online. We’ve been waiting for literally 15 years for online…

As it’s been three weeks since I made my transition to Mac and bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro, I thought it would be useful to share some thoughts on how it’s going so far.

One of my biggest concerns was ad…

From Entrepreneur:
Just selling a product like beer-infused potato chips should be enough to grab some peoples attention.
But Brett Stern, founder of Portland-based Beer Chips, wanted to make sure his compan…

Google has released a preliminary developer’s guide to aid those interested in porting their Web or mobile applications to Google TV, the newly announced platform built on top of Google Chrome technology. With…

If writing is part of what you do or want to do, calling yourself a “writer” isn’t as simple as putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, now is it?
A big writing project I’m working on (more soon) i…

I am moderating a discussion about podcasting this morning at the Webvisions conference here in Portland. My interest in podcasting these days centers around how cloud computing is affecting the medium so I tho…

Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can foll…

Susan Wojcicki / The Official Google Blog:
Working with AdMob to move mobile advertising forward — Today, the Federal Trade Commission cleared our acquisition of AdMob, a mobile advertising start up. W…

In the spirit of good old summer reading lists, we thought we’d follow up on our original entrepreneurial book list, and give you some new selections to enjoy this summer.
We consulted a few entrepreneurs, exe…

As an SEO, web marketer and blogger, I need to process tons of information daily. Very often this information is compiled in a table (I love organizing information in tables myself). Today I am reviewing a grea…

The Dalai Lama, having only been a Twitter user since late February, is already using the platform to circumvent Chinese censorship. Today the Tibetan spiritual leader held a one-hour question-and-answer sessi…

“Congratulations, Apple, you’ve made it. You are the number one target/foe/enemy/strawman of every tech company and media outlet around” — Macworld editor Jason SnellJoin the conversation about this story »…

Rick Burnes leads the content production team at HubSpot, a marketing software firm that produces the Inbound Marketing Blog and Inbound Marketing University.Chances are, most of the businesses you interact wi…

Apple’s new iAd proposition has been generating a great deal of discussion lately…

Usernames get passed along in the HTTP “Referer” header.

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For those of you wanting to learn iPhone development, there are a number of resources available. Besides blogs (like ours) there are a number of books that can help pull things together for new and budding deve…

Developers are abandoning Flash because clients want their sites to run on Apple’s iPad an iPhone, reports the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).The Flash-based Apple v. Adobe battle is in full swing, and Apple seems…

Picture this: Apple as a punching bag, or as Apple as a Google’s whipping boy. It sounds link an unlikely role for the Cupertino titan of tech, but it fit like a glove yesterday during Google’s IO Conferenc…

When it comes to marketing in the current economy, small businesses need all the help they can get. They don’t have the ad budgets, the personnel or the time that the bigger competition has. But none of those…

Last year I wrote a very popular post about 100 thoughts on marketing. Given that in many ways social media has provided more experiences and intimacy, and created more interest around those thoughts, I tho…

In March 2010, Facebook emerged as the top search term at Google, Bing, and Yahoo according to Experian Hitwise. Bing reported that 2.6% of all searches were dedicated to Facebook with Google at 1.17%.
To say…

I looked out at the room right before I started to speak. The first two rows were completely empty. Typical. Why is everyone so shy about sitting closer to the speaker?
I was at Ohio State Univ…

I wanted to show you this awesome music video because it’s creative, hilarious and it also reinforces a theme I’ve been writing about over several months …
Toyota paid big bucks to produce this YouTube v…

Still running focus groups? How very 20th century. An increasing number of organizations have moved consumer research online. Major brands including Godiva, ABC Studios, InterContinental Hotels, and Kodak, are…

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Social Media Club (San Francisco and Silicon Valley chapter) panel session around Social CRM which was moderated by Jeremiah Owyang and included Salesforce, Get Sati…

Click here to view the embedded video. The buzz of the day is Google TV – with most analysts having a Googlegasm and saying things like Louis Gray’s “While Apple Slept On Their Hobby, Google Executed�…

smooth wombat writes Its been 15 years since Bill Gates wrote his book The Road Ahead, in which he talks about how technology would shape the future. In the intervening years, technology has changed many aspect…

PayPal has just launched its Mobile Payments Library for Google’s Android OS, allowing developers to include in-app payments into their software. Thanks to this, when everything is set up right, you’ll be…

What if forensics experts could use a microscopic sample of DNA to figure out what a criminal suspect looks like? No, it’s not science fiction. In just a few y…

Apple versus Google. That’s the major thread these days, two corporate monoliths duking it out for tech supremacy. But today, Apple’s actions allowed Google to…

One of the big fears about social media is that it provides a platform for consumers to make lots of bad noise about brands. This is what most senior marketing folk are afraid of, if they have reservations abou…

You may have seen the evidence that running barefoot can really pay off in the long term. There’s more to it, though, than just chucking your shoes and hitting…

Seasons and
events in the UK
and the world over have developed an increasing importance for brands and
marketers in appealing to consumers. One only has to look at the impact of
occasions such as Valentine’s…

I delivered a presentation yesterday at the Minnesota Magazine and Publishers Association (MMPA) about how publishers can leverage social media channels to grow their online footprint (and revolutionize th…

I wanted to point you to this short TED talk below for two reasons: (1) It’s a pretty good example of delivery while displaying visuals on a monitor, and more importantly, (2) the content will be inspiring t…

When you ask someone with a successful social media presence how to build your own audience, the answer most often is, “Write a blog post, Tweet it to your following, and share it on Facebook and …

On Forbes.com, the drug
industry analyst Avik Roy has written a comment on my piece The Treatment in last weeks New Yorker. A few small
points, in response.

Roy is of the impression
that that I bel…

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone, but hopefully this means that more folks in the press will realize a simple point: their job isn’t just to report on what both sides said, but to say directly when someone…

According to Seth Godin, Linchpins are those indispensable geniuses who stand out from the crowd by taking on the essential jobs that would otherwise languish in a pit of neglect under the limpid banner of “…

In an effort to keep you up to date with my iPad experiments, I’m now a few weeks in and feeling pretty good about the purchase. I take the iPad with me quite often, and have lots of business uses for it. Th…

Google Android phones are shipping out at incredible rates lately (65,000 units a day) and with those numbers Google ad impression stock appears to be rising. While the company is still no where near the 62 pe…

At Thursday’s Google I/O keynote, VP of engineering Vic Gundotra repeatedly ripped into Apple, and he did it right off the bat. The video above, which just came out, shows the first ten minutes of his keyno…

The internet is constantly, relentlessly public. Post something and it’s there, for everyone, all the time.Acar has come up with a clever idea, a small idea that makes things just a little protected. Trick.ly i…

I touched briefly on TweetDeck’s promised integration of the Google Buzz API yesterday evening, but did not gain the opportunity to try Iain Dodsworth’s latest client until today. Luckily for me, I also ran int…

This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Oracle Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com.
Visit the Resource Center for the latest in whitepapers, tools and webcasts.
Of course, the content of…

When Google first launched its location-sharing service, Latitude, developers were left wondering how to access their users’ data. Now, over a year later, we finally have a Latitude API. But we also have a nu…

Popular movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes is now integrated with Apple’s iTunes Store, giving viewers the chance to instantly see the rating of a movie in the form of a popularity gauge called the Toma…

Chris Soghoian recently gave a talk where he reminded companies that it actually can be good for business to say “no” when the government comes asking for info. He ran through a variety of scenarios (many cove…

Continuing in my series of “20 Leadership Questions,” we come to the second question that Michael Smith asked when he interviewed me. This one is particularly important. It has huge implications for your or…

It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up. We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.
—Lee Unkrich, director…

Seesmic, Twitter and the iPhone have all been around for a couple of years, but for whatever reason it took a while for French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur‘s latest venture to come out with a proper iPhone / iP…

For todays marketer, the real enemy is obscurity.

How do you build attention for your product, company or brand and rise above the marketplace noise?

One way is to make sure your web content is complete…

When Andy Sernovitz talks, people listen. Afterall, he is the person who created the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

Sernovitz literally wrote the book on Word of Mouth Marketing, and in the process has g…

Less than one month to World Cup. Nike does it again, an amazing short movie, in my opinion the best football TVC ever. Kudos to my friends Coach Balleri Colin for writing the future with the support of WK.

Almost 40% of UK employees use social networks to criticise their workplace, while one in five take a pop at their boss, according to a new survey.
The research was carried out by MyJobGroup, which surveyed 1…

For nearly as long as the internet has been available to the general public, entrepreneurs and technologists have dreamed of the convergence of the television and the web. From WebTV to today’s internet-enabled…

When talk of highly profitable digital businesses comes up these days, 100-year-old sports companies don’t normally get mentioned. But there is at least one sports institution that has made a killing in digital…

Look out, CloudMade. Google has just announced a new feature in its Maps API that lets developers control the underlying map imagery. Map Styling gives you control of colors and whether types of features are in…

AP – Online business software maker Salesforce.com on Thursday said its fiscal first-quarter profit fell despite a 24 percent jump in revenue, as expenses climbed.

Posted by Dennis SellersMake no mistake: the battle between Apple and Google has just heated up. Immensely, due to a plethora of initiatives unveiled at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco Thur…

Since the release of Time Machine, backing your Mac up has never been easier. If you want to back up different sets of files to more than one drive, though, th…

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Google opened up an entirely new store of inventory for advertisers today with Google TV, an interactive platform that collapses the wall between TV and internet in the living room. The…

We all have a story to tell. Some naturally have more interesting stories than others, while the great story tellers have a way with words, even if their tales are not particularly earth-shattering. What we…

Google TV is going to be very interesting. It is far from a certainty that it will be more than Apple TV in terms of consumer sales. From a first glance the Marketplace is the most important and interesting…

Here’s a fun one by Thomas O’Toole, looking into a lawsuit by the US gov’t against a guy who committed identity fraud to apply for emergency disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina. Basically, the entire case…

Social media marketing has revolutionized marketing by creating an environment of engagement and conversation – a place where brands no longer just talk at their customers, but actually treat them wit…