Mashable: Latest 28 News Updates - including “New BlackBerry Curve and Torch Get Specced [PICS]”

The specifications and images of RIM’s new BlackBerry Curve and Torch 2 have leaked out over on Boy Genius Report, with the two phones getting a mild visual refresh but a decent hardware overhaul.

The Torch 2 looks very similar to the original BlackBerry Torch. On the inside, however, it packs some very decent specifications: a 1.2 GHz CPU, 3.2-inch display with a 640×480 pixel resolution, 512 MB of RAM and 8 GB of built-in memory paired with BlackBerry OS 6.1.

It also has a 5-megapixel camera with flash, HSPA, GPS, NFC, and Bluetooth, as well as a proximity sensor, accelerometer, magnetometer, and it’s all powered by a 1300 mAh battery.

Curve, RIM’s mid-range BlackBerry phone, won’t amaze you with its 480×360 display and 800 MHz processor, but the rest of the specifications – HSPA, 512 MB of RAM, 5-megapixel camera – are nothing to be ashamed of. The device is only 11 mm thin and looks far more elegant than the previous version.

How do you like the visuals and the specifications on these two new BlackBerrys (as well as the recently leaked BlackBerry Dakota)? Let us know in the comments!

[via BGR]

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Reviews: Bluetooth

More About: blackberry, Curve, Mobile 2.0, RIM, smartphone, Torch 2

A note to our readers: Today we’re rolling out some minor design changes here on Mashable.

Among other things, we’re simplifying our pages for faster page loads. But ultimately we hope you won’t notice much of a difference in the way you interact with the site.

That’s because this isn’t a radical redesign: Rather, this layout is the foundation for a number of new features we’ll be rolling out later this month — we look forward to inviting you to try these additions in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, please excuse our dust!

PS. If you experience any technical issues, please do contact us.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Kutaytanir

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Reviews: iStockphoto

More About: announcements, mashable

Startups are raising huge rounds of financing. Valuations are rumored to be in the billions. Everybody and his dog has an eye on (or a hand in) the social media scene of web apps.

So are we headed for another cyclical bust, or aren’t we?

While some of the numbers being floated around — Groupon will IPO at a $15 billion valuation! Facebook’s worth $50 billion! Zynga raised $366 million! — are dizzyingly high, high enough to make us wonder if investors, entrepreneurs and journalists aren’t all a little out of their minds, there’s another set of number that balance out the picture. Numbers that, as this journalist and others recall, one didn’t hear a lot of during the first dot-com boom-bust cycle: real revenues.

For example, Facebook made $2 billion in 2010 through a mix of advertising and virtual currencies. And Groupon’s annual revenues, which come from profit-sharing splits with the local and national brands that run daily deals on the site, are between $800 million and $2 billion.

Of course, naturally, a lot of these reported revenues are likely inflated. But they still represent a pretty big difference from the kind of revenues and business models we saw in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Rare is the startup that continues to operate and raise money without a business model. (Twitter and Formspring are notable exceptions.) No longer is a huge userbase enough to net popular support and a ton of funding. No longer is a really great idea alone an adequate foundation for a business.

And no longer are developers and eager entrepreneurs indiscriminately bagging every offer of funding that comes their way. In fact, bootstrapping has become a cool new cult in the startup world. And if they’re not bootstrapping, many entrepreneurs might not be interested in taking money for an unprofitable side project. Even Chatroulette, one of the simplest flashes in the pan that is the Internet, has shied away from funding offers, instead trying to find a way to make money.

As a group and as a culture, we’ve learned from our dot-com mistakes, both on the investor side and on the entrepreneur side. We’ve learned that a little more skepticism and a lot more realism are the best kind of preventative medicine to ward off another crash. We’ve especially learned, with a few exceptions, to look for business models and find the revenue first.

Still, the startup market is on shaky ground as we head out of a national recession and into uncharted technological territory. In many cases, it’s nearly impossible to say what will make money and what won’t. After all, if you’d asked me a couple years ago to invest in a company that sold cartoon livestock, I would have had you locked up.

So, what’s your take on it: Is the web startup ecosystem headed into troubled waters, or will it be smooth sailing for the foreseeable future? Vote in the poll, and let us know your full thoughts in the comments below.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ahlobystov

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Reviews: Facebook, FormSpring, Internet, Twitter, iStockphoto

More About: boom, bust, crash, dotcom, poll, startups

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.

Money Dashboard hopes to do in the UK what Mint successfully accomplished in the U.S. — survive the uncertain online personal finance management market and build a useful tool loved by most.

The startup makes a web-based financial tool that runs on Silverlight and uses Yodlee (also used by Mint) to aggregate financial transactions from users’ bank and credit card accounts.

Users can get a snapshot of their financial well-being via the dashboard, manage and group spending with automatically applied tags, set budgets and track spending, and configure e-mail alerts for account activity, like when a bank balance drops below a certain amount.

With Mint only supporting users in the U.S. and Canada, the UK market could very well be ripe for a big hit in the personal finance category. CEO Gavin Littlejohn hopes Money Dashboard, which has been in an extensive beta period since May of last year and is readying for an official product launch, will be that hit.

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Money Matters

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“Here in the UK, there is very little access to financial advice. Most people don’t know their bank managers, and few people have access to a financial advisor,” says Littlejohn.

But roughly 25 million consumers are using Internet banking services in the UK, he says. As such, he believes the market demands an all-in-one dashboard that helps users better understand and manage their finances.

Still, the startup will need to convince UK users that there is a tangible benefit to providing their financial account information. The company has spent the last several months perfecting the beta product for that purpose.

“We want to communicate to the market that we’re here, that we work and that there are tangible benefits for using the service,” Littlejohn says.

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Money in the Bank?

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Should it wish to succeed, Money Dashboard will also need to circumvent the murky waters that sunk the likes of Wesabe and Kublax, the latter of which was a UK-based personal finance startup that shut its doors in February 2010.

Littlejohn believes Kublax was dealt a crippling blow by a tenuous economy when it needed to raise more capital. Money Dashboard, however, seems to be secure for now, having raised more than $3 million dollars from angel investors with retail and finance backgrounds. The startup is looking to take on further capital, according to Littlejohn.

It also monetizes its service through affiliate relationships with financial service providers. Money Dashboard attempts to recommend services in the “Ways to Save” section of the site based on users financial needs as determined by account activity, and it earns a percentage on leads from the third-party providers.

The elephant of the room is, of course, Mint. The Intuit-owned company has previously indicated plans to expand to the UK. Should it do so, that would be problematic for Money Dashboard. Littlejohn credits Mint with innovation in the space, but he ultimately believes his company has local market advantages that will help it win out in the UK.

For now, Money Dashboard is a web-only product; but mobile applications are in the works, along with additional features to help users improve their wealth. The company also has a more long-term goal of introducing financial products that contextually and behaviorally meet the needs of users.

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, Adriana3d, Flickr, s2photo

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Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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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.

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Reviews: Flickr, Internet, Mint, iStockphoto

More About: bizspark, financial services, mint, mint.com, money dashboard, personal finance, spark-of-genius, startup

Unnamed sources close to Groupon‘s financial decisions say the company is talking with bankers about an initial public offering (IPO) that would put the startup at a valuation somewhere between $15 and $20 billion.

Turning down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google isn’t looking like such a bad idea now.

Groupon has just come off a year of meteoric growth and a record-breaking fundraising stint that yielded a $950 million Series D from investment firms that included Morgan Stanley, Greylock Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Last week, founder and CEO Andrew Mason said, “We're thrilled that Groupon has earned the confidence of some of the world's most respected investment firms. With their support, we will continue on our mission to change the way people shop locally and serve the world's local businesses.”

Today, two sources confirmed to the New York Times that the startup was preparing for an IPO in the spring, meeting with bankers more than once this week.

A successful IPO for Groupon could signal good things for the web startup and VC world. In fact, this is just the kind of splashy exit that many VCs and VC-backed CEOs have been observing in 2010 and predicting for 2011. Still, a Groupon IPO would be a blockbuster by any standards.

While we wait and see if these rumors are true, let us know in the comments what you think of this reported valuation. Is the price right for a local deals site?

More About: business, exit, groupon, ipo, startup, trending

Posterous has introduced a sweet new feature — photo slideshows — for sites, posts and groups; this feature really brings photos to life.

Posterous site visitors and group members can now click on the slideshow button atop a site or within individual posts to view images in a stylish slideshow.

The fullscreen lightbox UI elegantly and automatically cycles through all photos posted to a site or shared within a single post. You can pause the slideshow, fast forward or rewind and toggle between a whole site and an individual post.

The addition of slideshows is a simple update, but one that dramatically impacts how users will experience photos shared via Posterous.

Give it a spin and let us know what you think of the new addition in the comments.

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Reviews: Posterous

More About: blog, blogging, Photos, posterous, slideshow, startup

When we look at a breakdown of Android device carriers, Verizon is a popular choice. So will the iPhone’s arrival on the most popular network for Android owners spell trouble for Android device manufacturers?

Before we answer that question, let’s take a look at the numbers. Our data comes from a sample of 2.5 million Android impressions across the Chitika mobile ad network.

When we consider Android operating systems only, the majority — that’s 54.58% and around 1.4 million impressions — were on the Verizon network.

Other networks included Sprint, which accounted for around a quarter (633,923) of the impressions, and T-Mobile, which garnered around 19% or 477,893 impressions. AT&T accounted for a mere 2% of impressions as counted by Chitika.

In fact, four of the top five Android devices in this survey were Verizon-powered phones from the wildly successful Droid line. The HTC Evo 4G, which is a Sprint phone, was the only exception.

We know that the Verizon iPhone isn’t necessarily disastrous for AT&T — at least not on the Verizon iPhone’s launch date — but the distribution of smartphones among wireless networks is decidedly about to change.

Current Android-owning Verizon customers could decide to switch to the iPhone and keep their current network. However, as the Android OS and app ecosystem continue to develop and as Android-powered hardware becomes more varied and sophisticated, the reasons for switching become less urgent and more emotional.

It’ll be interesting to see Apple and Android device makers continue to battle it out through their ad campaigns now that a core tenet of the argument has changed.

Will Android owners on Verizon switch to the iPhone now that AT&T’s famously bad service is no longer mandatory? Or will they keep their devices because the network was just one reason they chose those phones in the first place?

Time will tell, but what happens next will be a portentious token of Android’s true position in the smartphone market nd in public opinion.

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Reviews: Android

More About: android, Chitika, iphone, stats, verizon

Beginning Thursday, young entrepreneurs and developers have a new advocate and a new aspiration: the Teens in Tech Incubator.

Teens in Tech launched three years ago as a support network for young people who were starting their own companies and getting involved in the tech world. Now, the organization is taking the next logical step by providing hands-on instruction and mentorship to young teams.

The incubator will begin this summer and run for about eight and a half weeks. Only teens ages 13 through 19 who are local to the San Francisco Bay area can apply for this session, and teams should have at least one developer who can code the project at hand.

Appcelerator in Mountain View will be providing the physical space for the startups to work from, and Teens in Tech will also be courting sponsor companies to fund the program.

Other benefits will include free web hosting, marketing and PR, and legal advice.

The application deadline is March 18, 2011, and the program will begin June 20. On August 10, Teens in Tech will hold a Demo Day for incubator teams to show their products to press and VCs.

Teens in Tech co-founder Daniel Brusilovsky says one of the biggest issues facing teen entrepreneurs is that “people don’t take them seriously. So we’re putting them in a room with 30 people who do take them seriously and who want to help them.

“Most people give these young entrepreneurs a thousand reasons why they shouldn’t jump off a cliff. I’m giving them 1,001 reaons to do it, and we’ll help them grow wings as they’re falling off.”

Brusilovsky speaking at the Teens in Tech Conference, one of the organization’s most successful endeavors.

Teens in Tech has built a substantial network over the past three years, both in terms of having broad connections in the sphere of young developers and entrepreneurs and in having solid ties to a large group of all-star mentors in their twenties and thirties. Many of these mentors are serving as advisers for the incubator.

In fact, this incubator’s roster of mentors is one of the most impressive things about it. Teen entrepreneurs and developers will be schooled in design by Jesse Thomas of JESS3 fame and über designer Joey Primiani. They’ll get coaching from investors like Paige Craig. And they’ll get coding and marketing tips and advice from the makers of Seesmic, Twilio, PBWorks, Disqus, Posterous, Eventbrite, Paypal, Salesforce and more.

“When we talk with young entrepreneurs and ask them about their struggles,” said Brusilovsky, “the top thing they always say is, ‘I wish there was someone I can go to and ask a question or get some advice.’ That was something we took to heart… so we have some fantastic mentors that are going to help shape these companies.”

Brusilovsky says his incubator is “not looking to compete” with organizations like Y Combinator and TechStars, which he said were his inspiration. “For them, this is their business model. For us, this is a learning expereince.

“Our number one goal is that every person in this program walks away learning at least five news things about startups that they didn’t know.”

The first season of this incubator will involve five startups. The Teens in Tech team hope to grow that number as well as the number of cities with Teens in Tech incubator programs in the years to come. Brusilovsky also hopes to hold some events for teen entrepreneurs and developers during the school year.

Along with giving solid legal advice for these business-owning minors (Brusilovsky says having parents involved is key), the Teens in Tech co-founder told us, “One of the most important things we can teach is balancing school, personal life and startups.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, nimbuzz.

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Reviews: Disqus, Flickr, Nimbuzz, Posterous, Seesmic

More About: daniel brusilovsky, incubator, paige craig, startups, teens in tech, y combinator

Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga with others to explore living with awareness and wisdom in our modern age, at the end of February in Silicon Valley. He is SorenG on Twitter.

The age of social media is not just changing our personal lives, but is increasingly affecting how business is conducted. No longer satisfied with strictly top-down models that view employees as cogs in a system, businesses are quickly adapting to a new paradigm that emphasizes connection, collaboration and innovation.

When people in companies and teams feel engaged, the benefits are significant. Towers Watson (formerly Towers Perrin), the global professional services firm, interviewed 90,000 employees in 18 countries, and found "companies with high employee engagement had a 19% increase in operating income and almost a 28% growth in earnings per share. Conversely, companies with low levels of engagement saw operating income drop more than 32% and earnings per share decline over 11%."

Companies are realizing that it is not enough to get people to show up to work; the real challenge is creating cultures that enhance creativity and innovation. Below you’ll find what leaders in the field had to say about this new age of innovation and engagement.

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1. Culture

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When I sat down with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh at the company headquarters some time back, he talked about the company’s desire to build a brand where customer service was second-to-none. However, they Zappos realized that trying to force unhappy staff to treat customers with respect and joy was a losing battle. You cannot ask staff to give what they do not receive. What is inside the company will be felt by those outside it.

The answer was to create a culture of happiness that would naturally overflow into all of the company's communication.

Chris Sacca, venture investor, formerly Google’s head of special initiatives and strategic advisor to Twitter, emphasized the same idea, saying, "Employees will rise to the expectations placed upon them. If you treat them like children, they will act like children. But, show them respect and trust and they will respond to your expectation."

The Old Paradigm: "Force people to do what you want."

The New Paradigm: "Give people what you want them to offer."

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2. Mindset

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It is a little known fact that the NBA coach with the most championship wins, Phil Jackson, had his teams do a short focusing meditation before games. Why? He knew that you can have the greatest physical athletes, but if their minds were not in the game, they would play poorly.

We all know that we can sit in a meeting for hours, but if people are not in the right mindset, nothing innovative occurs, and often people leave feeling even more drained and frustrated. The mindset people bring to the meeting matters greatly. If people are stressed or unfocused, little moves forward.

Zynga co-founder Eric Schiermeyer, when asked about innovation, touched on the need to engage from a place of creativity instead of stress: "One aspect is to allow for enough time to think from a place of relaxation. This requires a series of complementary components like the right amount of sleep, exercise, social activity and a good diet to name a few key ones."

At the conference I organized last year, Twitter CTO Greg Pass echoed this, saying that with Twitter’s new hires, "The main principle I present in my orientation is that I ask them to pay attention to what they are doing."

Old Paradigm: "Just put your body in the room."

New Paradigm: "Show up with a creative, open mindset."

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3. Group Wisdom

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It is no accident that the most innovative companies are generally those that engage and involve their staff and users. In fact, some of the most innovative functions of Twitter, like the hashtag, were created by users. Twitter management just had to pay attention. The same is often true for businesses.

The old paradigm was that the higher up the hierarchy you went, the more wisdom you had to share. Leadership was the ability to direct, not listen.

The new approach is likely best expressed by Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior: "The one thing that over two decades of experience in the technology industry has taught me: never assume you know the answer. I find that the more I listen, the quicker I learn." She not only does this internally, but also uses Twitter and other social media to "ensure that I'm inviting and absorbing the tacit knowledge that resides outside the boundaries of Cisco."

Old Paradigm: "All wisdom exists at the top."

New Paradigm: "Listen and make space for various voices."

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4. Environment

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The people I spoke to also emphasized creating spaces that support collaboration and innovation. This includes physical space. This was likely best expressed by Eric Schiermeyer of Zynga: "If you have ever met with the same group of people in multiple rooms over time you may have noticed that the meetings feel more productive in one room over another."

The old paradigm was to hold meetings while sitting in chairs and a desk in a conference room since, well … that is normal. In this new paradigm, the goal is not to be normal, but to be innovative, which requires finding the optimal space for a particular objective. A group walk may serve the needs much better than a conference room.

Old Paradigm: "Do what is normal."

New Paradigm: "Approach space creatively to serve the purpose."

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5. Vision

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A company is not likely to get much sustained passion from staff if its vision is to create yet another widget that does little to affect the world. People need a sense of purpose to drive their innovation.

Tony Hsieh likely put it best in an interview I held with him: "From a business perspective, if you have a greater vision beyond just profits or money — and that you can get employees to be happy about and believe in — and you combine that with a culture with committable core values, I think that is what will help grow businesses and brands in the long-term."

Padmasree Warrior of Cisco emphasized the same idea: "Innovation flourishes in a culture of purposeful chaos. The operative word here is 'purposeful.'” People need a sense that their work matters, both for the company and the society.

Old Paradigm: "Work to get a paycheck."

New Paradigm: "Make your work about something bigger."

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Conclusion

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While we cannot force innovation and creative thinking, we can foster these abilities, whether we work in a 20,000-person company or with one other person.

The old paradigm was individualistic and focused on thriving to be personally brilliant; the new one is much more social, and it involves creating cultures that enhance innovation in all those present. The companies and teams that can do this, that can create cultures that support innovation and engagement, will create the leading technologies and services that affect our culture.

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More Business Resources from Mashable:

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- HOW TO: Create a World-Class Online Community for Your Business
- How Social Data & Mobile Tech Can Improve the Retail Experience
- 5 Creative Facebook Places Marketing Campaigns
- Top 9 Job Sites to Bookmark for Your Career Search
- Twitter for Brands: 6 Winning Strategies to Learn From

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Yuri_Arcurs

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Reviews: Twitter, iStockphoto

More About: advice, business, Business Lists, List, Lists, small business, tips, trending

Mobile photo sharing startup Picplz released a new version of its iPhone app Thursday that drastically improves the overall app experience. Everything from the app’s speed, design, navigation and photo posting flow has been reworked in response to user feedback.

Perhaps the most useful update for avid photo sharers is the addition of automatic thumbnail filter previews. Now Picplz users can snap a photo and instantly view how the photo would appear in each of the 10 available filters. It’s a fast and simple process that greatly improves upon the previous filter experience.

Users will notice that the app’s navigation has been restructured to enable faster switching between photo posting and browsing screens. Also new is a streamlined feed view of photos in the “My Network” tab, which puts the app on par with the website.

Picplz has also added camera “tap to focus” functionality to the iPhone app. New users can also now test out the app without signing up for an account.

Picplz founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell says the team focused on making the “entire experience snappy,” and snappy it is. The app was noticeably sluggish at applying filters and loading photos from friends before. This no longer is the case. Caldwell believes the new version removes the friction of posting and sharing photos, and makes the overall experience a lot more fun.

Picplz competes with Instagram in the red hot mobile photo-sharing sector. Unlike Instagram, Picplz has an Android and web app in addition to its iPhone app. Caldwell shares that the service is nearing 200,000 total members across all of its platforms and is experiencing significant upticks in traffic.

Follow Mashable on PicPlz

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Reviews: Android, instagram, picplz

More About: iphone, mobile photo sharing, picplz, startup

If Scott Kurnit has his way, soon you will go from ignoring online ads to saving them.

Kurnit, the founder of About.com, plans to roll out web ads from McDonald’s, Best Buy, Sears, Showtime and others on February 14. Each will contain an AdKeeper button that lets users store them for future viewing (see image). The launch is more than a month later than Kurnit originally planned, but he says the initial date was never set in stone. “I thought about 1/11 back in March [2010]” says Kurnit. “As we started to realize CES was in the way, we changed our minds.”

An infusion of $35 million in Series B funding on January 3 also influenced the decision, Kurnit says, since it allowed the company greater scale. It will also help the sustain the company for the first six months of the launch when all the ads will be free to partners. “It’s free to everyone in the industry,” says Kurnit. “We’re taking a page from Google and Twitter.”

Although many people — particularly those in the advertising industry — are skeptical that consumers will want to save any ad, Kurnit says that his own research with Nielsen shows that 56% of consumers would save an ad for later viewing if given the option. Why? Kurnit rattles off a number of reasons ranging from coupons and offers, entertainment value and product research (meaning consumers are getting data about a product they’re planning to buy). Kurnit says that if the research is correct, AdKeeper will be “twice as big as Twitter,” meaning at least 16% of people on the web will engage with it, vs. 8% for Twitter.

Not everyone is convinced.  ”Saving advertising may be a rare activity people do offline by ripping an ad out of a magazine, but it isn’t something consumers are used to doing online,” says Augie Ray, an analyst with Forrester Research. “I question if [a] sufficient number of consumers will learn about AdKeeper, trust them, sign up, save ads and — most importantly — return to view, engage and click their saved ads. There are quite a few steps required for AdKeeper to succeed.”

Kurnit claims that such doubts come about because of the way advertising has been traditionally viewed on the Internet. Consumers generally don’t like ads because they get in the way of web browsing. But if ads are seen as more along the lines of content, then they will be perceived more favorably. “Our simple contention is that people like ads,” says Kurnit. “They just hate the way we do it on the Internet.”

What do you think? Would you ever save an ad?

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Reviews: Google, Internet, Twitter

More About: AdKeeper, advertising, Scott Kurnit

This post is brought to you by Research In Motion, sponsor of the Mashable Awards’ “Best Social Media Customer Service” Category. RIM creates innovative wireless solutions, including the BlackBerry® wireless platform and the new BlackBerry PlayBook, coming soon. Learn more on the Inside BlackBerry Blog.

Eurail.com, an e-commerce site for Eurail train passes, took home the “Best Social Media Customer Service” category award at this year’s Mashable Awards.

The category, supported by BlackBerry, pulled in five competitive finalists, as voted by Mashable readers: Eurail, Aramex, ZocDoc, Hewlett Packard and Boingo.

What makes Eurail’s social media customer service so great? Chantal Sukel, campaign manager for Eurail.com, gave us a bit of insight:

“Eurail.com is lucky enough to have extremely dedicated agents that strive to answer all questions within eight hours or sooner. Not only in English, but also Spanish and even Dutch or German. Our fans receive a personal reply, not a script. They talk to an actual human being who can give them anecdotes and tips from their own rail travel experiences.”

Accepting the award at Mashable Awards, Sukel said, “‘Dank u wel’ is Dutch for ‘thank you.’ So, I would like to say ‘dank u wel’ to everyone who’s been voting for us; ‘dank u wel’ to the European railways; and ‘dank u wel’ to the Facebook team who has been providing this award-winning service.”

Congratulations, Eurail.com on your win!

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The Mashable Awards Gala at Cirque du Soleil Zumanity (Vegas)

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In partnership with Cirque du Soleil, The Mashable Awards Gala event brought together the winners and nominees, the Mashable community, partners, media, the marketing community, consumer electronics and technology brands and attendees from the 2011 International CES Convention to Las Vegas on Thursday, January 6, 2011. Together, we celebrated the winners and the community of the Mashable Awards at the Cirque du Soleil Zumanity stage in the beautiful New York New York Hotel. The event included acts and performances from our partner Cirque du Soleil Zumanity, in addition to special guest presenters and appearances.

Mashable Awards Category Sponsor:

Research In Motion is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, SMS messaging, Internet and intranet-based applications including the BlackBerry® wireless platform and the new BlackBerry PlayBook. For the latest on the BlackBerry PlayBook visit the Inside BlackBerry Blog.

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Reviews: Facebook, Internet, Mashable, hewlett packard computer

More About: mashable awards, mashable awards 2010, open web awards

File this under “One Day The Machines Will Rise Against Us”: Today, IBM’s Watson supercomputer bested a pair of Jeopardy! champions in a practice round — of Jeopardy!, that is, not mortal combat (yet).

According to ZDNet, whose reps were at the practice round at IBM Research Worldwide Headquarters, the four-year-old computing system project beat champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter swiftly and without emotion, which you can see in the video embedded below (courtesy of ZDNet).

This demonstration is just a precursor to the first-ever man vs. machine Jeopardy! competition, which will air on February 14, 15 and 16.

Basically, this will be an event to rival IBM’s Deep Blue computer beating World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1996.

Watson was named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson and was built with the aim of producing a computing system that can answer questions in the same way a human can — picking up on all the cues of natural language.

“After four years, our scientific team believes that Watson is ready for this challenge based on its ability to rapidly comprehend what the Jeopardy! clue is asking, analyze the information it has access to, come up with precise answers, and develop an accurate confidence in its response," says Dr. David Ferrucci, a scientist who leads the IBM Research team that built Watson.

Naturally, Watson was not created for the sole purpose of competing on game shows. According to a release, it could also be used in fields like healthcare, customer support, etc., as it has the ability to sort through tons of data and return answers ranked by its confidence in its conclusions.

Image courtesy of Flickr, REL Waldman

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Reviews: Flickr

More About: computer, IBM, Jeopardy, tech, television

Google has made its first acquisition of 2011 with eBook Technologies, a company that focuses on hardware and software distribution of e-books and e-book readers. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“eBook Technologies, Inc. is excited to announce that we have been acquired by Google,” the company announced yesterday on its website. “Working together with Google will further our commitment to providing a first-class reading experience on emerging tablets, e-readers and other portable devices.”

It’s no secret that Google has big ambitions in e-books. It launched a web-based e-books store in December, after all. While there’s not a great deal of difference between competitors like the Kindle Store and iBooks, Google Books can be accessed from any mobile or desktop web browser and it allows users to see actual scans of books, rather than just the book’s text.

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Digging Deeper Into E-book Technology

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While most of ebooktechnologies.com has been taken down, a Google Cache version of the website reveals that the company had five primary products: actual e-book hardware, firmware for e-book devices, an “online bookshelf” software interface, an online e-bookstore and e-book publishing tools.

When we dug deeper, we found ETI-1, one of the two e-book devices the company was developing. It sports an 8.5-inch LCD screen, USB port, 8MB of memory, an ethernet port and a 56k modem.

Yes, you read that correctly: it has a 56k modem and no Wi-Fi. If that weren’t enough, the 5.5-inch version actually has a 33.6k modem.

We can forgive eBook Technologies, though — we believe this device was developed in the late 1990s or early 2000s. The company launched its first product in 1998, so it’s been around for a while. Our guess is that its e-readers are legacy devices.

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So What Is This Acquisition About?

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This acquisition is most likely about patents, personnel and technology, rather than hardware or software. Google’s e-book interface is vastly superior to the one created by eBook Technologies, and we doubt the search giant has any plans to launch a Kindle competitor, especially with a device that still uses a 56k modem.

Former eBook Technologies CEO John Rivlin and President Garth Conboy are the inventors of several e-book patents, though. Here’s what the company’s website used to say:

“John is co-inventor and patent holder of a system to provide secure electronic book delivery. He is also a co-inventor of a patent-pending system to provide offline catalog shopping on an electronic book.

“Garth is inventor or co-inventor of seven issued eBook patents; technologies include: cryptography and secure content distribution, eBook UI, resource/database dynamic conversion for cross-platform applications, and optimal paginated document presentation.”

Google would definitely have an interest in owning that technology and the people who invented it. While some of these technologies were developed at their previous jobs at Gemstar-TV Guide and SoftBook Press, eBook Technologies has likely accumulated several different patents and proprietary technologies over the years. Google could only get them by acquiring the company.

Rivlin and Conboy’s expertise in e-books and distribution will likely serve Google well in its quest to distribute its massive library of electronically scanned books to the masses. Couple that with its proprietary technology and it’s no wonder Google forked over the cash for this company.

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Reviews: Google

More About: acquisition, eBook, EBook Technologies, ebooks, Google

When you think back to the special moments in your life, it's likely that there’s a song attached to each one: Your first dance at your wedding, the lullaby you played every night when you were putting your newborn to bed, the song that was playing in the car when you broke up with your first love. Any time you hear that song, you are whisked right back to the emotions you felt at that particular time, and its connection has been imprinted in your memory. That's the power of music.

The technology available to us to make music an integral part of our lives is staggering, and luckily, it just keeps getting better. Whether you like to rock out on your iPod or you are still sporting a portable CD player (do those still exist?), music and its ability to transform moods is one thing that connects us all.

Everyone knows about Pandora, Last.fm and Spotify, but the following 10 apps, which have mostly flown under the radar, deserve props for making it easier for us to enjoy the music we love.

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1. Audiogalaxy Mobile

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Are you one of those music hoarders who have thousands upon thousands of MP3 files on your iPhone, so much so that your library is starting to affect your storage capacity to the point where you can’t add new apps? If this sounds familiar and you are constantly picking and choosing which tunes to store and play on your iPhone, then Audiogalaxy may be the answer for you.

This app gives you cloud-based access to your entire music library without the need for syncing your phone or worrying about space. After downloading the Audiogalaxy helper program and syncing your music library to your account, you are all set to stream your music to your iPhone. Audiogalaxy also enables you to access your music from any computer and a large number of other handheld devices.

Cost: Free

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2. sir Sampleton

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At first glance, this app appears to be a simple keyboard that you'd let your kid play around with as you wait in line at the grocery store. But on closer inspection, sir Sampleton is actually a sophisticated and feature-rich app that lets you do everything from recording or changing sounds to mixing beats, adding vibrato, and even saving recordings. It's a fun way for both novices and more seasoned beat masters to get their groove on.

Cost: $2.99

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3. ooTunes Radio

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If you want to mix up your radio station listening experience and you crave a huge variety of genres and styles, including talk radio, ooTunes Radio is a great app for limitless listening pleasure. Compiling audio from more than 30,000 streams in 150 countries, ooTunes Radio lets you create the exact playlist you want and gives you the chance to listen to radio shows from around the world. The neat Radio Roolette feature offers a playlist of available music and enables you to listen to a sampling of music from hundreds of stations without having to manually pick them yourself. If you hear a song you like, the app also lets you purchase directly from iTunes for instant download, as well.

Cost: $4.99

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4. Earworms

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There's nothing more annoying than getting a bad song stuck in your head. If you're cruel and want to impart that annoyance onto someone else, use Earworms to send an audio clip to someone in the hopes that it'll stick. This fun app features 20 songs; all you have to do is pick which one you want and email it. You know you've accomplished the task when you hear your friend walking around singing, "Oh, Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey, hey Mickey."

Cost: $0.99

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5. SoundHound

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Have you ever heard a catchy tune on the radio, sang it all day long, but had no idea what it was called or who sang it? You try to sing it for your friend to see if she knows it, but sadly, you’re greeted with a blank stare. Luckily, with SoundHound on your iPhone, there is no more guessing. This fun app can actually recognize a user humming or singing a tune and will pull up all the relevant matches it finds. And it really works — SoundHound was even able to recognize and identify a hum from my friend, who we'll just say, has less than perfect pitch.

A free, lite version is available as well, but it limits the number of songs you can ID to five a month.

Cost: $4.99

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6. TuneWiki

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Have you ever thought you knew the lyrics to a song and realized you were way off base? It happens frequently, but with TuneWiki, you can memorize the lyrics to your favorite songs and ensure that you have it right from the get-go. TuneWiki is both a radio player and lyrics decoder and provides a wide array of music streams to choose from. You can either listen and get lyrics through TuneWiki's radio options or use your own iTunes library. You can even search for songs if you know just a line or two of the lyrics.

Cost: Free

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7. Concert Vault

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Concert Vault is a great app for music lovers who would prefer to listen to live music recordings. It really is a veritable cache of recorded treasures from past decades, including artists like Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Queen and more. The app, and up to 10 hours of streaming, is free for every user, but if you're a live concertaholic and 10 hours isn't enough, you can upgrade your membership for $48/year and get benefits such as unlimited access to recordings, upgraded bitrate streaming and discounts on merchandise.

Cost: Free

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8. Local Concerts

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Local Concerts is a handy resource that keeps track of upcoming concerts and live shows in your area. You can search by date or venue and also have direct access from the app to where you can purchase tickets and get directions. Local Concerts also scans your iTunes library and alerts you to upcoming concerts of artists you have in your music inventory for a more personalized experience.

Cost: Free

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9. Top 100s by Year

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Top 100s by Year is a great app that provides a huge database of the 100 most popular songs from each year from 1947 to today. You can search by year, see the full year's listing and listen to the songs (the app automatically has each year’s songs in shuffle mode). It also allows you to buy any song on its lists directly from iTunes and/or see its accompanying music video on YouTube. This is a great reference app for pulling together playlists or just waxing nostalgic on songs that were hits when you were in eighth grade.

Cost: Free (currently on sale from $1.99)

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10. Adaptunes

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If you run with your iPhone, drive with it or listen to any kind of music on the go, you know what a pain it can be to constantly adjust the volume to adapt to your listening environment. Adaptunes takes care of this conundrum by automatically adjusting your volume based on speed and motion-based sensors. There are also different activities you can choose from that provide different modes of sound adaptation, such as driving, mountain biking, jogging, skiing, exercising, etc. Further, you can create playlists within Adaptunes for on-the-spot volume adjustment.

Cost: $0.99

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More Music Resources from Mashable:

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- Music Tech: 8 Digital Instruments for the Cutting Edge Composer [VIDEOS]
- 8 Musical iPad Apps for the Digital Maestro
- 4 Ways Bands Can Cash in Online Without a Label
- Top 10 Twitter Tips for Bands, By Bands
- 5 Great Ways to Find Music That Suits Your Mood

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Reviews: Audiogalaxy, Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, iPhone

More About: adaptunes, App, apple, audiogalaxy, audiogalaxy mobile, concert vault, earworms, iphone, iphone apps, itunes, List, Lists, local concerts, Mobile 2.0, music, ooTunes radio, sir sampleton, soundhound, top 100s by year, tunewiki

CheckPoints, the mobile shopping startup that encourages users to scan product barcodes in exchange for points and rewards, has surpassed 500,000 registered users since its public launch in mid October. At this rate, CheckPoints will hit 1 million members before the end of the first quarter.

The startup has also shared exclusively with Mashable that nearly 50% of all barcode scans — there have been more than 600,000 total scans to date — are taking place in grocery store aisles. In fact, all scanning activity is on the rise and tripled between November and December of last year, says CheckPoints CEO Mark DiPaola.

These figures, according to DiPaola, prove the viability of CheckPoints’s approach to mobile shopping and location-based promotions, and put to rest questions of whether consumers would actually use its iPhone or Android app while shopping. “CheckPoints is changing in-aisle user behavior,” he says.

DiPaola points to an ongoing Frito-Lay test promotion as proof. The big-name snack brand kicked off a CheckPoints promotion a few weeks ago, serving up specialized content to app users that scan Frito-Lay products. CheckPoints drove 10,000 users to pick up and scan Frito-Lay products in less than four days, with no explicit encouragement to users, says DiPaola.

CheckPoints is a self-funded startup based in Los Angeles. It has advertiser and partner relationships with Unilever, Energizer, Seventh Generation, Belkin, Tyson Foods, Frito-Lay, SoyJoy, Kmart and Arby’s, and faces competition from Shopkick. The startup is fielding a lot of inbound interest from investors and is exploring funding options, according to DiPaola.

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Reviews: Android, Mashable

More About: checkpoints, mobile shopping, startup

One of our favorite mobile travel apps, TripIt, announced that it has been acquired by integrated travel and expense management company Concur in a deal valued at $120 million.

Concur will be acquiring TripIt for $27 million in cash, $44 million in stock and a cash contingency valued up to $38 million, to be settled 30 months after closing.

On its blog, TripIt says that its employees will remain in San Francisco and that TripIt will continue to be offered as it is today. The difference is that TripIt will now have the resources to innovate and develop more features.

Beyond that, TripIt will also now have a better opportunity to target the business and corporate travel market, an area where Concur really shines. As a company, Concur offers small, medium and large businesses a way to manage travel and expenses together, through web and mobile offerings.

In the acquisition FAQ document, Concur outlines some of the reasons for the acquisition and some of the assets it expects to get from the startup.

TripIt will offer Concur a way to expand into markets that extend beyond the corporate, managed travel space. Although Concur does target the small business market for its expense solutions, much of its travel integration is focused on medium and larger businesses or corporations. TripIt will allow the company to target less frequent or independent business travelers.

As a long-time TripIt user, the reason I love the service is because of how easily it integrates into my life. I can either forward travel plans to plans@tripit.com or just link it to my Gmail or Google Apps account. If Concur could integrate an expense feature that works in the same sort of way, we think the company could create a compelling offering that really speaks to a growing segment of the business travel market.

Do you use TripIt? What services do you use to manage your travel plans (business or otherwise)?

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Reviews: TripIt, blog

More About: acquisitions, concur, startups, travel, tripit

Welcome to this week's edition of "What's Hot in Social Media," a series in which we revisit the week’s most popular stories concerning social networks.

We're keeping our eye on five interesting developments this Thursday.

MySpace Confirms Sale Likely in Near Future

MySpace has confirmed that parent company News Corp. is looking for a way to unload its flailing social web property after unloading nearly half of its staff this week.

Participation in Real-Time Social Media Increased 20% in 2010

According to a recent repot from Trendstream, users are increasingly engaging in real-time social media conversations via platforms like Facebook and Twitter, over static conversational tools like blogs and forums.

AMBER Alerts Now Available on Facebook

U.S. Facebook users will now be able to receive AMBER Alerts — the notifications issued when a child is abducted — on the social network, the result of a new partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Foursquare Bolsters Local Content With New Partnership

Examiner.com has inked a deal with Foursquare to offer ratings and other extras on the location-based service. Starting Monday, consumers who log on to Foursquare will get access to content from 68,000 "examiners" around the country who contribute to Examiner.com.

Social Gaming Will Generate $1 Billion This Year

Social gaming is poised to become a billion-dollar industry this year, according to new research from eMarketer. Approximately 62 million U.S. Internet users — that's 27% of the total Internet-using population in the U.S. — will play at least one game on a social network on a monthly basis in 2011, a 15% increase from 2010, the research firm claims.

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Reviews: Facebook, Internet, MySpace, Twitter, foursquare

More About: facebook, foursquare, myspace, social media

Apple’s infamous keynotes are a thing of legend in the consumer technology world, with pomp and pageantry unrivaled by any other company.

Whether it’s Steve Jobs’ “uniform,” the “reality distortion field” effect or the “one more thing” tradition, the keynotes — sometimes called “Stevenotes” — have become more than a slightly flamboyant way to announce new products. They have become part of our modern pop culture.

We’ve found five remixes and edits of Steve Jobs in action that highlight some of the tricks of his amazing presentation skills.

Oh, and be sure to stay reading right until the end — we might just have one more thing for you.

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1. iPad Keynote Superlatives

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Language is a very powerful thing and Steve Jobs uses it particularly well during his keynote presentations.

In a blog post about Apple‘s handling of the iPhone 4′s antennagate issues, Dilbert creator Scott Adams writes, “I’ve wondered for some time if Jobs studied hypnosis, or if he’s some sort of freakish natural,” asserting that Jobs “speaks and acts like a master hypnotist.”

This cleverly edited version of the iPad keynote is a fascinating look at Jobs’s use of positive adjectives. Although you may not realize it as you watch the full-length keynote in real time, this edit reveals his presentations are liberally peppered with powerful, affirmative language.

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2. iPhone 4 Keynote Auto-Tuned

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Apple keynotes always include live demos that, according to Carmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, must be well-practiced ahead of time.

“Jobs is closely involved in every detail of a presentation: writing descriptive taglines, creating slides, practicing demos and making sure the lighting is just right,” says Gallo. But live demos are risky, especially if you need to rely on a network connection to show off the product.

Although Jobs rarely makes a misstep on stage, the iPhone 4 keynote was blighted by connectivity issues. Because there were more than 500 Wi-Fi stations in the conference room, Jobs couldn’t get his iPhone 4 to reliably connect to a network.

It was a tense and uncomfortable moment in the history of Apple keynotes, but here it gets auto-tuned into a much more light-hearted clip. Gallo assures us “His Steveness” would not have been devastated: “Sometimes things go wrong, but Jobs doesn’t let the small stuff get to him. He’s going to have fun, whether a demo works or not.”

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3. Boom!

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The Cambridge Dictionary of American English has three definitions for the word “boom,” although none of them match up with Jobs’s use of the word.

As the video above ably demonstrates, Jobs has said “boom” so often during his keynotes that a drinking game exists where you have to down a shot every time he says the word.

After 2007′s WWDC presentation, Seattle PI blogger Nick Eaton created the “Steve Jobs Boom Index.” Eaton worked out that Jobs emitted 0.157 booms per minute. Particularly notable was the following paragraph from Jobs’s demo of the new Mac OS X Quick Look feature in Leopard:

“All I do is hit the space bar, and boom, there it is, and I am now looking through my PDF. Without launching a viewer app, or anything else. Boom, boom, boom. Keynote presentation? Boom, there it is. I can just click through the slides, make sure this is what I want. Boom, there it goes.”

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4. Star Wars iPad Briefing

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(NSFW: language)

There’s no real Steve insight to be gleaned from this creative clip, but it’s a highly entertaining use of keynote audio — definitely worthy of 1.5 minutes of your time. “Casting” Stephen Fry as C-3PO is pure comedy gold.

The video was created by Adam Buxton of Adam and Joe fame (in the UK anyway) who is a tentative fanboy. Buxton says “I’m wary of being evangelical about Apple. Their products have transformed my life and enabled to me to have a huge amount of fun making my stupid crap, but they’ve also siphoned off a large part of my income.”

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5. iPad Orgasm

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If you wanted to explain to an alien what a Stevenote is, this great 42-second clip would be adequate, but what it wouldn’t do is help understand the “reality distortion field.”

Today, the RDF is used to describe the effect that viewing a Steve Jobs keynote can have on your rationale: You are so taken in by Jobs’s charisma and belief in his products that you buy into the story you’re being sold. The “RDF” was originally coined to define Jobs’s real-life presence.

Ex-Apple employee Andy Hertzfeld reveals the origin of the phrase as explained to him by colleague Bud Tribble: “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”

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One More Thing…

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Now a traditional part of the format of any “Stevenote,” the “one more thing” convention employed by Jobs is a show-stopping way of rounding off the presentation with yet another product revelation.

“One more things” in recent years have included FaceTime for the iPhone 4, a new Apple TV and most recently of all, two new MacBook Airs.

Incidentally, when Phil Schiller stepped in to cover for Jobs at Macworld 2009, during Jobs’s health-related leave of absence, he continued the convention. Schiller’s “one last thing” was DRM-free iTunes.

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More Apple Resources from Mashable

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- 5 Vintage Apple Products That Time Forgot [PICS]
- 10 Fascinating Facts You Didn't Know About Apple
- The Evolution of the Apple Mouse [PICS]
- 10 Vintage Apple Ads That Time Forgot [VIDEOS]

Image via Flickr, Collin Allen

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Reviews: Flickr

More About: apple, iphone, keynote, remix, steve jobs, stevenote, video

Sony Ericsson is getting into the entertainment biz with Xperia Hot Shots, a new YouTube-based show following the lives of six aspiring Women’s Tennis Association stars.

The show, starting in March, offers a behind-the-scenes look at the women’s lives off court as they compete in various tournaments around the world. Product placement will figure prominently into the show; the women will be shown using their Xperia handsets to film their own content and share it on Facebook and other social media outlets.

Sony Ericsson’s Experia X10, an Android-based phone, hit the U.S. market last August.

To help get the word out, Sony Ericsson employed spokeswoman Maria Sharapova to help develop and show off a logo for the show (see picture).

Ben Wyatt, director of communications for the WTA in Europe, says that the six women haven’t been chosen yet. As for Sharapova: “She’ll certainly have a role to play,” but that exact role hasn’t been finalized. Sony Ericsson’s YouTube channel has close to 10,000 subscribers and currently offers such fare as “Battle Fingers,” an odd contest in which viewers vote on videos showing people’s fingers dancing to pop songs.

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Reviews: Android, Facebook

More About: advertising, Maria Sharapova, MARKETING, Sony Ericsson, youtube

Update: As many of you have noted, the site is no longer in action. All that remains is a note reading, “Aww, we got lawyered. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted!” According to TechCrunch, the developers responsible for the site received a "Cease and Desist" letter.

You know how you used to plaster your locker with snaps of rock idols like The New Kids on the Block and Soul For Real? Well, kids today have it so much better than we did, folks.

Now, thanks to a Justin Bieber-inspired URL shortener, rabid fans can see Biebs’s face wherever they look online — even more than usual. Every URL shortened by bieber.ly yields a website emblazoned with Bieber’s grinning face.

While we’re not exactly rabid fans over at Mashable (despite the poster that hangs in our office), we admire this little tool’s entertainment/practical joke value.

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Reviews: Mashable

More About: humor, justin bieber, pop culture

The specifications and an image of RIM’s new flagship smartphone, BlackBerry Dakota, have been unearthed by Boy Genius Report.

The device looks quite similar to BlackBerry Bold, with a standard BlackBerry form factor: a 2.8-inch screen with a 640×480 pixel resolution and a full QWERTY keyboard, placed in a 10.5mm-thick case.

Specifications include a 5-megapixel camera with HD video recording, 768 MB of RAM and 4 GB of built-in storage. It supports UMTS, NFC Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and it sports a MicroUSB port, as well as a proximity sensor, accelerometer and a magnetometer. On the software side, the device will be running BlackBerry OS 6.1.

The device hasn’t been officially confirmed yet, and pricing and availability are unknown.

[via BGR]

More About: blackberry, BlackBerry Dakota, Mobile 2.0, RIM, smartphone

LivingSocial, the social commerce site, added to its international expansion today with a controlling interest in Spain’s Let’s Bonus.

The deal gives LivingSocial the ability to speak to consumers in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and gives the company presence in 10 countries. This is the second time LivingSocial has bought a controlling stake in a foreign firm. Last November, the company invested $5 million for a controlling stake in Australia’s JumpOnIt.com. Financial terms of the latest deal were not disclosed.

Launched in September 2009, Let’s Bonus helped start the collective buying trend in Europe. The company offers daily deals with discounts of up to 70% on dinners, luxury spas and romantic escapes in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Buenos Aires and Lisbon.

The move comes just one month after LivingSocial closed on a round of financing totaling $183 million, most of which — $175 million — came from Amazon. The round brought LivingSocial’s total funding to date to $232 million. The company said at the time that it planned to use the funds to aid its global expansion.

That funding, however, has been dwarfed by LivingSocial rival Groupon, which just secured $950 million in funding.

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Reviews: Australia

More About: groupon, Let's Bonus, LivingSocial

This post is brought to you by Mobile Future, sponsor of the Mashable Awards’ “Best Mobile App” Category. Its mission is to educate key decision makers on innovations in the wireless industry and to advocate continued investment in wireless technologies. Check out its Year in Review video here.

For this year’s round of The Mashable Awards, which highlights the very best of web and tech, we introduced the “Best Mobile App” category, as supported by Mobile Future.

The five finalists for the category, as voted by Mashable readers, included: DriveSafe.ly, eBuddy, Evernote, ScoutMob and Gravity.

This year’s winner is DriveSafe.ly, a mobile application that reads text messages and e-mails aloud in real time and automatically responds without drivers touching their mobile phones.

What’s so special about the app? Heath Ahrens, CEO of iSpeech, makers of the app, told Mashable:

“It helps keep people safer on the road. Even if you don't text while driving, perhaps you can help keep someone else from doing it by encouraging them to use DriveSafe.ly. It's not just an app, it's a solid cause…

The idea behind DriveSafe.ly was to help solve a real problem, texting while driving, while mainstreaming iSpeech technology. DriveSafe.ly helps keep people's eyes on the road, serves as a flagship 'powered by iSpeech' app and helps popularize the SMS reading genre of app and safe driving apps in general.”

Accepting the award, Ahrens sent a huge shout-out to the iSpeech development team in Newark, New Jersey for making the app possible. We commend the iSpeech team for creating a useful app that’s helping solve a real-life problem. Congratulations!

Photo by Jehangir Irani

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The Mashable Awards Gala at Cirque du Soleil Zumanity (Vegas)

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In partnership with Cirque du Soleil, The Mashable Awards Gala event brought together the winners and nominees, the Mashable community, partners, media, the marketing community, consumer electronics and technology brands and attendees from the 2011 International CES Convention to Las Vegas on Thursday, January 6, 2011. Together, we celebrated the winners and the community of the Mashable Awards at the Cirque du Soleil Zumanity stage in the beautiful New York New York Hotel. The event included acts and performances from our partner Cirque du Soleil Zumanity, in addition to special guest presenters and appearances.

Mashable Awards Category Sponsor:

Mobile Future is a broad-based coalition of businesses, non-profit organizations and individuals interested in and dedicated to advocating for an environment in which innovations in wireless technology and services are enabled and encouraged. Our mission is to educate the public and key decision makers on innovations in the wireless industry that have transformed the way Americans work and play and to advocate continued investment in wireless technologies.

Our "Mobile Year in Review 2010" animation launched this December and provides a glimpse into the most notable breakthroughs in the wireless industry this year.

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Reviews: Evernote, Mashable, Scoutmob, eBuddy

More About: mashable awards, mashable awards 2010, open web awards

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.

MySpace Confirms Sale Likely in Near Future

MySpace has confirmed that parent company News Corp. is looking for a way to unload its flailing social web property.

iOS 4.3 Developer Build Reveals "Find My Friends" Feature & More

Apple has released the developer build for iOS 4.3. Among the new features we can expect in the next iteration of Apple’s mobile platform: settings for a new tool dubbed "Find My Friends," AirPlay video support for third-party apps, personal hotspot support for the iPhone and multitouch gestures for iPad.

Venture Capital Fundraising Hits 7-Year Low

A recent report from Dow Jones shows a 14% drop in funds raised by venture capital firms in 2010, down to $11.6 billion for the years.

Further News

• CityVille, the latest game from the largest Facebook game maker Zynga, now has nearly 100 million monthly active users, according to the stats on CityVille's Facebook page.
• Shazam, the music discovery engine that lets users identify songs as they play, has partnered with Spotify to offer full track music playback for identified tracks.
• Social app developer RockYou has acquired Playdemic, a UK-based social gaming company, in order to boost its efforts to build more social games.
• TargetSpot, an advertising network for online audio ads, has raised $8 million in a Series C round from Fred Wilson's Union Square Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, CBS Radio and Milestone Venture Partners.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DNY59

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Reviews: Facebook, MySpace, Shazam, iStockphoto

More About: ios 4.3, myspace

This post originally appeared on Dyn.com, a world leader in managed DNS, powering the best brands on the web including Gowalla, Mashable, Twitter, Wikia and more. Follow @DynInc on Twitter.

The 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a wrap. Tech’s largest trade show tends to kick off the year with a slew of new gadgets and provides a first glimpse into what will be hot in tech for the rest of the year. This year’s CES was no different.

We spent nearly a week talking with tech leaders, testing out products, visiting booths and attending press conferences in order to find out what devices, emerging trends and technologies to watch in 2011. A few trends clearly stood out at this year’s show.

From tablets to the influence of a certain company in Cupertino, here are five big consumer technology trends to watch.

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1. Dual-Core Smartphones

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Three recently announced phones, the LG Optimus 2X, Motorola Droid Bionic and the Motorola Atrix 4G, all have one thing in common: They run 1GHz dual-core processors.

This year will be the year smartphones take a major leap in power and functionality. More and more phones will come packed with HD screens, 4G connectivity, increased RAM and dual-core processors. The latter is especially important, because users are demanding more and more multitasking capabilities in their handheld devices.

Right now, the only dual-core devices on the market run Android, but you can expect Apple and the rest to launch their own dual-core phones later this year.

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2. Android or Bust

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CES was once again dominated by Google’s Android OS. The best devices at the show all ran on the Android platform. The biggest draw, the Motorola Xoom tablet, also showed off the upcoming Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” interface, made specifically for tablets.

Why have Samsung, Motorola, LG and many other electronics companies put their money on Google? Simple: It’s the only viable alternative to Apple, who would love to do nothing more than crush Android and CES. It’s an alliance of necessity if anybody is to gain traction against Apple’s growing power and profits.

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3. Seeking the iPad Challenger

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Thanks to the iPad, 2011 will be known as “The Year of the Tablet.” Microsoft, Samsung, Motorola, BlackBerry and more showed off their tablet devices at CES. The Samsung Sliding PC 7 is a Windows 7 tablet with a nice slide-out keyboard, while Toshiba showed off a yet-to-be-named 10.1-inch Android tablet. Oh, and let’s not forget about The BlackBerry PlayBook.

The winner of the CES tablet wars, though, was clearly the Motorola Xoom. With a 1GHz Tegra 2 dual-core processor, 10.1-inch screen, 1280×800 resolution, 4G connectivity, 32GB of on board memory and the Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” OS, the Xoom clearly outclassed its competition.

Does that make the Xoom a viable iPad competitor? We’ll have to wait and see how many of these devices people snatch up when March rolls around, but for now, it has the momentum, power and potential to give Apple a run for its money.

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4. TVs Get Smart, But Will Consumers Care?

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Sony, Samsung, Sharp and LG revealed new TVs this year, and every single one can connect to the web and run apps.

LG calls its platform Smart TV. Sony has bet the farm on Google TV. Samsung’s TVs have ultra-thin bezels on top of 3-D and Internet connectivity.

We saw a lot of connected TVs last year, but now they’re essentially standard. Almost every new TV you see from now on will be able to browse the web, connect to Netflix and more. And these TV manufacturers are even signing deals to bring content directly to the device, bypassing cable. Samsung has a deal with CBS, while Sony has penned one with Time Warner.

Still, most people don’t turn on the TV to check out YouTube, and with alternatives like Apple TV and Roku, will consumers really choose their TVs based on how adeptly they connect to the web?

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5. Apple Casts a Giant Shadow

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One of the most talked about companies at CES wasn’t even there. Instead, it worked behind the scenes to undermine the show and steal the spotlight. And boy, did it succeed.

I am talking about none other than Apple, the world’s second most valuable company. Apple sees Android, which CES has embraced, as a threat and has worked every year to suck the oxygen from the room. Last year, Apple took over the show with fervent speculation about the iPad. This year, Apple did it twice with the the launch of the Mac App Store and the announcement of a press conference to reveal the Verizon iPhone.

It’s shocking that one company can be so powerful and influential that it can undermine technology’s largest trade show, but that’s exactly what Apple has been able to accomplish year after year. The game has become Apple vs. CES and iOS vs. Android.

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More Tech Resources from Mashable:

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- 5 Reasons Connected TV Could Flop in 2011
- 8 Tech Companies to Watch in 2011
- 8 Gadgets to Watch in 2011
- iPad 2 Rumors: The Comprehensive Guide
- HOW TO: Your Get Your Old PC Running Like New Again

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Reviews: Android, Google, Internet, Windows, YouTube

More About: android, android tablets, apple, CES, CES 2011, ces2011, gadgets, Google, iOS, ipad, iphone, Motorola, Motorola Atrix, motorola xoom, samsung, Sharp, sony, Tablet, tablets

CityVille, the latest game from the largest Facebook game maker Zynga, has reached 100 million monthly active users, according to the stats on CityVille’s Facebook page.

AppData, a site that specializes in Facebook app metrics, has CityVille at 99.9 million monthly active users, but since (by AppData’s count) CityVille has been adding nearly 400,000 new monthly active users every day, the 100 million MAU milestone will surely be reached in the next update.

The success of CityVille has been meteoric and has totally eclipsed FarmVille, an earlier Zynga title that reigned supreme over the world of Facebook games for more than a year. It took CityVille less than a month to surpass FarmVille in terms of both daily and monthly active users, and it took less than 40 days for it to reach 100 million users.

Zynga’s apps still rule AppData’s leaderboard, holding four of the top five spots, but CityVille‘s success is unmatched. It seems that Zynga has another huge winner on its hands. The only question now is: how big can CityVille get?

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Reviews: Facebook

More About: cityville, facebook, farmville, social game, social gaming, social networking, Zynga

Social app developer RockYou has acquired Playdemic, an England-based social gaming company, in order to boost its efforts to build more social games. Terms of the deal were not announced.

Playdemic is a 16-person social gaming firm with just one known game, Gourmet Ranch, a cooking/farming simulation game for Facebook. The game has around half a million monthly active users, far less than competitors like Zynga’s FarmVille or Playfish’s Pet Society. The company now has 170 employees, including today’s acquisition.

RockYou COO Lisa Marino tells us that the company will be investing in growing Gourmet Ranch‘s user base through its pre-existing advertising network. RockYou not only develops games, but it also has a social application advertising platform that can help it drive new users to its new game properties.

Playdemic will be run as an independent unit of the company, primarily responsible for helping the company build more social games. Last month, RockYou acquired TirNua for its 3-D game engine.

While RockYou has been around longer than Zynga, Playfish and the other social gaming giants, it completely missed the boat on social gaming. The result has been stagnated growth and significant layoffs while its rivals grow into multi-billion dollar businesses.

Despite raising more than $100 million from investors like Softbank, Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, the company is struggling to stay relevant in an era where the popularity of social widgets has waned. Profitability still eludes RockYou, but social gaming has proven itself to be a massive moneymaker. “We’re very committed to creating an organization that can make money and stand on its own,” Marino told us.

RockYou is the developer of classic Facebook applications like Super Wall, Hug Me, Birthdays and MyGifts, but now focuses its energy on games like Zoo World and Toyland. Zoo World is the company’s most popular game, with 8.9 million monthly active users.

It seems strange to us that a 16-person company has only produced one game with only half a million users, but this acquisition seems motivated by the company’s need to churn out new games. Playdemic must create social gaming hits for its parent company if RockYou is to survive.

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Reviews: Facebook, Super Wall, pet society

More About: acquisition, facebook, PLaydemic, RockYou, Zoo World, Zynga

Shazam, the music discovery engine that lets you identify music playing around you, has partnered with Spotify to offer full track music playback for identified tracks.

With more than 1 billion identified songs and 100 million users, Shazam is one of the strongest players in the music discovery space. Spotify, on the other hand, is quite popular in Europe, but still unavailable in the U.S., having missed a Q3 2010 U.S. launch window due to failure to reach a licensing deal with the record labels.

The new functionality enables you to play a track you’ve discovered in Shazam directly in Spotify. Of course, it means you have to have both apps installed, so U.S. users won’t be able to use the new feature. Currently, the new functionality works for users in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

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Reviews: Shazam, Spotify

More About: android, iphone, Mobile 2.0, music, music discovery, music playback, shazam, spotify