Jumat, 17 September 2010

Mashable: Latest 26 News Updates - including “Apple’s 27-inch Cinema Display Comes to Apple Online Store”

Mashable: Latest 26 News Updates - including “Apple’s 27-inch Cinema Display Comes to Apple Online Store”

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Apple’s 27-inch Cinema Display Comes to Apple Online Store

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 03:18 AM PDT


Apple’s 27-inch Cinema Display, first announced about a month and a half ago, is finally on sale in Apple’s online store.

It’s an IPS-based glossy monitor with a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution, with LED backlighting, 1000:1 contrast ratio and a 178 degree viewing angle. It comes with built-in MagSafe charging, iSight camera, speakers, and three USB ports.

This new display replaces Apple’s old 30” Cinema Display; shipping time is 1-2 weeks and the price is $999.

More About: apple, cinema display, LCD, monitor

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Facebook Places Goes Live in the UK

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 02:12 AM PDT


Facebook’s location feature, dubbed Facebook Places, has launched in the UK today, one month after it went live in the U.S.

Facebook is rolling out the feature for UK users gradually, meaning it may not be available for everyone immediately. To check it out, try tapping on the Facebook Places option on your Facebook for iPhone app, or on Facebook’s mobile site touch.facebook.com.

If you haven’t used Places yet, it’s a simple feature that lets you check into real-world locations through your Facebook profile, similar to the functionality offered by services such as Foursquare or Gowalla. For a detailed explanation on how to use Places, go here.

Facebook again points out that the users have full privacy control, and that checkins are defaulted to friends only (unless, of course, your master privacy setting is “everyone”). Also, minors will not appear in posts or check-ins to anyone except their friends, and users can remove any checkin from their phone or the web.

We’ve seen reports that Places has launched in other European countries, too, but have not been able to confirm it.

Update: Facebook has confirmed that today’s launch of Places was UK-only. Places will be coming to the rest of Europe “soon.”

More About: facebook, location, places, social media, social networking, uk

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Your Credit Cards Will Never Be the Same Again: Meet Card 2.0 [VIDEO]

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 11:06 PM PDT


Card 2.0 is the next logical step in personal banking. Half credit card, half futuristic gadget, the cards are as versatile as they are secure. You can tie multiple accounts to the same card or completely hide certain digits of your card number at the push of a button — buttons which are embedded in the card and are as thin as the card itself.

Our editors were hardly surprised to learn yesterday that Dynamics, the startup that makes the cards, won both the first prize and the people’s choice award at DEMO, the startup-centric conference held in Silicon Valley. We saw the company’s founders showing off their creations in the DEMO Pavilion, and we quickly pegged the product as one of the most interesting of this year’s DEMO startup crop.

Winning a startup competition is only a piece of the puzzle; we were more interested to know whether Dynamics and Card 2.0 were likely to be viable as a business and a product.

Cool gadgets are but novelties without widespread distribution. We asked for more information on the business side of things, and CEO Jeff Mullen was able to tell us that Dynamics has been working with several major banks to stealth-test the cards; bank-branded cards will be launching “soon.” Mullen couldn’t disclose exact dates; still, it’s good to know that forward-looking financial institutions (Bank of America, perhaps?) are already working with Card 2.0 prototypes.

Check out the demo video below, and let us know what you think of Card 2.0 in the comments.

More About: banking, card 2.0, credit cards, demo, DEMO 2010, demofall, finance, startup

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McDonald’s Foursquare Day Campaign Brought in 33% More Foot Traffic

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 08:20 PM PDT


With so many brands trying their hand at location-based marketing campaigns, one has to wonder: is Foursquare really effective as a platform for bringing in new business? McDonald’s seems to think so; the company’s head of social media Rick Wion recently spoke of the fast food giant’s big wins from a spring pilot program using Foursquare.

At the Mobile Social Communications conference yesterday, Wion shared that McDonald’s was able to increase foot traffic to stores by 33% in one day with a little Foursquare ingenuity. McDonald’s total cost for the successful campaign was a measly $1,000.

Econsultanty reports that McDonald’s, with Wion driving campaign direction and strategy, opted to try and take advantage of Foursquare Day (4/16) to bring in more business. The company used 100 randomly awarded $5 and $10 giftcards as checkin bait to lure in potential diners. The bait also worked to attract the media’s attention and resulted in more than 50 articles covering McDonald’s Foursquare special.

The campaign worked in both digital and real world capacities. Patrons flocked to McDonald’s restaurants for the chance to win giftcards in exchange for checkins, and 600,000 online denizens opted to follow and fan the brand on social media sites.

“I was able to go to some of our marketing people — some of whom had never heard of Foursquare — and say, ‘Guess what. With this one little effort, we were able to get a 33% increase in foot traffic to the stores’,” Wion explained to conference attendees.

A company of McDonald’s size spends millions on advertising every year, and yet a simple $1,000 Foursquare campaign netted the company measurable success. Of course, the metric here was checkins (not sales), and there were likely several other factors contributing to the campaign’s success, but it’s still a story that many an agency should pay heed to.

McDonald’s is not alone in their Foursquare success. Earlier this year, Domino’s UK attributed social media, and its Foursquare pilot program in particular, as a primary factor in helping the company increase profits by 29%.

Image courtesy of Donna Greyson, Flickr

Reviews: Flickr, Foursquare

More About: MARKETING, McDonalds

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Constant Contact to Help E-mail Marketers Track Social Behaviors [EXCLUSIVE]

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 07:14 PM PDT


On Monday, e-mail marketing behemoth Constant Contact will release an important update for its clientele interested in better understanding how, when, where and why customers share the e-mail newsletters they receive on social sites.

Constant Contact will be introducing Social Stats as an integrated feature for its small business customers. The new email marketing tool will offer a complete social snapshot around email campaign performance. Social Stats tracks Facebook “Likes,” tweets, LinkedIn posts and e-mail pageviews originating from social media channels.

The social media analytics will be presented as part of the e-mail details page, and add another layer of insight to the pre-exisitng data on e-mail and click-through stats. Analytics will include individual counts per social site, as well as a graphic presentations of shares and page views.

We already know that e-mails including Facebook and Twitter share options generate 30% higher click-through rates and significantly boost reader engagement. Social Stats will help marketers connect the dots for themselves to better measure, track and understand their customers’ social e-mail behaviors.

In related news, NutshellMail, a Constant Contact property, will also be upgrading with more marketer-friendly social media monitoring tools. Users already using the tool for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace activity e-mail notifications, will be pleased to discover that the application will soon include YouTube channel monitoring and Facebook Page tracking.

Image courtesy of jek in the box, Flickr

Reviews: Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, NutshellMail, Twitter, YouTube

More About: constant contact, email, email sharing, MARKETING, NutShellMail

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Say Hello to the New Yahoo Mail

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 05:59 PM PDT


Yahoo isn’t ceding the webmail market to the likes of Gmail and Hotmail; the company has announced the launch of a cleaner, faster and more social version of Yahoo Mail.

The new Yahoo Mail Beta, which will debut in the next few weeks, focuses on providing the user with a slicker, cleaner and snappier interface. Yahoo says that may of its core features have been “re-architeched” in an effort to make downloading and e-mailing a faster experience. The interface itself is reminiscent of the Gmail interface.

Yahoo has also made its e-mail client more social. Like Gmail or Hotmail, if someone sends you a link from Flickr or YouTube, those photos or videos will automatically be embedded in the e-mail. Flickr (a Yahoo property) also includes a new slideshow feature.

Facebook and Twitter are the big social additions to Yahoo Mail, though. As part of its strategy to integrate social media into its products, Yahoo is giving its mail users the ability to update their statuses on Facebook and Twitter. The “What’s New” tab also lets you see your friends’ updates from Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

Google and Microsoft have been upping the ante recently with updates to their webmail products, so Yahoo’s move shouldn’t surprise anybody. Microsoft recently reinvented Hotmail, bringing a faster interface, integration with Office Web Apps and a new “Sweep” function. Gmail Priority Inbox on the other hand is a major reinvention of e-mail management that has launched to mostly positive reviews.

What do you think of the new Yahoo Mail? Is it enough to get users to switch, or does Yahoo have to do more to compete with Microsoft and Google?

Reviews: Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, Google, MSN Hotmail, Twitter, YouTube

More About: gmail, Yahoo, Yahoo Mail

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OpenTable Acquires European Competitor TopTable for $55 Million

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 05:20 PM PDT


Popular online restaurant reservation service OpenTable is making a play for the European market with the $55 million acquisition of UK-based TopTable.

TopTable is essentially a European version of OpenTable; it provides online restaurant reservations in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US (only in New York City, though). While OpenTable has operations internationally, it doesn’t compare to the 5,000 restaurants TopTable serves in Europe (3,000 of them in the UK).

For $55 million in cash, OpenTable will immediately gain a presence in Europe, one it can quickly leverage to expand into more restaurants internationally. The publicly-traded company has been on the rise since February, jumping from a stock price of $25.01 to $62.80 as of market closing today. The restaurant reservation service has also recently integrated with Yelp, launched a group-buying service and debuted an iPad app.

[via GigaOM]

[img credit: ZagatBuzz]

More About: business, Food, opentable, restaurant

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Samsung Reveals Tablet Launch Details

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 04:16 PM PDT


Just in time for the holiday season, Samsung is launching its tablet device, the Samsung Tab, on all four major U.S. wireless carriers: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.

Samsung is clearly making a strong bid for your holiday shopping dollars; this is one iPad competitor that is prepared do some serious business in the consumer electronics market.

Samsung didn’t announce any pricing details today; prices for the Tab will depend on carriers, both in terms of retail price and data plan pricing.

The seven-inch tablet will be shipping within just a few weeks. It will run Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo), will contain a Cortex A8 1 GHz processor and 16GB of onboard memory, and will weight about half as much as an iPad. Its battery will allow for up to seven hours of continuous video playback. It will also come with a car dock for large-screen GPS navigation and more.

The Tab is optimized for on-the-go entertainment. Since Android and Adobe have been quite cozy with one another, Flash content, including video and interactive games, will run beautifully on the Tab.

The Tab will have a 3-megapixel, rear-facing camera with a flash HD-quality video captures. The device also has a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front for video chat, which we saw demonstrated tonight with the Qik Android app.

As far as integrated software, the Tab will have such features as Social Hub (it is what it sounds like), Daily Briefing (for news, calendar, stock quotes and the like) and Media Hub, a new service. Software will be slightly customized depending on which carrier is being used.

Media Hub will allow for on-demand movie and TV rental and purchase for instant playback. It’s one of the more exciting aspects of the device. Pricing will be competitive with other similar offerings. Purchased content will be available on multiple registered devices; in other words, you can download the same content on any device you own that works with Media Hub. We’re thinking this will include all Galaxy S devices.

As far as licensing is concerned, Samsung is collaborating with an impressive stable of entertainment properties, including MTV, NBC, Warner and others. Media Hub content will be at the level consumers have come to expect from high-quality digital media.

For some time, Samsung has been churning out gadgets that, while they might be useful for the everyday user, weren’t quite as exciting to us technophiles as the tablets and “superphones” available from manufacturers like Apple, Motorola and HTC. The Galaxy S line of consumer electronics is definitely changing our perception of the brand and the reality of Samsung’s ability to compete in the high-end mobile market.

Still, we’re anxious to see how consumers react to the device and how Froyo and Android Market apps work within the tablet form factor. While Samsung’s bespoke apps, such as e-mail and calendar apps, are custom-made for the Tab, many Android apps aren’t quite ready for operation on tablets. In fact, Google reps have gone as far as stating publicly that Froyo and the Android Market are not intended for tablet use. We’re not sure about Samsung’s relationship with Google, but this is one issue we’ll be watching closely, especially as tablet-specific Android OSes begin to roll out in the coming months.

We’re watching Samsung’s live webcast and will update this post as more pertinent information becomes available.

Reviews: Android, Android Market, Google

More About: ipad, samsung, samsung tab, Tablet, trending

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How Flixster Found its Groove (and Profitability)

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 04:06 PM PDT


This post is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark as a new part of the Spark of Genius series that focuses on a new and innovative startup each day. Every Thursday, the program focuses on startups within the BizSpark program and what they’re doing to grow.

With Twitter, Facebook, Google and Foursquare dominating the tech news cycle, it’s easy to forget about Flixster and its movie discovery service — and that’s a huge mistake. With more than 22 million downloads of its mobile apps, Flixster is a major player in mobile and one to watch as the mobile web continues to take over the world.

Flixster has been around for more than four years now. It’s growing by leaps and bounds with each new mobile application release, and this year’s acquisition of Rotten Tomatoes (and not selling itself to MySpace — more on that later) proves the company is an independent force to be reckoned with.

Much of Flixster’s success can be attributed to its fantastic mobile applications, Facebook integration and the organic effect of friends telling friends about the application. Over the course of the next few months, however, you’ll start to see Flixster in a whole new light — on the big screen.

Beginning this fall, Flixster will be working with in-theater ad network NCM Media Networks on a major consumer marketing push to promote Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes to movie going audiences on big screens in 17,000 theaters across the U.S.

That’s some major mainstream exposure. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to Co-founder and CEO Joe Greenstein, who also hinted that Flixster will make its way on to Internet-connected television sets in the near future.

What follows is a deeper look at the company’s growth strategies and a little background on how they got to where they are today.

The Road to Profitability

One thing Flixster has managed to do over the course of the past four years is to evolve its product to match consumer demand. Flixster started as a destination site, made the leap to build on top of other social platforms like Facebook and MySpace when that was an emerging trend and then quickly transitioned to mobile. The company’s nimble reinvention strategy has worked — Flixster is now a profitable and expects to break even in 2010.

To date, Flixster has raised a little less than $9 million from angel, Series A and Series B rounds of investments. Greenstein says the startup is not looking for additional funding at this time.

But, are they looking to be acquired? That’s seems to be a negative for right now. In fact, rumors that MySpace would buy Flixster were blown out of proportion, a mixup that Greenstein attributes to the assumption that Flixster’s frequent talks with News Corp. were MySpace-related when they in fact were about the Rotten Tomatoes deal.

The Future is Mobile

Mobile has been huge for Flixster. Greenstein details that the iPhone has been the company’s most successful platform, though in recent months he has seen Android bubble up in terms of importance. Today, Flixster downloads on Android are on par with iPhone downloads.

The company also projects massive Flixster adoption on tablet devices. Flixster’s completely reworked iPad app has been downloaded more than 600,000 times since release. “We designed it from scratch around the idea that the iPad is a browsing and discovery device,” Greenstein says.

That approach is paying off handsomely. iPad app users are proving to be Flixster’s power users and are using it much more heavily than other mobile apps. Greenstein hopes to further cater to this content consumption crowd with a new 2.0 version of the app coming soon.

At some point, though, one has to wonder: is Flixster’s growth on mobile devices sustainable? To that question, Greenstein responds by pointing to research showing that overall smartphone penetration is still quite low — Italy has the highest penetration of smartphones at just 28%. This means that Flixster is poised to capitalize on the huge number of users expected to switch from feature phones to smartphones as they become cheaper and more accessible.

Plus, mobile growth is where the money is. “Direct brand advertising is up 300% in the last year, and there’s ton of interest from advertisers in mobile products,” Greenstein says.

Flixster’s Small and Big Picture

Mobile innovation will help Flixster continue to grow, but the company also has designs to graduate and become the brand that most consumers use to discover and make decisions about the movies they see. Flixster’s NCM Media Networks arrangement will go a long way to drive home brand awareness, but the company will also make a push for your living room attention as well.

Just recently, Flixster launched a channel on Roku set top boxes. That channel is essentially just a simple application that lets users watch movie trailers on their TVs, but it is already the number one downloaded channel on Roku.

Greenstein wouldn’t disclose any specifics, but he did talk about connected TVs from the perspective of a savvy entrepreneur salivating over the next big platform. With that in mind, we can only make the educated guess that the Flixster experience will be carried over to Internet-connected television sets and even more set top boxes. Soon enough, Flixster will be everywhere.

Images courtesy of alasis, Far0_RC1, Flickr

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Reviews: Android, Facebook, Flickr, Flixster, Foursquare, Google, Internet, MySpace, Rotten Tomatoes, iPhone

More About: bizspark, rotten tomatoes, spark-of-genius

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The New Twitter: The Web is Back

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 03:48 PM PDT

cnnopinion

If the web is dead, nobody told Twitter.

Just last month, Wired controversially claimed that the web is going the way of the dodo — users are increasingly abandoning the web browser and instead accessing their favorite web services via applications on smartphones, the logic goes.

One of the companies shaping this trend was Twitter, the information network that became accessible through countless third party applications on mobile devices and the desktop.

This week, however, Twitter announced a major redesign of its website. The intent: To make Twitter.com a compelling web destination. Whatever happened to the death of the web at the hands of mobile applications?

That’s the topic of my CNN column this week.


Read the full column on CNN.com >>

Reviews: Twitter

More About: cashmore, cnn, petecashmore, social media, social networking, twitter, web

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ABC’s New iPad App Syncs with TV for Interactive Programming

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 03:35 PM PDT


The iPad is an entertainment device on its own, but it’s also proving to be a perfect second screen companion to the television watching experience. Disney and ABC are looking to capitalize on this potential with the release of a new iPad app that provides broadcast viewers with synchronized interactive content as they watch.

The app in question goes by the name of ABC’s My Generation Sync [iTunes link]. The first of a kind app is designed to push exclusive content around the new show My Generation (premiering next week on ABC) to TV watchers also toying around with their iPad in real time.

The My Generation iPad experience will center around engaging viewers with questions, facts and tidbits about show characters, polls and quizzes. The synchronization works regardless of whether or not the viewer tunes in live or watches a show recording at a later time.

Nielsen’s Media-Sync Platform powers the real-time synchronization between TV and iPad. Nielsen’s technology is capable of automatically detecting and synchronizing with TV programming by picking up the audio from your television set — if you can hear the audio, the app can too. A click of the “Sync With Show” button will prompt the app to listen for 10 seconds and then offer up iPad content synced with show content.

Disney and ABC are the first to use Nielsen’s platform, but we suspect that this technology will become integrated into a number of entertainment-focused applications moving forward.

More About: abc, abc's my generation sync, Apple iPad, disney, ipad, my generation, tv

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Trent Reznor to Release Preview for “The Social Network” Soundtrack

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 02:51 PM PDT


Wanna hear the Trent Reznor-spun score to The Social Network before it hits screens this October? Well, you’re in luck, because Reznor, along with his record company, The Null Corporation, and Sony’s Madison Gate Records has decided to self-release the soundtrack. Five tracks will be available for free download tomorrow.

In addition to checking out a handful of songs from the eagerly anticipated “Facebook Movie,” you can also pre-order the entire record, which drops on September 28. Reznor also informs us via e-mail that he’s partnered with Amazon to make the full album $2.99 on the retail site. You can get the sampler and put in your pre-order from Null Co’s website tomorrow when the link goes live.

“This has been an interesting new discipline for me to work in and I’m pleased with the process and the result,” Reznor says in an e-mail.

As we noted back when we found out that Reznor would be scoring David Fincher’s already-controversial film, the rocker is known for being democratic with his music via the web — he put up the first volume of Nine Inch Nails’s album Ghosts on torrent sites under a creative commons license a couple of years ago, and threatened to sell the Nine Inch Nails iPhone app on the black market after Apple blocked it from the App Store for profanity.

It will be interesting to see what kind of buzz the giveaway, as well as the Amazon price cut, builds for the sound track. Democratization + Lots of Pre-Hype can be the formula for success, as we saw when the Arcade Fire’s new disc, The Suburbs, was given the Amazon discount treatment last month. The move helped the band sell 156,000 copies in the U.S. by August 11, and score the number-one spot on Billboard's album chart.

Now, I’m guessing the question on everyone’s mind is: How’s the music? Well judging by the eerie tones and ominous feel of the five tracks I just listened to (you can tell that Reznor leant his talents to David Lynch’s Lost Highway), The Social Network ain’t gonna be all friends and FarmVille.

Image courtesy of Flickr, chadlewis76

Reviews: App Store, Flickr

More About: facebook, music, the social network, Trent Reznor

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Foursquare Targets College Students with New Universities Program

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 02:31 PM PDT


Foursquare announced the rollout its Foursquare for Universities Program Thursday afternoon, designed to help students, alumni and staff share information about classes, building hours, campus activities and traditions, and other information.

Late nights at the library are now a little bit better thanks to the geosocial service, which will reward you in badges what you missed in sleep (depending on how much value you put on virtual badges, anyways). And if you start to see more compsci majors at the Homecoming football game this season, you can thank Foursquare’s school spirit badge for that, too.

The startup has partnered with 20 universities for the launch, along with student ambassadors located at several dozen others. If your university isn’t one of them, however, don’t despair; Foursquare makes it easy for users to claim and build a university page on the service with a short questionnaire. Students can even request custom badges for their school.

As Foursquare grows beyond its userbase of 3 million, targeting the technologically savvy, tight-knit communities that reside on most college campus these days is a smart idea, in our opinion. What do you think about the program? How else can Foursquare add value to campus life?

Harvard University’s Foursquare Page

Image courtesy of Flickr, Šarūnas B..

Reviews: Flickr, Foursquare

More About: foursquare, geolocation, geosocial, universities

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10 Ways Touring Bands Can Leverage Location Apps

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 02:09 PM PDT

Bands Location Image

Jonathan Ostrow is the co-founder of MicControl, a music blogging network based on a social networking platform for the emerging music community.

Most people use geolocation services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places to share their location and leave tips for friends and others within their network. For touring musicians and bands, there is an opportunity to take this premise one step further.

The DIY musician, who is always short on resources during a tour, can tap into location-based social media to establish a nationwide, or even worldwide network of other musicians (and local music fans) willing to share all of the insider tips necessary to make any city feel like home. Establishing these insider networks can help musicians address challenging obstacles as they travel.

The mutual benefits for musicians who leave touring tips for each other can be huge, but it can only be put to good use if a plan and agreement is in place. Here are some ways your musical network can leverage location for a smoother ride on the tour bus.

1. Discover “Hidden Gem” Venues

Everyone can use Google to find the most popular and well-established venues in a city or town, but there are always great clubs that manage to stay below the radar. Those with an established patronage and excellent performance spaces can do more to build your mailing list and fanbase then many of the bigger venues that require you to bring in your own crowd.

Tap into your location network to unearth these hidden gem venues and reap all of the benefits that the local scene has to offer. If you find a great venue, be sure to leave a tip for your followers as well.

2. Get Venue Details Ahead of Time

As any performing artist will tell you, the sound and atmosphere is different in every venue. A slight difference in shape, depth, height, angle, or equipment can cause a significant change in the acoustics. But as you and your network go on tour, location apps offer the perfect opportunity to test the waters and leave tips about bass boominess, the lack of sound check time, or how to get a particular audience really cranked up about a show. Use this info to your advantage to make the best of any situation and knock each show out of the park.

3. Sleep for Cheap

The touring musician is on a strict budget. An easy way to get off track is by staying in hotels that cost entirely too much — and sleeping in the van gets really old, really quickly. Use your network to discover and suggest the best deals in every the city — those comfortable, safe and cheap spots for a good night’s rest before the next gig.

4. Emergency Instrument Repair

A nightmare of a situation, but one that can happen at any time — you’re in a new city and your amp blew a tube, your guitar keeps shorting out, or you popped a hole in a drum head during load-in. The opportunities for disaster relating to your equipment are endless.

Each potential store or repair shop has its own specialty, so use your network to quickly find the most recommended shops and get everything fixed before it’s time for the sound check.

5. Target Your Audience in a New Market

Which venues have an established scene and which require you to bring your own audience? The latter is more likely in big city markets like NYC, so plan accordingly and make the most of every performance.

If you are spending time and money to travel cross-country, or even to the next state over to play a few gigs, make sure it’s worthwhile. Before you book the gigs, use your network to learn which venues cater directly to your genre of music and your target audience. Which venues have paid off for other bands? Your geosocial connections should point the way.

6. Drum Up Local Support

Many businesses that support local artists may be willing to post a show flyer or let you perform outside or in the lobby. Each city or town has at least one hang-out with a supportive public that might be willing to endorse upcoming events.

If you find support in a community, be sure to leave a tip behind for your fellow musicians. If your social media friends do the same, you’ll know exactly where to turn to scrounge up that extra publicity the next time you’re in town.

7. Find Open Mic Nights

If you have some time before the big show in a new city, don’t just party. Get out and promote the gig. A great way to do so is at the scene’s most popular open mics. Sometimes the good ones are hard to find. That’s where your tip network comes in handy.

Don’t forget to mention your name in between songs and plug your upcoming show. Many college campuses and bars hold regular, well-attended open mic nights, so use your network to map out the best option that’s close to your gig venue.

8. Snag Good Cheap Food

It’s easy to get quick, greasy eats in any new city, but who wants to live on fast food the entire tour? For the real neighborhood gems — cheap, quality, unique eats — a local guide is necessary. By using a network of location-based tipsters, you can tap into that local knowledge and get fed better while on the road, without busting your budget.

9. Find Cheap Parking

So you’ve arrived, but where are you going to park your gear-filled van? This is especially important in cities like NYC or LA, and is something that isn’t planned in advance. There are many advertised parking lots that come at ridiculous prices, but city natives may know of some secrets — the parking space that a neighbor rents out for cheap, or an empty block that doesn’t charge. Location, location, location.

10. Find Auto Repair

You never know when a flat tire or engine trouble will strike, and a broken-down van or bus could be the death knell for a troubled tour. Mechanics are all over the place, but finding a good one who won’t rip you off is just the sort of insider tip that a city native would have. Before you hit Google or the phone book, check your location networks for a recommendation.

Are you already in touch with other touring musicians who could benefit from shared road experiences? Share this idea and create a network of strategic partnerships so that every city you hit feels a little more like home.

More Music Resources from Mashable:

- Top 10 Twitter Tips for Bands, By Bands
- Top 5 Tips for Aspiring Music Bloggers
- 10 Cool Crowdsourced Music Video Projects
- 7 Unique Sites for Discovering New Music
- 8 YouTube Channels for Unique Music Performances

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, bubaone, and Flickr, themarina, ouyangwulong, kenstein.

Reviews: Flickr, Foursquare, Google, Gowalla, iStockphoto

More About: bands, cheap eats, cities, Crowds, Facebook Places, fans, foursquare, geolocation, gowalla, hotels, instrument repair, location, music, open mic, soundcheck, touring, venues

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Auto-Tune the News Creators on Living the Viral Dream [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 01:52 PM PDT

The Gregory Brothers, of Auto-Tune the News fame, are spanning just about every genre lately — from television to alternative music. Mashable caught up with two of the four Gregorys to chat about their recent success.

From rocketing to legit musical fame with their remix of “Bed Intruder” (scoring a spot among iTunes’s top downloads as well as a place on Billboard’s Hot 100), to securing a Flight of the Conchords-esque pilot on Comedy Central, the Gregory Brothers are living the viral dream.

Fresh off a recent appearance in the album release campaign for Weezer’s Hurley, Michael and Andrew Gregory stopped by Mashable HQ for a chat. Check out the video above for more on their Hurley vid (embedded below), as well what other artists they wish they could auto-tune. Stay tuned to the end to hear the jingle they auto-tuned (naturally) for us.

The Weezer Collaboration

Video by Evan Wexler

Image courtesy of The Gregory Brothers

Reviews: Mashable, news, video

More About: auto-tune the news, humor, music, pop culture, television, viral video

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“Dude, You Have No Quran” Guy Is the New Bed Intruder Dude [VIDEO]

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 01:07 PM PDT


If you were a fan of the Bed Intruder Dude, then steel yourself for a new addition to the canon of Internet heroes: the “Dude, You Have No Quran”… Dude.

Adherents to the viral Interwebs, meet Jacob Isom, the 23-year-old pizzeria employee who rocketed to Internet stardom this week after snatching a Quran from the hands of a religious leader before he could set it aflame.

In support of Rev. Terry Jones, a pastor of a small church in Gainesville, Florida, who announced (and then repealed) his plans to burn a Quran last week, David Grisham (director of Repent Amarillo, which aims to deter promiscuity, homosexuality and non-Christian worship practices) tried to burn the holy book this Saturday in Amarillo, Texas, according to Amarillo Globe News.

Amid protesting crowds, Grisham was divested of the book by the skateboard-toting Isom, who during a local news cast, famously told reporters: “[I] snuck up behind him and took his Quran. Said something about burning the Quran, I was like, ‘Dude, you have no Quran,’ and ran off.’” See below:

Since uttering those words, Isom’s sentiments have been plastered across the Facebook walls of many a user, and, as Gawker reports, there’s now a Facebook Page dedicated to the homegrown hero as well as T-shirts featuring both his likeness and the famous quote. He even got a mention on The Daily Show.

Gawker also reports that, despite his online fame, Isom is green when it comes to the ‘net, “I don’t have an iPhone. I don’t even have a computer. I don’t know who’s running this fan page on Facebook about me. I don’t even have a Facebook,” he told the entertainment site. He didn’t even have an e-mail account until recently.

Still, the young man is keen enough to attempt capitalizing on his fame. “I’m hoping maybe I can get two rich people to battle for my skateboard on eBay, and I could make enough money to buy a truck and sell pizza by the slice from a truck,” he tells Gawker. He also wants to be in High Times (Look! He made it!).

As we allude to in the title of this piece, Isom isn’t the first unlikely Internet hero — from the JetBlue flight attendant to the Bed Intruder Guy to the Double Rainbow Dude, folks from all corners of the world are attracting hangers-on for deeds both ridiculous and heroic (yet still ridiculous).

There’s no question that Isom’s quote will only continue to grow in virality over the next few days. In fact, there’s already an auto-tuned remix of the news clip out there (sadly, not via Auto-Tune the News, but still pretty good).

Reviews: Facebook, Internet, news

More About: facebook, humor, pop culture, viral video, youtube

For more Web Video coverage:

Justin.tv Brings Live Video Streaming to the iPhone and It Rocks

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 12:03 PM PDT


Just two weeks after bringing its live video recording app to Android, Justin.tv has just issued an update to its popular iPhone app that lets iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 users in on the fun.

Justin.tv for iPhone [iTunes link] now supports live video broadcasts from Wi-Fi, 3G and even EDGE connections. The app uses hardware encoding to capture and transmit video, which produces fantastic audio and visual results.

We had a chance to talk to the Justin.tv team about the iPhone app, the impact the Android app is already having on traffic and their thoughts on mobile’s place in live video.

It’s clear that mobile has huge implications for live video services. Justin.tv told us that in just two weeks, Android users already make up 20% of the total broadcasting population.

How it Works

Justin.tv designed the iPhone app to work as a standalone entity. You don’t need to log in to the website first; you can do that all directly from the app, including registration.

Just like the previous versions of the iPhone app, users can view and share content, as well as leave comments.

What’s new is that iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 owners now have an easy way to broadcast themselves. Just click a big red button and you are broadcasting. You can chat in real-time within the app and roam between EDGE, 3G or Wi-Fi and the video quality will be adjusted automatically. Justin.tv has also integrated a landscape mode for broadcasting.

You can choose whether or not you want to use the front or rear camera on the iPhone 4, but you can’t switch between the two modes. If that becomes possible, Justin.tv will add the feature, but you can always switch modes and start a new clip for now.

By default, Justin.tv saves every video you make using the mobile app. This is great for parents or for users who want to archive their vacations and other home videos.

Let’s Talk Quality

Justin.tv isn’t the first company to bring live video broadcasting to the iPhone. As they said themselves, they aren’t even the second or third. However, what does separate Justin.tv from some of the other services is that the video quality is awesome.

In fact, the need for quality was one reason that Justin.tv waited to bring this app out to the public. Smartphones are finally fast enough to do proper live video streaming and the tools are now available within the iOS SDK for hardware access to the camera.

I watched a demo while I was on the phone with the Justin.tv team yesterday, and was floored by the fluidity and quality of the live video. The resolution may only be 320×240, but the bitrate on Wi-Fi is really high. This is good for several reasons. First, it makes watching live broadcasts better. Second, it makes re-watching live broadcasts something people might want to do.

Future of Live Broadcasting

The ability to do quality live broadcasts from your smartphone is something that has long been promised but hasn’t really come to fruition. Justin.tv’s latest mobile apps bring us one step closer to that kind of reality.

I can’t wait to start using the app on my vacations and at conferences. Have you used Justin.tv for iPhone or Android? What do you think of it so far?

Reviews: Android, Justin.tv, iPhone

More About: iphone apps, justin.tv, live video, mobile video

For more Mobile coverage:

How Social Media Has Changed Fashion Week

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 11:54 AM PDT

Fashion Week Image

Fashion Week has experienced nothing short of a revolution — or evolution, if you will — over the last five years, largely due to the advent of social media.

What was once a series of exclusive events and parties for designers, buyers, media, models, celebrities and various hangers-on in the major (primarily Western) capitals of the world has now become a live global spectacle for consumers. Gone are the days of waiting for the next issue of Women’s Wear Daily or Harper’s Bazaar for the first news of seasonal collections — or even religiously refreshing Style.com 48 hours after a runway show.

Now, thanks to a cornucopia of new technologies, as well as public events like Fashion’s Night Out, consumers are as much a part of Fashion Week as the so-called fashion elite.

Fashion Media Gets More Competitive

Social media has played the biggest role in how Fashion Week is covered by the media. Before laptops, digital cameras, Wi-Fi and blogging platforms like WordPress, there was a relatively long delay between when a runway show occurred and when that information was relayed to consumers. Even in the early ’00s, the quickest way to get news about Fashion Week was through print industry publication Women’s Wear Daily, which would showcase photographs of select looks alongside a review the day after the shows.

This started to change in 2005 and 2006, when a new breed of reporters, calling themselves “fashion bloggers,” began entering the tents. One of those early pioneers, Julie Fredrickson, co-founder of fashion blogging network Coutorture (acquired by Sugar Inc. in 2007) and now manager of social and digital marketing at Ann Taylor, says that back then brands had little idea of who fashion bloggers were, but were “willing to roll with you so long as you were related to some sort of tenuous publication.”

In fact, Fredrickson says she was able to get registered for her first New York Fashion Week in February 2006 “on someone else’s random webzine.” At the time, she was working in a furniture showroom as a way to pay her bills, and was able gain entry, laptop in tow, without any invitations. She’d then zip over to a Chipotle or the public library so that she could upload images and reviews immediately after the shows, ensuring that her content was up hours before that of any more established publication or website.

“The fact that you could see anything the first day, even a single photo, was really novel,” Fredrickson says of fashion bloggers’ early success. “Coutorture focused on getting photography up as fast as possible. Style.com was still 24 to 48 hours behind. As a result, we monopolized all of top searches on search engines,” she explains.

Fashion bloggers have also dramatically improved the quality of the content around Fashion Week, Fredrickson claims. Blogs and mainstream media alike must now not only compete to be first, but to secure an interesting angle. “Instead of having a generic, two-paragraph writeup, you can now go to any number of sites that cover all kinds of minutiae, from where someone sat to what the runway music was like. It made everyone really up their games,” Frederickson says.

Nowadays, “if you don’t have video within a couple of hours, you’re considered ‘behind,’” she adds.

Frederickson recalls that starting in 2008 most of the bigger players, Style.com included, were beginning to get content up as quickly as the old guard of fashion bloggers. “The traffic spikes we saw initially on Coutorture [during Fashion Week] were enormous — quadrupling, quintupling. We didn’t see traffic bumps once it got more competitive,” she says. “Even though there’s such a proliferation of information [about Fashion Week] now available, it doesn’t necessarily mean people are consuming more of it. They’re just focusing on different niches.”

Yuli Ziv, founder and CEO of blogging network Style Coalition and co-founder of networking group Fashion 2.0 Meetup, made similar observations. “If you want to be a successful fashion blogger today, you have to pick your own niche, your own point of view, such as plus size, denim, or vintage. There’s no point competing with the professional editor to review the collection. What bloggers can provide is a real person’s perspective.”

This year, crowdsourcing projects like Milk Made’s Live at Fashion Week took another step forward on behalf of the media by extending opportunities to document Fashion Week to everyone. They encouraged Fashion Week attendees to submit photos from their mobile phones to live at milkmade.com to produce a visual, near real-time record of New York Fashion Week from all over the city.

New Opportunities for Brands

Brands are taking advantage of many of the same tools as the media. This year, more than 20 labels, including Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Vera Wang and Oscar de la Renta, hosted livestreams on their websites, often accompanied by widgets that allowed viewers to comment on the looks on Facebook, Twitter or on-site with each other in real time. Their view of the show was, in many cases, better than many of those sitting further back in the tents.

Besides livestreams, brands are also producing backstage video and photographic footage, and sharing it with their fans via their websites, their mobile apps and various social platforms. Tibi, a relatively young fashion label, has been posting behind-the-scenes photos (see above) from castings, sittings and other events and posting them to its Facebook Page for the last two shows, Graphics and Communications Manager Lacy Little tells us.

“It gives a broader perspective of the amount of work and vision that are put into these shows, and it gives our fans a great opportunity to see the creative environment that we produce the collection in. We’re able to showcase the creative aspects and the faces behind the company, not just the garments you see on the racks,” Little explains.

Fredrickson adds, “Fashion Week is a brands’ opportunity to tell a coherent narrative for their season. Whether it’s Tumblr, Facebook, or YouTube, they’re going to use whatever makes most sense to present their vision for this season, to tell their story in the fullest possible way. Fashion is all about storytelling.”

Fashion labels are taking advantage of other technologies, as well. Instead of the paper invitation system of years past, fashion show attendees can now RSVP to shows online and can scan their barcodes at kiosk stations in the tents to receive their seating assignments. Not only does it streamline the seating process, it also helps brands keep track of who actually shows up to their events, which they can measure against media coverage to determine the value of a particular invite.

More notably, brands are exploring ways to leverage Fashion Week buzz to pursue e-commerce opportunities. Both Oscar de la Renta and Burberry are making select pieces available for online purchase immediately after their shows on September 15 and September 21 respectively, months before they show up in retail stores. Burberry has even invited customers to watch the livestream in 25 of its physical stores worldwide. Visitors can watch the show on one of the many available iPads and use a custom-built app to purchase several items immediately afterward.

Oscar de la Renta CEO Alex Bolen said the company decided to test the new e-commerce opportunity after the success of its iPad covers, the first edition of which were sold exclusively online a few weeks after premiering at the company’s resort show. (One was given away to the Foursquare Mayor of its flagship store.) “People wanted them and they wanted them right away,” he said. “We shipped what we could, but we definitely missed business. For spring, Oscar [de la Renta] picked a key jewelry group [to] offer for immediate delivery.” Bolen emphasized that the initiative was an “experiment,” but that he expects more of these kinds of opportunities will come “not only from Oscar de la Renta, but from many fashion brands."

Perhaps the most forward-thinking move of all came from designer Prabal Gurung, who premiered pieces of his Spring 2011 collection to online consumers at social styling platform Polyvore before the show. To honor the initiative, Polyvore is holding a contest for two tickets to Gurung’s next runway show and a tour of his Garment District studio for the best ensemble created with the new collection. The winning sets will also be displayed on nytimes.com/tmagazine and T's Facebook Page.

What This Means for Consumers

From livestreaming and crowdsourced coverage, to debuting and selling collections immediately online, Fashion Week is shifting from an event for media and buyers to a spectacle for consumers.

This trend is being reinforced by offline events as well. Fashion’s Night Out, a now-international occasion in which consumers are invited to meet with designers and other fashion personalities at various retail venues, offers a new level of interaction for both parties.

It’s a trend we expect to see more of as bigger media outlets turn to consumers to crowdsource their coverage of Fashion Week, and more brands debut their collections to consumers online before their official presentations.

What trends and opportunities do you foresee for fashion weeks ahead?

More Fashion Resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Follow Fashion Week Online
- HOW TO: Get the Most from Fashion's Night Out with Social Media
- HOW TO: Score the Best Fashion Deals on the Social Web
- 14 Sites Changing the Way We Shop
- How the Fashion Magazine Industry Plans to Profit from Digital This Fall
- 10 Essential Accessories for the Fashionable Geek

Images courtesy of Monica Feudi, GoRunway.com and Tibi.

Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Tumblr, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube

More About: blogging, burberry, crowdsourcing, fashion, fashion bloggers, fashion week, gps, livestreaming, new york fashion week, nyfw, oscar de la renta, polyvore, prabal gurung, social media, style.com

For more Social Media coverage:

Zagat Offers Group Buying Deals at New York Restaurants

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 11:12 AM PDT


Restaurant ratings and reviews service Zagat Survey has launched Zagat Exclusives, a new group-buying program that offers regularly discounted meals at Zagat-Rated restaurants, in New York City.

Everyone from casual diners to self-proclaimed “foodies” can sign up to have deals delivered straight to their inboxes, which will be available for purchase over a short period of time.

The first deal in the program, which is powered and hosted by Groupon competitor DealOn, offers consumers $30 off a three-course meal at former speakeasy “21″ Club. The restaurant has a “very good to excellent” rating for food, decor and service from Zagat.

Although Zagat Exclusives is currently only available to New York City residents, the service should shortly roll out to other major cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles Philadelphia and San Francisco.

What makes Zagat Exclusives different from Yelp Daily Deals and OpenTable Spotlight, both of which began offering daily discounts on meals and other edible goods this summer, is that the deal gets better as more people buy in. Although you may originally agree to pay $69 for today’s deal at “21″ Club, you may end up paying less than that if the offer is popular enough (at the time of writing, the price has dropped to $59). The company is also hoping the caliber of its ratings service will make people more comfortable purchasing its offerings over, say, a mystery restaurant from OpenTable or a consumer-reviewed venue from Yelp.

Which company do you think has the best group-buying program?

Image courtesy of Geoff Peters 604

Reviews: Yelp

More About: dealon, group buying, groupon, opentable, opentable spotlight, yelp, yelp daily deals, zagat, zagat exclusives, zagat survey

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Diaspora Releases Source Code, Developers Dissect It

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 10:35 AM PDT


The young team behind Facebook alternative Diaspora has just released the project’s source code, and in doing so, has put both the team and the scheme up for examination by an international (and often quite critical) group of peers.

Developers have been making preliminary judgments on recent commits (a slew of which bear the comment “spell our own name right”), licensing choices (AGPL) and the programming/scripting language the Diaspora team chose to use: Ruby, a topic that never fails to excite certain factions of the developer community in both positive and negative ways.

We’ve seen a few devs with their own Diaspora installations up and running so far. As noted by the original developers themselves, the code is extremely “pre-alpha,” a kind way of saying that it’s buggy and unstable and still very much in development. And while the UI is clean, the features are still quite sparse. Frankly, many of us were expecting a bit more; the source code so far strikes some devs as a weekend hackathon project, not a highly anticipated, funded-to-the-tune-of-six-figures, legitimate startup.

As developer J. Chris Anderson tweeted, “After looking at the Diaspora codebase, it’s just a pretty Rails app that lets you upload photos.” In other words, this isn’t a Facebook competitor, nor is it likely to be within the next several months or longer.

One of the most interesting points raised on Hacker News is detailed in this thread on security issues. Initially, most of us would think privacy issues and user information security wouldn’t be a top priority for a GitHub source code repository without much of a consumer-facing implementation yet. As user loire280 points out, “If you’re smart enough to get code from GitHub working on your own box, paranoid enough to worry about Facebook’s control of your data and be interested in an alternative, and savvy enough to get wind of such an early release, I don’t think you’re going to put anything that sensitive in this network!”

Still, even though this is a source code-only release, because of surrounding media hype and promotion of the service to non-developers, we’re probably going to see quite a few end users creating profiles on Openspora and other publicly accessible Diaspora-based sites. User bl4k makes the salient point that the project should be moving toward a goal of security, writing, “There is no argument against having a policy for receiving, reviewing and patching security reports. It is that simple. ‘Hundreds of other bits of (unsafe, untested) social networking code floating around the interwebs’ is not a benchmark that this project should aspire to.”

We have a few other opinions from developers around the web in the gallery below.

Let us know what you think of Diaspora’s code (as a separate entity from the concept) and whether you’ve played around with it yourself yet. Is it just a “pretty Rails app” with a $200,000 runway? Or are you more optimistic than some of your peers about the possibilities for this “open-source Facebook”?


Diaspora: Developer Opinions





Diaspora: Developer Opinions





Diaspora: Developer Opinions





Diaspora: Developer Opinions





Diaspora: Developer Opinions





Diaspora: Developer Opinions





Diaspora: Developer Opinions





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Diaspora: Developer Opinions





Diaspora: Developer Opinions





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Diaspora: Developer Opinions





Diaspora: Developer Opinions




Reviews: Facebook, Hacker News

More About: code, developers, diaspora, facebook, open source

For more Dev & Design coverage:

Why Foursquare Needs More Coke Fairies

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 10:34 AM PDT


Foursquare was built for individuals by design. As brands and marketers leverage the platform for creative location-based campaigns however, they’re starting to employ objects (Jimmy Choo shoes) and pop culture products (Barbie) in lieu of real people to facilitate checkins and challenges.

Coke Australia is the latest brand to put their brand name product to work on Foursquare’s mobile gaming platform. The company has manufactured The Coke Machine Fairy to flit and fly around Syndey, leaving behind one winning Coke bottle in a Coke vending machine each day.

The Coke Machine Fairy is, of course, dropping hints and clues about its whereabouts on Foursquare and Twitter. Should you follow the clues, check in at the right venue and find the fairy’s Coke droppings, you can shout out on Foursquare about your big score and The Coke Machine Fairy will magically appear with gifts in tow.

Winners will receive prizes ranging in value from flight vouchers to cooking classes. Yesterday’s winner, for instance, walked away with free tickets to a Cloud Control concert.

Coke Australia’s decision to fly with Foursquare demonstrates the startup’s ability to continue to attract big brand attention and provide more than just checkins. With relative newbies like SCVNGR chomping at the bit to usurp Foursquare in the mind’s of brands and consumers — and SCVNGR is proving ever more successful on that front — big brand attention is critical.

Coke Australia’s fictional fairy and the scavenger hunt-like checkin challenge point to the flexibility of Foursquare’s platform for once unthinkable purposes.

Image courtesy of COKEmachFairy, Twitpic

Reviews: Foursquare, Twitpic, Twitter

More About: Coke, foursquare, MARKETING, the coke machine fairy

For more Social Media coverage:

Travel the World with Chatroulette-Inspired Street View Hack

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 09:13 AM PDT


Chatroulette might be all about depicting a random array of topography (if you know what I mean), but a new hack called Globe Genie gives you a peek at a whole new kind of peak: random views from around the world, via Google Street View.

Globe Genie was developed by MIT grad student Joe McMichael, who describes the inner workings thusly to the Guardian: “Globe Genie generates random latitude and longitude coordinates within several pre-specified rectangles around regions that have Street View imagery. It then queries Google’s servers to determine whether the point is valid. If not, it repeats this process until it finds a valid location.”

You can choose from an array of continents (sans South America and Antarctica) or merely shuffle through all landscapes. The hack is addictive and highly entertaining, especially if you’re longing for a much-needed vacation.

Reviews: Google

More About: chatroulette, Google, hack, software, street view, tech

For more Tech coverage:

5 iPhone Apps to Help Fight Poverty

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 09:01 AM PDT


Hectic lives, jam-packed schedules and the all-too-common feeling of powerlessness can keep us from doing what we can to make a difference — even if that difference is simply offering a donation.

Social media and the social good movement has revolutionized and re-energized fundraising, with mobile apps making it easier than ever before to do what you can to help others. And it can be surprisingly simple. Knowing that your ability to help others is but a tap away should be motivation enough for you to download these apps and start pitching in.

Here are five iPhone apps to help in the fight against poverty.

1. Make Poverty History

This is an app that doesn’t actually do much, but has the potential to do a lot of good. We’ve all seen the bracelets people wear to show support for a certain cause — well, here is one for your iPhone. The white band with the words “Make Poverty History” can be purchased as a background for your phone for $0.99, with 100% of the profits going to charity.

With more than 50 million iPhones sold world wide, and more than 3 billion apps downloaded, if every iPhone owner was to download this one app, it would definitely be a start towards making poverty history.

2. Give Work

Give Work is a free app designed to benefit the refugees in the developing world. This app is a little strange: It asks you to complete a task on your phone and a person in a developing region will do the same thing. Your partner will get paid for both tasks.

The organization behind the app, Samasource, works with refugees by giving them “life-changing opportunities via the Internet.” Samasource says that in doing so they “enable socially responsible companies, small businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs in the U.S. to contribute to economic development by buying services from our workforce at fair prices.”

Their services include “data entry, book digitization, Internet-based research, business listings verification, audio transcription, and video captioning.”

In effect, every time you complete a task, you support a refugee in two ways — by generating income that goes to their digital training, and your task’s accuracy scores help develop and design training programs for the future. The points you create with each task can be traded in by refugees, and a little goes a long way.

When I tried it, the task was to ask a question about personal finances. That task alone earned 5 points, which is enough to buy a tomato, a large banana, and a small bunch of greens for the refugee. For a little time taken out of your day, you can do a lot of good.

3. Compassion

Here is an app to tug on your heartstrings and open your check book. Compassion gives you access to information on child poverty from its blog, and connects you to the organization’s Facebook Page and Twitter feed. Compassion International is a Christian child advocacy group that began providing Korean War orphans with aid and Christian values.

With this app, you can search through profiles of children in need of aid in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and the Caribbean and make your selection of who you’d like to sponsor. If sponsorship is not for you, there is also the option to donate directly from your phone to the Disaster Relief Fund.

4. CauseWorld

CauseWorld is a geolocation app that allows you to check in, earning you karma points instead of badges, which you can cash-in as donations to charities.

The app has you performing “good deeds” just for walking into a stores like Trader Joe’s and Borders. Sponsors like Proctor and Gamble, Citibank and Kraft donate money for your checkins. You can choose where the money is going: Poverty in Africa, Chilean relief efforts, clean water initiatives, chimpanzee habitats, tree planting efforts, education, and cancer research are just some of the deserving causes. You can earn more karma points by scanning the barcodes of specific products, and you can download certain associated iPhone apps, both free and paid, to earn more karma.

To date, CauseWorld and its karma have been able to offset 1.4 million pounds of carbon, raise more than $100,00 for Haiti and Chile, donate more than 228,000 meals to hungry Americans, plant more than 58,000 trees in rain forests, donate more than 24,000 books to children, and provide more than 18 million liters of clean drinking water.

If you are going to check in somewhere it might as well count for something good, right?

5. Donation Connect

If you’re a busy person, it’s sometimes difficult to talk to the college-aged kid canvassing on the street for charity even if you really want to. Here is an easy solution: Donation Connect brings all your valued charities right to your phone.

Download the app and hit “Find a charity.” You’ll be directed to a list of categories where you can pick which charity you’d like to support. The amount that you choose to give will then be charged to your wireless bill or deducted from your prepaid balance. You’ll never not have time to give again.

Brought to you by the Mashable & 92Y Social Good Summit

This post was brought to you by the groundbreaking Social Good Summit. On September 20, as global leaders head to New York for United Nations Week — including a historic summit on global issues known as the "Millennium Development Goals" (MDGs) and the annual General Assembly — Mashable, 92nd Street Y and the UN Foundation will bring together leaders from the digital industry, policy and media worlds to focus on how technology and social networks can play a leading role in addressing the world's most intractable problems.

Date: Monday, September 20, 2010
Time: 1:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET
Location: 92nd Street Y, New York City
Tickets: On sale through Eventbrite

Register for Social Good Summit Mashable tickets in New York, United States on Eventbrite


More Social Good Resources from Mashable:

- How Non-Profits Can Maximize a Foursquare Account
- 5 Cool Non-Profit Uses of Location-Based Tech
- Are Social Media Giving Contests Good for Non-Profits?
- How Open Data Applications are Improving Government
- HOW TO: Turn Slacktivists into Activists with Social Media

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, wweagle

Reviews: Facebook, Internet, Mashable, Twitter, iPhone, iStockphoto

More About: cause world, charity, compassion, donation, donation connect, give work, iphone, make poverty history, poverty, social good, social media

For more Apple coverage:

Understanding How and Why Facebook Users Interact with Brands

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 07:50 AM PDT


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

While much of finding what works for your business on social media sites is a process of trial and error, recent stats from e-mail marketing firm ExactTarget (which recently acquired social CRM platform CoTweet) shed some light on how the Facebook population uses the site, and specifically, how it interacts with brands.

First, the good news: Based on its study of 1,500 Facebook users, ExactTarget concluded that 38% of online U.S. consumers "Like" (formerly "Fan") a brand on the social networking site. And the average fan Likes nine different brands, giving you plenty of opportunity to find your way into potential customers’ news feeds.

The news that presents a challenge to businesses looking to benefit from Facebook, however, is that just because someone has Liked you doesn't mean they're ready to see your promotional messages. Citing an earlier study, ExactTarget reports that 70% of consumers don't think becoming a fan equates to opting in to marketing.

Fortunately, ExactTarget didn't stop there, and did some research into what motivates users to Like companies on Facebook. The results offer some insight into what you can do as a business to keep the fans you accumulate engaged and not hitting the "hide" button in their news feeds. Here's the breakdown of why users might "Like" your brand, illustrated by the percentage of respondents who said that they use Facebook for the listed activity:

  • 40% to receive discounts and promotions
  • 39% to show my support for the company to others
  • 36% to get a “freebie”
  • 34% to stay informed about the activities of the company
  • 33% to get updates on future products
  • 30% to get updates on upcoming sales
  • 29% for fun or entertainment
  • 25% to get access to exclusive content
  • 22% someone recommended it to me
  • 21% to learn more about the company
  • 13% for education about company topics
  • 13% to interact

On the surface, some of these findings seem to conflict with the idea of users being resistant to marketing messages. But the real takeaway is that users like brands for a wide variety of reasons, and the mix of content you post to your Facebook Page should reflect that.

There's a bit more to it than that, however, if you dive further into some of ExactTarget's findings relating to demographics and usage patterns. For instance, 65% of Facebook users only access the site when they're not at work or school – typically meaning early morning or evening. That means that if you're making social media only a part of a 9 to 5 work day, you might be missing out on connecting with consumers during the times they're likely to be online.

There are also differences in how men and women use the site, with women indicating that their primary focus on the site is on maintaining relationships (by a margin of 63% to 54%), implying that they have less time for engaging with businesses.

Hopefully, by combining some of these broader findings with your own analytics and anecdotal successes and failures, you can refine your strategy to grow both your fan base and your levels of engagement.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Choose the Best Workspace for Your Business
- 5 Winning Social Media Campaigns to Learn From
- 10 Emerging Social Platforms and How Businesses Can Use Them
- 10 Free WordPress Themes for Small Businesses
- 8 Funding Contests to Kick Start Your Big Idea

Reviews: Facebook

More About: business, exacttarget, facebook, facebook fan page, facebook fan pages, small business, social media, stats, trending, user feedback

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Top 4 Stories in Mobile, Business and Tech This Morning

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 06:32 AM PDT

Morning Brief: iOS 4.1 Jailbreak, T-Mobile’s Next Android Phone, MaxMara’s iPad App

This series is brought to you by HTC EVO 4G, America’s first 4G phone. Only from Sprint. The “First to Know” series keeps you in the know on what’s happening now in the world of social media and technology.


Welcome to this morning's edition of "First To Know," a series in which we keep you in the know on what's happening in the digital world. We're keeping our eyes on three particular stories of interest today.

Apple’s iOS Continues to Lose Marketshare to Google’s Android

Despite impressive sales numbers following its launch, the iPhone 4 has not yet helped Apple reverse the year-long decline in its share of the U.S. smartphone market, according to the latest data from ComScore.

Apple dropped by 1.3% in the three-month period ending in July, while Android’s share grew by five percentage points. Research in Motion (RIM) and Microsoft fared even worse at 1.8% and 2.2% respectively.

Given that the iPhone 4 was not released until late June, we may very well see a reversal of this trend in the next report, however.

Printing to Come to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch in November

Apple has announced that the latest beta of iOS 4.2, which will become available for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users in November, comes with printer support. The forthcoming feature, dubbed AirPrint, allows device owners to print wirelessly over Wi-Fi without having to install any drivers or additional software. HP’s line of ePrint-enabled printers will be the first to support AirPrint.

Diaspora Releases Open Source Code to Developers

As promised, Diaspora, the much-hyped open source alternative to Facebook, has publicly released its source code to developers.

The project, which is helmed by four NYU students, rose out of the controversy following a number of significant privacy changes. Dramatic interest helped them raise more than ten times their initial fundraising goal, including a contribution from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

T-Mobile to Impose SMS “Tax” on Businesses

Beginning October 1, T-Mobile USA will begin charging businesses an additional $.0025 for every SMS delivered to customers over its network, including tweets, according to GigaOM.

Verizon Wireless made a similar — albeit more expensive — proposal two years ago, which it promptly abandoned after customer backlash.

Further News

  • Skyhook Wireless, a company that provides technology for determining location via Wi-Fi, has filed a lawsuit against Google in the Massachusetts Superior Court for patent infringement and interfering with its business [via GigaOM].
  • The Internet Explorer 9 Beta is now available for public download. We’ve got a video walkthrough available for you here.
  • Google's much-anticipated music offering is said to be launching by Christmas, and new information suggests that it will be both a digital download store and a cloud-based subscription service costing $25 per year.
  • An innovative online charity auction is allowing consumers to bid to have their favorite celebrity follow and tweet at them on Twitter. The auctions run until September 25.
  • American Idol is taking auditions for its next season to a new venue: MySpace.
Series supported by HTC EVO 4G

This series is brought to you by HTC EVO 4G, America’s first 4G phone. Only from Sprint. The “First to Know” series keeps you in the know on what’s happening now in the world of social media and technology.

Reviews: Android, Facebook, Google, MySpace, Twitter, iPhone

More About: AirPrint, android, apple, diaspora, facebook, first to know series, Google, iOS, ios 4.2, ipad, iphone, iPod Touch, skyhook wireless, T-Mobile, t-mobile usa

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Facebook Alternative Diaspora Releases Initial Source Code

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 06:30 AM PDT


After announcing it back in August, the folks at Diaspora, an open-source Facebook alternative, have kept their promise, releasing the project’s source code to developers Wednesday.

Now that the code is open to everyone, could Diaspora become to Facebook what Firefox was to Internet Explorer? Despite Facebook’s enormous popularity, many users have expressed concerns about their privacy on the social network, and changes to the site often provoke a backlash from users — often to no avail.

Diaspora could be different. As a community project by design, it will be far more open to users’ suggestions, which in the end might prove crucial to the overall experience.

Still, it’s far from a finished product; the first alpha is slated for October, and hopefully the developers who will now be able to start working on the source code will further improve the founders’ original ideas.

As far as features go, Diaspora currently supports sharing status messages and photos privately and in near real time, in addition to providing options for friending people and uploading photos and albums. All traffic that goes through Diaspora (except photos, for now) is signed and encrypted.

When the alpha version launches in October, Diaspora should also have Facebook integration, internationalization as well as data portability. Disapora offers a more complete roadmap for the project on its website.

What do you think of Diaspora so far? Could it become a serious alternative to Facebook and other popular social networks? Would you be willing to give up certain advanced features to have more privacy?

Reviews: Facebook, Firefox, Internet Explorer

More About: diaspora, facebook, social network

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Android Gains Market Share on Everyone Else [REPORT]

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 05:42 AM PDT


In the summer, when Apple usually releases a new version of the iPhone, its overall mobile sales and market share are expected to jump up. However, despite reports of iPhone 4 selling really well, it doesn’t seem to be selling fast enough to keep Apple from losing market share to Android.

According to comScore, Android gained 5% market share in the period from April to July 2010, while all other smartphone platforms declined: RIM lost 1.8%, Microsoft lost 2.2% and Apple lost 1.3%.

With Microsoft being in pre-Windows-Phone-7 release limbo, and RIM being on a slow losing streak for quite a while now, it’s not surprising that Android is gaining market share on these mobile platforms. But Apple started selling its iPhone 4 late in June, and the bump caused by the new device on the market was not enough to start catching up with Android.

Why is Apple losing ground? For the most part, analysts agree that Apple’s sales have been hurt by the lack of contracts with some of the world’s largest mobile carriers, such as Vodafone and Verizon. Apple should seriously consider changing this if it wants its iOS to stay ahead of Android.

Still, it’s important to look at this data in perspective. With the smartphone market constantly growing (according to comScore, it grew 11% from April to July), both Apple’s iOS and Android were actually on the rise — Android was simply growing faster. Furthermore, iPhone 4 was available only in the last month covered by this comScore report. In the next couple of months, we may get a clearer picture of the smartphone market.

Image courtesy of comScore

Reviews: Android

More About: android, apple, ComScore, market share, Mobile 2.0, smartphone, trending

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