Mashable: Latest 29 News Updates - including “How Do You Create an Orchestra Using YouTube?”

It turns out all you need to play in the storied Sydney Opera House is a YouTube account and a touch of talent. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra (YSO) recently announced their list of musicians who won a spot in the orchestra. All they had to do was post a video of themselves playing a classical piece, get user votes and be great at their chosen instrument.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra is a crowdsourced classical orchestra enjoying its second year. Last year an entire orchestra was selected from audition videos posted to YouTube by professional players and skilled hobbyists. The musicians then met for the first time in New York, rehearsed, and performed at Carnegie Hall.

This year, applicants came from all over the world mixed both quirk and actual talent, such as a German trombone player, Ramon, buzzing out “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on a vuvuzela while wearing a tuxedo in the snow. Other anomalies include a guzheng player from Beijing or an electric guitarist from Brazil. While the orchestra is primarily made out traditional instruments like violins, horns, and percussion, it’s a testament that anyone can get involved. “Usually [an audition] is done behind a curtain. With our partners, we wanted to challenge that,” said Ed Sanders, YouTube’s Group Marketing Manager. “If you have the skill and a webcam, you should be able to give it a crack.”

While the orchestra will be performing in a traditional venue and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, the widely-respected music director of the San Francisco Symphony, the goal of the YSO is to open up classical music to a new, curious community. Its website has played a huge role in both drawing together a global network of professional musicians and also introducing orchestral music to younger or casual listeners.

The site, hosted on YouTube, provides online master classes, improvisations, musician profiles and human interest stories designed to intrigue amateurs and professionals. “The classical music community globally was very large but very fragmented and something that we wanted to do, as sort of an experiment, was to create a hub where people could sort of connect around a common passion,” said Sanders.

The master classes are definitely geared towards prospective players, but they offer enough historical tidbits and musical insights that they’re fun to watch even if you can’t play along. The improvisations are more clearly meant to be enjoyed as musical flights of fancy featuring bizarre or unexpected instruments — like a vocoder cello — riffing on an original piece by Mason Bates. More videos will be added as the final performance date, March 20th, draws near.

For the truly uninitiated, “Experiment” allows anyone to start playing music, provided they have a webcam. The user can wave a photo or printout of the supplied QR code in front of their webcam to play different notes. You can choose from three different types of “instruments” and slide the tempo to suit their playing styles.

Mauricio Cespedes is principle violist for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra and one of the musicians selected to be part of the YSO. Last year he watched the different master classes and the final performance at Carnegie Hall. Inspired by what he saw, he auditioned for the YSO this year: “I think the YouTube Symphony Orchestra is designed to bring, first of all, talented players from around the world together that represents a new generation that is connected online, that is connected through YouTube, through these powerful tools.”

What do you think of the YSO and its online hub? Is this the kind of integration that both YouTube and the classical arts need to survive? Let us know in the comments below.

More About: music, youtube, YouTube Symphony Orchestra, YSO

The entire back catalog as well as new issues of Playboy magazine will become available on the iPad in March 2011, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner revealed via Twitter.

Furthermore, Hefner confirmed on Twitter that Playboy will be coming to iPad in uncensored form, which makes sense, as we doubt many would be ready to pay for a watered-down version of the magazine.

However, Apple is notorious for its strict policy of not allowing adult content on the iOS platform (Playboy’s official iPhone app, for example, has no full frontal nudity), which makes us wonder how exactly Hefner and Playboy plan to pull this off.

Steve Jobs once said very clearly that he doesn’t intend to allow porn on the iOS platform. Allowing full frontal nudity on the iPad would definitely blur the line between innocuous adult entertainment and pornography; we’ll have to wait and see how Apple feels about Playboy’s plans.

When you’re as big as Playboy, you can try to persuade Apple to place additional measures of protecting minors from accessing adult material, and it’s quite possible that we’ll see something along these lines in March. Such a move by Apple would open a Pandora’s box of questions: would Apple allow other adult apps and magazines on the iOS platform under the same rules? How far would it go in terms of nudity and adult content?

What do you think, should content such as Playboy be allowed on the iOS platform? As always, share your opinions in the comments.

[Twitter via Engadget]

More About: Adult, apple, hugh hefner, iOS, ipad, magazine, nudity, playboy, publishing

The fashion community has taken root on Tumblr, and Tumblr is determined to help it grow.

The blogging platform recently hired Rich Tong, the founder of social fashion site Weardrobe (acquired by Google in mid-2010), to serve as fashion director. His first big project? Sending more than 20 bloggers to New York Fashion Week next month.

Eight bloggers are already stationed in New York; the rest will be flown in for the nine-day series of shows and parties, which run from February 9 to 17. Tumblr is fronting the costs for all participants, including flights, hotel accommodations, transportation, meals, etc., and handling all of the invites to fashion shows.

When asked if he was having trouble securing enough invites, Tong replied that the initiative “has been very well received among designers.”

Among the lucky 20-plus bloggers, many of whom have never before attended Fashion Week, are Jessica Quirk of What I Wore, Sara Zucker of farpitzs, Rebecca Roe of The Clothes Horse, John Januzzi of Textbook and Erin Hagstrom of calivintage. Tong would not disclose how the bloggers were chosen, but it appears (understandably) that those with the largest followings make up the list.

Tumblr will host a stream of the bloggers’ content at tumblr.com/nyfw, alongside news from other media sources. The startup is also throwing its own Fashion Week party for the fashion community.

The goal? “More than anything, this is just to build awareness around the fashion community on Tumblr because it’s one of those communities that we [at Tumblr] have noticed but not everyone in the [fashion] industry has,” he explained.

Tumblr is also out to prove that its fashion bloggers aren’t just personal style bloggers, posting images of their outfits on their blogs, but capable reporters as well, Tong said in an interview with Fashionista.

The fashion community on Tumblr is valuable to brands, he contends.

Image courtesy of Jessica Quirk

More About: fashion, fashion bloggers, new york fashion week, nyfw, rich tong, tumblr

What kind of impact has Apple’s iPad had on the tablet market? In just one quarter, the iPad helped drive up sales of media tablets by 45% and took nearly 90% of the market.

A new report from IDC shows that both the media tablet market and the e-reader market made big leaps in 2010. The market for media tablets grew from 3.3 million in Q2 to 4.8 million in Q3, an increase of 45.1%. That growth was fueled almost exclusively by the iPad. In Q3, Apple sold 4.19 million iPads, representing over 87% of the media tablet market.

IDC defines media tablets as devices larger than five inches and less than 14 inches running “lightweight operating systems,” primarily iOS and Android.

E-readers experienced rapid growth as well, led by the Amazon Kindle. 1.14 million Kindles were shipped in Q3, representing 41.5% of the e-reader market. Unexpectedly though, the Pandigital Novel (440 million) beat out the Barnes and Noble Nook (420 million) for second place.

The most interesting part of the report though was the overall forecasts for 2010, 2011 and 2012. For 2010, IDC predicts that about 17 million media tablets will be shipped (they’re still counting up the numbers), but that it will grow to a whopping 44.6 million in 2011 and 70.8 million in 2012. If devices like the iPad 2 and the Motorola Xoom succeed though, then IDC might have to revise its numbers.

Will Apple be able to sustain its massive lead in the tablet market, or will Android start eating into that market share? We’re going to find out soon.

[via paidContent]

More About: amazon kindle, apple, idc, iOS, ipad, Kindle, Tablet

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Pose

Quick Pitch: Pose is an iPhone app that allows users to share photos while they shop.

Genius Idea: If the recent surge of photo-sharing and object-tagging applications, such as Instagram, picplz and Foodspotting, are anything to go by, iPhone owners love to take photos with their phones, and they love sharing them with friends and strangers alike.

Enter Pose, a Santa Monica-based startup that’s attempting to cut out a niche in the photo-sharing crowd with an iPhone app [iTunes link] (coming soon to Android) targeted directly at fashion and shopping enthusiasts. Pose launched in beta last week, having just raised $1.6 million from True Ventures, GRP Partners and Founder Collective, with participation from angel investors (and Path founders) Dave Morin and Shawn Fanning.

Currently, the features are very limited: Users can snap photos of apparel and accessories while they shop, tag them with their prices and the location of the store in which they were found, and then share them with other Pose users, as well as their personal Facebook and Twitter networks. Users can also explore and bookmark the most recent and most popular finds of other users, and peruse those of Pose’s roster of curators, a.k.a “posers” (including, notably, designer Norma Kamali). And that’s about it.

What it’s missing, primarily, is all of the features that make other truly social apps addictive: mainly, the ability to follow others and be followed, to view the activity of one’s personal network in a newsfeed and to add comments in-line. Following would appeal to both tastemakers and the countless number of Internet users who already follow style blogs, whilst commenting would allow users to solicit feedback on their finds from both their personal networks and the Pose community, thus rendering apps like Fashism and Go Try It On obsolete.

Pose could also use a few bonus features to persuade consumers to use it over other photo-sharing apps when shopping, such as photo filters that reflect current trends in fashion photography, or, say, the ability to purchase and/or put on hold items found within the app, a la Lucky at Your Service.

Although it has a long way to go, Pose has an inviting, user-friendly (and thus promising) interface and set of advisors, including Jon Callaghan of True Ventures and Mark Suster of GRP, which is why it’s on our to-watch list.

What do you think of the app? What other features could be added to to make the app more compelling?

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Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, 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.

More About: fashion, iphone app, pose, spark-of-genius

Wikipedia is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a video (narrated by founder and CEO Jimmy Wales) and an infographic showcasing the organization’s major milestones over the years.

The State of Wikipedia is a project that takes into account Wikipedia history, site statistics and results from the March 2010 Wikipedia survey conducted by the United Nations University.

It also incorporates real-time data from Twitter, an interactive timeline of Wikipedia mentions from around the web and the beautiful aesthetic that typifies JESS3′s work.

All creative materials come from the JESS3 team members, who released the site, video and infographic under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

JESS3 says the project “explores the rich history and inner workings of the web-based encyclopedia, but it's also a celebration of its tenth anniversary.”

“With more than 17 million articles in over 270 languages, Wikipedia has undoubtedly become one of the most visited and relied upon sites on the web today. More than a million people have contributed to make the site what it is today,” JESS3 adds.

The State of Wikipedia is the fourth installment in JESS3′s “The State Of” series. The first installment, The State of the Internet, made its debut about a year ago.

Take a look at the video below and the following infographic, then let us know what impact Wikipedia has had on your life during the past decade.

Click to see full-size infographic.

More About: infographic, JESS3, Jimmy Wales, video, wikipedia

Nearly 6,800 company-operated Starbucks stores in the U.S. will begin accepting mobile payments Wednesday. Customers using the Starbucks Card Mobile app on their iPhone, iPod touch or BlackBerry will now be able to use those devices as tender.

The nationwide rollout marks the official launch of the Starbucks Card Mobile payment program, which has been piloted at Target stores and select San Francisco, Seattle and New York Starbucks locations.

Starbucks Card Mobile [iTunes link] lets users add their Starbucks Cards, track rewards and reload cards as needed via PayPal or credit card. To pay with their phone, app users simply select “touch to pay” and hold up the barcode on their mobile device screen to the 2-D scanner at the register.

An Android application is also said to be in the works, but the company has yet to disclose a release date.

Starbucks is using its own custom-built technology to enable the 2-D mobile barcode scans. The coffee retailer opted for barcode scanning over near field communication technology — which Google is exploring — because of its limited availability. The coffee retailer was reluctant to wait for a NFC ecosystem to develop when its customers have expressed interest in mobile payments now, according to Chuck Davidson, the category manager of innovation on the Starbucks Card team. “Once there are more users, we will adapt,” he says.

In testing, Starbucks assessed the mobile payment option by measuring application speed, transaction speed and total customer wait time, says Brady Brewer, vice president of Starbucks Card and brand loyalty. In all instances, Starbucks Card Mobile was the fastest way for customers to pay.

Starbucks is investing in mobile payments, an investment Davidson describes as modest in relation to expectations, because customers have requested the option and have shown a propensity to not only pay with Starbucks Cards — one in five transactions are made using a Starbucks Card — but frequently use their smartphones while waiting in line.

The company also believes that its customers carry their mobile phones more often than a wallet or purse, and sees Starbucks Card Mobile and the mobile payment program as an opportunity to reach these consumers and build stronger relationships.

Starbucks seems confident that its customers will appreciate the new, faster way to pay. Both Davidson and Brewer believe that adoption will spread as customers tell their friends about the new mobile payment option.

Image courtesy of gumption, Flickr

More About: MARKETING, mobile payments, starbucks, starbucks card mobile, trending

Twitter has just launched the Korean version of its popular service, bringing the total of supported languages to seven.

As is typical for the microblogging company, it made the announcement in Korean. In its blog post, Twitter revealed that it chose Korean as the next language for launch because the number of Twitter users from Korea has increased tenfold in the last year. That’s an astounding growth metric.

Not only is Twitter.com now translated in Korean, but so are the official Twitter Android and iPhone apps. It has also launched a recommended user list of Korean users, including actor Park Joong (@moviejhp) and novelist @Oisoo.

Twitter now supports seven languages. The others include Spanish, Italian, German, French, English and Japanese.

More About: Korean, twitter

We now know the first rule of Apple earnings calls: you don’t ask about Steve Jobs.

Apple has rocked Wall Street twice in just two days. Yesterday, Apple announced that CEO Steve Jobs was taking another leave of absence from the company, citing unspecified health reasons. When the markets opened the next day, Apple stock tanked by more than 5%.

Earlier tonight though, Apple wowed the markets with a record breaking quarter, earning more than $26 billion in the most recent quarter. We expect the company’s stock to bounce right back when the markets reopen tomorrow morning.

One thing was noticeably absent from the call though: Steve Jobs. With the company’s visionary leader left it to COO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer to lead the call and answer the questions of Wall Street’s analysts.

While they asked about everything from Android to Apple’s long-term strategy, not a single analyst asked about Steve Jobs or his health. How could they have not asked about something that has such a profound impact on Apple’s bottom line as the uncertain condition of its high-profile leader?

Perhaps the analysts knew they wouldn’t get any sort of answer from the tight-lipped company. Perhaps they feared that Apple wouldn’t invite them to any more calls or give them any more information if they treaded into the forbidden territory of Steve Jobs.

Regardless, the result is that we know absolutely nothing new about the Apple empire without Steve Jobs at the helm. And that’s exactly how Apple likes it.

More About: apple, iOS, ipad, iphone, iphone 4, steve jobs, tim cook, wall street

The Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department have voted to approve Comcast‘s merger with NBC Universal, giving the cable and ISP giant majority ownership of NBC and its media properties, including a piece of Hulu.

By a 4-1 vote, the FCC approved Comcast’s deal with General Electric, the current majority owner of NBC Universal. The Justice Department issued a similar statement declaring that the merger did not violate U.S. antitrust laws.

Under the deal, Comcast will acquire 51% of NBC Universal from General Electric Co. for approximately $13.75 billion. The deal, which has been in the works for over a year, should close before the end of the month.

The regulatory approval came with conditions, though. The majority of the conditions are designed to assure that the new Comcast-NBC entity doesn’t try to hamper the growth of online video.

“Under the proposed settlement and the FCC order, the joint venture must make available to online video distributors (OVDs) the same package of broadcast and cable channels that it sells to traditional video programming distributors,” the Justice Department declared. “In addition, the joint venture must offer an OVD broadcast, cable and film content that is similar to, or better than, the content the distributor receives from any of the joint venture's programming peers.”

In total, Comcast accepted nine conditions directed by the FCC which will remain in effect for seven years. They include ensuring access to Comcast-NBC programming, protecting the development of online competition, guaranteeing access to Comcast’s programming distribution, protecting content diversity, increasing broadband deployment in low income households, promoting localism, expanding Spanish-language programming, increasing children’s programming and safeguarding educational and governmental programming.

Among the conditions is an agreement by Comcast to follow the FCC’s Open Internet principles, even if a court nullifies the new net neutrality rules the FCC has been crafting.

There are a lot more details available in the FCC’s announcement, but it essentially boils down to the FCC erecting multiple safeguards to protect online video and to prevent Comcast from hoarding its content from others in an attempt to become a monopoly. Still, the new Comcast-NBC entity will have full or partial control of SyFy, G4, E! Entertainment Television, Versus, USA Network, Telemundo, NBC News and NBC. Combine that with its Xfinity operation and its stake in Hulu, and you come up with one of the world’s largest media conglomerates.

While not as shocking as Comcast’s $54 billion attempt to take over Walt Disney Co. in 2004, the new Comcast-NBC entity will be a force to be reckoned with. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

More About: comcast, fcc, nbc, net neutrality, trending

Path, the startup that seeks to create a “personal network,” is out with an update to its iPhone app that finally lets users react in-app to photos and 10-second videos shared by friends.

The startup has again opted for something a bit unconventional, however. Instead of introducing traditional comments, something Path has yet to do, it has opted to added the ability to attach emoticons — or “Emotions” as the startup calls them — to photos and videos.

App [iTunes link] users can now select from one of five emotions to visually emote to the photos or videos shared by friend. Emotions are happy, mischievous (ie. the wink), sad, shock, sad and love. And, as is this case with everything Path has done stylistically, emotions are an aesthetically pleasing addition the app. Not only are they cute, but they are carried throughout the app experience.

Emotions, from a functional standpoint, are an interesting, dare I say clever, deviation for the startup. Most social networks allow for “likes” and free-form comments, but most don’t support a range of positive and negative emotions. We anticipate users will respond positively to new addition, as the ability to quickly react to moments shared by friends and visually assess how others are reacting are nice conveniences. Still, app users may be dismayed that, at least for now, comments are not a part of the app experience.

Should Path accumulate a large enough user base and aggregate emotions across its private social network, it could use emotions data to develop a mood algorithm that understands human emotion over time. Of course, that’s a stretch, but perchance there’s more method than madness happening behind the scenes at Path.

The updated app, version 1.3, should be available for download later this afternoon.

Image courtesy of Flickr, paloetic

More About: Path, social media, startup

What would you do if you found a canister of film in the middle of a snowy park? (After wondering to yourself, “Who the hell still uses film?” that is). Well, if you’re Todd Bieber, you make a YouTube video in order to find the owners of that film.

Bieber, who works as director of production and content at Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, was cross-country skiing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park when he came across a lone canister of film.

“When I first I got the canister, I set it back down on a fence post,” Bieber says. “And then I went back and grabbed it, because, well, that’s not fun.”

After getting the film developed, Bieber found a series of pictures depicting New York in the wake of the blizzard — from the ducks swimming in Central Park (an obvious Catcher in the Rye reference, he thought), to Coney Island to photos of the park where he found the canister. The photos — some of which showed the mysterious travelers who snapped them — intrigued Bieber.

“First of all, they’re film and then they’re black and white,” he says. “It looks like a history book a little bit. Especially with the snow. It has a weird timeless feel to it.”

Bieber also became interested in the people in the pictures. “They hit a lot of touristy spots in New York, the cool ones, not the lame ones,” he says. “They were people from out of town and made the most of being here in a blizzard.” They seemed like the kind of people he would want to have adventures with.

Most people would have left it at that — pocketed the pics and perhaps brought them out at a party to facilitate the anecdote. Not Bieber, who promptly made the above video with the aim of getting the film back in the proper hands.

“They’re not mine,” Bieber says simply. “If I lose one picture, I’m upset. I would think they were the same way.”

[ht Nick Walsh]

More About: pop culture, video, youtube

Ahead of its earning call for the first quarter of fiscal 2011, Apple announced record-breaking earnings, led by strong sales of the iPhone, Mac and iPad product lines.

The iPad in particular had a phenomenal holiday season, with more than 7.3 million units sold. That’s an increase of more than 85% from the fourth quarter. Since launching the iPad in April 2010, Apple has sold almost 15 million iPads.

The success of the iPad hasn’t cannibalized Mac sales — to the contrary, Apple had its best quarter ever for the Mac, selling 4.19 million units in the December quarter.

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Apple: We’re Not Sitting Still

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As we saw at CES, tablet fever has taken over the consumer electronics industry, with would-be iPad competitors appearing at every turn. Everyone (and we do mean everyone) has a tablet or is working on a tablet.

The fact that Apple has established a user base of nearly 15 million in just nine months makes Apple a formidable competitor in this emerging space.

For comparison, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab — one of the few high-profile non-Apple tablets to hit the retail market before the end of 2010 — managed to sell more than a million units in its first 60 days. By comparison, Apple is averaging a little more than 2 million iPad units per month, with that figure rising every month.

We should note that these sorts of leads are not insurmountable. After all, Android as a device category is now eclipsing iOS in terms of sales. Still, individual phone models from companies like HTC, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung aren’t matching the figures Apple continues to turn out with the iPhone.

Apple COO Tim Cook (the man currently taking over day-to-day operations for Steve Jobs) commented on the current competition during Tuesday’s earnings call. Cook made it clear that Apple doesn’t believe the Android-based tablets on the market are competition. He called these devices “scaled up smartphones” and continued to opine that he sees them as “bizarre product[s]” that don’t offer the “real tablet experience,” and he asserted Apple’s belief that it has a “huge, first-mover advantage.”

Cook acknowledged that future tablets running Google Honeycomb or from RIM may provide some competition, noting that Apple will “assess [the competition] as [it is] coming;” Cook made it clear that Apple isn’t sitting still.

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted that 80% of the Fortune 100 is either deploying or piloting the iPad in the enterprise. That’s up from 65% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

With this level of penetration on the consumer and business side, unseating Apple in this space won’t be easy. It will be interesting to watch what Google, Microsoft, RIM and HP do in the future.

More About: android, apple, apple earnings call, iOS, ipad, sales, tablets

To promote its new racy teen drama, Skins, MTV has launched an entertainment checkin service that lets fans interact with each other, the show and even snag free tunes.

Partnering with social television startup Starling, MTV has created a co-viewing tool called MTV Skins Captionbomb. The premise is rather simple: Access the tool via Facebook, and then start chatting.

Users are presented with a card on which their Facebook picture appears, and then can start interacting with others in order to “unlock” new cards, which feature the faces of the Skins cast. Players can then “Play” those cards by commenting on them, thereby contributing to the general conversation about the show.

Perhaps the coolest aspect of the game is that you’re not just playing for virtual currency, you can also unlock free MP3 downloads from bands featured on the show — mostly indie acts like The Drums and The So So Glos.

“We were trying to figure out how we could get beyond a checkin and create more interesting engaging ways that users can interact around our shows,” says Suejin Yang, vice president of product development for MTV.

“Music is a big part of the show experience,” says Colin Helms, vice president of MTV Digital Media. “They’re putting a lot of new and indie music into the show. The theme song was even sourced from the audience,” he adds, citing 3D Friends, the band that provided the track.

In addition to crowdsourcing the theme song, MTV really took to the web to grow buzz for the show. Since Skins was originally a UK show, it was easier to grow a fanbase before the premiere.

“We usually build a community after the show has launched,” says Helms. “We did the opposite with Skins.”

In fact, MTV started ramping up online efforts three months before the show’s premiere last night, January 17. The network launched skins.tv, a community hub featuring show content and a variety of apps, including Where It Went Down, which lets users share where memorable moments “went down”; the Fast Society group-texting mobile app, which we covered in the past; and a Facebook app to determine your “party personality.”

According to MTV, this virtual pre-gaming, if you will, paid off — garnering more than 5 million video streams and 700,000 uniques on the skins.tv site, 9,000 followers on Twitter, 55,000 “Likes” on Facebook, and 2,500 followers on Tumblr. That’s all before the show launched.

Granted, Skins has the advantage of being a known entity with a pre-existing fanbase, but MTV and Starling’s efforts — particularly the addition of free music to the checkin game — certainly are innovative.

Yes, entertainment checkin services are a known entity — that’s basically the premise of GetGlue (who sometimes even doles out physical rewards rather than digital stickers), and WE tv has partnered with entertainment checkin service Miso to create a branded campaign around the show Bridezillas.

Still, the addition of music — including up-and-coming music — fits perfectly with the campaign. Viewers are not only exposed to new music, they’re also impelled to interact with the show in order to get it.

“The whole experience is going beyond the badge,” says Kenny Miller, co-founder of Starling.tv. “To give people things they can actually use.”

While it may be counterintuitive — and distracting — to actively engage with others while also watching a show, recent studies have shown that a goodly number of people watch TV and surf the web simultaneously, and given that this is a show geared toward 12- to 24-year-olds, we imagine most of the viewers are online anyway.

What do you think of this campaign? Will you play while tuning into Skins next week?

More About: checkin, mtv, music, television, web apps

In recent quarters, Apple has seen sales of iPod fall flat, a signal to some that iPhone is starting to cannibalize sales of standalone mp3 players.

However, on its earnings call this afternoon, Apple noted that sales of iPod touch are continuing to grow. In fact, the company says that iPod touch now makes up more than half of total iPod sales, up 27% year-over-year.

That means that the company sold roughly 10 million of the device in the quarter (versus 16.2 million iPhones and 7.3 million iPads). Beyond helping Apple's bottom line, that's important because of the impact it has on the total size of the iOS ecosystem, which now totals 160 million devices.

The latest iteration of the device, which was revealed back in September, does just about everything that one can do with an iPhone 4, including run apps, use Facetime and record HD video (or what Steve Jobs joked is an “iPhone without a contract”). Given the sales numbers, that appears to be a compelling proposition to customers, even as mp3 players on the whole appear to be a declining category.

With Android smartphones (in aggregate) now outselling iPhone and Android-powered devices like the Samsung Galaxy Player set to hit the market, iPod touch is clearly a big part of keeping iOS's numbers in the same ballpark as its main competition, which, unlike Apple, now has devices being built by dozens of manufacturers.

More About: apple, iOS, ipod, iPod Touch

StumbleUpon, the former eBay-owned web discovery engine that returned to startup status in 2009, is making a strong comeback. On Monday, StumbleUpon users set a new record: 27.5 million stumbles in one day, which equates to 320 stumbles per second.

The metric was shared via Twitter on Tuesday. The company tells us the record-breaking day follows a strong December, which saw more than 700 million stumbles for the month.

Web users are showing a renewed interested in StumbleUpon; it launched back in 2001 but was quickly losing relevance under eBay’s domain. However, 2010 proved to be a big year for StumbleUpon, as it crossed the 12 million-member milestone back in November and now has upwards of 13 million members, according to a company spokesperson.

StumbleUpon has been aggressively rolling out new features, but it — like social news site Reddit — is likely benefiting from Digg’s fall from grace.

The veteran startup is also said to be soon launching StumbleUpon Pro, a freemium option for businesses and publications.

What do you make of StumbleUpon’s renaissance? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, magerleagues

More About: social media, stumbleupon

Hailed as the next big thing last year, commerce over Facebook — or “F-Commerce,” if you prefer — hasn’t really caught on yet. But Josh Himwich believes that’s because most people have it wrong. Instead of F-Commerce, Himwich thinks it’s more along the lines of “F-Errands.”

Quidsi, a unit of Amazon, last week launched Facebook sites where consumers could buy items from Soap.com and Diapers.com. Himwich, the vice president of eCommerce Solutions at Quidsi, says he took a while to add that functionality because he didn’t see any other merchants who had success selling via Facebook pages.

“Many of the retailers who have currently tried it at least in private will talk about the lack of success they’ve had,” says Himwich. “You’d be hard pressed to find a story where it did extremely well for them.”

Although Himwich declines to name names, JCPenney, Procter & Gamble’s Pampers, and retailers The Limited and Nine West, among others, have recently set up shop on Facebook. Jeffrey Grau, a senior analyst with eMarketer, agrees that F-Commerce hasn’t yet lived up to the hype. “It’s a real challenge because people are on Facebook to socialize with their friends and family,” Grau says, adding that the platform seems effective for broadcasting “liked” products.

What finally encouraged Himwich to embrace F-Commerce for Quidsi was his belief that instead of shopping on Facebook, many people would use it to knock out some errands. That was especially true for certain items Quidsi sells, like diapers. “It’s replenishment,” Himwich says of such purchases. Himwich says he got the idea from mobile apps, which are frequently use for “micro-tasks” like buying household staples.

About 600,000 shoppers regularly visit Quidsi’s sites. About a quarter of those consumers use an app called “My List” that was designed for replenishment purchases. Himwich’s hunch is that with targeted pay-per-click ads on Facebook, people who are on that social network will be reminded to buy more diapers, take a few minutes to get that done and then return to whatever they were doing on Facebook.

Grau says he thinks Quidsi’s approach is smart since the company is merely trying to increase its customers’ rate of repurchase rather than sell them something new. Still, Grau believes that others will figure out new ways to sell on Facebook that make sense. “It’s a harder business model on Facebook,” says Grau. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

More About: amazon, F-Commerce, facebook, Quidsi

One day after announcing that Steve Jobs was taking a leave of absence from the company, Apple has reported record-breaking earnings, with revenue of more than $26 billion for its fiscal first quarter, which includes holiday sales.

During the quarter, Apple sold 7.3 million iPads, 16.2 million iPhones, 4.1 million Macs and 19 million iPods. That brings the total number of iPads sold to nearly 15 million since the device was released last April.

The success of iPad doesn’t appear to be coming at the expense of Mac sales though, as some analysts had projected. Mac sales were up 23% year-over-year, setting a new record for the company.

iPhone sales were up 86% from the same quarter last year, with Apple remaining bullish on its prospects thanks to its impending launch on Verizon. “We've got some exciting things in the pipeline for this year including iPhone 4 on Verizon which customers can't wait to get their hands on,” Jobs said in a statement.

Shares of Apple — which opened down about 5% this morning in the wake of the Jobs news — continued to rebound after hours following the initial release of the earnings report.

Apple is holding a conference call at 5 p.m. ET / 2 p.m. PT to discuss the results in-depth and undoubtedly face questions from analysts about Jobs’s health and the company’s plans for a successor. Stay tuned to Mashable throughout the afternoon for additional coverage.

More About: apple, ipad, iphone, ipod, trending

The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Keep up with Oneupweb through its blog and monthly newsletter.

Running out of cereal is usually a problem that one must face on his own. But when David Berkowitz awoke to the dilemma one morning this October, he got some support from an unexpected source. After reading a tweet about his irritation, Edge Shave Gel sent him enough cereal that it should be a very long time before he runs out again.

“I'm still eating the cereal they sent me, so the positive brand association continues,” says Berkowitz.

Since September, 234 people have benefited from similar random acts of kindness from the @EdgeShaveZone Twitter account. As part of Edge’s Anti-Irritation Campaign, a team of two devotes its full-time efforts to seeking, responding to, and relieving irritation across Twitter, much of which is conveyed using Edge’s #soirritating hashtag. The team has given out everything from iPads and computers to megaphones and dancing panda YouTube videos in their efforts to “solve irritation.” One woman tweeted that she had voices in her head that were speaking in Spanish — Edge responded with the gift of a Spanish/English dictionary.

In about three months, @EdgeShaveZone has gathered about 1,500 followers, the #soirritating hashtag has been used about 6,800 times, and attention from numerous media outlets has contributed to mounting buzz — all of which likely contributed to Edge’s decision to continue the campaign throughout 2011. Mashable recently spoke with the team at Edelman Digital, that runs the campaign, about the factors that have contributed to its success.

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Using Twitter, Not Changing Twitter

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When was the last time you used Twitter to rave about a product you use every day? Most of us do that quite often. Designing a Twitter campaign that both promotes a brand effectively and fits the platform can be challenging. Instead of trying to change the way that people use the platform, the #soirritating campaign builds on top of what Twitter users are already doing: complaining.

"We picked Twitter because we noticed that a truth about Twitter was that people were always talking about how irritated they were about things, and we have a product that matched that truth, which was anti-irritation, so that was a good place for us,” says Katie Facada, the copywriter who composes tweets for @EdgeShaveZone.

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Getting the Word Out

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Edelman’s traditional PR agency handled media outreach to help spread the word about Edge’s random acts of kindness, but they also tried a unique angle. They asked popular humor blog someecards to design cartoons that promoted the campaign.

Another strategy in getting the word out was to solve irritations even before people picked up the #soirritating hashtag. The team set up Hootsuite to scan Twitter for its most irritated tweeters and surprised them by offering solutions. As people started becoming more familiar with the campaign and following @EdgeShaveZone, the team could respond to requests or tweet out timely conversation topics like “What Halloween candy is #soirritating?” (Orange foam peanuts, clearly.)

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Becoming a Personality

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When someone tweeted it was #soirritating that they had no Microsoft Surface, @EdgeShaveZone used this photo to explain that the team was in the middle of a game on the Microsoft Surface that happened to be in the lobby and wouldn’t be able to send it.

Nobody wants to converse with a marketing bot. And Edge made significant efforts to avoid being boring. They kept their tweets honest, conversational, and as the campaign’s community manager Kevin DeStefan puts it (though he hates this phrase), “real.”

Obviously, many people find it #soirritating that their iPods, computers and other expensive electronics are broken, but the team continues to focus on unique requests they can start conversations about.

One woman, for instance, tweeted that her husband never put his hearing aids in.

“We can't send him hearing aides, we can't really make him wear hearing aids,” explains DeStefan. “So, we sent her a megaphone.”

This was something they could start a conversation about (i.e. “It’s like caps lock for real life”). The woman posted a Twitpic of herself speaking to her husband using the megaphone.

“It was great for us, we got that engagement, and people actually followed us. So, other people were interested in what [was] going on,” DeStefan says.

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Dolling Out Creativity, Not Cash

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The team has given out a good share of expensive prizes: iPads, game tickets, and even a MacBook Pro. But they’ve found that it’s really the thought that counts.

“A lot of times we didn't even have to give out prizes to solve irritations,” DeStefan says. “We had one computer programmer, she tweeted us saying that it was so irritating that she was having to program for old browsers. And obviously we really couldn't do much about that irritation, so we sent her a video of a dancing panda, and that made her day.”

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Taking Twitter Seriously

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Copywriter Katie Facada and Account Executive Kevin DeStefan relieved irritation on a full-time basis from “The Zone” at Edelman Digital

During the campaign, Facada and DeStefan spent all day monitoring irritation on Twitter in a special room that they began to refer to as “the Zone.” This was no half-effort.

“One of the top things is really resource commitment, and really understanding that in order to have the frequency and the level of engagement required to talk with people in a meaningful way, it takes time,” explains Andrew Foote, senior vice president of Edelman Digital. “This isn't something that you would typically add to the bottom of a program, you know—hey, put a few hours toward Twitter, send out tweets.”

In order for the campaign to be effective, it was also important to be able to interact in real time without waiting for client approval. Had the team, let’s say, had a weekly meeting with the client to approve that week’s tweets, the campaign would have lacked its conversational tone and much of its ability to engage.

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Series Supported by Oneupweb

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The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb. The agency has been a leader in the digital marketing space for nearly 15 years, creating and executing integrated online marketing plans that blend search, social and design to deliver maximum impact and ROI to their mid-and enterprise-level clients. An award-winning agency, Oneupweb is committed to helping brands grow. Visit OneUpWeb.com to learn more.

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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 Flickr, MARCOS XOTOKO.

More About: #soirritating, advertising, Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, edelman, edge, MARKETING, social media marketing, Twitter campaign

Chris Pitre is a social marketing strategist at Idea where he serves as an in-house maven on social, mobile, and integrated strategies. Chris is also an instructor at the Houston School of Advertising on social media and digital strategy.

When it comes to marketing strategy, research is critical. Marketing research, an unsung hero of the marketing cosmos, tends to be excused, neglected, forgotten, or ignored as concepts move into execution and execution turns into conversation, engagement, or criticism. Why?

Sometimes the cost alone to execute a valid study can blow the budget. In addition, as timelines are getting reduced in order for brands to get consumer attention, taking the time to recruit participants, execute the study, and analyze the results extends beyond, or well into, the go-to-market plan. Or, the findings are stale from the time lapse between executing the study and reporting the findings.

Crowdsourced research can help span that gap by providing timely, detailed results to help marketing strategies at large. Read on for some of the associated advantages and tools to get you started.

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The Advantages of Crowdsourcing

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While traditional research is proven, scientific, and almost always reliable, there is room in many marketers' plans for crowdsourced research. It can be a timely addition to the traditional efforts brands employ as it allows some degree of collaboration, control, and continuity to flow between consumers and those brands interested in learning from them.

Whether for agencies, brand marketers, researchers, academia or media companies, crowdsourcing research can provide insights and opinions to the team quicker and cheaper. Crowdsourced research comes from the collective voices of consumers and typically constitutes some form of digital collaboration between a brand and its community.

Traditional research is one-way, where the brand, or presiding organization, has the control and employs rigid, scientific methodologies. Crowdsourced research began with private communities and wikis but has come a long way. Communispace has been helping brands since 2000 when it launched Hallmark's first private community. Now, monitoring tools, video chat capabilities, social networks and advanced mobile devices makes crowdsourced research easier, cheaper, and quicker to do.

What are the advantages of crowdsourced research?

• Cost-effectiveness –- Comparatively speaking, crowdsourced research can be done at a fraction of the cost of traditional research.
• Quick Turn Around –- The time it takes to gather, execute, and analyze is shorter thanks to a purely digital foundation.
• Flexibility –- As trends emerge in findings, researchers can easily adjust their strategy to catch any shifts or "surprises.”
• Collaboration –- Crowdsourced research allows brands to collaborate easily with customers to ideate or improve upon products, to test concepts, ads, and experiences, and to continue the conversation over a longer term.
• Velocity –- Crowdsourced research can travel at the speed of digital, allowing for real-time consumer behavior analysis and insight for new technologies, memes, trends, and conversations.
• Marketing and Marketing Research –- Even though it's frowned upon and often times refuted in traditional research, the nature of crowdsourced research implies there will be some form of marketing intertwined as consumers share their stories, insights, and ideas for brands they support.

Crowdsourced research can be very helpful in getting a quick pulse on a strategy, idea, concept, or experience before it's released to the public. It also can be a great complement to traditional research to validate or re-validate findings after time lapses. For agencies, crowdsourcing research can be a resource saver on new business pitches while still showing the client innovation through research, not just ideas and traditional methodologies. Our agency has saved thousands of dollars, as well as enhanced the final product, by incorporating crowdsourced research into our pitch development process.

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Crowdtap

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Crowdtap, which is still in beta, is a tool that fills the gap between traditional research and digital, and helps with insight gathering, customer empowerment and influence. At my company, we use Crowdtap to augment our research activities, especially when time is of the essence (i.e. new business pitches, client presentations, low-budget projects). Brands and agencies can leverage Crowdtap to target questions (polls, discussion topics, and open-ended queries) to a certain demographic profile subscribed to the tool.

You can view responses in real time, which can allow you to optimize subsequent questions or actions based on those responses. The tool is best for B2C efforts, especially marketers interested in Millennials and moms. B2B marketers will have to be more creative in using the tool. Marketers can sign up at Crowdtap to be notified when it launches publicly.

While it's not a replacement for traditional methodologies, Crowdtap comes close to providing similar qualitative and quantitative findings to traditional research. In addition, it takes away the burden of providing incentives to participants, as they are rewarded through a unique combination of cash and points. Between 5 and 100% of this cash reward can be donated to a designated charity, with another 5% matched by Crowdtap if donated. The tool can also be used to help organize events or share digital content.

With advancements in digital, brands can (and should) go beyond engagement and drive more intelligence, especially social intelligence, into its marketing efforts. This can be done by employing crowdsourced research as well as using findings to optimize strategies. With so much focus on content and conversation these days, it seems as though research from the crowd is a perfect fit.

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More Marketing Resources from Mashable:

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- Case Study: How Google Sells Its Free Products
- HOW TO: Create a World-Class Online Community for Your Business
- How Social Data & Mobile Tech Can Improve the Retail Experience
- Making Data Relevant: The New Metrics for Social Marketing
- Why Marketing Threatens the True Promise of Social Media

Image courtesy of Wayne Large

More About: business, Crowdsource, crowdsourcing, crowdtap, MARKETING, marketing research

Appcelerator, a platform for mobile and web development, has just announced its acquisition of Aptana, an integrated development environment (IDE) for web apps.

Together, both entities hope the new offering will be the best suite of tools for designing, developing and deploying cloud-connected apps, particularly for enterprise-level applications.

Appcelerator is also putting a strong focus on mobile and cross-platform app development.

In a statement, Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie said, "We have always focused on enabling the best possible native application experience. This announcement furthers that vision by empowering our growing community of developers to build, test and deploy native, cloud-connected mobile applications faster and with higher quality than ever before.”

“We are also excited to introduce Aptana's millions of developers to the mobile innovation wave that we have been riding and supporting as a company over the past two years," he added.

Currently, Appcelerator is behind around 10,000 native iOS, Android and desktop applications, making it one of the leaders in cross-platform development. The mutual customer base is expected to be around 1.5 million developers, with integrated support for the combined developer community coming over the coming months.

As part of the acquisition, Appcelerator is getting Aptana’s talented team, all of whom will stay on board to keep building the joint company’s platform and tools.

The integrated Appcelerator/Aptana product will emerge in free beta in late Q1 this year.

A company rep writes, “This release will include a full debugger, auto-complete and robust editing tools for Titanium-based applications.”

More announcements about the company’s product and roadmap will be coming from Appcelerator over the next few months, so stay tuned.

More About: acquisition, appcelerator, aptana

Scribd, the popular service for embedding and sharing documents around the web, has just inked a deal with investors for a $13 million Series C. The round was led by MLC Investments and SVB Capital, with Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group participating.

This is the first money the four-year-old startup has taken in more than two years; its Series B was a $9 million round in December 2008. The company’s total funding to date is $26 million.

The San Francisco-based Scribd will use some of this new money for hiring new engineers — with a likely concentration on devs with mobile experience — and other key staff.

The company’s focus on mobile, with the ultimate goal being universal accessibility, is alluded to in a statement from CEO Trip Adler.

"2011 is going to be a milestone year for us," he said. “As the world rapidly changes the way it reads, we are rapidly preparing to change the way we deliver what they read."

SVB Capital managing director Sulu Mamdani also said in the same statement, "Smartphones are the next computer for billions of consumers, and Scribd's aggressive expansion plans in the mobile space could bring social reading into the hands of every one of those users.

“Product growth, combined with the site's already impressive advertising revenue, presents enormous opportunity in the year ahead."

In fact, Scribd has been working on its mobile offering for at least the past year. In February 2010, the company rolled out a send-to-device feature intended to make its service play nicely with smartphones and e-readers.

Scribd reps say the site’s documents garner around 60 million readers each month.

More About: business, charles river, funding, investment, kinsey hills, MLC, RedPoint, scribd, series c, SVB, vc, venture capital

We’ve been expecting HP to show off at least one webOS-based tablet at a February 9 event. Now it looks like Engadget has gotten some leaked renders and marketing materials that show off some of the company’s tablet strategy.

When HP acquired Palm last year, it was clear that the company saw plans for webOS beyond just the smartphone. The company affirmed its plans to enter the tablet space in July.

Now Engadget is publishing information from a “trusted tipster” that sheds some light on HP’s plans.

The tipster reveals that HP is planning not one, but two tablets: a 9-inch model codenamed Topaz and a 7-inch model called Opal.

The rendered images Engadget obtained show off the Topaz, and the unit looks like a cross between an iPad and a Palm Pre. From the renders, it looks like the device will not have any physical buttons (capacitive perhaps) and will include a front-facing camera.

The render also shows off what looks like webOS on the device itself. Perhaps more than any other mobile OS, we expect webOS to have the easiest transition to larger-sized devices, so this makes sense.

While specifics like price and specifications weren’t revealed, Engadget did get a hold of what looks like an internal slide with a tentative release date slated for this September. This slide was for the Opal, so perhaps HP will be releasing the Topaz tablet more quickly.

Our only concern for HP is that announcing a device more than six months in advance, especially given the competition from — well, everyone — could wind up putting the company at a disadvantage.

Although webOS is better designed to scale to multiple device sizes than many of its competitors are, the lack of brand recognition in the smartphone market — when compared to iOS, Android and even BlackBerry — may limit some of the initial customer base.

We still think the potential for a webOS tablet is immense and we look forward to seeing what HP unveils next month.

Image courtesy of Engadget

More About: HP, hp palm, palm, tablets, webOS, webos tablet

Ever since MySpace cut its staff the other week, we’ve been wondering what social network/music discovery service could possibly replace it should it totally collapse. Well, UK-based startup MFLOW probably won’t be that service, but it certainly is fun.

MFLOW, by its own description, is “Twitter meets iTunes,” in that it allows users to both share and buy music. In essence, it’s a music discovery service/social network.

Basically, you create an account on MFLOW (for free) and connect it to your Twitter, Facebook and Buzz accounts (or any combination of the three). You can then search for music within the service’s 5 million song database (which is also ad-free), and then “Flow” a track. Flowing a track basically means sharing it on the aforementioned social networks.

When it comes to music, I was able to find a lot of my favorite bands thanks to UK partnerships with Sony Music, EMI and Universal, along with most of the independent labels and big aggregators. According to CEO Oleg Fomenko, MFLOW is currently working on deals that will hike 5 million tracks up to 7 million.

The first 10 tracks you Flow can also be downloaded for free and can be listened to by other users — sans payment. The only catch is that you can’t listen to a Flow over and over again, preventing people from liberally reaping the benefits of the services without paying anything.

Speaking of payment, you can also buy tracks using partner bank HSBC, and if another user buys a track that you Flow, you get credit for future purchases (20% of the cost of the song your friend bought).

Perhaps the most useful aspect of the service is discovery — the site features a “People Wall” that you can use to explore other people’s Flows (which you can listen to in full). You can also follow people on the service to get their latest picks. The only annoying thing is that the service doesn’t pull friends from Facebook, Twitter and Buzz, which makes it hard to find people.

Currently, the service has no mobile apps, but it is accessible on any device that supports HTML5, which is pretty awesome, because it will work on the iPad. Also, much like Spotify, MFLOW isn’t fully available in the U.S. yet — you can still listen to Flows and download your 10 free tracks, but you can’t buy music. MFLOW, however, has plans to become fully available in the U.S. toward the end of 2011.

MFLOW launched in the UK back in December and currently has 80,000 users who have — to date — sent more than 700,000 "flows" and purchased more than a quarter of a million tracks.

More About: mflow, music

U.S. marketers will spend $3.08 billion to advertise on social networking sites this year, according to new estimates from eMarketer.

That’s a 55% increase over the $1.99 billion U.S. advertisers reportedly spent on social networking sites in 2010, and nearly 11% of what they are expected to spend on all online advertising in the U.S. in 2011, eMarketer says.

Worldwide spending on social networks is expected to rise 71.6% to $5.97 billion, approximately 8.7% of the total amount advertisers are predicted to spend online in 2011.

And which social network is poised to take the biggest slice of those ad dollars? You guessed it: Facebook.

eMarketer expects that advertisers will spend $4 billion on the social networking giant this year, $2.19 billion of which will come from U.S. advertisers. That’s more than double the amount ($1.86 billion) Facebook pulled in in 2010.

“2010 was the year that Facebook firmly established itself as a major force not only in social network advertising but all of online advertising,” said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer. “In 2011, its global presence is something multinational advertisers can’t ignore.”

It could even surpass these estimates if it’s able to increase its global user base and pull in more revenue per user, she said.

Images courtesy of Flickr, Dell, Constant Contact

More About: ad spending, advertising, emarketer, facebook, MARKETING, social media

At long last, the mythical white iPhone 4 could finally be ready to reach stores.

According to reports from Engadget and MacRumors, white iPhone 4 units are showing up in inventory systems at Vodafone Germany and Best Buy. Leaked screenshots of the Best Buy inventory system indicate a projected in-stock date of February 27, 2011.

Antennagate aside, we think the white iPhone debacle was Apple’s most embarrassing moment of 2010.

First displayed at the iPhone 4 announcement in June, Apple was supposed to release the white version of the device at the end of that month. Launch day came and went, with the company attributing delays to “manufacturing problems.”

The exact nature of these problems has never been officially explained, but rumors suggest there was an issue matching the exact color on the glass and the plastic iPhone button.

Whatever impact a white iPhone option may have had on handset sales has likely passed. As MacRumors notes, customers have generally moved on, either to case modifications or to simply accepting the black model as is. Additionally, with the next iPhone likely due in June, users who have waited this long for a special color might just wind up waiting even longer.

In any event, we hope the white iPhone 4 does end up hitting stores, if only so we can confirm — with our own eyes — that it does exist.

More About: apple, iphone 4, white iphone, white iphone 4

This week, Acura announced a Facebook-based promotion for its 2011 TSX Sport Wagon designed to get consumers with an interest in outdoor sports to talk up the model. The cost: somewhere around $31,000.

Though Acura may spend multiples of that amount advertising the promotion, that’s the suggested retail price of the grand prize, the Sport Wagon. Car giveaways are the common prize for auto promotions, whether they’re on Facebook or via location-based services. For instance, a new scavenger hunt promo from Buick that uses location-based services offers a grand prize of a Buick, though there is a smaller prize of $2,000 for semi-finalists. Nissan’s “Juke the City” promo with SCVNGR offers…a new Nissan Juke.

Why base a national promotion on the price of one car? Wouldn’t the carmakers be better off offering $1 million or maybe a dozen cars instead?

Probably not. Rodney Mason, chief marketing officer of promotions firm Moosylvania, says that automakers are at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to promotions since they can’t offer small prizes to large amounts of people. Instead, they have to offer one big prize to one person, or at best, a handful of contestants.

Mason says the gold standard for promotions that actually engage large amounts of people is McDonald’s Monopoly, which starts with a national free-standing insert in various newspapers that offers everyone a free order of fries. With a sweepstakes promo, most people assume they won’t win, so there’s much less participation.

Mason says a 5% response rate is very good for an auto promotion like Acura’s. But would auto promotions do better if they offered, say, 10 cars instead of one? The answer is no. “The number of prizes and the dollar value is really irrelevant,” Mason says.

Another reason that automakers can get away with such relatively skimpy prizes is that activation is easy on Facebook. “Normally only having one prize would limit participation but this is not necessarily the case on Facebook,” says Drew Neisser, the CEO of Renegade, a social media and marketing consultancy. “That's because its just so easy for the consumer to hit the ‘like’ button and enter. Brands are using sweepstakes to inflate their like counts attracting a wide but not necessarily engaged audience.”

Neisser, however, says that auto companies need not be limited by the fact that they can’t give away fries, like McDonald’s. He suggests that they think bigger with, by offering, say, a test drive with Megan Fox or small prizes like iTunes song giveaways. On the other hand, they may conclude that giving away one car works, so why mess with it? “All that said, Acura will drive away with a lot of new so-called fans with whom they'll be able to converse cost-effectively down the road.” Or not. Neisser guesses that many consumers will have nothing to do with the brand after the contest. Says Neisser: “You can always unlike the brand after the contest.”

More About: Acura, advertising, facebook, MARKETING

Fans of Node.js will appreciate today’s finding: NodeFu, a sort of Heroku for Node.js.

The incredible success of Node.js last year was one of the top web-dev highlights of 2010. And the advent of more web-based development tools and more open-source tools was one of our predictions for 2011.

So it makes perfect sense to us that a developer has created an open-source hosting platform for Node.js.

NodeFu is a free way to deploy Node.js applications (here’s the source on GitHub). It’s a cool toy for devs who are experimenting with the hot new framework on the block.

NodeFu’s creators write on the site (which is rather bare bones, as NodeFu is currently more about the API than the pretty packaging), “We started this project because the ‘other’ Node.js hosting services was not sending out coupon invitations. Now anyone can host Node.js apps!”

NodeFu is currently running Node v.0.3.5 and updates all Node Package Manager modules weekly. Git is required to push updates to NodeFu.

Here’s a video explaining the origins of NodeFu and a walkthrough of how to use the site and the service:

More About: foss, heroku, node, node.js, nodefu, open source

Just a little more than two years after it was first conceptualized, the “One Day On Earth” project is one step closer to completion with the launch of its video archive, featuring thousands of videos shot by people around the world on October 10, 2010.

The project, which will culminate in a feature film, had been in development long before YouTube announced a similarly crowd-sourced, Ridley Scott-produced documentary — Life In A Day — that will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival later this month. Today, as of 12 p.m. ET, “One Day On Earth” has released its geotagged video map, featuring all content shot on 10-10-10; this archive can be searched by topic, popularity and location.

It was not a simple task for Director Kyle Ruddick and Executive Producer Brandon Litman, friends who met at the University of Southern California about 10 years ago. But a combination of social platforms, partnerships with 60 non-profits — including the United Nations Development Programme — and donations helped keep it going. The project website — something of a social network in itself — wound up drawing in 15,400 members from all over the world. And digital educational toolkits, distributed for free by those behind the project, were requested for 450,000 students in 62 countries. Litman and Ruddick talked to Mashable about how it all came together.

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Building the Online Community

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When Ruddick — a filmmaker himself — first started to look into finding out whether anyone would have interest in a large-scale collaborative film, video sharing site Vimeo became one of the main forums he used to reach out to others. He began to gather “an impressive list of names,” as Litman puts it, and it was eventually decided that it was time to put together an actual social network, so people could interact and collaborate beyond just sending their footage in. The two friends felt a social network was important for the project, which has been funded out of their pockets and via donations from friends, family and other interested parties.

“The idea was that for people to participate in something out of the kindness of their heart, they needed to be in an open space where they can be openly reciprocated for that — for credit, and for being part of it,” Ruddick explains. “That sort of creative paradigm is really why it evolved into what it is now.”

And so the site was formed, using social networking platform Ning and the Vimeo API, to make “One Day On Earth” become a reality. It offers many of the usual features found on social networking sites like Facebook, with members being able to share media and create groups, which included one for women expecting children on October 10, 2010. Once the day of filming passed, all the videos people uploaded were linked back to their profiles, providing viewers with direct access to the sources of the content.

“If you see something that you like, you can easily get in touch with the person who shot it and ask questions,” Litman says. “If that person is interested in following up, you can start a whole dialogue about what that person experienced and sort of get this unfiltered perspective.”

Meanwhile, Litman and Ruddick made sure participants could provide them with as much information as possible while uploading their videos, making it easier to sort through hours of footage. As participants initiated uploads, they would answer a variety of questions, providing admins with time stamps, locations — sometimes even transcripts — and categories the video could be filed under. Those behind the project also made sure to verify information — such as a participant’s age — and used the site’s administrative panel to make notes about whether the video had been reviewed or whether a user was being asked to submit raw footage (for the feature film) as well.

“It saved us so much time,” Litman says. “It’s what’s needed in this sort of large global project.”

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Forming Large-Scale Partnerships

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From providing their own video footage to promoting “One Day On Earth,” non-profit organizations — and even federally-funded ones like NASA — have played a large part in contributing to the project. For instance, 350.org — which has a mission to find solutions for the climate crisis — held its own Global Work Party event on October 10, 2010.

“Because they had a worldwide climate change event that day, it’s become a part of the big picture of that day in many ways, which is great,” Ruddick says. “People pretty much in almost every country in the world were reducing their carbon emissions, and part of that process was to document it. And I think they came to the table with a lot of documentation of that around the world.”

While international organizations like the United Nations, Water.org, the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch all played a part, grassroots organizations also got involved.

“Some of the grassroots really took this project under their wing to explain what they were doing,” Ruddick points out. “These kind of small non-profits actually sort of really had a moment to produce a video and it was for themselves too.”

In addition, when users uploaded their videos, they were given the option to link the video to a particular cause, thus providing that cause with permission to use the footage for promotional purposes.

Meanwhile, even though the majority of “One Day On Earth” is driven by online platforms, some organizations have been helpful in bringing video footage to the project’s producers from areas with poor Internet access, slow postal systems or government-related difficulties.

“With the U.N., one of the most amazing things about the collaboration is they’re helping us logistically get videos back from areas without extremely good bandwidth,” Litman says. “So as we speak right now, there are packages in transit… which has turned out to be a really critical part of this project.”

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Looking Ahead

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With the launch of today’s archive, which Ruddick views as a “global video map,” online visitors will be able to see a geotagged map of all the footage shot around the world on October 10, 2010. While Ruddick and Litman are careful not to specify exactly how many submissions they received, pointing out that sometimes a single participant would provide edited pieces along with a bundle of other clips, viewers should have access to approximately 5,000 to 6,000 edited pieces in the archive.

The archive features videos from the aforementioned organizations, as well as experienced and amateur filmmakers alike. And there’s a variety of footage out there, including a bride in Kosovo having her face painted for her wedding, babies in Finland taking swimming lessons with their mothers, a poverty-stricken community in Pakistan and NASA’s footage from space.

“The hardest part about this whole experience as producer, [in] building this all, and also as the viewer, is to really digest that this is all life, this is all one day,” Litman says. “It’s almost sensory overload — this is the diversity of our planet. But at the same time, it’s also something to celebrate.”

It is likely that more video footage — especially the footage being delivered via snail mail — will be added to the archive in the future. Though Ruddick and Litman say they’ll stop accepting videos at some point, they will likely take a few here and there on a case-by-case basis.

The final feature film, though it has no set release date, will likely be debuted this fall at a runtime of about 90 minutes. The team plans for a worldwide premiere event, which will include an online component for the “One Day On Earth” community and an offline component in developing nations. There are plans to follow up with a limited theatrical release, and eventual DVD and TV distribution. All those who participated will have free access to view the film online.

And though the October 10, 2010 aspect of the project has yet to be truly completed, there are plans for another installment. November 11, 2011 has already been marked on the calendar, and Litman and Ruddick have already started talking to non-profit partners to figure out what issues might be important to highlight in the next round.

“I think that while we already have some accomplishments that probably could never have been done before,” Ruddick says, “I think that we’re scratching the surface related to how amazing and big a picture we can create.”

You can view a video out of Nigeria (below) to get a preview of what to expect in the “One Day On Earth” archive:

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More Web Video Resources from Mashable:

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- Why the Future of Online Video Is in Serious Trouble [OP-ED]
- YouTube's Most-Viewed Ads of 2010 [VIDEOS]
- The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads of 2010
- 4 Ways to Find Legal Music for Your YouTube Videos
- 5 Fresh Places to Find Great Online Video

More About: crowd sourced documentary, documentary, Film, one day on earth, social media, Vimeo, web video

Cultural historian Johan Huizinga suggested that play and games have always been learning tools, key to the development of culture and civilization. Today, as the multi-billion dollar gaming industry continues to soar and begins to embrace social good integration, Huizinga's theory reigns true.

From FarmVille calling on players to support Haiti to an onslaught of environmental, educational, and corporate social responsibility initiatives being driven by games, the fastest growing segment of entertainment is evolving into a new force of digital activism and facilitating social change.

The New York-based gaming advocate and non-profit organization Games for Change (G4C) has been supporting the creation of social impact games since 2004, and is focused on games for government agencies and NGOs, such as NASA and the U.N., as well as corporations that have a vested interest in teaching their employees how to find solutions for political, social, and financial issues.

Here’s a look at how games are being used in creative and inventive ways that help social good initiatives reach new audiences.

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Games for Change

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Games for Change Co-President Asi Burak believes games are going to be the most powerful media of the 21st century, but recognizes the challenges that come with measuring the success of games designed to drive social impact. "It's not enough anymore to say, 'I've got 100,000 people playing a game," said Burak. "What needs to be asked is 'what happened to the players as a result? Did they change their behavior?'"

As for when the tipping point will occur, Burak believes it all comes down to if and when games are accepted by the education system. "Right now, it’s almost like students go to school and go back into a time machine," opined Burak. "Someone will close this gap. I think when we see games in the classroom, we'll have a major breakthrough."

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The Education Arcade

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With organizations like Institute of Play, and the Games for Learning Institute working to exploit games as tools for education and social action, the "breakthrough" may transpire sooner than later.

The serial entrepreneur and founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, Nolan Bushnell (widely referred to as the father of the video game industry), predicts that as much as 60 to 70% of what children learn will be from video games. "One of the things that really helps people learn is … context," said Bushnell. "Kids don't like to learn abstract things out of context. A video game presents that context in a very serious way. The reality is that today's children have different brains than years and years ago. Brains are very plastic and conform to the types of structures that they're placed in."

Founded on that idea and that education should be designed to promote problem solving in our digitally savvy youth, New York City non-charter public school Quest to Learn has reconfigured the classroom to revolve around a video game-based curriculum. Students work collaboratively, building and playing in virtual worlds. They are taught how to understand and take ownership of the roles they each play in a larger system.

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Games Explore Real-World Systems

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Colleen Macklin, Associate Professor of Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design, says "games are an excellent tool for modeling and playing with all kinds of systems, economic, social and cultural."

She explained that today, video games are pervasive, and not just with youth. "I think as the field diversifies and game developers explore new profit models — as we’ve seen in the explosive success of Facebook games, which took many console-oriented game companies by surprise — we will see more games exploring ‘real world’ systems and learning outcomes for all kinds of players.”

Case in point: Mannahatta the Game was developed by PETLab at Parsons, in cooperation with members of the New Youth City Learning Network. It maps out the city of Manhattan's historical ecosystem, giving players points as they connect ecological elements that existed back in the year 1609.

Macklin says games are the best medium for learning about systems. "They place players right in the middle of a system and provide dynamic feedback to player actions," she stated. "You don’t get that kind of interaction — or learn the same way — with a book or a movie."

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Games Explore Real-World Problems

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Taking a business-minded approach to game-based learning, IBM released CityOne, an online game that challenges players to make city energy systems more efficient and sustainable. Through solving real-world problems with water, energy, banking, and retail, participants learn how technology can be applied to help accelerate and innovate the aforementioned systems.

Another game pushing sustainability to the fore is CEO2, which was released by the UK-based World Wide Fund for Nature to help companies decrease their carbon footprint. Players act as CEOs and determine which strategic investments will help their corporations grow in a low-carbon economy.

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Social Good Games and Good Business

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After all is said and done, the social change games must appeal to investors if they hope to have mainstream success. It just so happens that venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are on the lookout for developments in game-based learning. Doll Capital Management General Partner Pete Moran said "edutainment" is his main focus.

"We haven't seen a lot of companies creating game-based products very well as of yet," Moran said. "However, this is the number one area where we're looking for deals. A lot of entrepreneurs in this field are just getting things started, so we’re working with some of them to get it from a core idea to a business plan to a company."

Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners says social good integration in games is sound business if the model "builds community where people feel good about themselves, while giving to [a] cause or charity, which in turn helps make a profit… But at the end of the day, the games need to be running on a good business metric, in order to last and succeed."

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More Social Good Resources from Mashable:

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- 5 Facebook Giving Campaign Success Stories
- 4 Innovative Social Good Campaigns for Education
- 3 Ways to Empower Social Media Giving This Holiday Season
- 5 Creative Social Good Campaigns for the Holiday Season
- How Social Media Is Making Veteran Service Organizations Better

Image courtesy of Axel Pfaender

More About: education, gaming, non-profit, social good, video games