Mashable: Latest 25 News Updates - including “Wi-Fi Stumblers Disappear from Apple App Store” |  |
- Wi-Fi Stumblers Disappear from Apple App Store
- WTFJeans Have Special Pockets for All Your Gadgets
- A New Meme is Brewing: YouTube Caption Fail
- Suite Arrival Delivers Toothpaste (And Other Essentials) to Your Hotel
- Twitter Hits 10 Billion Tweets
- Tumblr Lets You Add Pages to Your Blog
- Sony Working on a PSP Phone and iPad Competitor
- Google Wave Gets Email Notifications
- Apple Tops Google and Amazon on “Most Admired Company” List
- How Google Keeps Your Data Safe in the Cloud
- Suze Orman Advises Mark Zuckerberg Against Buying Twitter [SPOOF VIDEO]
- Yahoo Mail Makes Friends With Facebook
- Omoby: Visual Search for the iPhone
- HOW TO: Get Started With Spotify
- American Idol Strips Contestants of Social Media Accounts
- Boxee Adds “Funny or Die” to Its Lineup
- Mashable’s Weekly Guide to Social Media & Web Development Jobs
- Send Email and SMS Messages Using Voice Commands With Vlingo for iPhone
- YouTube Launches Auto-Captioning for Videos
- Opera: Downloads Have Tripled Since Intro of Browser Choice Screen
- Pepsi Refresh Wants to Give You $50,000 For Your Digital Pro-Social Idea
- Microsoft’s “Project Pink” Mobile Project is Real and Coming Soon
- How Much Are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Worth? [REPORT]
- 3 Crisis Survival Lessons for the Social Media Age
- Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook in No Rush to Go Public
- Microsoft’s First App for Android is Called Tag
| Wi-Fi Stumblers Disappear from Apple App Store Posted: 05 Mar 2010 03:40 AM PST  
Cult of Mac noticed that Apple has removed apps such as WiFi-Where, WiFiFoFum and yFy Network Finder. These apps scan Wi-Fi networks in the vicinity, which is not very different from simply going to the Wi-Fi Networks menu on your iPhone. However, according to a post on WiFi-Where creator’s website, the app was removed from the App Store for “using private frameworks to access wireless information.” The odd thing about this is the fact that some of these apps have been available in the App Store for years. Removing them now will make iPhone app developers even more uncertain about the future of their apps, as it seems they can be arbitrarily removed at any time, for vague reasons. Tags: apple, application, iphone, stumbler, wi-fi
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| WTFJeans Have Special Pockets for All Your Gadgets Posted: 05 Mar 2010 02:32 AM PST 
What’s so special about these jeans? Well, they have an iPhone/iPod Touch pocket with micro-fiber interior protection, as well as a hidden, high security USB stick pocket. These should be a perfect fit for your gadgets, unlike the pockets usually found on, well, regular jeans. While we cannot comment on build quality, fit style and all those other things that make you love or hate a pair of jeans, the idea of jeans with custom pockets for our favorite gadgets warms our geeky hearts. According to the site, the jeans are still in beta stage (whatever that means), and the first pairs are expected to ship on the 2nd of May, at the price of 59 euros (80 dollars). 
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| A New Meme is Brewing: YouTube Caption Fail Posted: 05 Mar 2010 01:54 AM PST 
But we also know that machine translation is not even near replacing human translation, and speech recognition isn’t exactly perfect yet. Machine translation alone will often get you hilarious results; add translation to the mix, and the translations often end up being very weird. Now, users are noticing it and already posting funny examples like this one. In fact, a simple Twitter search will reveal many similar examples, ranging from unfortunate to hilarious. We’re posting several favorites below.    What’s your favorite YouTube caption fail? Let us know in the comments! [Images by tristopiaTV, kman101, AJCShow]
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| Suite Arrival Delivers Toothpaste (And Other Essentials) to Your Hotel Posted: 04 Mar 2010 06:33 PM PST 
Quick Pitch: Travelers customize Suite Arrival kits with their favorite brands of personal care items. Suite Arrival ships the kit for the traveler to receive upon checking in to their hotel. Genius Idea: When you fly to a distant city, you can’t take a lot of your personal items with you because of airport security concerns. Toothpaste tubes and shaving cream bottles contain too much liquid. Razors can also pose problems. You have to either rely on what the hotel has waiting for you when you arrive, or you have to buy new hygiene items in your destination city. It’s a pain, especially when you’re too busy with meetings to pick those items up at the store. Suite Arrival attempts to resolve that issue; it calls itself the “Netflix for travel.” The analogy isn’t precisely accurate since you’re buying the materials, not borrowing them, but it’s nevertheless a great idea. When you’re planning a trip, you can go to the website and select the personal hygiene items that you want: shampoo, toothbrush, hairspray, shaving cream, body wash or whatever you need. Suite Arrival will make sure those items are waiting for you at your hotel after you’ve landed.  The travel kits are intended to be affordable, especially if your stay is a long one; a sample kit we made was fairly comprehensive but cost less than $20. Suite Arrival has a Twitter account that you can follow for updates and more information, but if you just head over to the website, you’ll get a clear sense of what the service has to offer. Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines)." Tags: bizspark, spark-of-genius, startups, suite arrival, Web 2.0 startups
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| Twitter Hits 10 Billion Tweets Posted: 04 Mar 2010 04:54 PM PST 
The milestone shows that Twitter’s still growing at a rapid pace: it broke 1 billion tweets in November 2008 and 5 billion tweets just four months ago. So who was the lucky person that sent out tweet 10 billionth tweet? We’re checking now and will let you know ASAP. Update: Tweet #10 billion apparently belongs to a protected user, as API calls won’t allow us to see that specific status update. Via @timdorr, here is Tweet #9,999,999,999 and tweet #10,000,000,001.  We want to also point out that the 10 billionth tweet doesn’t necessarily correlate to the actual 10 billionth tweet — tweet IDs have been tweaked several times due to technical issues such as Twitpocalypse. Still, it’s close enough, so now it’s time to look to the future and count down towards 20 billion tweets! Tags: Gigatweet, trending, tweets, twitter
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| Tumblr Lets You Add Pages to Your Blog Posted: 04 Mar 2010 03:57 PM PST 
Tumblr has grown a great deal without this feature — it’s simplicity has always been its selling point. However, many companies need static pages — it’s often the best way to provide contact info, company data, and more to provide customers with the information they need. Regular users can use them to describe who they are or what they are working on. Now tumblrs have the option to build pages. While simple overall (it’s just like building a blog post), you do get three choices for layouts: standard (title and body with your tumblelogs’s layout), custom (create a page with a completely custom theme), and redirect (forward a page to another domain). The new pages feature seems to keep Tumblr’s simplicity in-tact while providing a very necessary feature to many bloggers. From the looks of commenters though, the feature still has a few bugs. So Tumblr users, let us know what you think of the addition in the comments! 
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| Sony Working on a PSP Phone and iPad Competitor Posted: 04 Mar 2010 03:35 PM PST 
If you haven’t been following the vicissitudes of the mobile rumor mill for as long as we have, you might want to know that a PSP phone has historically been a mythical device about equally as hot and sought-after as the likewise completely mythical and often-rumoured Microsoft Zune phone — the latter of which is also reportedly about to materialize. According to the WSJ’s sources, the PSP Phone is part of a larger initiative to get some synergy going between Sony’s various existing platforms: the PlayStation Network, which offers both gaming and media content, the PlayStation Portable handheld gaming device, and its Sony Ericsson phone division. Until now those realms didn’t quite completely gel beyond PSP-PSN integration, and the overall pipeline for the consumer hasn’t been nearly as streamlined as in Apple’s iTunes ecosystem. There have also been inside reports that Sony didn’t want to let Sony Ericsson run with the PlayStation brand even though they’ve expressed interest in the past. Today’s news seems to indicate the parent company has had a change of heart in that regard. The idea with a PSP Phone would be to tie all those heretofore loose ends together and create a more seamless mobile content delivery service. We may even see another device enter the fray that would compete with the iPad and other emerging tablets of the world: something that “blurs distinctions among a netbook, an e-reader and a PlayStation Portable.” In other words, Sony is preparing a concerted push to go after Apple’s popular digital delivery ecosystem. Would you be excited about a PSP Phone? Let us know in the comments. [img credit: Engadget] Tags: apple, ipad, iphone, itunes, playstation, playstation portable, PSN, PSP, psp phone, sony, sony ericcson, video games
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| Google Wave Gets Email Notifications Posted: 04 Mar 2010 03:20 PM PST 
Email updates can be turned on via the Inbox dropdown menu. Once on, Google Wave will notify you with a summary of updates to your waves and email you when you’re added to a new wave. Thankfully you’ll only receive one update for each individual wave — instead of receiving an email for each update to a wave — until you log into that wave again. As notifications are still in the testing phase you can definitely expect the experience to be somewhat buggy. Google warns that you could get notifications for updated waves even if you’re the one that made the update, you can’t turn off notifications via the email link, and information in the notification may not show all the participants in a wave. Still, the option of email notifications is far better than no option at all. We have a sneaking suspicion that Google may have rushed the feature out to get inactive wavers absent in the past few months back into the wave experience. To that same purpose, Google recently released a smarter API in an effort to spur more developer interest in their preview product. Tags: Google, Google Wave
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| Apple Tops Google and Amazon on “Most Admired Company” List Posted: 04 Mar 2010 02:55 PM PST 
Other companies that ranked high on Fortune’s list include Google at #2 and Amazon.com at #5. Check out this video from Fortune that explains a little more about the process and provides some insights into why certain companies are so admired: Consumer and business trust, strong customer loyalty and the ability to transform new markets are all reasons that Apple was voted “most admired.” Apple easily topped the survey by scoring 51% of the vote. Because this survey was taken before Apple filed suit against HTC, its recent legal actions obviously weren’t taken into consideration. Apple, Google and Amazon.com all represent strong brands and strong feelings of loyalty amongst customers — plus good business decisions and balances sheets that appeal to investors. Tags: amazon.com, apple, branding, Google, most admired companies
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| How Google Keeps Your Data Safe in the Cloud Posted: 04 Mar 2010 02:35 PM PST 
Synchronous replication is a system that Google Apps uses to store customer’s info in two data centers at once, so that if one data center fails, Google says it nearly instantly transfers data over to the other one that’s also been reflecting the actions taken by the customer all along. On the practical side this means that thanks to the cloud-based storage solution, Google customers won’t lose any data in a data center failure. Just as crucially, they are theoretically back up and running straight away — although the online giant does acknowledge that no backup solution is perfect. This synchronous replication is applied to the entire Apps suite as well as Gmail (Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Sites), with the sales angle being enterprise-class back-up for all at a much lower cost than if companies were to provide or contract separately for their own data redundancy systems. Google, ever keen to push its Apps suite to new corporate clients of all sizes, estimates that this kind of back up could cost up to $500 for 25GB of data from other providers, but says it can bundle it in because it’s already running large, fast data centers. This is essentially Google reminding enterprise customers (and potential customers) about one of the significant benefits of cloud computing over traditional in-house server farm data storage. How does your business handle data backup and redundancy issues? Do you think cloud computing is the ideal solution to hardware failure? Tags: cloud computing, Google, google apps
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| Suze Orman Advises Mark Zuckerberg Against Buying Twitter [SPOOF VIDEO] Posted: 04 Mar 2010 02:02 PM PST 
In her latest “Can I Afford It” segment, Orman strongly advises Mark Z. — an obvious reference to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — against buying Twitter. She exclaims, “You want to spend $1.5 billion on Twitter, do I have that right? … Why do you need to buy it … you know Twitter, you can get it for free.” Of course, the video is all in jest and first aired at last night’s Shorty Awards in New York. Orman, who happened to be nominated for a Shorty Award in the finance category, agreed to film the spoof video when approached by producers. The end result is a slice of comedic genius at the expense of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and even Chatroulette. Check out the clever and entertaining mock segment below: Tags: celebrities, facebook, twitter, video, viral videos
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| Yahoo Mail Makes Friends With Facebook Posted: 04 Mar 2010 01:18 PM PST 
The new feature means that Yahoo Mail users can now connect their Facebook accounts and integrate their Facebook friends’ email addresses into their Yahoo Contacts list. Users can visit the Import Contacts page to be guided through he Facebook friend import process. Of course, this is just the beginning of the full Facebook Connect feature bonanza on Yahoo. You can expect functionality to be integrated into News, Sports, Finance, and even Flickr in the months ahead. Given that Facebook is now 400 million members strong, we have to believe that there’s a significant shared user base between Facebook and Yahoo. In a perfect world, Yahoo will see those users stay on Yahoo properties and use the Facebook contact and sharing functionality to push Yahoo content out to the world’s largest social network and generate more traffic in return. [Img credit: superfluity] Tags: facebook connect, social media, Yahoo Mail
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| Omoby: Visual Search for the iPhone Posted: 04 Mar 2010 12:58 PM PST 
The technology behind the app is visual object search, so it doesn’t require a barcode to be scanned, and can tolerate a fair amount of object rotation and general object obscurity in making an identification. In our tests oMoby fared better on some things than others: boxed media like video games or DVDs were easily identified while the Nexus One was rendered simply as “Google Android phone.”   Still, it’s a nice quick and dirty way to pull up information or do comparative shopping for a wide range of objects. The app saves a history of your visual searches too so you can reference them later. Hooking in your Twitter or Facebook allows you to share results with your friends; sharing via email is an option as well. The app is powered by IQ Engines visual search technology, which also offers an API for developers who want to incorporate image intelligence into their own apps. So if you’re an iPhone user who has been jealous of your Android counterparts’ access to visual search, oMoby is definitely worth a look at the low, low price of free in the App Store [iTunes link]. We’ve embedded a demo video below of the app in action; if you get a chance to watch the video or try out the app, let us know what you think in the comments. Tags: google goggles, iphone, iphone apps, IQ engines, Mobile 2.0, object search, omoby, product search, Search, visual search
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| HOW TO: Get Started With Spotify Posted: 04 Mar 2010 12:44 PM PST 
Currently only available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain (technically), Spotify has previously talked about plans for expansion — including a U.S. launch later this year, the exact date of which is TBD. The basic version of Spotify is free to use for anyone who manages to grab an invite (either via another user or through a waiting list-based e-mail sign-up), although consumers can skip the ad-supported free option and choose to sign up for its £9.99 per month (approx $15) “Premium” service that also gives you access to Spotify’s mobile apps — and more — which we’ll explore in a later post. But for now, here’s a quick guide to getting started on the entry-level version of Spotify, taking you through the sign-up process to more interesting options such as how to start sharing your music. Signing UpOnce you get your e-mail invite, there’s a direct link within it to set-up your account which is a standard username/password affair. However, be careful when you select your username, as it’s not possible to change it — to do so would mean you’ll have to re-register which will mean begging around for another invite.  When you’ve created an account you need to download the software (which works with Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X 10.4.0 and up, and Linux using Wine) via the installer option which is the usual save file, double-click, choose where you want it process as far as a Windows install goes.  With a Spotify account, you can sign in anywhere via a connected computer and download the software, although you can only play music on one computer at a time.  Start Finding MusicWith the simple sign-up process complete, there are now several ways for you to start gathering content. The quickest is search, via the search box which does offer fuzzy “did you mean” options if you aren’t quite sure whether it’s “Byork” or “Bjork.”  If you’re impatient to hear some tunes, you can start listening to music right away while you’re looking for more — just search, click on the track or album you want and it’ll start playing immediately. Another option is via browsing, which is link-based, so you need to initiate at least one search before you can start surfing. But once you do, almost everything you see in Spotify is clickable — artist names, album titles, years, genres, styles, tracks, playlist titles, etc. — starting you off on a click-through-fest which could take you days to return from. Clicking through on an artist’s name will give you that artist’s homepage which offers an “overview” including a pic, brief bio, top hits, related artists (always good for new music discovery) and then a scrollable list of albums, complete with artwork. Some artists also offer a longer biography, too. More advanced text-based search options include the ability to narrow down your search from a general keyword search to a more focused effort. These work along the following lines — to search for a song with the word “prince” in the title, enter “title:prince,” or search for “album:prince” or “artist:prince” to find matching albums and artists. Other ways to find music are by hitting the “Home” option on the right-hand side menu which offers a “What’s New” selection as well as “Top Lists” which lets you browse playlists, including an option to see what’s hot in your country, as well as others.  Creating PlaylistsOnce you have found tracks you like it’s easy to start making playlists. Just click “New Playlist” from the menu on the right-hand side and name it.  Then you can either drag and drop tracks, or you can right-click a track or an album and select “Save To” which will bring up the roster of your existing playlists. You can control and click to select multiple songs. A single Spotify playlist can store up to 10,000 tracks.  Sharing Songs and PlaylistsAnyone with Spotify can listen to your songs or playlists through Spotify’s sharing options. You can either right-click on a playlist and select “Copy HTTP Link” which will generate a link along the lines of  You can also share through Twitter, Facebook and Delicious by right-clicking, selecting “Share To,” which will give you the three sites as clickable options. 
If you want to make sharing a more interactive effort, then right-click on your playlist and check the “Collaborative Playlist” option. This means that others can add songs to your playlist by opening it in Spotify and adding tunes — this feature is impressive and works almost in real-time.  Listening to Spotify RadioSpotify’s radio options offer the usual genres — blues, country, jazz, disco, funk, etc. — and then also offer radio stations by decade, which is a nice touch. You can select as many genres as you’d like in order to generate a combined stream, so if for some bizarre reason you fancy a mix of country and techno, you can hit both those buttons to create a custom station.  The radio player offers a visual for all the songs playing and coming next, so if you spot something you’re desperate to hear two songs along, you can skip forward, or keep clicking back if you want Suicidal Tendencies’ I Feel Your Pain repeated 17 times. Similar to competing sites like Last.fm, you can also choose to generate a radio playlist based on a favorite artist. Just click on the artist’s name link and select “Artist Radio.” The subsequent song list is generated from your chosen artist, as well as related artists.  Buying SongsSpotify does offer the option to purchase some songs through its download partner 7digital, although it will likely be a different company when the service launches in the U.S. Any songs with an arrow in a circle under the “Buy” option can be purchased. Doing so for the first time generates a quick small print message to agree to before giving you the option to add credit or debit card details. At this point Spotify will give you one-click buying options, or the choice to enter your password.  The next time you want to buy a track you don’t need to enter you card details again, just click to confirm the purchase, which is devilishly easy, so do watch those Spotify spending sprees if you’re on a budget. As well as downloading to the Spotify client, the music is also downloaded to your computer. You can set where you want it to save to in the preferences, otherwise it saves to default locations such as My Docs/My Music on a PC.  The files are DRM-free MP3s, from 192kbps to 320kbps, and can be downloaded several times (the number of which is dependent on the track and label) then transferred to an MP3 player or burned to a CD from your computer. That’s All, FolksThat should be more than enough to get you up and running with Spotify. If you’re looking for an invite and don’t know a current Premium user to ask for one, you can sign-up your e-mail address on the Spotify site (just hit the “Getting Started” button) to go on the waiting list. Are you a Spotify user? How do you like it? Share your thoughts about the service in the comments below. More HOW TO resources from Mashable:
Tags: delicious, facebook, how to, music, social media, spotify, twitter
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| American Idol Strips Contestants of Social Media Accounts Posted: 04 Mar 2010 12:28 PM PST 
Twitter followers of each of the individual contestants were sent the following message, “Thanks so much for following me! All my updates from now on will be on our Official Ai9 Twitter Page, please follow me there @AI9Contestants.” Similar messages were posted to Facebook and MySpace as well. The contestants individual social media identities were stripped by the show without rhyme or reason, but The Wall Street Journal and USA Today speculate that the move was likely made because of the propensity of social media site follower counts to reveal early favorites, influence voting, and possibly remove the veil of the mystery that clouds American Idol’s typically stealth results. The logic is sound — a contestant with more Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and MySpace friends is likely to get more votes and thus would have a higher chance of winning the competition. But in making the decision, American Idol has also made it impossible for contestants to develop that now all-important connection with their fan base, which is becoming crucial to the business side of the industry. We should also note that while Idol’s consolidation efforts may be designed to maintain the mystery of the show’s outcome, there’s no stopping the rest us from turning to social media analytics providers to try and predict the winners and losers based on overall buzz and sentiment breakdown. In fact, we know that Philip Kaplan of Blippy has plans to do just that, indicating that he may try to ruin American Idol with a custom program that will look at who people say they’re voting for in social media channels.
Tags: american idol, social media, tv
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| Boxee Adds “Funny or Die” to Its Lineup Posted: 04 Mar 2010 11:51 AM PST 
Boxee is a software application for home theater PCs (Apple TV, Mac, Linux or Windows) that brings web-hosted content to the TV screen and has a BitTorrent client for downloading videos to watch in the living room. It also plans to offer a payment plan for premium content in the near future. The idea: challenge the traditional cable TV model with on-demand content downloaded and streamed from the Internet. Funny or Die features sketch and stand-up comedy bits from both relative unknowns and stars like Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis. Galifianakis’ talk show Between Two Ferns has been nominated for multiple Streamy awards. The most recent hit from the site is a a political sketch that brings together two decades of Saturday Night Live performers who’ve portrayed U.S. presidents including Fred Armisen (Barack Obama), Will Ferrell (George W. Bush), Darrell Hammond (Bill Clinton), Dana Carvey (George Bush Sr.), Jim Carrey (Ronald Reagan), Dan Akroyd (Jimmy Carter), and Chevy Chase (Gerald Ford). The site will also have its own show on HBO called Funny or Die Presents. In case you’re wondering what kind of content you can access on your Boxee box now, the SNL presidents sketch is embedded below. Enjoy! Tags: boxee, comedy, funny or die, gadgets, set-top box, software, television, tv, web series
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| Mashable’s Weekly Guide to Social Media & Web Development Jobs Posted: 04 Mar 2010 11:50 AM PST 
If you’re seeking a job in social media, we’d like to help out. For starters, Mashable’s Job Lists section gathers together all our resource lists, how-tos and expert guides to help you get hired. In particular, you might want to see our articles on How to Leverage Social Media for Career Success and How to Find a Job on Twitter. But we’d like to help in a more direct way, too. Mashable's job boards are a place for socially-savvy companies to find people like you. This week and every week, Mashable features its coveted job board listings for a variety of positions in the web, social media space, and beyond. Have a look at what's good and new on our job boards: Mashable Job Board ListingsNew Media Manager at Golin Harris in Arlington, VA.
Read more about this opportunity here. Director of Digital Strategy at Feeding America in Chicago, IL.
Read more about this opportunity here. Director of Technology/Lead Developer at Patents.com in Sterling, VA.
Read more about this opportunity here. Interactive Designer at Blackbaud in South Carolina.
Read more about this opportunity here. Human Resources at GovDelivery in Minnesota.
Read more about this opportunity here. Social Media Manager at Wm Wrigley Jr Company in Chicago, IL.
Read more about this opportunity here. Digital Group Manager/Account Director at Weber Shandwick in New York, NY.
Read more about this opportunity here. Part Time Account Coordinator at Strategis in Stoughton, MA.
Read more about this opportunity here. Account Director – Digital at The Marketing Store in Elmhurst, IL.
Read more about this opportunity here. Rockstar PHP Developer at BigCommerce.com in Surry Hills, Australia.
Read more about this opportunity here. Interactive Media Designer at Fearless Media, LLC in New York, NY.
Read more about this opportunity here. Web Application Program Manager at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA.
Read more about this opportunity here. Digital Strategist at Ketchum, Inc. in San Francisco, CA.
Read more about this opportunity here. Director of Marketing at Unigo.com in New York, NY.
Read more about this opportunity here. Interaction Designer at a confidential company in Lexington, MA.
Read more about this opportunity here. Buzz Builder (Summer Position) at theKbuzz in New York.
Read more about this opportunity here. Temporary Edit and Production Assistant at Time Inc. in New York, NY.
Read more about this opportunity here. Marketing Manager/Senior Mgr at Time Inc. in New York, NY.
Read more about this opportunity here. Account Director/Director of Sales at Cracked.com / Demand Media in New York, NY.
Read more about this opportunity here. Director of Digital and Marketing Strategy at PDI Global in Chicago, IL.
Read more about this opportunity here. Social Media Coordinator at CreativeFeed in New York, NY.
Read more about this opportunity here. Social Media Online Marketing Manager at Media Storm in New York, NY.
Read more about this opportunity here. Project Manager at Savings.com in Santa Monica, CA.
Read more about this opportunity here. PPC Specialist at Savings.com in Santa Monica, CA.
Read more about this opportunity here. Digital Architect – User Experience at Powell Tate / Weber Shandwick in Washington DC.
Read more about this opportunity here. Data Analyst at 3CSI in Novi, MI.
Read more about this opportunity here. Technology Editorial Blogger at Justmeans in San Francisco, CA.
Read more about this opportunity here. Mashable has a variety of web 2.0, application development, business development, and social networking job opportunities available. Check them out at Mashable's Job Board.
Got a job posting to share with our readers? Post a job to Mashable today ($80 for a 30 day listing) and get it highlighted every week on Mashable.com (in addition to exposure all day every day in the Mashable marketplace). Tags: career, careers, jobs, mashable
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| Send Email and SMS Messages Using Voice Commands With Vlingo for iPhone Posted: 04 Mar 2010 10:56 AM PST 
That’s not the case anymore. Dragon Search, Dragon Dictation, Bing for the iPhone and Siri are all recent voice-to-text applications that can offer some of the similar functionality as Vlingo. The big difference is that Vlingo lets you do more from within a single application. You don’t have to open up a new or different app to do a web search, send an e-mail or SMS or update Twitter or Facebook, you can do it all within one app. Check out this video that Vlingo put together to show off the new features in Vlingo for iPhone: The interface for Vlingo has been totally revamped and it is now much more streamlined and easier to select what you want to do. Moreover, corrections work better too. Bing joins Google and Yahoo! as an option for doing voice-activated web searches — and you can select your default search engine but still search using another search engine if you so choose. Just say “Bing movie times Alice in Wonderland Atlanta” for instance. SMS and EmailSMS and Email have long been part of the BlackBerry application but are just now coming to Vlingo for iPhone. The implementation is solid. You can create a text or e-mail by speaking the message type and then your contact name — Vlingo uses your address book to find your contacts. So I could say, “Email Grant, Subject Dinner, Message Pick something up” and an e-mail would be created with those parameters. The voice recognition is pretty good — in my own tests, Dragon’s apps still set the standard — but I was able to do much of what I needed on Vlingo with little correction.   I spoke with Hadley Harris, the VP of Consumer Business at Vlingo and he told me that the application gets better as you go. As it starts to learn your voice and your accent, the applications accuracy rate improves. Moreover, Vlingo can tap into its entire network of users to learn new words or names. In-App Purchase
You can download Vlingo for the iPhone for free and try out the included features to see if you want to then upgrade to e-mail and SMS. Hadley told me that an Android version of Vlingo is also in the works. Voice-to-text apps are improving at a startling rate and Vlingo is unique in its convergence of multiple functions into one application. Do you use any voice-to-text apps? Let us know! Tags: dragon search, iphone app reviews, iphone apps, siri, vlingo, vlingo iphone, voice to text
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| YouTube Launches Auto-Captioning for Videos Posted: 04 Mar 2010 10:32 AM PST 
Mike Cohen, part of Google’s Speech Technology team (as a note, he is also deaf), first spoke via sign language to talk about his team’s work on video. This press conference is about YouTube and accessibility to the disabled, specifically the deaf. It’s also about YouTube’s new auto-captioning technology, which is rolling out to everybody today. Below are my live notes from today’s press conference: DetailsAuto-captioning launched in limited beta in November of last year. It was for select partners to test out the system, where Google’s algorithms would parse words within videos and transform it into captions — speech-to-text, a technology used on he Nexus One and Android. - Mr. Cohen spoke about the new technology and demoed it with a video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote at Google I/O 2009. The English auto-captions were very effective. - Then he turned out speech recognition translation for French. Auto-captioning is only supported in English, but you can see the captions in multiple languages.  - This is what it looks like. Scroll farther below to see a video with the auto-caption technology. - Now the Google Speech Technology team is speaking about the challenges they faced to get auto-captioning operational. Their vision was to create accurate captions for all videos in all languages, but had to deal with huge vocabularies, background noise, poor recordings, accent variability, and distinguishing between song and speech. - Google’s approach is to deliver captions from the cloud, given them the ability to rapidly iterate and model at a large scale. How Google’s Auto-Captions Works- Now Naomi Bilodeau of Google is speaking on the launch of auto-captions. - She says auto-captions simply help YouTube content creators reach a larger audience, so it’s a clear win for them. - You can only caption your own videos — you can’t just caption someone else’s videos. - Ms. Bilodeau is now demoing the captioning interface. You can see the full caption file with timestamps and even download them as a text document. You can also upload your own captions as its own track — useful if auto-captioning isn’t doing the job or to make edits to the auto-captioned text. - It takes time to caption: a day or several days depending on the length of the video. Education- Now Obadiah Greenberg, who works on YouTube’s content partnerships team (specifically YouTube EDU). - Universities were the earliest partners of auto-captioning (Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, MIT, Duke, Yale, Columbia, University of New South Wales), as well as a few media publications (Demand Media, PBS, National Geographic, UCTV). - Now Ben Hubbard, who works on webcasts for UC Berkeley, is speaking about extending the reach of its lectures and content through Google and YouTube and being excited to be part of the auto-caption project. - New speaker: John Foliot, who runs the Stanford Online Accessibility Program. He is speaking about the rise of web video. One of the biggest challenges he saw to bringing videos to more people is simply the fact that professors and video creators are very busy and don’t have the time to look through long videos to find specific content. With auto-captioning, these people can simply use text-based search to find what they need. - Mike Cohen is back on stage. He’s speaking about the use of auto-captions in search. You can specify search only brings up videos with closed captioning (it shows the cc icon in search). In the past, when he was at MIT, he couldn’t understand lectures because he had no sign interpreter. Now he can use the captioning to watch lectures he missed. - Ms. Bilodeau is now speaking — via sign language this time (she is not deaf), introducing several members of the California School for the Deaf. She showed off this video (auto-captioning is enabled; click the bottom right button to bring up the option) - Now students of the California School for the Deaf are speaking (sign language) on how they feel not excluded anymore from the major phenomenon of web video and are grateful to Google for building this technology. - Joey Baer, of the school, hopes that in the future there will be a system to translate sign into text automatically. That would be cool, but definitely seems even more complicated — image recognition is still in its early stages. - This may be one of the largest experiments ever conducted on the web. It’s unclear whether this undertaking is the first of its kind.
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| Opera: Downloads Have Tripled Since Intro of Browser Choice Screen Posted: 04 Mar 2010 09:56 AM PST 
The browser ballot sees Microsoft make consumers that have PCs with Internet Explorer set as the default browser aware that it’s not the only browser on the market with a new screen that promotes Microsoft’s competitors like Opera and Mozilla. It highlights 12 other options in total, although only five show up on the first screen (IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera) the consumer sees — something that has drawn criticism from the smaller browsers hidden away on different pages. “In several major countries, Opera downloads have tripled since the ballot screen appeared,” Rolf Assev, the chief strategy officer for Opera told Reuters. The surges in downloads for Opera — which recently released version 10.5 — have been seen most heavily in Belgium, France, Spain, Poland and the UK. While Apple and Google traditionally don’t comment on these kind of figures on request, we’ve asked Mozilla for comment on how its downloads have been affected and will let you know the results when we hear back. [Via PC Pro] Tags: Browsers, Firefox, internet, microsoft, opera, statistics
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| Pepsi Refresh Wants to Give You $50,000 For Your Digital Pro-Social Idea Posted: 04 Mar 2010 09:54 AM PST 
Today we're excited to announce that we have an opportunity to get of our reader’s ideas funded to the tune of $50,000, and it will all happen within the next couple weeks in conjunction with SXSW. We’ll also be keeping you updated about the project and letting you know how you can help here on Mashable. Here's how it works:
Interested? Be sure to read Pepsi's guidelines and eligibility requirements (a key one being this is US-only) and then submit your idea to Mashable by going here. We'll be in touch with the winning team early on March 9th to discuss next steps. We look forward to your ideas and working with our selected team! Disclosure: Pepsi is a previous sponsor of Mashable events. Tags: Pepsi, pepsi refresh, social media, sxsw
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| Microsoft’s “Project Pink” Mobile Project is Real and Coming Soon Posted: 04 Mar 2010 09:01 AM PST 
Today Gizmodo is reporting that they have confirmation that Project Pink not only exists, but that it is coming to Verizon. Gizmodo received some third-party marketing materials that discuss the roll-out plans for Project Pink and while the site didn’t publish those materials (to keep the anonymity of its source), it has confirmed that the photos are the same renderings as the Project Pink leaks it published back in September. So that basically means that this new phone will look feature a few different shapes and feature the same sliding-keyboard design that the Palm Pre, Motorola Droid and T-Mobile Sidekick sport.  Details concerning specific specifications, price and release date information wasn’t included, but Gizmodo says that the materials indicate that a release appears to be taking place soon. How Does This Relate to Windows Phone 7?From what Gizmodo can tell (and certainly from what the timing indicates), these new Microsoft phones will not be running Windows Phone 7 Series, as the interfaces are very different. And given the statement from Microsoft that even newly released Windows Mobile 6.5 phones won’t be able to upgrade to Windows Phone 7, it sounds like this phone will operate on an entirely different platform. Because of the big focus on social networking in the marketing materials, it seems like the phone probably has some sort of platform — whether the apps will be compatible with other Windows Phone Classic apps or if it is an entirely different platform — we just don’t know. A Stopgap Release or Something New?By announcing Windows Phone 7 Series last month and by confirming that only future devices will work with the software, Microsoft has put itself in a difficult position. On the one hand, they need to announce the new platform so that people know what is coming and so developers can be courted to start working on software. On the other hand, knowing about the future products (and that current Windows Mobile 6.5 devices won’t be upgradeable) really makes it hard to attract new customers in the next six months or so. This is what is known as the Osborne effect and it can be very difficult for a company to overcome. When Apple famously announced its transition to Intel processors at WWDC 2005, the announcement caught many off-guard, in part because of the fear of an Osborne effect. That ended up not happening and sales of PowerPC Macs remained consistent until the Intel Macs introduction in January 2006, but more often than not, this strategy inevitably means a slow in demand for the current product. Project Pink might just be a stopgap release — something to sell until Windows Phone 7 launches — but it could also be indicative of a completely different platform. It appears that these new phones are not fully-fledged smartphones in the Android/iPhone/Palm/Windows Mobile motif — but instead it’s more of a “feature” phone like what Samsung, LG and Nokia offer. That is, you can get a certain selection of apps and go online and message on Twitter and Facebook, but the phone itself lacks the more sophisticated mobile OS. If that is indeed the case, this might be an opportunity for Microsoft to attack the lower-end of the mobile market (a market that has in many ways been obliterated by smartphones), while also selling something “new” until the flagship product launches this September. Whether or not this strategy will work will depend on pricing, phone features and how this device is targeted. What Do You Think?What do you think of Microsoft’s apparent dual-phone platforms strategy? Do you have any interest in a lower-cost social network-centric mobile phone? Let us know! (Photo from Gizmodo) Tags: microsoft, Project Pink, windows mobile, windows phone, windows phone 7, windows phone classic
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| How Much Are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Worth? [REPORT] Posted: 04 Mar 2010 08:32 AM PST 
SharesPost, however, is a company that lets owners of shares in private companies sell them to prospective buyers, and they've just released an index detailing valuations of some of the most prominent companies in the social media space.
How close are these valuations to reality? Facebook's most recent investment from DST valued the company at north of $10 billion, while Twitter was valued at roughly $1 billion when it took $100 million in funding back in September. In other words — likely not too far off. SharePost also says that they've been involved "in the negotiations of more than $229MM worth of transactions," so there is enough activity in their marketplace for them to make rough estimates of valuation. Their estimates also take into account venture capital investments and research reports from equity analysts. What do you think of the valuations? Let us know in the comments! Image courtesy of iStockphoto, tforgo Tags: facebook, finance, linden labs, linkedin, Second Life, sharespost, trending, twitter, Zynga
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| 3 Crisis Survival Lessons for the Social Media Age Posted: 04 Mar 2010 08:04 AM PST 
If there was any doubt before last year as to social media's ability to exacerbate reputation crises, 2009 settled the debate. In just that one year, Domino's, United Airlines, and Tiger Woods were but a few of the headlining examples that were variously infected by the viral bug. These global brands made their problems even worse with sloppy responses to online news reports, blog posts, Facebook updates, YouTube videos, and Twitter entries. With big names such as Toyota and Johnson & Johnson suffering similar ills in just the first two months of 2010, it seems that the second decade of the 21st Century will be as unrelenting as the first on brands that fail to effectively prepare for and respond to crises in the online marketplace. The good news is that by understanding how online crises can be transformed into trust-building opportunities, companies and high-profile individuals can avoid repeating the grave mistakes of 2009. There continue to be teachable moments in abundance. It's time to seize on their lessons. Size Doesn't Matter In the age of digital crises, big does not mean savvy. Indeed, the bigger the brand, the harder it often falls. Having worked with dozens of Fortune 1000 companies under digital duress, several salient problems seem glaringly apparent to me. Far too often, for example, corporate marketers have no contact with those entrusted with crisis response. In many cases, the company's social media wunderkinds are completely walled off –- intentionally –- from those empowered to ensure the survival of the brand itself. Toyota has particularly suffered the consequences of such balkanization. Toyota boasts more than 81,000 fans on Facebook, yet the company simply failed to utilize that immense resource during the first days of its recalls. To put Toyota's silence in perspective, Google registered more than 22,000 recall-related blog posts in the first week after the announcement. Rather than engage their tens of thousands of self-identified brand ambassadors who were waiting for information, it seems Toyota simply forgot they existed. This failure to engage a captive and influential audience represents an utter misunderstanding of the power that online communities wield in crisis. Individuals who align themselves with brands online do so for a reason. If kept informed, these individuals are a willing and enthusiastic first line of defense both online and off. Yet with each passing day of the Toyota recalls, these audiences quickly grew more concerned for themselves and their families than the brand they trusted and treasured. The messages they needed weren't there for them in the places they look to first. The internal walls that separate crisis response efforts must come down or more brands will suffer the wrath of real-time communications and the public's demand for instant access to vital information when it matters most. What Got You Here, Won't Get You There
Yet three decades later, when J&J found itself embroiled in new recalls, the rules of the game had changed dramatically. Audiences today want information and solutions in real time. At the decisive moment, J&J did not respond fast enough to reaffirm its brand as a champion of consumer safety. Of course it isn't always possible to offer a solution in the first hours of a crisis, but it is essential to at least assuage consumer fears by acknowledging the problem and affirming that all that can be done is being done. Silence only raises more vexatious questions from consumers, the media, regulators, and increasingly, online communities. The lesson here is all the more underscored by contrast to the past: If you are still reading from the pre-social media revolution crisis playbook, you will fail in the digital age, period. You Can Not Advertise Out of Crisis
Oddly, Tiger Woods' ordeal was similarly patterned. His agents and public relations specialists had built a seemingly bulletproof brand, yet, at the first blush of controversy, those same advisors utterly faltered by leaving key questions unanswered and allowing the online outrage to transform uncertain rumor into outright truth. As we saw on February 19th, months into the controversy, Team Tiger still failed to learn even the most basic lessons of his crisis ordeal. In today's world, every brand has a plug. When it's pulled, the balloon can instantaneously deflate. Traditional advertising and brand/reputation management cannot work in such a galaxy where crisis moves at the speed of light. Today's consumers do not make decisions based solely (or in many cases even largely) on what they read in print or see on TV. Rather, they are increasingly turning to the experiences of their friends on Facebook and the bloggers they follow. In its 2009 State of the Blogosphere report, Technorati found that 70% of these bloggers actively discuss products and companies. Meanwhile, no platform has shown more rapid ability to drive the lifecycle of a story than Twitter. Penn State's College of Information Science and Technology found that 20% of the 27 million tweets posted each day mention brands in one way or another. Yet only 20% of Global Fortune 100 companies have a comprehensive social media plan that includes a presence on each of the major social media hubs, and just over a third still don’t even have Twitter accounts. ConclusionIn a crisis, consumers need honest answers and they need them fast –- and no messaging vehicle is better suited to meet this demand than those fueling the crisis in the first place. Transparent engagements in the online communities, where your customers already live, provide a credible and direct channel for the answers they need. As we round the corner of the first quarter of 2010, successful companies will need to embrace the reality that effective crisis management has undergone a fundamental evolution in the Digital Age. Companies that still focus primarily on traditional journalists and broadcasters or messages through paid marketing campaigns do so at their own peril. At bet-the-company moments, open and rapid engagement via blog posts, tweets, viral videos, Facebook updates, and other online venues make the difference between victory and defeat in the Court of Public Opinion. More business resources from Mashable:
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, rjzinger Tags: brand, brand management, business, facebook, pr, small business, social media, tiger woods, Toyota, twitter
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| Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook in No Rush to Go Public Posted: 04 Mar 2010 06:31 AM PST 
Asked about Facebook’s plans to launch an initial public offering (IPO), he said the company will do it eventually, but it’s “definitely in no rush.” The reason for the leisurely approach, according to Zuckerberg, is the simple fact that Facebook doesn’t need money. “If you don’t need that capital, then all the pressures are different, and the motivations (to go public) are not there in the same way,” he said. While estimates about Facebook’s future earnings vary wildly, Facebook recently turned cash flow positive, which is a big deal for a company many once thought was pure vaporware. As long as Facebook keeps it that way, it can calculate and delay the IPO for as long as it deems necessary. Tags: facebook, ipo, wall street
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| Microsoft’s First App for Android is Called Tag Posted: 04 Mar 2010 05:24 AM PST 
We wrote about Tag a couple of weeks ago; simply put, it’s an app that lets you link physical objects with content on the Internet (as featured in Get Married magazine). You point your smartphone’s camera at a specially designed barcode, and your smartphone opens a link to any sort of online content: video, image, or text. At launch, Microsoft supported most mobile operating systems – Symbian, iPhone OS, BlackBerry – with Android also being on the list, but clicking on that link actually revealed a “coming soon” message. Now, Android users can try out the app too, but its significance lies in the fact that Microsoft has created an application for Google’s Android. It’s not that big of a deal, since the same app exists for the iPhone OS, another competitor to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 mobile operating systems. Still, in the epic battle of Microsoft vs. Google, this is another small victory for the online giant from Mountain View. Tags: android, microsoft, Mobile 2.0, Tag
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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details 
Name: 
It’s official: Twitter has surpassed 10 billion tweets. While 
Simple blogging platform 
Consumer electronics juggernaut Sony is apparently stepping up to the plate to tackle Apple’s 
Google Wave has finally turned on email notifications as a feature for users who want to see immediate, hourly, or daily email notifications for new and updated waves.
In Fortune Magazine’s annual ranking of “most admired companies”, Apple has once again walked away with the top spot. Apple was voted #1 for the third year in a row in a poll of executives, industry analysts and company directors. This year, Apple actually 
In a 
Twitter may be 
In December, Yahoo revealed a new strategy: 
Boxee has added popular comedy site Funny or Die to the repository of video content offered on its cross-platform home theater software.
Since 
While Facebook and Twitter updates, maps and web searches remain free in Vlingo for iPhone, if you want to use the new Email or SMS feature, you need to purchase it via an in-app upgrade. The features are $6.99 individually or $9.99 if you buy both together. That’s not bad when you consider how much you can do with the app — though we do wish a more generic “to-do” feature also existed for making quick notes.
I’m here at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California for a press conference called by the Google-owned video website. In a room reminiscent of a U.N. meeting, a group of speakers from YouTube, Google, Stanford, Berkeley, and the California School for the Deaf (CSD) are about to speak on YouTube and accessibility.
Opera has revealed that its desktop browser downloads have tripled since the new 
Last month, Pepsi made the bold move of forgoing Super Bowl ads in favor of a 
When Microsoft unveiled its plans for 
For the moment, the valuations we have for private companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are based mostly on what we know from venture capital investments.
Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at 
Johnson & Johnson's response to the Tylenol tampering incident of 1982 is the stuff of legend. After numerous deaths were attributed to cyanide contamination of its marquee pain reliever –- which then represented a large portion of the analgesic market –- J&J initiated a costly nationwide recall, ultimately revolutionizing the industry with tamper-proof packaging that's now an industry standard.
There's no debating the historical success of big brand advertising and marketing programs. As a result of such programs, Toyota's Camry has long been America's best-selling car. As recently as January 6, 2010, 
Everyone is still trying to figure out just how big a business social networks are, how much is Facebook worth, and how much money it’ll be making in a couple of years. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, however, 
Admit it: seeing Microsoft release an application for Google’s operating system seems a little weird, doesn’t it? Still, it’s true; Microsoft has launched its first Android app, called Tag.| You are subscribed to email updates from Mashable! To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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