Mashable: Latest 29 News Updates - including “How Are You Watching the Fall TV Lineup? [POLL]” |  |
- How Are You Watching the Fall TV Lineup? [POLL]
- A More Organic Way to Organize The Web’s Content
- Glee Karaoke for iOS Keeps It Rocking in the Free World
- Digg’s Decline by the Numbers: Plummeting Traffic, Waning Power [STATS]
- New Service Aims to Drastically Change the Way Virtual Teams Communicate
- Mark Zuckerberg Talks Philanthropy and More on “Oprah” [VIDEO]
- Adobe, Apple and Google’s Anti-Poaching Agreements Come to an End
- Kindle Gets its First Paid App: Scrabble
- 10 Dead Simple Gmail Tips, Tricks & Shortcuts
- Facebook Officially Launches Page Browser to Help You “Like” Stuff
- Sony Ericsson Drops Symbian from Smartphone Plans
- 8 of the Best Premium WordPress Themes
- Zipcar-like Bike Sharing Service Gets a Major Test in Washington DC
- Facebook Places Debuts in Canada
- New Mobile Ticketing Service Issues QR Code Tickets via SMS
- Microsoft Adds Web Embeds to Office Web Apps
- Thanks to Mashable’s Socially Savvy Supporters
- 5 Ways HTML5 Is Changing Mobile Advertising
- Stars of “The Social Network” to Discuss the Film on… MySpace
- Google’s Extremely Bizarre Pizza Video
- Mark Zuckerberg Announces $100 Million Foundation: “Startup: Education”
- It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s “Super Wi-Fi”
- Incase Signature Camera Bag Keeps Your DSLR Safe and Stylish
- Interview: Facebook’s Role in Social Good [VIDEO]
- Target to Start Selling iPad Next Month
- Our Favorite YouTube Videos This Week: The Do-Gooder Edition
- LIVE: Watch the UN Week Digital Media Lounge [VIDEO]
- HOW TO: Find the Best Fall Travel Deals on the Social Web
- Top 3 Stories in Social Media, Mobile and Entertainment This Morning
- T-Mobile G2 Pre-orders Now Available for Existing Customers
| How Are You Watching the Fall TV Lineup? [POLL] Posted: 24 Sep 2010 11:44 PM PDT      Fall is here! For the unfortunate young, this means time to head back to school. But for those of us who’ve already paid our academic dues, fall means new seasons of all our favorite television shows. No matter what shows you enjoy, you’ll have several options when it comes to accessing and viewing the programs you know and love. Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about cord cutting and “over the top” content delivery, a phenomenon that’s got cable and network execs in a panic. Basically, many people have figured out that we don’t need a cable box, a subscription to service and a huge monthly bill to get popular television shows. The newest generation of lifehackers have eliminated traditional television in the same way that their forebears all but eliminated the landline telephone, and they’ve done so largely thanks to the Internet. DVD subscription services such as Netflix and Redbox remain popular, but they’ve also got on-demand streaming capabilities — a fact that’s helped push Blockbuster into bankruptcy. And Hulu is getting bigger (in terms of its content offerings and in terms of site traffic) all the time; it even launched a subscription service, Hulu Plus, over the summer. And let’s not forget the questionably moral, definitely illegal but perennially popular practice of peer-to-peer downloading of television episodes, seasons and movies. Clients such as BitTorrent, Vuze, µTorrent and others make P2P simple, cause P2P traffic to grow and even make filesharing apps competitors with streaming video sites for users’ time and traffic. So, here’s our question for you today: Vote and let us know how you’ll be getting your TV shows (multiple selections are okay for this poll), and if you’re using a website other than Hulu or a DVD service other than Netflix, tell us about them in the comments! Reviews: Hulu, Internet More About: hulu, netflix, p2p, poll, television, torrent For more Entertainment coverage:
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| A More Organic Way to Organize The Web’s Content Posted: 24 Sep 2010 11:12 PM PDT   This post is part of Mashable's Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by
Quick Pitch: Trailmeme is a new kind of web publishing that allows users to create, annotate and walk individually curated trails through web content. Genius Idea: Trailmeme, a Xerox-incubated startup that celebrated its official launch at DEMO this week, is a tool that enables users to bookmark and then organize web content into diagrams to draw connections between them. Imagine, for instance, that you wanted to illustrate the history of the battery (see below), or Foursquare’s rapid ascent in terms of popularity. For Foursquare, you could build a cluster, or diagram, showing how a single profile of the startup led to one major brand partnership, which led to additional coverage by a couple of blogs, which led to a proliferation of other brand partnerships, more media coverage, a Forrester study and news that the social gaming service had surpassed the 3 million user mark. The story you could tell with this kind of diagram would be much more comprehensive than a chronological list of links to articles about Foursquare milestones; it could also help you draw connections about who tends to provide early coverage in the space, what news sources marketers read and how technology and/or marketing trends gather momentum on the web. The tool isn’t limited to just linking articles and illustrating trends, however — see this Periodic Table Trail, for example, which takes advantage of the app’s ability to add tags and commentary to each box on the diagram. Trailmeme is still in an early stage of development (the startup is still “twist[ing] and turn[ing] in search of a business model,” founder Venkatesh Rao tells us), but the team behind it has created both a web-based app and Wordpress plugin that enable users to create and explore these kinds of diagrams, as well as a Firefox toolbar and bookmarklet to tag content you eventually want to diagram. Soon, the startup hopes to branch out into enterprise knowledge management. Rao explains that employees spend a lot of time hunting down information on poorly-organized intranets. “If trails can make even a small dent in that wasted time, the productivity gains will be huge,” he imagines. “And if organizing information becomes a fun and creative visual activity instead of a bureaucratic burden, the problem of knowledge management will simply go away,” he says. Trailmeme’s ultimate mission is to help denizens of the web overcome information overload or, as Rao likes to call it, information anxiety. “The real-time web is great, but it has us constantly living at the microsecond level, tweeting furiously on our smartphones,” he says. “We don't dare step back, because we are afraid we'll miss something. The way to overcome that fear is to have the big-picture tools that allow you to step back and look at the web at different scales, see things in context and not always be clicking the squeakiest tweeted link. A trail can reveal that the most important article on a topic is a year-old blog post rather than the latest, squeakiest link.” Rao’s dream is to one day see “a bunch of people at an airport, on iPad-like devices, zooming in and out of the web using trails and really making full use of the power of their brains to process information at multiple levels and through multiple modes: visual, verbal, tactile,” he said. “And I'd like to see them doing so with relaxed control and mastery instead of the anxiety and stress I see on people's faces everywhere. I'd like to see us literally getting on top of information instead of being buried by it. If Trailmeme can help do that, there's no telling where we could go.” Sample Trail: History of the Battery Image courtesy of Flickr, Jenny Downing. Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
Reviews: BigTweet Bookmarklet, Flickr, Foursquare, TweetBacks WordPress Plugin More About: bizspark, media, spark-of-genius, trailmeme, web, wordpress plugin For more Tech coverage:
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| Glee Karaoke for iOS Keeps It Rocking in the Free World Posted: 24 Sep 2010 09:56 PM PDT   Just in time for the second season of the hit TV show Glee, Smule has updated its über-successful iOS app. The app, now known as Glee Karaoke [iTunes link], brings back all the same features of the original and adds a layer of competition to the mix. We were big fans of the original app, and we’re happy to report that version 2.0 is just as much fun. The big, new feature is that users can compete with others from around the world. You can also earn a starburst value for each song you sing and share; then, you can see how you stack up against the rest of the world on the starburst leaderboard. You can also comment and become a fan of other users’ performances. This new competition layer actually adds a huge amount of replay value to the app. When your pitch and timing are better, you score more points. The app also gives you advice on how to improve your performance.  Every week, new music from the television show is added to the app and can be purchased for your sing-along pleasure. A very cool feature that Smule integrated into the app earlier this year is the ability to use songs you’ve purchased from iTunes or Amazon.com to sing along with. This option is really cool for users who buy the songs each week from iTunes, because it means you don’t have to re-buy the track to use in Glee Karaoke. The team at Smule made this video to show off what’s new in Glee Karaoke: Glee Karaoke is $0.99 in the App Store and is a free upgrade for existing app owners. There is a problem when the app uses the iPod touch 4G’s built-in-microphone, and Smule has submitted a fix to the App Store, so it should be corrected soon. Have you played Glee Karaoke? What do you think about how entertainment properties are using social media and social gaming to enhance an overall brand? Let us know. Reviews: App Store More About: GLEE, glee karaoke, ipad apps, iphone apps, Smule For more Mobile coverage:
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| Digg’s Decline by the Numbers: Plummeting Traffic, Waning Power [STATS] Posted: 24 Sep 2010 08:49 PM PDT   When it comes to releasing a new product, users and pundits’ opinions only count for so much, but numbers — including revenue and traffic– don’t lie. We’ve been watching Digg closely ever since we got wind of its fourth version, a.k.a. “New Digg,” last month. While we’ve gathered plenty of anecdotal evidence from power users and average users alike, we’ve yet to publish anything definitive about how the site is doing traffic-wise. Users have “revolted” against the new version of Digg since Day One of its public launch. We knew loyal Diggers were complaining, so we decided to poll our own readers about the situation. It turned out that Mashable’s own readers preferred the old version by a huge margin — 78.4% of respondents, all told. But this kind of evidence only showed the New Digg was unpopular, not necessarily faring badly in reality. After all, Facebook users “revolt” over new features all the time, but that site’s growth continues at a mind-boggling rate. This week, the web analysts at Hitwise gathered data showing a 34% decline in visitors in the U.K. and a 24% decline in the U.S. in the past 11 weeks.   What could have caused this drastic drop-off? For one thing, Digg hasn’t made any truly significant changes for around four years. Unlike Facebook, which we used for comparison earlier and which makes incremental changes on a near-monthly basis, Digg dumped on its users an entirely new interface, a new algorithm for story popularity and a new paradigm for power users all at once. Digg’s traffic was reportedly shaky before New Digg was revealed, but the new version of the site seems to have nailed the coffin, to an extent. The other issue is that one of Digg’s main benefits for users was its ability to direct traffic. But we’re hearing from site owners and content producers around the web that as Digg’s onsite traffic drops, their Digg referrals are tanking, while Twitter and other sources are on the rise. We recently postulated what Digg needed to do to survive. With both inbound and outbound traffic on the decline, and with this decline being so precipitous, we wonder if Digg’s “do or die” moment hasn’t already come and gone. What do you think of Digg’s chances these days? Or, more to the point, when was the last time you visited Digg.com? Let us know in the comments. Reviews: Digg, Facebook, Mashable, Twitter For more Social Media coverage:
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| New Service Aims to Drastically Change the Way Virtual Teams Communicate Posted: 24 Sep 2010 06:47 PM PDT  This post is part of Mashable's Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by
Quick Pitch: Sococo makes Team Space, a new mode of online communication that uses smart spaces to make online communication natural and intuitive. Genius Idea: The virtual office is as old as the Internet itself. From lightweight options, including chat rooms Yammer and Skype to more robust solutions in the vein of Basecamp, Colaab and the almost defunct Google Wave, there are a host of online tools that exist simply to make business-related person-to-person and person-to-team communication easier. Socoo enters the crowded space with its interpretation on online communication: Team Space. Team Space is an always-on group communication tool for remote teams, where team members are organized at desks in a virtual office building and can interact with each other through voice, chat and multi-screen sharing. The Team Space can include private offices, common areas, conference rooms and personal spaces. The service is “alive” thanks to a feature called Social Awareness which allows users to see who is talking to whom, who is free to engage with and who is busy at work. As a user, you can click in to any of the areas to join meetings in progress or start a one-on-one conversation with a coworker. Once you join a room, you’re immediately connected to room members via voice, chat and screen share. You also have your own personal space where you can share applications and documents with other Team Space users. Sococo recently launched at DEMO and, for now, the Team Space software is available in beta for Windows; a Mac OS X version is currently in alpha and you’ll need to contact Sococo to grab it. Sococo’s Team Space is certainly a neat twist to an old problem, but we’re curious to see if it actually becomes a practical solution to team communication. Obviously, the limited Mac support will be a hinderance to adoption for the time-being. Also, will it be a system resource hog? Will all team members embrace it? What about team members who only have mobile capabilities? These are fair questions that will influence user adoption as well. What do you use to collaborate and connect with remote team members? Will you be trying Team Space? Share your thoughts in the comments.   Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jwohlfeil Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
Reviews: Basecamp, Google Wave, Internet, Skype, Windows, Yammer, iStockphoto More About: bizspark, social collaboration, sococo, software, team collaboration, team space For more Tech coverage:
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| Mark Zuckerberg Talks Philanthropy and More on “Oprah” [VIDEO] Posted: 24 Sep 2010 05:34 PM PDT   Mark Zuckerberg was in Chicago today for a cozy chat with Oprah Winfrey about the social network founder’s enormous philanthropic donation to public education. They were joined by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Newark, NJ Mayor Cory Booker. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan even made an appearance via sattelite. Zuckerberg’s actions are setting into motion Startup: Education, a $100 million foundation dedicated to improving education in the United States, beginning with the Newark school system, one of the worst in the country. Zuckerberg said on the talk show that he believed Christie and Booker were on the right track where fixing public schools is concerned. Originally, he had planned to help them through an anonymous donation. Not only does this segment feature details about the Facebook CEO’s plan to help public education; it also shows a day-in-the-life clip shot in Zuckerberg’s home and office (realms that no cameras, including ours, have ever entered) and featuring the young entrepreneur’s girlfriend. Finally, Zuckerberg comments on the upcoming “Facebook movie,” The Social Network. This is the first time Oprah’s made tech news since her initial foray into Twitter last year, where she was joined by Ashton Kutcher and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. We’ve noticed that “the Oprah effect” can generate huge amounts of traffic and consumer interest in projects the media maven chooses to highlight; we’re glad she’s picked such a worthy cause in Zuckerberg’s new foundation and hope others are inspired to help because of it. Reviews: Facebook, Twitter More About: mark zuckerberg, oprah, philanthropy, social good, trending, Zuckerberg For more Social Good coverage:
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| Adobe, Apple and Google’s Anti-Poaching Agreements Come to an End Posted: 24 Sep 2010 04:37 PM PDT
For years, these companies have had either implicit or implied agreements regarding the recruitment of their employees. Generally, these were policies of the “if you don’t poach my employees, I won’t poach yours” variety. Last year, though, the Washington Post reported on an investigation by the Department of Justice (DoJ) into whether these agreements violated U.S. antitrust laws. Today, the DoJ made it clear these companies have indeed been entering anticompetitive employee solicitation agreements, and that the government won’t tolerate such actions. The result is a settlement of a civil antitrust complaint filed today; this settlement bars six of tech’s most prominent companies from entering in these types of agreements, especially ones that ban “cold calling.” “In the high technology sector, there is a strong demand for employees with advanced or specialized skills,” the DoJ said in its announcement. “One of the principal means by which high tech companies recruit these types of employees is to solicit them directly from other companies in a process referred to as ‘cold calling.’ This form of competition, when unrestrained, results in better career opportunities.” The Agreements Between Apple, Adobe, Google and MoreIn its announcement, the Department of Justice outlined five key agreements between Apple, Adobe, Google, Intuit, Intel and Pixar that violated antitrust laws. Some of the agreements aren’t any surprise (Apple-Pixar), while there are others we never expected (Apple-Adobe). Here’s the list:
Since the DoJ’s announcement, Google has issued its own statement, stating that it ended its “no cold call” policies in 2009, some time after the Justice Department’s investigation began. While the deals made sense for all of these companies, it definitely teeters on the edge of anticompetitive agreements. It’s good to know that this issue has been put to rest, although we’re pretty sure Google is far more concerned about Facebook poaching its employees these days. Image courtesy of Flickr, mentalman1369. Reviews: Facebook, Flickr, Google More About: adobe, apple, Department of Justice, Google, intel, intuit, pixar For more Business coverage:
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| Kindle Gets its First Paid App: Scrabble Posted: 24 Sep 2010 03:33 PM PDT
The $4.99 app [Amazon link], which was developed by Electronic Arts, joins two free word games already in the store. Amazon will take a 30% cut of revenue generated from sales of the app. Although it’s a well-designed app, perfect for the Kindle’s book-loving userbase, it’s somewhat disheartening that only three apps have been released thus far. When the app store was first announced, Amazon VP Ian Freed said that the company had “heard from lots of developers over the past two years who [were] excited to build on top of Kindle.” Somehow, we weren’t expecting “lots” to equate to “one.” (The first two apps were both developed by Amazon’s internal team.) It’s possible that the promise of an app store, announced just ahead of the iPad unveiling, was merely an attempt to make the media think twice before labeling Apple’s tablet device the “Kindle killer.” Time will tell whether Amazon does, in fact, plan to go after developers and build an app store to rival those of Apple, Android and BlackBerry. Given the Kindle’s lack of a touchscreen, ability to play animations, and myriad other capabilities that allow for highly interactive apps, it doesn’t seem likely. Of course, if Scrabble turns out to be a commercial success, that may change things. Screenshots  [via Wired] Reviews: Android, BlackBerry Rocks!, scrabble More About: amazon, App, electronic arts, Kindle, scrabble For more Tech coverage:
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| 10 Dead Simple Gmail Tips, Tricks & Shortcuts Posted: 24 Sep 2010 03:10 PM PDT   Gmail can be tweaked almost endlessly with various Firefox and Chrome extensions, and offers some pretty nifty Labs options too. However, we’ve taken a look at some simple tips, tricks, tweaks and shortcuts you can use without going down the plugin or experimental route. These 10 features will help you get so much more out of the webmail service, from an enhanced chat experience, to smarter filters, to offline access. Have a read through now and let us know any neat Gmail hints you’d like to share in the comments box below. 1. Add Emphasis in Chat Gmail’s instant messaging Chat function is one of the more basic options around, but there are a few bits of formatting you can use to add nuance to your online communication. To bold a word, asterisk it like this: *Mashable* To add italics, just underscore before and after the word like this: _Mashable_ And to strike a word through, add hyphens before and after like so: -Mashable- 2. Customize Your Web Clips You’ve no doubt noticed the “Web Clips” line of text that appears above your Gmail inbox which contains news, blog posts, ads and other info. But did you know you can personalize it to make it more relevant to you? Simply go to “Settings” on the top right of your screen and select the “Web Clips” tab. From there, you can search, browse from the categories, and add and remove items to your heart’s content.  3. Create Variations of Your E-mail Address Although technically you only have one Gmail address, you can create as many variations of it as you wish to help manage your incoming mail. You can do this by adding a word after your name with a plus sign (if the site you’re entering the address into allows it). So, yourname+newsletters@gmail.com, yourname+shopping@gmail.com, and so on. This alias system then comes into its own if you also set up filters to direct those messages where you want them. For example, they could skip the inbox and be archived, have a label applied, be forwarded to another account, and so on. To set up a filter, go to “Settings,” hit the “Filters” tab, select “Create New Filter” and follow the simple steps from there.  4. Access Gmail When You’re Offline This is a useful option for anyone on the go, as it allows you to access your Gmail account when you’re not connected to the web. You can search, read and compose e-mails when you’re not in a Wi-Fi zone, and Gmail will simply auto-update (and send/receive any new mail) when you next reconnect. To set up your Gmail to be available when you’re offline, you have to download Google Gears, but it’s a simple process from within Gmail. Head over to your “Settings” menu, hit the “Offline” tab, and check the option to “Enable Offline Mail for this computer.” Once you save the changes, Gmail will auto-prompt you through the process and even gives you the option to create a desktop shortcut for quick access to Gmail when offline. 5. Chat Off the Record Gmail handily saves your chat history for conversations with other Gmail users and makes them searchable too (use the search term “is:chat” to look for a keyword term). But there might be times you want to chat and not have it recorded. To chat “off the record,” open a chat window with whom you want to talk, click on the “Actions” drop down menu and select “Go off the record.” The person you’re chatting with will be notified of this change, and you can go back on the record in the same way. 6. Get New Mail Desktop Notifications Gmail offers a free Notifier as a quick download that will alert you with a visual pop-up and audio cue when new mail has arrived, even if you don’t have Gmail open in a browser. It automatically checks for new mail every two minutes, with the icons changing to show unread mail in case you miss the notification. The app is available for both Windows PCs and Macs. It should be noted that downloading this will also make Gmail your default e-mail program, which you might need to consider if you don’t want this to be case. 7. Use Gmail’s Advanced Search Operators While Gmail’s keyword search works well enough for basic queries, there are some advanced options that can help refine your process. For example, entering to:me is:unread in:inbox will bring up any unread mails in your inbox. Entering has:attachment will show you a list of e-mails with files attached, and after: 20/08/2010 before: 25/08/2010 will offer up a list of messages from that specific time period. You can view the major search operators over at the Gmail support site — it’s well worth memorizing a few. 8. Improve Gmail Priority Inbox Gmail’s “Priority Inbox” functions by highlighting what it considers your most important mail, and has launched to positive feedback. But you can improve it as time goes on. In order to help Gmail better recognize what really is important (and conversely, what isn’t), simply select an e-mail message and hit the little plus or minus arrows at the top of your inbox. 9. Find Out if a Message Was Sent Just to You Useful for prioritizing replies if nothing else, there’s a setting in Gmail that will enable you to see if a message has been sent just to you, or a mailing list. To activate it, go to “Settings,” then scroll down to “Personal level indicators” and select “Show indicators.” This will now mean that every message in your mailbox shows how many recipients there were at a glance. No arrows will show if the message was sent to a mailing list, “>” shows up when the message was sent to you and others, and “>>” indicates the message was sent to just you. 10. Play a Gmail-Inspired Game And finally, on a lighthearted note, did you know there is a free online game you can play that’s inspired by Gmail? “Galactic Inbox” was created by Paul Truong, a creative technologist “in part, as a ‘thank you’ to the Gmail team for their ongoing work to improve the webmail galaxy.” If you want to show the gTeam some love too, then hop on over and have a play! More Gmail Resources from Mashable
Reviews: Gmail, Gmail Notifier, Mashable More About: e-mail, email, gmail, Google, how to, inbox, List, Lists, productivity, Productivity Lists, shortcuts, tips, tricks For more Tech coverage:
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| Facebook Officially Launches Page Browser to Help You “Like” Stuff Posted: 24 Sep 2010 02:48 PM PDT   Facebook has officially rolled out its new feature for helping you discover Facebook Pages. Called “Page Browser,” the tool was briefly available to users earlier this month. Page Browser is simply a collection of Facebook Pages, highlighted through Page photos, that users can sift through to discover and quickly “Like” Pages of interest. Facebook says that the experience also provides a favorable browsing experience for discovering interest-related content — like searching for a movie to rent. Not too much has changed to Page Browser since it unofficially appeared on the scene. Pages are still organized into nine different categories including Music, Sports, Celebrities, Movies and Games. You’ll also still see the country drop-down menu for accessing popular Pages by country, and the “Friends similar to you” — with a count of their corresponding “Likes” in common — in the right-hand sidebar. Now that Page Browser is an official Facebook product, we can expect to see it evolve over time. We also anticipate that Page Browser will become a part of the Facebook on-boarding experience for new users. For Facebook, Page Browser is the perfect tool to facilitate new user engagement and ensure that members keep coming back for their Facebook Page activity fix.  Reviews: Facebook, pages, sports More About: facebook, facebook pages, page browser For more Social Media coverage:
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| Sony Ericsson Drops Symbian from Smartphone Plans Posted: 24 Sep 2010 02:13 PM PDT   Despite Nokia’s best efforts to entice developers, the Symbian mobile operating system continues to lose support from users and vendors. The latest OEM to leave the platform is Sony Ericsson. BusinessWeek quotes Sony Ericsson spokesman Aldo Liguori as saying, “we have no plans for the time being to develop any new products to the Symbian Foundation standard or operating system.” In terms of sheer numbers, Symbian still has the highest market share worldwide, in large part because of its use on lower-end smartphone/feature phones in Asia and other parts of the world. Symbian’s reign is dwindling all the time and Gartner predicts that by 2014, Google’s Android will be close to overtaking Symbian as the number one smartphone OS. Sony Ericsson was a longtime proponent of Symbian, using it to power its Vivaz line of phones. Sony Ericsson is also a member of the Symbian Foundation, which is a group Nokia set up in 2008 to allow chipmakers and OEMs to share code with one another. However, like Motorola and Samsung, Sony has shifted much of its focus to Google’s Android platform. Sony Ericsson released its first Android handset in November of 2009 and is reportedly working on an Android-powered gaming smartphone. Meanwhile, Nokia, the company that bought Symbian back in 2008, vows to make the platform more open. Symbian’s code finally became open source in February. Nokia has just launched a new promotion to encourage North American developers to target Symbian. On its Calling All Innovators website, Nokia is partnering with AT&T to encourage U.S. and Canadian developers to build apps and games for the new Nokia N8 Symbian^3 smartphone. Nokia will be giving out $10 million in cash and marketing to the winning apps and developers. Of course, the irony is that the N8 is not being sold at a subsidized price on any of the North American carriers. Users and developers can still use the phone by buying an unlocked version directly from Nokia, but the phone doesn’t have the big carrier partnerships like the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry handsets. Nokia is hoping to use this contest as a way to re-ignite developer interest in the waning platform. While we applaud its efforts, it’s going to be tough to convince already taxed mobile developers to put energy and resources into Symbian, especially when one of the bigger OEMs has no plans to use it in further projects. Reviews: Android, Google More About: Nokia, Nokia N8, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, Symbian^3 For more Mobile coverage:
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| 8 of the Best Premium WordPress Themes Posted: 24 Sep 2010 01:59 PM PDT
Still, there’s a wide world of premium themes to choose from. Once upon a time, Thesis was the king (more or less) of premium WordPress themes; however, a recent squabble over licensing issues has left a tarnish on designer Chris Pearson’s otherwise lovely work, and has sent former Thesis users running to find alternatives. Now that the dust has settled from that recent unpleasantness, we thought we should revisit the subject of premium themes. Here are a handful of gorgeous WordPress themes you and your clients can buy right now. They’re great for developers, professional bloggers, SMBs, web dev shops and anyone who can afford to shell out a few bucks for a professional-looking and robust WordPress theme. And since they’re paid products, most come with decent support, as well. Give them a look, and let us know your thoughts in the comments. 1. Genesis
Based on user feedback and adoption trends, we’re ready to call StudioPress’ Genesis the successor to Thesis. This WordPress 3.0-ready theme starts simple and SEO-focused, but it’s incredibly extensible in terms of design and development through hooks and child themes. Widgets can go in a lot of places with Genesis; they’re not relegated to the sidebar. This theme also integrates with BuddyPress, if you or your client need open-source social networking capabilities along with your WordPress site. Price: $59.99 for the theme, $249.95 for the StudioPress Pro All Theme Plus package 2. Coda
WooThemes has long been one of the better sources of premium WordPress themes, and this shop’s latest creation, Coda, leaves little to be desired. This digital mag template features a nifty jQuery-based scroller for showcasing specific posts and a completely widget-based design for the home page. Coda’s “Timeline” archive page is also an elegant solution to one of the ugliest sections of any content-focused website. Price: $70 for standard license (two bonus themes included), $150 for developer license (three bonus themes and the Coda PSD file) 3. Iridium
RocketTheme’s Iridium was designed for WordPress 3.0 and comes with six style variations and a slew of widgets out of the box. It’s a graphics-intensive package from the start and works well for sites that need to go beyond subtle. That being said, the smaller details (such as RocketTheme’s Fusion Menu, a rhapsody in JavaScript) inherent in this theme are well-executed, too. Price: Subscription pricing starting at $50 for a 90-day plan with two installations of a theme and ranging to $250 annually for unlimited access 4. Emporium
While many of Templatic’s themes appeal to the news bloggers in us (Hello and NewsTime look perfect for a content site, for example), this theme shop really shines in the e-commerce category. The gallery of themes has a killer iPhone app site based on WordPress and quite a few offerings for those whose websites are also commercial portals. One that particularly struck us was Emporium, a shiny storefont with an administrative backend for real and virtual goods. This theme even has customization for a “catalog mode” if your online shop is inquiry-based rather than online sale-focused. Price: $65 for a single license, $99 for a single theme with unlimited licenses, $299 for all Templatic themes 5. iTeam
iThemes’ premium WordPress theme iTeam was conceived as the ideal framework for building a sports team website, but we can see this format going over well for a ton of different applications. With support for video, photo galleries, up-to-the-minute updates and who’s-who rosters, we could imagine getting a lot of mileage out of this community-focused theme for recurring event websites, clubs and organizations, churches and others. Price: $79.95 for a single theme with multiple licenses, $297 for all themes 6. Standard Theme
Don’t be fooled by the name. The Standard Theme isn’t “standard” as in “ordinary.” Rather, it aims to set an industry standard for content-centric sites and blogs by being the (allegedly) best-coded WordPress theme ever. Standard is SEO- and load time-optimized, and with ample ad placement opportunities and Google Analytics integration, it’s ideal for professional and commercial applications. Price: $49 for standard license, $99 for a support license, both of which work for multiple applications 7. Photon
Multimedia and photography portfolio themes abound, but this one fits the bill perfectly, and for a pretty sweet price, too. Images are gorgeously showcased in an almost-fullscreen layout with few distractions. Text and filmstrips recede gracefully and appear only when needed and wanted by the user. For a working photog, designer, model or other professional who relies on an image-based website, this theme is simple and strong enough to let the work stand out. And for an amateur shutterbug, the price is right for getting started with a portfolio. Price: $17 8. Cinch
If you love the look of Tumblr but need the power of WordPress, Cinch is the theme for you. Another WooThemes creation, Cinch harnesses the seemingly endless popularity of the tumblog for use on a WordPress site. Just like Tumblr, Cinch brings super-simple multimedia capabilities, adding speedy posting options with advanced QuickPress support. The theme also includes 11 alternative styles and slick jQuery-powered navigation. Price: $70 for standard license (two bonus themes included), $150 for developer license (three bonus themes and the Cinch PSD file) What Are Your Favorite Themes?That’s it for our round-up of premium WordPress themes. If you’ve done some WordPress development in the past, we encourage you to share your own favorites, finds, steals and tips in the comments. And for all you bloggers and site owners, let us know what premium themes you’ve tried, what you use now and why. Series supported by Rackspace  Rackspace is the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why. Hat tip: @chepebs, @andyfortson, @lucaslshaffer and @technosailor Reviews: Cinch, Coda, Google Analytics, Tumblr, WordPress More About: genesis, iridium, ithemes, premium themes, studiopress, templatic, thesis, web design, Web Development, web development series, woothemes, Wordpress For more Dev & Design coverage:
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| Zipcar-like Bike Sharing Service Gets a Major Test in Washington DC Posted: 24 Sep 2010 01:39 PM PDT   The largest public bike-sharing program in the U.S. just rolled out in Washington, D.C. and Arlington, VA. Unlike local bike rental companies that typically offer extended rides, the pricing structure of Capital Bikeshare makes it perfect for quick commutes. Capital Bikeshare uses a technology called BIXI that was developed by the Public Bike System Company. The BIXI system allows riders to quickly unlock a bike with a special key card. The concept of bike sharing is not completely new, but the scale at which Capital Bikeshare is operating is impressive. It will manage more than 1,100 bikes across 114 rental stations. Unlike Zipcar, the bikes can be returned to any station — not just the location from which it was rented. The pricing structure is fairly competitive for short rides. Membership in the program costs $25 for 30 days, $75 for an entire year ($50 during the special introductory period) or, if you’re not completely sold on the concept, $5 for one day. The first 30 minutes of any ride is free, but 60 minutes will cost you $1.50, and 90 minutes will be an additional $3.00 (for a total of $4.50). The price then spikes to $6 for each additional 30-minute block, making it not particularly viable for extended rides. A bike can be kept for a maximum of 24 hours (for $70.50), before it is considered stolen and your credit card is charged $1,000. (Don’t worry, the company will refund you once you return the bike.) If that sounds scary, there is an up side: You can simply drop the bike off at a rental station and get a new one when you’re ready to ride again. Breaking your ride into chunks will keep bikes in circulation and your fees down. Capital Bikeshare presents a very competitive and eco-friendly commuting option for residents of the D.C. and Arlington region, but it does make us question when we’ll begin seeing similar services in other major cities. Removing the need to store and maintain a bike is more than worth the small fee, and that leaves us ready to give it a try. More About: bike sharing, bikeshare, capital bikeshare, public bike share, zipcar For more Tech coverage:
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| Facebook Places Debuts in Canada Posted: 24 Sep 2010 01:25 PM PDT   Facebook Places, which launched just a month ago, is conquering international territory with expansion in Japan, the UK and as of today, Canada. Facebook’s geolocation feature is a direct response to the rise in popularity of location apps like Foursquare. It allows users to check in to different physical locations, primarily through the company’s iPhone app. Initially, Facebook Places launched in the U.S., but soon rolled out to Japan and the UK. Canada becomes the fourth country to get Facebook’s check in feature. Facebook has previously had a rocky relationship with the nation. Last year, a Canadian privacy commission stated that Facebook didn’t comply with its privacy laws, eventually leading to intervention from the Canadian government. The end result: Facebook was forced to change its privacy policy. Could Facebook Places raise new privacy concerns for the social network? Canadian users, have you noticed Facebook Places popping up in your streams? Do you intend to use the feature?  Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare More About: Canada, facebook, Facebook Places, geolocation, lbs For more Social Media coverage:
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| New Mobile Ticketing Service Issues QR Code Tickets via SMS Posted: 24 Sep 2010 12:06 PM PDT   In today’s digital world, most of us would prefer paper tickets to go the way of the dodo, if only because they’re a pain to print and easy to lose. MogoTix, a brand new mobile ticketing service, is doing its part to make paper tickets vanish by offering event organizers an easy way to create and distribute mobile tickets as QR codes. MogoTix makes a platform that event organizers can use to publish event websites, and sell and distribute the QR code mobile tickets. Organizers can also use the newly released iPhone application [iTunes link] to scan and process the QR code tickets, access the full attendee list and track attendance and sales in real-time. End users who purchase tickets through MogoTix will receive an event reminder via SMS with their ticket. The QR code tickets are not iPhone-dependent, and instead are accessible to any mobile user who has mobile browsing capabilities on their device. Should an attendee have an unsupported device, event organizers can still manually check the party in through the MogoTix iPhone application attendee list. MogoTix prices their service similar to other event sites. Event organizers can expect to pay 2.5% of the ticket price plus $0.99 per ticket, which means a $30 ticket price will come with a $1.74 per ticket fee. Mobile ticketing is by no means a new phenomena. Many individual retailers, including Fandago and MovieTickets.com, are experimenting with paperless tickets. It’s a convenience that consumers are expected to embrace to the tune of $100 billion in transactions by 2012, according to Juniper Research.  More About: iphone app, Mobile 2.0, mobile tickets, mogotix, QR Codes For more Mobile coverage:
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| Microsoft Adds Web Embeds to Office Web Apps Posted: 24 Sep 2010 11:54 AM PDT   Microsoft has added some new features to its Office Web Apps service, including the ability to embed Excel and PowerPoint documents into blog posts or websites. Launched in June, Microsoft Office Web Apps is Microsoft’s attempt to compete with the ever-popular Google Docs. Microsoft says the service has already been used by 20 million people, despite some tepid early reviews. In addition to adding new features, Microsoft is also expanding the global availability of the Office Web Apps to Australia, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Russia. Web embeds are a great new feature for PowerPoint and Excel users, but it’s something that Google has been offering for several years. Additionally, services like Slideshare have made it easy to upload and embed PowerPoint or PDF-based presentations. This is what an embed of a Microsoft PowerPoint document looks like: Have you used Office Web Apps? If so, what are your thoughts? Reviews: Australia, Google, Google Docs More About: Excel, google docs, microsoft office, office web apps, powerpoint, software For more Tech coverage:
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| Thanks to Mashable’s Socially Savvy Supporters Posted: 24 Sep 2010 11:45 AM PDT
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| 5 Ways HTML5 Is Changing Mobile Advertising Posted: 24 Sep 2010 11:33 AM PDT   Xavier Facon is CTO at Crisp Wireless, a rich media advertising technology company based in New York City. He blogs regularly about ad technology and mobile best practices. Close to five years have passed since the early mobile ad networks emerged with basic banners on mobile screens. Despite numerous attempts at innovation, there are still very few mobile ad unit technologies being used by major networks or agencies. Many have just relied on the same basic banner ads that were used five years ago. When Apple's iAds came on the scene several months ago, it was considered a game-changer. While Apple believed it was setting a new standard for the quality of ads on the mobile device with its use of animation, sound and video, the company has since drawn criticism for production delays of initial iAd campaigns. Apple has managed to introduce a few campaigns from top brands including Nissan and Unilever in the past few months, but its early challenges underscore the struggles with innovation that have plagued the industry over the years. The question is, why? The Introduction of HTML5A large part of the issue is that many rich media ad technologies are proprietary and closed platforms. None of the mobile ad integration kits for apps are interoperable with each other. The technical barrier for running a mobile rich media ad campaign is very high. With iAds demonstrating that HTML5 is a viable option for mobile ad development today, the industry will see more progress. HTML5 and compatible HTML5-based ad formats will have a major impact on the future of the mobile ad industry. Here are the five reasons why HTML5, an open standard, will change mobile advertising the way Flash changed it for the desktop. 1. Open Systems Support Speed And ScaleWhen ads are programmed using HTML, agencies can give the work to their own designers and developers. It saves time and money to put the creative control back in their hands instead of having to go back and forth with third-party vendors or ad networks. Some rich media ad technologies may be based on open standards, but they are generally all closed systems where it often takes one or two months to get the ad unit developed and tested. After all, earlier HTML versions resolved the content creation bottleneck in the early days of the world wide web as well. 2. HTML Can Run AnywhereHTML can be downloaded from an ad server and displayed on the web and in apps. The ability of apps to render HTML is a huge boost. Android and iOS support HTML5, and soon all major smartphone platforms will follow suit. The same can't be said for Flash and other Flash lookalikes. One of the key issues in extending desktop campaigns to mobile is dealing with the fragmentation of that audience by diverging technologies. Let's take the recent extension of the Nissan Leaf campaign to mobile platforms. One vendor could have developed a Flash creative for the desktop web. Another vendor could have converted it to run in Android apps. Yet another vendor might support it to run on mobile web browsers. Apple could also use iAd to run the campaign on iPhone apps. Imagine the headache a media agency would have customizing that ad to run across all of these different platforms. HTML5 can be leveraged to solve that. 3. Tracker CompatibilityWhat's the point of extending a campaign to mobile devices if you can't get the delivery and brand interaction metrics right? This is another point easily solved by the unifying nature of HTML/JavaScript-based ad units. Agency ad servers can track banner impressions and clicks across many devices and technologies and produce a single report. This is a more reliable approach than collecting various reports out of different mobile platforms, which are all calibrated according to different methodologies. For example, most in-app mobile ad servers count an impression every time an ad is requested from the server, while web servers track an impression only after the ad is displayed. 4. Lightweight Ad Display EngineYou may well be aware of the ongoing HTML5 vs. Flash debates happening across the industry and the web. One of the arguments in that debate is the potential quality and performance problems that plug-in technologies can suffer. With rich media advertising for mobile, much of the same concept stands. When a mobile application developer integrates a rich media ad kit, it adds weight and can cause application performance issues. On the other hand, the code involved in leveraging the browser as the ad rendering engine is comparatively lighter and simpler, thus more suitable for resource-constrained mobile devices. 5. Design FlexibilityLast but not least, HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript offer remarkable design flexibility and capability, which is unlikely to be trumped by a single technology compatible with so many mobile devices. It doesn't require downloading of potentially insecure pre-compiled binaries and it doesn't necessitate any heavy UI framework to be bundled with the app. For instance, the iPad apps for The Wall Street Journal and Popular Mechanics use HTML5 exclusively for their advertisers. Based on a dozen or so major app publishers I've spoken to, the majority are either already serving HTML5-based display ads in their mobile tablet or smart phone apps, or they are considering it in the near future. There are even app developers who are collaborating on open source software development kits to create a rich media mobile advertising standard based on HTML5 with some extra native application hooks. While display advertising on mobile devices may not reach full maturity for a while, the need to de-fragment the platforms on a technical level is key right now. Bridging the gap between the mobile web and apps has pushed the technology to evolve towards a cross-platform architecture. It is an exciting time for interactive developers and designers. More Mobile Resources from Mashable:
Reviews: Android More About: advertising, android, apple, Flash, HTML5, iAd, iOS, iphone, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, phone, smartphone, Web Development For more Mobile coverage:
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| Stars of “The Social Network” to Discuss the Film on… MySpace Posted: 24 Sep 2010 10:51 AM PDT   With the release of "The Social Network" only a week away, the stars of the film are set to make a live video appearance on the social networking site that Facebook long ago unseated as top dog: MySpace. This Sunday, cast members Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin will discuss the film with host Olivia Munn and also answer questions from fans – a format that has become fairly common on MySpace. The event takes place at 5:30 p.m. ET this Sunday on the movie’s MySpace page. One might think it somewhat ironic that this isn't taking place on the site the movie is about, but as has been previously reported, that's because Facebook isn't letting that happen (though plenty of promotion is still finding its way onto the site indirectly via "Like" buttons). Thus, the studio behind the movie – Columbia Pictures – has embarked on a fairly large scale marketing campaign on other social sites. MySpace has been a big part of that with both the upcoming live chat and the recently released interactive trailer as prominent examples. The movie currently has more than 2 million "friends" on the site. "The Social Network" has also popped up as a promoted topic on Twitter from time to time, with tweets driving users to the glitzy website for the movie. Mashable is also hosting screenings in New York and San Francisco next week. We'll soon see if all that social media outreach (as well an aggressive campaign through traditional media) pays off in the form of ticket sales. Reviews: Facebook, Mashable, MySpace More About: facebook, Film, Movies, myspace, the social network For more Entertainment coverage:
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| Google’s Extremely Bizarre Pizza Video Posted: 24 Sep 2010 10:24 AM PDT   There’s only one word we can come up with that describes this new and utterly bizarre promotional video from Google: pizza. We ran across this little gem thanks to our friends at Reddit. It’s a promotional video from Google Mobile designed to promote Google Search with My Location, a feature that automatically pulls up local listings on GPS-enabled phones. Unlike most of Google’s promotional videos though, it’s 10 minutes long, and all but 10 seconds of it is dedicated to pizza. We’re not kidding; the man in this video (who we’re currently in the process of identifying) repeats “pizza” more times than we’re willing to count. The volcano, disco ball, subway and antarctic background changes just add to the hilarity. If Google was looking to get some free press and YouTube virility with ten minutes of pizza, then congrats, the search giant has succeeded. That’s all we’re going to say about this 10-minute masterpiece. We want to hear your thoughts in the comments. Reviews: Google, YouTube More About: Google, Google mobile, pizza, youtube For more Web Video coverage:
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| Mark Zuckerberg Announces $100 Million Foundation: “Startup: Education” Posted: 24 Sep 2010 09:51 AM PDT   Punk, traitor, genius or philanthropic entrepreneur? Mark Zuckerberg can be described by many a colorful adjective, and on Friday, October 1, the world will watch Hollywood both celebrate and vilify Facebook’s founder in The Social Network. Just one week in advance of the movie’s debut, Zuckerberg is launching Startup: Education, a $100 million foundation dedicated to improving education in Newark, New Jersey and the rest of the U.S. The ultimate aim is to create a model for rewarding excellence in education on a national level. The fund, which was first revealed on Wednesday but formally announced today, will work with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s and Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s new bipartisan initiative, the Partnership for Education in Newark, which was also officially unveiled today. Zuckerberg and Christie will discuss the news in a media conference call this afternoon at 1:00 p.m. ET. Later, Christie and Booker will discuss the partnership on The Oprah Winfrey Show. In addition to working with Zuckerberg’s new foundation, the Partnership for Education in Newark will also work with the Newark Education and Youth Development Fund, a non-profit organization that aims to raise an additional $150 million for Newark’s youth. Currently, only 40% of Newark children can read and write at grade level by the end of third grade. In a blog on the Startup: Education Facebook Page, Zuckerberg writes, “I believe in the Mayor and his vision, and that’s why I want to help them succeed. Using my own Facebook stock, I’m creating the Startup: Education foundation with over $100 million to invest in educating and improving the lives of young people. I’m also challenging others who want to improve education in America to match my contributions.” Whatever your characterization of Zuckerberg, one can only hope that the New Jersey partnership will produce the model of educational excellence that its founders envision. Reviews: Facebook More About: education, facebook, mark zuckerberg, New Jersey, partnership for education, startup:education For more Social Good coverage:
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| It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s “Super Wi-Fi” Posted: 24 Sep 2010 09:40 AM PDT   In Washington D.C. yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted some new technical rules in the area of white spaces — the unused spectrum between broadcast television channels — that many hope will lead to a so-called “Super Wi-Fi” or “Wi-Fi on steroids.” The FCC’s decision was a big win for companies like Microsoft and Google that have been pushing to take advantage of these white spaces in order to bring faster, more powerful wireless broadband to the United States. Google, one of the biggest advocates in this space, has a post on its Public Policy Blog where it says “[yesterday's] order finally sets the stage for the next generation of wireless technologies to emerge, and is an important victory for Internet users across the country.” The idea behind Super Wi-Fi is basically the same as how Wi-Fi currently works, only taken to the next level. Wi-Fi was originally born out of some unused areas of bandwidth that the FCC decided to open up as unlicensed spectrum. Super Wi-Fi would likewise used unlicensed spectrum, but focus on the now unused television frequencies that operate between 54-698 MHz. These frequencies are no no longer in use, thanks to the June 2009 digital television transition. Google, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Intel, Philips, Samsung and Earthlink are all part of the White Spaces Coalition that has been working to lobby the FCC and Congress to set policies that will make moving forward in this space more tenable. Companies like Microsoft and Google have been performing tests using white spaces in various locations for quote some time, so with any luck, yesterday’s decision will mean we should see major mass-market consumer products that take advantage of the new unlicensed spectrum within the next few years. That means that we might not be that far off from 80 Mbps and above long-range wireless speeds and 400-800 Mbps short-range wireless networks. Perhaps this means that wireless Internet can now actually be “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” Reviews: Google, Internet More About: broadband, fcc, Google, microsoft, super wi-fi, white spaces, wi-fi, wireless broadband For more Tech coverage:
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| Incase Signature Camera Bag Keeps Your DSLR Safe and Stylish Posted: 24 Sep 2010 09:27 AM PDT   Incase has announced a new signature DSLR camera bag. Like Incase’s bags for MacBooks, the form factor more closely resembles a messenger bag, making it well-adjusted to tight situations like crowded subways. Developed in collaboration with photographer Ari Marcopoulos, the bag can pack enough to satiate even a professional photographer. The outside is built from a heavy-duty, water-repellent canvas shell with a reversible across-the-body shoulder strap. Inside, the bag features a quick access point-and-shoot camera pouch, iPad sleeve and adjustable padded compartments to securely fit your DSLR and lenses. It’s fashionable enough that you wouldn’t be embarrassed to go out for drinks with it after work. It is, however, inscribed with a giant signature from Ari Marcopoulos, so you might need to come to terms with that. The Incase Ari Marcopoulos Camera Bag is available now for pre-order at the not-so-great price of $200. That said, a good camera bag is almost as important to a DSLR as its lenses, so try not to think too hard about the price.  More About: accessories, Bags, cameras, DSLR, gadgets, Incase For more Tech coverage:
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| Interview: Facebook’s Role in Social Good [VIDEO] Posted: 24 Sep 2010 08:57 AM PDT Earlier this week at the Mashable & 92Y Social Good Summit, Facebook's Associate Manager of Public Policy Adam Connor spoke about the role that the social network plays in enabling charitable work around the world. Afterward, I got an opportunity to chat with Connor a bit more about Facebook's efforts in the space as well as how the company can do more to empower those in the developing world with technology — part of the United Nations Millennium Development Goal #8. Connor sees the company's role partly as that of a platform, enabling developers, non-profits and users to create social experiences around raising awareness and participation in causes. But he also sees Facebook working to connect people in areas like India and Africa through projects like Facebook Zero that make the site accessible to those without smartphones or even a landline Internet connection. Check out the video above to learn more (as a side note, news of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million foundation came a couple days after our interview). Reviews: Facebook, Internet More About: facebook, Facebook Zero, social good For more Social Good coverage:
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| Target to Start Selling iPad Next Month Posted: 24 Sep 2010 08:35 AM PDT   Target has announced that Apple’s highly popular iOS tablet, the iPad, will make its debut in retail stores across the U.S. on Sunday, October 3. Currently, you can buy Apple’s iPad from two retailers: Best Buy, and Apple itself. However, at a press conference at Target’s headquarters in Minneapolis, the company announced that it will be carrying four models of the iPad: the 16, 32, and 64 GB versions of the Wi-Fi model, and an unspecified 3G version. We find it a bit strange that Target wouldn’t carry all six models, but perhaps Target’s customers aren’t really interested in shelling out $829 for a 64 GB 3G iPad (Update: Target tells us that this was a misunderstanding — they will, in fact, carry all six models). Today’s announcement confirms a recent leak that Target was preparing for the iPad. The leak suggested the retailer would carry all six models of the iPad, though. Regardless of which models Target is carrying, the expansion of the iPad into more stores across the country is a win for everyone involved. It places the iPad in front of a bunch of potential customers, and if it continues to sell the way it has been, Target should make a sizable profit off the device. Competitor Walmart has also indicated that it hopes to sell the iPad by the end of the year. Image courtesy of Flickr, J. Stephen Conn. Reviews: Flickr More About: apple, ipad, Target For more Business coverage:
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| Our Favorite YouTube Videos This Week: The Do-Gooder Edition Posted: 24 Sep 2010 08:00 AM PDT   All tuckered out from a week of do-gooding? I know we are over at Mashable, having taken part in UN Week as well as our own Social Good Summit. Well, don’t slack off, friends — just ’cause the week is over doesn’t mean the job is done. That’s why this week’s YouTube roundup theme is: Do-Gooders. (Yes, it is a silly word.) Regardless, check out the below collection of do-gooding vids — some are serious and some are… not so serious (hint: drunken monkeys). Because laughter can be charity, right? Tween CEO Driven to SuccessKaren Hartline: Amiya is an inspiration, bringing joy and fun through dance to children in her town through her company, Amiya's Mobile Dance Company, who may not be able to afford regular dance studio lessons. What's more impressive...she's not even a teenager yet. "We Are the World" cover for Haiti and Chile by Cody Simpson.Erica Swallow: Get a little inspiration from this young singer/songwriter and Bieber lookalike, and then get out there and do something good. STILLERSTRONGZachary Sniderman: Stay strong. Moving Windmills: The William Kamkwamba storyVadim Lavrusik: The story of William Kamkwamba, "The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind," is so inspirational. He learned how to build a windmill from scraps in a junkyard for his village in Malawi. Drunk MonkeysLauren Indvik: These monkeys are saving tourists from potential drunken embarrassment. Social good at its finest. Know A Do Gooder?Brenna Ehrlich: Strangely enough, someone tweeted this to me today. It's from my 'hood! Vote! Pay It ForwardMeghan Peters: "Power of Three" from Pay It Forward. Image courtesy of Flickr, Eneas Reviews: Flickr More About: Film, music, social good, video, youtube For more Web Video coverage:
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| LIVE: Watch the UN Week Digital Media Lounge [VIDEO] Posted: 24 Sep 2010 07:48 AM PDT Mashable is proud to be working with the United Nations Foundation and 92nd Street Y to host the first ever UN Week Digital Media Lounge this week. Today’s lineup includes a panel lead by Matthew Bishop, U.S. business editor of The Economist, Chrysula Winegar of Work Life Balance and a discussion on alternative energy sources. The conversation about the world's biggest challenges no longer belongs to a small set of voices — it is a global conversation with an increasingly online pulse. As the world's leaders convene in New York, the UN Week Digital Media Lounge offers a dedicated venue that is completely wired and accessible to today's top online voices and up-and-coming bloggers. The Lounge brings the conversations from this historic UN Summit out of the halls of the UN and into the 92nd Street Y, where digital media will deliver it to the world. A comprehensive agenda will give bloggers the chance to interact with thought leaders on the most important global issues. Friday Agenda9:00 a.m. – Lounge Opens 9:30 -10:00 a.m. – Oxfam's "breakfast with the world" 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Changing the world: one online mother at a time
12:00 -12:30 p.m. – Wrap-up with The Economist: UN Week report card
1:00 – 2:00 p.m. – Beyond Oil: Blueprint for an Energy Revolution
4:00 p.m. – Lounge Closes Reviews: Mashable, Skype More About: 92y, digital media lounge, mashable, social good, un foundation, UN week For more Social Good coverage:
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| HOW TO: Find the Best Fall Travel Deals on the Social Web Posted: 24 Sep 2010 07:01 AM PDT   Mollie Vandor is the Product Manager for Ranker.com and Media Director for Girls in Tech LA. You can find her on Twitter and on her blog, where she writes about the web, the world and what it's like to be a geek chic chick. The sweet memories of summer vacation may be fading, but that doesn’t mean travel season has to end too. In fact, fall is one of the best times to travel, as many airlines and hotels try to fill their books between the summer and winter vacation seasons. But, with rates falling faster than the autumn leaves, how do you hone in on the hottest deals happening right now? Fortunately, there are plenty of ways the social web can help you save money on major travel expenses like airfare, lodging and car rentals. Read on for ways to save money on every leg of your trip, from take off to lights out. Airfare Every airline, from JetBlue to United to Virgin, seems to be jumping on the social networking bandwagon these days. You can follow them all on Twitter or Facebook for good, last-minute deals on flights they’re looking to fill. Check out these master lists of all the airlines on both networks to make finding your favorites even easier: For a more diverse selection of deals, follow an aggregator like CheapestAirfare or AirFareWatchdog, which feature offers from multiple companies at once. There’s also the Twitter-sanctioned EarlyBird account, which has previously featured major discounts from Twitter advertising partner JetBlue, and has plans to release more travel deals in the future. Another good resource is FareCompare, a site where you can see a map of multiple Twitter-based airfare deals happening at the same time. You can also “Like” FareCompare on Facebook to get deals sent directly to your Facebook stream all day long. And, if there’s a specific city that you like to visit or fly out of, you can find a feed from Fly.com that features fares for that particular place, like NYCFares, ChicagoFlightDeals and DenverFlightDeals. They even have a Twitter list of all their city-specific fare alerts, so you can browse deals from all over or find an account that’s listing flights for your city of choice. Hotels Aggregator sites are still the way to go when it comes to surfing for hotels on the web. Sure, a single hotel is likely to post some special offers on their site from time to time, but you’re bound to get a better deal if you search multiple sites at once to compare their coupons. Online coupon company EBates recently released a service that helps you do just that. Additionally, if you book through Ebates, you become eligible for easy cash back rebates on whatever you spend. Similar sites like Kayak, GetARoom and TravelZoo allow you to search all sorts of offers at the same time and quickly compare rates on everything from luxury hotel rooms to amusement park admissions. Private sale site Jetsetter.com – an offshoot of Gilt Groupe – lets you sign up to receive exclusive e-mails full of deals and discounts from the best luxury travel brands. For luxury deals, you can also check out Off & Away, which lets you bid on high-end room rates in an eBay-style auction format. Many of these sites also offer RSS feeds, so you can keep a constant stream of assorted travel deals coming into your regular RSS reader. Another great way to get access to multiple hotel and attraction deals at once is to follow the social networking profiles of a company with many properties, like Joi De Vivre Hotels, Mandarin Oriental Hotels and W Hotels, who have locations around the world and loyalty programs that can mean big discounts during the off season. These sorts of deals are also starting to pop up more and more on services Foursquare and Whrrl, as hotels look to capitalize on the popularity of location-based social networks by offering special rewards to customers who check in regularly. Similarly, you can sign up for TopGuest, a service that turns check-ins from all of your services – including Twitter, Facebook and Gowalla – into points that earn you perks from any hotel loyalty programs you’re a member of. Finally, if you have a specific destination in mind, one of the best quick tricks for tracking down great lodging is to Google newly-opened hotels in the area. A brand new hotel looking to book up its rooms and build up its reputation is likely to charge a lot less in its first year or two than it will once it has already made a name for itself. HousingYou could significantly cut your lodging costs by skipping the hotels entirely. For example, instead of booking a hotel, you can find a couch to crash on at CouchSurfing.org. Advocates of couchsurfing say it allows them to meet new people in the place they’re traveling to and get access to locals-only experiences they may not have found otherwise. Plus, it’s almost always a whole lot less expensive than a hotel room. Alternatively, you can find someone to swap houses with at HomeExchange or HomeLink, and get the benefit of becoming a temporary resident of your vacation destination — cooking your own meals, interacting with neighbors and enjoying the comforts of a home — even if it’s not your own. Even if you don’t want to swap your home for a stranger’s, you still have plenty of similar options at short-term vacation rental sites like AirBnB, VRBO and HomeAway, where you can often book lodging for a lot less than what you’d pay for a hotel, especially during non-peak travel times. Either way, you’ll likely pay less than what you’d shell out for a hotel room, and you’ll definitely save money on meals and activities by having a “home base” where you can cook, eat and hang out. During the fall season, many more gorgeous vacation homes are available for rental, as their regular owners return to their full-time homes, making must-see destinations like the Hamptons more affordable for the average traveler. Transportation Once you get to your destination, you have to get around. Social media can save you money on that as well. Use Google Maps to plan public transportation routes in a strange city or save on cab fare by finding the fastest route to your destination. If you’re driving yourself, use Bing’s Gas Prices app to figure out the cheapest place to fuel up for your big trip. You can also use sites like ZimRide and RideShare to find people to share the driving load, and cost, on the way to your destination, or from one attraction to another. While enroute, do some social media research on your destination, or use the time to sign up for Groupon, Gilt Groupe or LivingSocial to check out daily deals waiting for you when you arrive. Often, you’ll find great prices on food and attractions this way. You can always cancel your subscription when you leave that city, if need be. Just because summer is over doesn’t mean your fabulous travel plans have to be too. Thanks to the combo of off-season fall travel deals and social media sites that help you track them, an impromptu excursion doesn’t have to break the bank. Affordable travel means more travel. Who doesn’t love that? More Travel Resources from Mashable:
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Sportstock Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Google Maps, Gowalla, Twitter, iStockphoto More About: airfare, Airlines, cheap, couchsurfing, deal, deals, facebook, fall travel, hotels, House, inexpensive, rentals, social media, travel, trending, twitter For more Social Media coverage:
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| Top 3 Stories in Social Media, Mobile and Entertainment This Morning Posted: 24 Sep 2010 06:32 AM PDT 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. Facebook Experiences “Worst Outage in Over Four Years” Facebook was down for most users for roughly 2.5 hours Thursday afternoon in what Facebook Software Engineering Director Robert Johnson has called “the worst outage we’ve had in over four years.” The outage was caused by “an unfortunate handling of error condition” related to Facebook’s automated system for correcting configuration values, Johnson said. To address the problem, Johnson did what many an amateur user does in an attempt to fix their own personal computers: turned it off and on again. T-Mobile G2 Pre-Orders Now Available for Existing Customers T-Mobile’s successor to the first-ever Android smartphone, the T-Mobile G2, is now available for pre-order. Current T-Mobile users can pre-order the device now and receive it as soon as October 4. It will also be available in Best Buy stores beginning October 6. The phone runs Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo) and is the first T-Mobile phone to support HSPA+. It also sports a full QWERTY keyboard, a 3.7-inch screen, an 800 MHz Snapdragon CPU, and a five-megapixel camera with a LED flash and autofocus, capable of recording HD (720p) videos. The device will cost $200 with a two-year contract after a $50 rebate. Saturday Night Live, Battlestar Galactica Come to Netflix Netflix and NBC have signed an expanded rights license, both companies announced today. The agreement gives Netflix subscribers web access to a number of broadcast and cable shows, including popular programs Saturday Night Live and Battlestar Galactica, which are not generally available on rival network Hulu [via AllThingsD]. Further News
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, Digg, Facebook, Foursquare, Hulu, Twitter More About: android, facebook, first to know series, Mobile 2.0, nbc, netflix, social media, T-Mobile, T-Mobile G2
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| T-Mobile G2 Pre-orders Now Available for Existing Customers Posted: 24 Sep 2010 06:22 AM PDT   The moment is near: If you want a phone that echoes the glory of the first Android smartphone ever, the T-Mobile G1, you can now pre-order the T-Mobile G2 and receive it by October 6. This offer is available only to existing T-Mobile customers, who will be getting their G2 early only if they order it before October 4. The cost of the device is $250 before a $50 mail-in rebate with the standard two-year contract. Remember, though, the G2 will also be available in Best Buy stores on October 6 for $199 after a $50 instant rebate and a two-year contract. We guess the question you have to ask yourself is: Do you feel like parting (at least for a while) with an extra 50 bucks to get this phone a couple of days earlier? T-Mobile G2 will be based on Android 2.2 and it will support HSPA+, the first T-Mobile to do so. It also has a full QWERTY keyboard, a 3.7-inch screen, an 800 MHz Snapdragon CPU, and a 5-megapixel camera with a LED flash and autofocus, capable of recording HD (720p) videos. Reviews: Android More About: android, Mobile 2.0, pre-order, smartphone, T-Mobile, T-Mobile G2 For more Mobile coverage:
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