Mashable: Latest 29 News Updates - including “iPhone Prototype With 64 GB of Memory Unearthed [VIDEO]”

We know that, at some point in time, the iPhone will get more storage memory than the current maximum of 32 GB. Now, that moment seems closer than ever, as MIC gadget posted pictures and video of an iPhone prototype sporting 64 GB of memory.

The device is basically an iPhone 4, marked as having XXGB of memory on the back. It has 64 GB of memory, and some details (model number XXXXX, for example) are quite similar to the iPhone 4 prototype obtained by Gizmodo in April 2010.

The upcoming iPhone 5, which will probably be revealed in June, is rumored to have a bigger screen and a better camera. This leaked device, however, reveals very little detail about the next generation of the device, other than the notion that Apple is at least considering an iPhone with 64 GB of memory.

[via MIC gadget]

More About: 64 GB, apple, iphone, iphone 4, memory, prototype

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Popular Q&A network Stack Overflow has secured $12 million in series B funding and officially changed the company name to Stack Exchange, the company has announced.

The funding round was led by Index Ventures, with Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures chipping in as well. The new funding will be used to support the company’s growth, which – according to Stack Exchange’s data – has been amazing. Stack Exchange started out as a Q&A site for developers, and now its network consists of 45 expert Q&A sites on a variety of topics, with nearly 20 million monthly unique visitors, 95 million page views, and nearly 800,000 registered users.

The new funding comes after a significant search algorithm change by Google, which had recently declared war on content farms. The change was good news for Stack Exchange, whose co-founder Jeff Atwood recently said that content syndicators have begun outranking the site’s original content on Google Search.

More About: funding, programming, Stack Exchange, stack overflow

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Watch out, Flipboard. As of Wednesday, you have some serious competition: a free app called Zite that is constantly learning what you like to read on the iPad and creating a magazine finely tailored to your needs.

Many iPad owners who have used the free Flipboard app for any length of time are familiar with its promise and its shortcomings. Sure, it looks cool — enter your Twitter name and Facebook account, and it turns those feeds into a magazine, complete with gorgeous photos, headlines and virtually flippable pages. That’s why Apple named it iPad app of the year for 2010. The app also offers its own curated news feeds and can now plug into your Flickr account.

But how often do you actually read it? Does Flipboard really help you discover content that got buried in your Twitter feed overnight? How’s that unfiltered Facebook feed in magazine form working out for you?

“What’s broken is there’s so much stuff out there, and I don’t know how to get to it,” says Ali Devar, Zite’s founder and CEO. “There’s no automatic system that’s catching the important stuff I miss every day. Search doesn’t solve it. Social doesn’t solve it. A lot of [Zite beta testers] came back to us and said, ‘Thank goodness, here’s something that gives me my content and more, but filters it for me.’ People are feeling the pain, and they need it resolved.”

Zite pulls in stories from your Twitter feed, if you wish, or your Google Reader account. Neither are necessary. You can also choose from hundreds of topics you’re interested in or start with the plain-vanilla version of the magazine. That also is not required. Every story comes with thumbs up and thumbs down icons and a button to request more of that kind of story. But none of this is truly important.

The app’s secret sauce is this: It learns from your everyday reading. It’s constantly watching what kind of stories you click on, how long those stories are, how long you’re reading them for — and just as importantly, the stories you don’t click on. (It’ll give you less of those.) Just as Netflix and Amazon bring you movies and products that users similar to you liked, Zite is doing constant behind-the-scenes comparisons between readers, both inside the app and on the web in general.

“You should be able to notice right away that Zite is giving you stories that are meaningful to you,” says Devar.

Devar’s eight-employee team is drawn from researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, specifically its Laboratory for Computational Intelligence. That academic know-how is part of Zite’s DNA in the same way that Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s graduate project in computer science at Stanford gave birth to Google. Spend any amount of time with Devar, who has all of Page’s excitable geekiness, and he’ll talk your ear off about machine learning and how advanced it’s going to get over the next 20 years.

But what you get on the surface is a clean, easy-to-read collection of stories and photos without too many geeky bells and whistles. That’s because Devar and his team spent the last five years taking as many features out of Zite as they put in. “We were looking for ways to include a search engine, but that broke the product,” says Devar. “It took away from the Zen of it. For an initial launch, what you want to have is the simplest product. The less the user does, the better.”

According to a recent survey by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, 88% of iPad owners use their tablets to keep up with news and current events — the most frequently cited use. So with the number of iPad owners climbing to 15 million and showing no signs of slowing down — especially with Friday’s launch of the iPad 2 — the field of news aggregation apps is likely to become an increasingly lucrative one. Devar talks disinterestedly about revenue sharing deals and excitedly about display ads and how marketers are just beginning to understand how good they can look on an iPad.

The simple fact is the news app that can get you launching it over and over will win, and Zite is a strong early contender for the title. Given the strong assist Zite has from some of the planet’s smartest machine learning experts, it’s going to be interesting to see how, or whether, Flipboard can ever catch up.

More About: Flipboard, ipad, ipad magazine, magazine, trending, zite

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Formspring, the popular social Q&A app, has taken the wraps off a suite of SMS features that will give its users a quick and simple way to stay connected while on-the-go.

The service’s new SMS features can be enabled from the user’s Formspring settings. When SMS is turned on, the user will get SMS alerts and will be able to respond to questions, ask new questions and send out a questions to their other social networking accounts via a simple list of text commands.

Alerts can be customized rather extensively. You can choose to receive questions via SMS from anyone, only from someone you follow, or not at all. You’ll have the same choices when it comes to receiving responses to your questions. Users can choose to set up “after hours” parameters so they’re not getting text messages at all hours of the day and night, and they can also limit their Formspring SMS use to 25 messages per day.

The service is free on Formspring’s end, but users will have to pay their usual SMS bills with their service provider. Currently, Formspring’s SMS service is only available in the U.S., but that should be changing in the near future.

Already, Formspring’s mobile website gets 22.5 million hits a month, and the company claims that 10 million responses to questions are being posted every day. SMS may push users’ activity on the service even farther.

As a first step into the mobile arena, SMS is a smart way to begin. First, it’s been suggested that a lot of Formspring’s users are in a younger demographic — perhaps not a feature-rich-smartphone-owning demographic. The SMS offering would be a great way to get these youngsters using the service even more than they already do. And even if we’re not necessarily talking about younger users, it’s important to remember that in many parts of the global community, feature phones still dominate.

Second, in the great mobile-web-versus-native, Android-versus-iPhone quagmire that is mobile development, SMS features offer a simple way to enter the mobile market and gather information on how users are responding to mobile use as well as feedback on how mobile features can be improved. After all, SMS is how Twitter started in mobile, and the company didn’t announce its official mobile apps until last year. When they did so, they released beautiful, full-featured apps that were clearly the product of a long and thoughtful development process, not just a slap-dash, hacked-together mobile offering to appease app-hungry users. We’re guessing Formspring is taking the same slow-and-steady approach.

Ade Olonoh, the startup’s CEO, said in a release that SMS features have been highly requested by Formspring users. “The potential for mobile responses is huge,” he noted, “and SMS alerts are just the beginning of our efforts to support our members in responding to the world around them.”

In other words, Formspring isn’t just thinking about the tech-savvy, big-city market in developing its mobile offerings; they’re looking to acquire users globally, and they’re truly fishing where the fish are.

But, as the CEO stated, SMS is just the beginning. While third-party developers are using Formspring’s API to create mobile apps for several platforms, we’re not sure what Olonoh and friends have planned in that area; but it certainly sounds like the company is getting ready to move forward into mobile — which would be bad news for any mobile devs trying to build an ad-supported business on another service’s API.

Do you plan to use Formspring’s SMS services, or are you holding out for an official, native mobile app?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DougScheiderPhoto

More About: feature phone, formspring, mobile app, SMS, Text, text messaging

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Investors, perhaps nudged by the pending release of Apple’s camera-riffic iPad 2, now see the promise in DailyBooth; Ignition Partners and Sequoia Capital together ponied up $6 million to back the two-year old startup.

DailyBooth tests the theory that teens and photo-sharing go hand-in-hand — or face-to-face. The web and mobile service encourages its (mostly) youthful members to share photos of their faces on a daily basis in a process known as “boothing.”

DailyBooth, a teenager in its own right when compared to mobile photo sharing upstarts Instagram and Picplz, has spawned more than 14 million photos, a.k.a. “booths”, from members using front-facing cameras and is now better positioned to face its new, fast-growing competitors.

"We believe DailyBooth is uniquely positioned as a platform to harness the distribution and engagement potential of the front-facing camera,” says Ignition Partners’ Chris Howard, who will join the startup’s Board of Directors. “After using the site regularly, we see DailyBooth as a new form of social communication, and our firm is thrilled to be contributing to the growth of one of the web's most interesting communities."

This is DailyBooth’s first sizable round of financing. The Y Combinator alum startup had previously raised $1 million in angel funding from Kevin Rose, Betaworks, SV Angel, Sequoia Capital, Chis Sacca and other notable angels.

More About: dailybooth, funding, photo sharing, series a

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Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, has just launched a new initiative focused on nonprofits and public service. Called craigconnects, this project aims to bring people together online to work toward the common good.

“It's a long-term effort, not a one-shot deal,” said Newmark in a release. “I'm committing 20 years to craigconnects, focusing first on nonprofits and public service organizations that get stuff done on a sustainable basis.”

Newmark is focusing his efforts on seven primary areas of support: Community building, journalism, the Middle East, open and accountable government, service and volunteering, technology for social good, and veterans issues.

You can browse the full list of organizations Craigconnects supports; so far, endorsed entities include nonprofits such as Wikipedia, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kiva, Charity: Water and many more. Currently, the site features DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit that links would-be donors with classrooms in need of a little extra financial help.

Newmark says that after 10 years of for-profit community-building via Craigslist, he’s taking time to focus on this social good initiative “because it feels right.”

Newmark is currently asking citizens of the web to check out the site’s list of featured nonprofits and “consider helping them,” we’re assuming through monetary donations or perhaps volunteerism.

The project won’t be donating grants to these organizations itself; rather, this is more a call to arms for the millions of Internet users who have the willingness and ability to help affect social change and good. Craigconnects aims to support these nonprofits with its public voice and to help them connect to interested donors and volunteers. Newmark also hopes the site and project can be used to defend the public from “fake organizations that have a good story, but actually end up hurting the people they profess to serve.”

Image courtesy of Stephanie Canciello, unali artists.

More About: craig newmark, craislist, social good

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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: LawPivot

Quick Pitch: LawPivot connects startups that need legal advice with lawyers who can answer their questions.

Genius Idea: Founding a company requires so much legal legwork that some law schools offer a special degree in entrepreneurship. But most startups are understandably reluctant to cough up $300 to $600 per hour for legal advice, and they generally don’t have time (or personal assistants) to track down the appropriate lawyer for a consultation.

LawPivot’s founders, both lawyers, weren’t the first to notice this problem for startups, but they may have been first to see how a complementary problem on the lawyer’s side could help solve it.

“The legal industry is fundamentally changing right now, where it’s about how good of a lawyer you are, but also how big of a book of business that you have,” says co-founder Nitin Gupta. “Lawyers were just not taught how to develop business. All the traditional ways of developing business, which are speaking events, conferences, and writing articles, are just very inefficient.”

Gupta’s team has set out to offer the exposure and the public reputation that lawyers need in order to develop their businesses by asking them to answer startups’ legal questions free of charge.

Here’s how it works: Startups submit a question, tag it with relevant topics, and confidentially submit it to LawPivot. LawPivot’s algorithm selects the 10 lawyers from its database to answer that specific question based on how it is tagged and the company that submitted it. The startup can then select as many lawyers from that list as it feels comfortable sending its question to. Those lawyers, and nobody else, will see the contents of the question and have an opportunity to respond with advice.

Online legal advice has an obvious potential for disaster, but LawPivot has done its best to keep the operation legitimate. Guptas cofounder, Jay Mandal, is the former lead mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Apple. Together the team personally vets every lawyer that applies to answer questions on the site (so far they’ve approved more than 200 of them). A seed investment from Google Ventures also makes a strong statement in favor of the site’s credibility.

LawPivot is not intended to challenge law firms. Fair questions are more in line with, “What are the usual terms that one gives to a newly hired executive?” than, “Can you draft this contract?” Rather, it is intended to help law firms establish relationships and reputation. Recipients of advice can write testimonials for the lawyers who offered it, and lawyers move up a public ranking system as they provide valuable advice. Meanwhile, startups and other verticals LawPivot plans to target in the future get an easy starting point for legal questions.

The service is free, but eventually LawPivot will charge both lawyers and startups to use it. If the company can pull this business model off, it will have devised a way to not only intercept fees lawyers sometimes collect for consultations, but also to collect fees from those lawyers themselves. If that doesn’t scream brilliant, we don’t know what it does.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, photogl

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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: Google Ventures, lawpivot, startup

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As part of this year’s SXSWi, Mashable presents the Mashable SXSWi House, featuring private events, open houses, meet-and-greet opportunities and two nights of parties. Learn more here and register for public events on Eventbrite.

The 25th annual South by Southwest conference kicks off Friday, March 11, with its Interactive portion, featuring five days of energetic, creative and inspiring events in Austin, Texas.

Thousands of creative minds will gather to exchange ideas about media, technology and entertainment. Events will cover everything from the newest startups and devices to the rise of location-based services and interactive entertainment. There will be panel presentations, networking opportunities, trade shows and, of course, parties.

Mashable staff will be there in full force, reporting, attending and presenting at a variety of panels. Here’s a look at the events we’ll be participating in. Hope to see you there!

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Mashable at SXSWi 2011 Events

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Friday, March 11

• Lessons Learned from the Arab Spring Revolutions, 2 p.m. at the Radisson Town Lake Ballroom (Vadim Lavrusik, Community Manager & Social Strategist)

Saturday, March 12

• Brands and Digital R&D: PepsiCo10, 10:30 a.m. at the Austin Convention Center PepsiCo Plugged-In Stage (Adam Ostrow, Editor-in-Chief)

Sunday, March 13

• Measuring Social Media — Let’s Get Serious, 9:30 a.m. at the Hyatt TX Ballroom 2-4 (Christina Warren, Mobile & Dev Reporter)
• The New Workstyle — How Work Is Evolving, 11 a.m. at the Hyatt TX Ballroom 1 (Sharon Feder, Managing Editor)
• Linguistic Mythbusting: The Fake Language of the Web, 12:30 p.m. at the Hyatt TX Ballroom 2-4 (Adam Ostrow, Editor-in-Chief)
• Geek Games, 2:45 p.m. at the Mashable SXSWi House, Buffalo Billiards (Mashable Team)
• Media Tomorrow: The Message Is the Messenger, 3:30 p.m. at the Sheraton Creekside (Jennifer Van Grove, Startups Reporter)
• Official MashBash SXSWi 2011 Party, 10 p.m. at the Mashable SXSWi House, Buffalo Billiards (Mashable Team)

Monday, March 14

• FEATURED Q&A: Enabling New Experiences & Creating Serendipity Through Check-ins, 12:30 p.m. at the Austin Convention Center Ballroom D (Pete Cashmore, CEO & Founder) — Be sure to tell us what you think Pete should ask Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley.
• Geek Games, 2:45 p.m. at the Mashable SXSWi House, Buffalo Billiards (Mashable Team)
• Stand Out: Investigative Journalism for Bloggers, 3:30 p.m. at the Hyatt TX Ballroom 5-7 (Josh Catone, Features Editor)
• Official Mashable Night 2 SXSWi 2011 Party, 10 p.m. at the Mashable SXSWi House, Buffalo Billiards (Mashable Team)

Tuesday, March 15

• SXSW Accelerator Awards, 3:30 p.m. at the Austin Hilton Downtown Fourth Floor Salon B (Adam Ostrow, Editor-in-Chief)
• Connected Devices, the Cloud & the Future of Music, 5 p.m. at the Radisson Town Lake Ballroom (Brenna Ehrlich, Associate Media & Entertainment Editor)
• Tech Karaoke, 8 p.m. at Six Lounge (Brett Petersel, Audience Manager)

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Collect a Custom Passport Stamp on Gowalla

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By checking in at the events listed above, you’ll collect the Mashable SXSW 2011 custom passport stamp and be eligible to earn the Mashable Insider Pin. For the pin, you must check into three Mashable events either from this list, or a combination of these and our SXSWi House happenings.

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Follow Mashable on Gowalla for Austin Highlights »

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Located at Buffalo Billiards, the Mashable SXSWi House is hosting a variety of public and private events ranging from VIP dinners to open networking opportunities and parties, including the third annual MashBash SXSWi party on Sunday, March 13, with music from DJ Chicken George, and the official Mashable Night 2 SXSWi 2011 Party with music from Eclectic Method.

Register for public events at the SXSWi Mashable House on Eventbrite. The event is open to all SXSWi badge holders who are older than 21.

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Thanks to our sponsors

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Come check out the Pepsi MAX Lot at 3rd Street and San Jacinto Boulevard! Follow @PepsiMAX on Twitter for the daily schedule for huge concerts, happy hours, BBQs, games and giveaways! And, well, lots of free soda.

Sony Electronics is a leading provider of audio and video electronics and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets. Sony is noted for a wide range of consumer audio-visual products, such as the BRAVIA® LCD and 3D high-definition televisions, Cyber-shot® and α (alpha) digital cameras, Handycam® camcorder and Walkman® personal stereo. Sony is also an innovator in the IT arena with its VAIO® personal computers; and in high-definition professional broadcast and production equipment, highlighted by the XDCAM® HD and CineAlta™ lines of cameras and camcorders, and the SXRD™ 4K digital projector. Join the Sony Conversation at Sony.com/Blog.

Skifta is an app-based media shifting service that turns your Android phone into a global remote control. Easily access your digital media from virtually any source and stream to connected electronics in the home. With the DLNA Certified® Skifta app on your phone, you can easily access music, photos and videos from your phone, the cloud, or remotely from your home and stream that media to connected DLNA and UPnP consumer electronics including TVs, IP-stereos like Sonos systems, PlayStation® 3 consoles, Windows 7 PCs, and thousands more. No wires, downloading or side loading. Check it out at skifta.com.

If your website has a play button, it belongs on .TV. Stand out from the crowd with a .TV domain name; tell people you create and share great video content on your site even before they visit. Come visit us in the Mashable House at Buffalo Billiards on March 13-14 for a chance to register a FREE .TV domain name. And, mark your calendars: the .TV AUCTION starts March 9. Bid on desirable, sought-after domain names including air.tv, stocks.tv, who.tv, and more at moniker.com/tv or register the .TV of your choice for while you're there.

Photo courtesy Flickr, toodlepip

More About: gowalla, mashable, south by southwest, sxsw, sxsw 2011, sxswi, writers

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Tuesday, Google announced a few changes to Chrome, its engineered-for-speed web browser.

The super-fast beta version that was announced a few weeks ago has already been updated to a stable version. For the Googlers working on Chrome, speed entails not only faster code (the latest version of Chrome boasts a 66% improvement in JavaScript performance) but also easier-to-navigate interfaces.

With that in mind, the company is rolling out a new Settings interface for all Chrome users. One major change is that Settings are now presented in a Chrome tab rather than a dialog box — a change that will seem familiar to those using Google’s Cr-48 notebooks, which run Chrome OS and present absolutely everything in a browser tab.

Settings are also searchable, which many users will likely find extremely helpful.

Here’s a brief demo video showing Chrome’s new Settings pages in action:

Google has also extended its sandboxing features to Chrome’s Flash player.

Interested parties can download the latest version of Chrome now; be sure to check back with us in the comments section to let us know what you think of the new browser.

More About: browser, chrome, Google, Update

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With iOS 4.3 set to arrive by the end of the week (perhaps in the next few hours), we know that many of you are going to be turning to iTunes to update your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices.

Mashable has already covered the big new features in iOS 4.3, namely the introduction of the mobile hotspot for carriers other than Verizon and iTunes Home Sharing. Cosmetically, little has changed from iOS 4.2

Still, there are a few new features and surprises for iOS diehards. This is an evolutionary release but the upgrades and improvements, especially with the web browser, are much appreciated. We love the Home Sharing feature, and it makes accessing content from a Mac or PC easy. Watching movies purchased in iTunes or listening to playlists or browsing downloaded podcasts from an iOS device over a local network is a real treat and the surprise highlight of this release.

Apple TV 2 owners now have more options with AirPlay, but the real impact of those changes will come in the next few weeks as developers add or update features within their applications.

Check out our iOS 4.3 walkthrough, and then let us know what you think of the new iOS in the comments.

Mute or Rotation Switch Selector

Apple made a wise decision in iOS 4.3 for iPad by allowing users to choose between using the switch on the side of the device to mute volume or act as a rotation lock.

By default, the switch acts as a mute button. However, in the General section under Settings, users can toggle the functionality.

Mute or Rotation Switch On-Screen View

iOS 4.2 introduced the ability to double-tap the home button and swipe right to access a panel to easily control brightness or audio or video playback. The panel will now show either a mute button or a rotation lock, depending on your settings.

For instance, if you choose to designate the side switch as a rotation lock, the on-screen button will act as a mute switch.

Enabling Home Sharing

One of our favorite features in iOS 4.3 is support for iTunes Home Sharing. Home Sharing allows users to browse and playback iTunes content from across a local network.

To use Home Sharing, first make sure that the feature is enabled in iTunes. In iTunes, this means clicking on the Advanced menu and selecting "Turn on Home Sharing." Then just enter in your iTunes username and password.

In iOS 4.3 users will need to enable Home Sharing. Go to Settings and then select the iPod section. Then enter in your iTunes username and password into the box. This will enable your device to access your iTunes library when on the same local network.

Selecting iTunes Library

In the iPod app in iOS 4.3 a new "Library" menu item will appear in the sidebar. Using this selector, users can then choose a local iTunes library to connect to from within the app.

Home Sharing Album Browse

Home Sharing works incredibly well. Playlists, Smart Playlists, Podcasts, Audiobooks and videos are all accessible from the sidebar, just as if you were accessing local content in iOS.

I have a Smart Playlist setup to list every album I buy from Amazon.com. I can access that playlist group and browse each album in an easy to view, concise manner.

Playback takes place over the network and is seamless.

Home Sharing Music Video View

You can easily browse the music videos that you have added to iTunes or purchased via iTunes.

Home Sharing Voice Memos

For users that choose to automatically backup their iPhone voice memos to iTunes, those audio files are accessible via the iPod app in iOS. This is great for use on the iPad or for accessing notes that may no longer be local on the iPod.

Audiobooks

Audiobooks downloaded or imported from iTunes are also accessible via iOS 4.3.

Movies

In the Videos app on the iPad or on the Videos tab in iPod for iPhone/iPod touch, users can browse video files in their iTunes library.

For movies purchased from the iTunes store, this means you can playback that connected content on your iOS device over the network.

Chapter marks are accessible and pressing the "next" button in playback will go to the next marker.

Movies

This is really just to highlight Errol Morris's amazing film, The Thin Blue Line.

Music Playback

Playing back music via Home Sharing is the same as playing back local content.

Album art comes in clear and tracks can be scrubbed forward, backward or paused.

Music Playback Track Listing

While listening to music it's easy to switch back to the track view of an album or playlist.

Audio Podcasts

Audio podcasts play back over the network in the iPod app on iPad. Again, cover art is displayed on the screen.

Video Podcasts

Video podcasts can be browsed via the iPod app on the iPad but play back in the Videos application.

SunSpider Results

During the iPad 2 announcement, Steve Jobs pointed out that the JavaScript engine from Safari 5 for Mac OS X was now part of iOS 4.3.

CNET UK ran some benchmark tests on the new iPad 2 and found that indeed, JavaScript performance is much, much faster on the new device.

This performance boost isn't limited to the new iPad 2, the original iPad and the iPhone 4 also get a big boost.

Our iPad running the final release of 4.3 scored a 3306 on the SunSpider benchmark (lower is better in these tests).

That compares with CNET's 2097 on the iPad 2 and an 8321 on their iPad running iOS 4.2.

For comparison, our iOS 4.2.1 iPhone 4 scored a heavy 10214. In iOS 4.3 it racked up a much faster 4141.

HotSpot Support

Verizon customers aren't the only users that can use a mobile hotspot on the iPhone 4. iOS 4.3 brings that ability to users with different wireless carriers too.

The feature is subject to fees and data caps set by wireless providers but users can use the iPhone 4's 3G connection to power 3 other devices via Wi-Fi, one via Bluetooth and a fifth via USB connectivity.

Image credit: TiPB

More About: apple, hands-on, iOS, ios 4.2, ipad, iphone

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Kenny Powers, the foul-mouthed antihero from HBO's Eastbound and Down, will shill for K-Swiss again, this time for a Facebook-centered March Madness promotion.

Tournageddon, as the program is known, will let K-Swiss and Powers fans fill out their NCAA Basketball Tournament picks with input from Powers. Fans are directed to Yahoo's Tourney Pick 'Em group to make their selections before the March 17 tipoff of the tournament's first game.

Throughout the tourney, Powers, played by Danny McBride, will offer his own, likely crude assessments of each team via K-Swiss's Facebook Page. Powers will also offer "Powers Challenges" — training-based wagers on individual games. For instance, a group member can challenge another member to sprints based on the outcome of a single game. Powers will recognize the winners and losers.

K-Swiss's program comes after the footwear brand announced its affiliation with the Powers character via a FunnyorDie video featuring Powers/McBride making outrageous demands for his endorsement of K-Swiss’s Tubes shoe.

The Powers linkup, engineered by ad agency 72andSunny, is a recent example of a marketer concluding that alienating a portion of the audience is OK as long as the brand inspires passion. Miracle Whip, a Kraft brand that also had a fairly benign image, is attempting to evoke a similar reaction with a new campaign featuring the Jersey Shore‘s Pauly D dissing the brand.

“We try to make sure the humor is put in front of the right people in the right places,” says Chris Kyle, the vice president of marketing for K-Swiss, who adds that the affiliation has surprised a lot of people. “If anything, the goal is to been seen as a brand with a little more spark and a little more sense of humor,” he says. “The connection has been very positive.”

More About: advertising, FunnyorDie, hbo, K-Swiss, march madness, MARKETING

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Because the people need their bread and circuses — and no circus is complete without adorable creatures doing tricks — we have chosen the above as the YouTube Video of the Day.

Just take a few moments, let your jaw go slack, and watch this little Slow Loris play. Isn’t s/he winsome? Don’t you wish you could revel in his wonderment for the remainder of the day? I know I do.

OK, now commence killing your cubicle-bound soul.

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More About: video, viral-video-of-day, youtube

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Inbound marketing software company HubSpot announced Tuesday that it has received a $32 million round of Series D funding from Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Salesforce.com.

The five-year-old startup was one of the earliest firms (in my memory, at least) to take advantage of social media, search and mobile to attract leads and sales, frequently running online seminars on those subjects as a way to build up its now more than 4,000-member client base of small- and medium-sized business.

HubSpot has one core software platform designed to increase website traffic and convert that traffic into leads and sales. Apps within the platform offer control panels for general website and lead management, blogging, SEO, analytics and social media monitoring.

In addition to the three new investors, HubSpot’s previous list of VC investors — General Catalyst, Matrix Partners and Scale Venture Partners — also participated in the round. Part of the new funding will be used to “provide liquidity to existing shareholders,” HubSpot said in a statement but did not otherwise disclose its plans. A total of $55 million has been raised to date.

Disclosure: HubSpot is a Mashable sponsor.

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Online styling community Polyvore announced Tuesday the four winners of its Spring Break Style contest with American Eagle Outfitters. Each of the winning collages, or “sets,” will be featured on American Eagle’s billboard in Times Square between March 11 and March 18.

Users submitted 13,684 sets made up of American Eagle merchandise — the most contest entries Polyvore has received in a single campaign to date, said communications head Jennifer Yuille.

Collectively, entries generated more than 40,000 “likes,” 3,000 comments and half a million impressions.

Polyvore has run a number of creative, brand-sponsored contests lately, offering users the chance to style runway shows and the windows of famous retailers, and even the opportunity to become designers themselves.

To see the winning entries, check out the slideshow below.

Winning set designed by lauren.y.b.

Runner up designed by Kristelle Yokley.

Third place designed by nperu.

Fourth place designed by StelleM.

More About: american eagle, polyvore

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We all know that geeks are now in vogue and should receive VIP treatment. That’s why participants in Mashable‘s Geek Games will get priority VIP entrance into the third annual MashBash SXSWi party on Sunday, March 13, and the official Mashable Night 2 SXSWi 2011 Party on Monday, March 14.

The 64 participating teams consisting of two to five players will participate in a single-elimination tournament of head-to-head matches in bowling, Twister, shuffleboard, trivia and more. Participants are competing for all the geek glory and a sweet prize package that includes:

• A Sony Internet TV
• Sony PS3 with Buzz TV trivia and SingStar® Dance games
• HTC Desire HD Media Link DLNA Adapters courtesy of our sponsor Skifta
• Special prize package courtesy of our sponsors Pepsi MAX and .TV
• Geeky T-shirts and wrist bands

Celebrity Host & Interviews

Celebrity host Romany Malco will lead the two-day tournament, and comedian Chris Hardwick of Nerdist.com and Web Soup will interview participants for .TV, a Geek Games sponsor.

Games That Give to Charity
In addition to fun games, geek glory, VIP entrance and prizes, Geek Games is earning money for a good cause: Big Brothers Big Sisters. The $25 team participation fee funds a full week of mentoring for a child.

To register your team for the Geek Games, click on this link: geekgames.eventbrite.com

Geek Games Schedule
Sunday, March 13, 2011 (Invite-only for registered teams)
2:45 – 3:45 p.m. — Geek Games check-in
3:45 – 4:00 p.m. — Welcome & Rules
4:00 – 5:20 p.m. — Round 1: Shuffleboard
4:20 – 5:00 p.m. — Round 2: Pepsi MAX Bowling
4:40 – 5:30 p.m. — Round 3: Pepsi MAX Pong

Monday, March 14, 2011 (Open to the public)
2:45 – 3:45 p.m. — Geek Games check-in
3:45 – 4:00 p.m. — Welcome & Rules
4:00 – 4:30 p.m. — Round 4: Skifta Twister
4:20 – 5:00 p.m. — Round 5: Geek Trivia on Sony PS3
4:50 – 5:30 p.m. — FINALS: SingStar Dance on Sony PS3

Located at Buffalo Billiards, the Mashable SXSWi House is hosting a variety of public and private events ranging from VIP dinners to open networking opportunities and parties, including the third annual MashBash SXSWi party on Sunday, March 13, with music from DJ Chicken George, and the official Mashable Night 2 SXSWi 2011 Party with music from Eclectic Method.

Register for public events at the SXSWi Mashable House on Eventbrite. The event is open to all SXSWi badge holders who are older than 21.

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Thanks to our sponsors

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Come check out the Pepsi MAX Lot at 3rd Street and San Jacinto Boulevard! Follow @PepsiMAX on Twitter for the daily schedule for huge concerts, happy hours, BBQs, games, and giveaways! And, well, lots of free soda..

Sony Electronics is a leading provider of audio and video electronics and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets. Sony is noted for a wide range of consumer audio-visual products, such as the BRAVIA® LCD and 3D high-definition televisions, Cyber-shot® and α (alpha) digital cameras, Handycam® camcorder and Walkman® personal stereo. Sony is also an innovator in the IT arena with its VAIO® personal computers; and in high-definition professional broadcast and production equipment, highlighted by the XDCAM® HD and CineAlta™ lines of cameras and camcorders, and the SXRD™ 4K digital projector. Join the Sony Conversation at Sony.com/Blog.

Skifta is an app-based media shifting service that turns your Android phone into a global remote control. Easily access your digital media from virtually any source and stream to connected electronics in the home. With the DLNA Certified® Skifta app on your phone, you can easily access music, photos and videos from your phone, the cloud, or remotely from your home and stream that media to connected DLNA and UPnP consumer electronics including TVs, IP-stereos like Sonos systems, PlayStation® 3 consoles, Windows 7 PCs, and thousands more. No wires, downloading or side loading. Check it out at skifta.com.

If your website has a play button, it belongs on .TV. Stand out from the crowd with a .TV domain name; tell people you create and share great video content on your site even before they visit. Come visit us in the Mashable House at Buffalo Billiards on March 13-14 for a chance to register a FREE .TV domain name. And, mark your calendars: the .TV AUCTION starts March 9. Bid on desirable, sought-after domain names including air.tv, stocks.tv, who.tv, and more at moniker.com/tv or register the .TV of your choice for while you're there.

More About: geek games, sxsw, sxswi

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Like a gorilla through the mist, a new music service has entered the jungle in a big way: Beyond Oblivion, which is partially owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, just raised $77 million in funding in a round led by News Corp and global charity foundation Wellcome Trust.

News Corp first invested in Beyond Oblivion last April, and the service is currently in talks with Universal, Warner Music, Sony and EMI, according to the Guardian. Users should expect Beyond Oblivion to debut in September.

So what is this service, exactly? Well, it’s apparently a kind of music locker — like Google is reportedly planning — that will let users store and share tunes across devices.

The service will come pre-loaded on various devices, the makers of which will pay a one-time fee for installation, according to Hypebot. Rights holders will then get cash every time a song (legal or not) is played on the software. Beyond Oblivion itself will pony up this fee.

For a better sense of what Beyond Oblivion does, check out the above video, which shows CEO Adam Kidron discussing the service at Digital Music Forum East. (To be honest, the video reveals little.)

“We’re going to launch with $500 million revenue guarantees, and we pay a large proportion of that –- between 70% and 90% –- back to content owners,” Kidron told the Guardian.

We can see how those terms would be attractive to rights holders, but wonder how Beyond Oblivion will fare when it comes to turning a profit itself. We’ll just have to wait and see how the service functions when it hits the market, and whether consumers (who are still not wholly flocking to music services of this nature) will match News Corp and Co’s enthusiasm.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, shulz

More About: Beyond Oblivion, money, music, News Corp

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Ah, how fickle fame can be when you’re rendered an Internet meme that draws its strength from insanity. Yup, the web is starting to grow weary of Mr. Charlie Sheen’s antics, as evidenced by Tinted Sheen, the Charlie Sheen Browser Blocker.

Yep, this browser extension for Chrome and Firefox blacks out all mentions of Sheen and his antics (i.e., words like #winning) from your Internets. Download it today, unless you’re one of the legions of folks planning to apply for his ad-sponsored internship position — or you’re following his famous Twitter account.

This little extension was whipped up by Greg Leuch, who also created a hack that turns your Twitter icon into an animated GIF, and JESS3′s Ex-Blocker plugin (which my Stuff Hipsters Hate co-blogger and I contributed to) and does basically the same thing as Tinted Sheen, just with exes.

Will you nix Sheen from your digital world?

More About: charlie sheen, chrome, extension, Firefox

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Foursquare, the location-based mobile game startup that pioneered the checkin, will introduce version 3.0 Tuesday evening. The new release turns on the power of every checkin accumulated over the course of its two-year history and transforms that data into recommendations.

“Our theme internally has always been that every checkin counts,” says co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, who speaks of version 3.0 as the materialization of that philosophy.

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New Recommendation Engine

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The Foursquare user will immediately begin to see the value of the checkin in the new Explore tab. The Explore tab, which sits where the Tips tab once was, now serves as the meat of the application. Here, users can query for recommendations or dive into food, coffee, nightlife, shops and arts and entertainment recommendations served up by Foursquare and ranked by what’s most interesting to the user.

Crowley explains that recommendations are similar to Amazon or Netflix recommendations, but made for the real world. He compares the recommendation engine to a recycling center that makes old data new again. “We’re recycling data; so [the engine] spits back things that are tailored to what you’re doing.”

The engine is constantly being refined, and Crowley is wisely reluctant to share its secret sauce. He does indicate that the engine takes into consideration many factors including places you’ve checked in, frequency of checkins, places friends go, places friends go that you haven’t been to, places you’ve been with friends, time of day and day of the week.

Version 3.0 also reemphasizes points, which have faded over time. Points have been resurfaced and fancied up in the Me tab because the startup has introduced a new points system that aims to better encourage user behavior. There’s now 30 different triggers for points, says Crowley, and the leaderboard is more focused on friends.

The startup has historically structured its applications around three principles: discovery, encouragement and loyalty. Recommendations introduce much improved discovery mechanisms; the new points system works on the encouragement piece; and a slew of new special types being rolled out Wednesday will help in the loyalty department.

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New Merchant Features

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There will soon be seven special types available to merchants: Check-in Specials, Friend Specials, Flash Specials (e.g. the first 10 people to show up after 5 p.m. get a free drink), Swarm Specials, Newbie Specials, Mayor Specials and Loyalty Specials. Foursquare will reveal more details in the days ahead, but the startup is introducing these new special types to respond to merchant demand.

Version 3.0 supports the new special types and also finally allows application users to browse all nearby specials in the Places tab.

Foursquare, which owes much of its early success to adoption by SXSW Interactive crowds in 2009 and 2010, is releasing version 3.0 in advance of the festival to get people talking once again.

“South by Southwest is a good opportunity for us to try to get people to think differently about what we’re doing,” says Crowley. He speaks of his company being misinterpreted as just a checkin game, and of SXSW as a platform to change this perception.

“We help build tools that make it easier to explore the world,” he says. “We have a chance here to invent the future … and play in the sandbox that we created.”

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American Express Partnership

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In this sandbox, Foursquare has crafted a new castle of sorts: a pilot program with American Express that offers cardholders automatic savings when they swipe their cards at 60 participating merchants in the Austin, Texas area.

The new automatic credit card swipe AmEx specials are supported in version 3.0. The main idea, says Crowley, is to remove friction from redeeming merchant rewards. Foursquare users need only register their American Express cards and tap to unlock the special in the app. The “spend $5, save $5″ credit is then automatically applied to the cardholder’s account when the credit card is swiped by the merchant.

The program will be officially unveiled Thursday when Austin merchants offering these AmEx specials will be revealed. Early details leaked last week from the Wall Street Journal, but Crowley says much more news is still to come.

The AmEx partnership is nothing more than an avant garde credit card specials experiment and will only run from March 11 through March 15. It could, however, have larger implications on all Foursquare specials in the future. And, if Crowley gets his way, forever change how people think of Foursquare.

More About: american express, foursquare, foursquare recommendations, geolocation, location based social networks, Recommendations, sxsw, sxsw 2011, sxswi

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Facebook has released extensive updates to its Insights tool, which provides publishers who use Facebook plugins with analytics on how content is performing. Now they can see those analytics in real time.

The update enables publishers to get real-time distribution and engagement metrics of how the content on their site is performing on Facebook, meaning they’ll be able to optimize it for Facebook. For example, publishers will be able to see if a certain post is performing exceedingly well and could adjust its prominence. The metrics, of course, are exportable through the Graph API.

The update also includes a well-rounded look into content performance on and off Facebook. Publishers now can see the impressions, referral clicks and the most popular pages on their site. The Popular Pages view was expanded to include the top 100 pages that are getting the most likes, comments or shares.

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Deeper Engagement Analytics

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What’s useful is that one can break down the analytics by Facebook plugin (Like button, Comments, etc.). Website owners with Like buttons, for example, will be able to see how many people saw the button, clicked on them, saw the stories that got posted through the Like button and how many of them clicked on it to come to view it on your site. It also provides metrics for the recently updated Comments plugin, enabling publishers to see the rate of comments taking place and from whom.

Users can see the granular information, such as how many “likes” included a comment from the user — only 6% on Mashable.com, I found (knowing that the comment functionality on the Like button doesn’t always work). I also was able to learn that the “likes” that included comments were more likely to get clicked on Facebook, which makes sense because it adds a personal voice from the user. What is interesting is that Insights also breaks out the shares that occur using the plugins and “organic” shares, which essentially is how many shares took places by users simply copy-and-pasting links to share or using the old Share button.

This is likely to bring some great insight to designers who implement Facebook’s “Like” buttons to see how its placement affects the click-through rates of the button.

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Demographics for Interactions

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Insights now breaks down interactions based on anonymized demographics, which may enable site owners to target specific audiences.

Publishers will be able to learn more about the audience that interacts with its Facebook plugins on their site. For example, site owners can see what age group, gender, language or country is most active in using these plugins on their sites. However, publishers should note that the data for demographics shows numbers per interaction, not per user. This means the numbers shouldn’t be interpreted as showing how many users are interacting with the content on the site but rather how many interactions are taking places from a specific demographic.

More About: facebook, facebook insights, social media, social networking

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Facebook Live is taking its show on the road to SXSW in Austin, Texas, where the company will host its first Facebook Live interview sessions in front of a live audience.

Mashable is excited to announce that we'll be teaming up with Facebook for these live interviews during SXSW Interactive.

Along with Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg, Mashable's CEO and founder Pete Cashmore and some of our top editors will be conducting live interviews for a ticketed audience on Sunday, March 13, and Monday, March 14, from the Mashable SXSWi House.

Guests will include some of the biggest names in technology and digital media at SXSWi.

The celebrity guests will be taking questions throughout the interviews from people in the audience and those watching online at Facebook Live. You can also watch the live interviews during SXSWi on Mashable.tv.

Facebook is also partnering with IFC and PureVolume for the film and music portions of the festival, respectively, where they'll be interviewing popular actors and musicians from March 12 to 18.

SXSW attendees looking to score tickets to the interviews can follow daily updates on the Facebook Live Page, where Facebook will be giving away clues about how to get tickets, as well as announcing the names of the celebrity guests in the coming days.

More About: facebook, mashable, sxsw, sxswi, video

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The Social PR Series is supported by “Social Media. So What,” the free online conference from Vocus that'll re-shape and re-shine your social media skills. Let Scott Stratten and friends wipe that frown off your Facebook and make you a sweeter Tweeter. Register now!

As the web evolves from a network of sites to a network of people, public relations campaigns must also evolve, and most successful PR campaigns now include a social component. But beyond the basics, such as creating tweetable press release headlines and reaching out to influencers on Twitter, what are some of the more inventive approaches out there?

Here are five great examples of innovative social PR campaigns.

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1. Rayovac: Rapid-Response Twitter Campaign

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In early February 2011, with a snowstorm of historic proportions on the horizon, social media outlets were abuzz with news and updates about the weather. Rayovac and Circle PR quickly created a campaign that capitalized on the fact that millions of Americans would be home — and online — on Wednesday, February 2, the day slated to be the worst of the storm.

The central feature of the campaign was a virtual snowball fight that had more than 1,000 consumers changing their profile picture to a Rayovac-branded widget and hurling #snowballs at friends and family coast-to-coast for nearly 48 hours. The brand also hosted a two-hour virtual snow day tweet-up, where followers could tweet about the weather in their area, their favorite snow day activities and answer fun storm-prep and weather-related trivia for a chance to win great prizes.

The campaign generated 1,188 click-throughs to download the profile picture widget, #rayovac made its first-ever appearance as a top-ten trending topic worldwide, and the brand saw a 30% increase in followers on @rayovac_battery.

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2. Healthy Choice: Pairing a Social Coupon with Blogger Outreach

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Healthy Choice was looking to grow its Facebook fan base, increase engagement and reinforce the brand’s reputation for value. Knowing that the Healthy Choice consumer is a user of social media and interested in coupons, the brand introduced a progressive coupon on the Healthy Choice Facebook Page. The coupon began at a low value ($0.75 off) and increased as people “liked” the page and signed up for the coupon, ultimately reaching a “buy-one-get-one-free” deal.

The progressive coupon was supported through a variety of public relations tactics. The team conducted extensive outreach to coupon bloggers and individuals with whom the brand has built a relationship, purchased a Facebook ad and utilized the brand’s e-mail database to spread the word and encourage consumers to “like” the page and sign up for a coupon.

In just two weeks, the Healthy Choice Facebook page grew from 6,800 to nearly 60,000 fans, and the team distributed more than 50,000 buy-one-get-one-free coupons. The progressive coupon campaign also generated significant trade coverage, including an article in Brandweek.

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3. Breeders’ Cup: Social Storytelling

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While horse racing continues to have a dedicated following, overall interest has dropped in recent years — the marketing team for the Breeders' Cup World Championships needed a fresh approach to attracting and engaging new fans.

For the most recent Breeders' Cup, the team at Conover Tuttle Pace decided to focus its efforts around the story of Zenyatta, the undefeated female horse who had become a star for her dancing, Guinness-sipping ways and thrilling, come-from-behind finishes. The team’s Zenyatta-focused social media efforts included creating a dedicated Twitter handle for Zenyatta to tell her story and share news and exclusive updates. They also seeded the Breeders’ Cup YouTube channel with race footage, relevant fan videos and World Championship race videos, capped off with a viral, Zenyatta v. Secretariat video release right after she won her 19th race.

Within one month, Zenyatta's Twitter handle reached 1,300 followers. "Breeders' Cup" and "Zenyatta," were trending topics on Twitter during the event. The Conover Tuttle Pace campaign also attracted 1,000 subscribers to the Breeders' Cup YouTube channel, accounting for more than one million views since the channel's establishment.

The race was the most successful Breeders' Cup of all time, with ticket sales up 40% from 2009.

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4. The BALSAMS Grand Resort Hotel: Using Social to Share an Experience

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It can be hard to convey the magic of an experience through an ad or a magazine article. Working with agency bobdonpaul, The BALSAMS Grand Resort Hotel in New Hampshire decided to use social media to tell the hotel’s unique story.

The hotel’s “InnBedded Resorter” campaign used social media to find the world’s first-ever “Resorter” — a person who would live at the hotel for July and August 2010 and use social channels to share all of their experiences at the 8,000 acre resort. Entries poured in from all over the world — after narrowing the field to a few finalists, The BALSAMS then used online voting to pick the winner.

The company’s first Resorter was 23-year-old Martin Edgar Earley, who spent two months at the resort this summer. Early blogged and posted daily social media updates, photos and videos about all The BALSAMS had to offer. The campaign was a hit, and the hotel saw a 20% increase in bookings in August.

The resort then ran a winter campaign with Canadian social media travel superstars Alex & Luke. While at The BALSAMS, the couple used their own website, along with the resort's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and other social media platforms to continually update followers on their adventures at the resort. As a result, the hotel’s opening week of Winter 2010/2011 nearly sold out and was the busiest holiday weekend in years. Since launching the campaign, website traffic has also doubled.

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5. KFC: The Power of a Single Tweet

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With 2.5 million college scholarships awarded every year in the U.S., KFC knew it had to cook up something innovative to stir buzz around the brand’s 75-scholarship Colonel’s Scholars program. That’s why KFC and Weber-Shandwick decided to do away with the tired old college scholarship essay and award a $20,000 scholarship based solely on a single tweet. Students had just 140 characters (including the hashtag #KFCScholar) to convince KFC execs why they deserved a scholarship.

Announced via a USA Today story, the scholarship tweet campaign generated more than 1,000 media placements and tens of millions of media impressions, including two AP Wire stories, multiple stories on CNN Headline News, MSNBC, The Weather Channel and NBC national news. The program also captivated the online world, generating more than nine million social media impressions as a result of tweets during the brief entry period. In all, more than 2,800 applicants tweeted for their chance at $20,000, and the KFC Twitter handle saw a 20% jump in followers in just two weeks.

One of those followers was 17-year-old Amanda Russell, whose tweet, “Hey Colonel! Your scholarship’s the secret ingredient missing from my recipe for success! Got the grades, drive, just need cash!” scored her the $20,000 college scholarship.

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Series Supported by Vocus

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The Social PR Series is supported by “Social Media. So What,” the free online conference from Vocus that'll show you what businesses are getting wrong with social media and how to stop making the same mistakes. Register today to join Scott Stratten of UnMarketing and four other social media stars on March 16, completely free.

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More PR Resources From Mashable:

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- HOW TO: Land a Career in Digital Public Relations
- HOW TO: Earn Some Inexpensive Online Exposure for Your Small Business
- 5 Lessons Madison Avenue Can Learn From Startups
- 5 Predictions for the Public Relations Industry in 2011

More About: bobdonpaul, breeders' cup, circle PR, conover tuttle pace, healthy choice, kfc, pr, PUBLIC RELATIONS, rayovac, social media, social media marketing, Social PR Series, weber shandwick, youtube

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Google Instant Previews is now available on mobile phones running Android 2.2+ or iOS 4.x.

The feature, which is supported across 38 different languages, lets users preview a website before making the decision to click on a link. By selecting a magnifying glass icon next to a search result, users can browse the websites that appear on the first page of results. Tapping the page preview will open up the respective link.

We think that Google’s mobile implementation of Instant Previews is elegant. It’s also quite snappy — at least on my iPhone 4. Instant Previews will often showcase the mobile version of a web page, which is a nice touch.

When thinking about the overall utility for this type of feature, the best usage scenarios are probably times when users have limited bandwidth. Having said that, we do question how useful this feature will be for most users, because when Googling on the go, most users are just as likely to visit a page, wait a few seconds and then return to search results if the page isn’t appropriate. In other words, it can take more time to browse through the instant preview options than it can to just visit a few pages.

Google also created this video showcasing Instant Previews:

What do you think of Instant Previews on the desktop and on mobile devices? Let us know.

More About: android, Google, Google Instant Preview, Google mobile, iOS

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Before RCRD LBL and The Hype Machine, if you were in the market for free, legal music on the web, Epitonic was the place to go. Until it shut down in 2004, that is. Well, Tuesday — exactly 12 years after its 1999 launch — the site is back, bursting with free downloads for music fans.

Back in 1999, Epitonic was founded by Justin Sinkovich, Aaron Newton and Scott Bilby as a kind of legal — and curated — alternative to Napster. The founders aimed to find the best new music, enlisting DJs, bands, record fiends, etc. to select jams and get them into the ears of music lovers who might otherwise not be exposed to such tracks.

According to Sinkovich, during the site’s heyday, it had more than 500,000 unique monthly users and scored a Webby Award. It was also nominated in the Wired Reader’s Poll for “Best Music Site,” losing out to Napster. Still, buzz isn’t always enough to pay the bills; the site shut down in 2004 — despite help from Palm Pictures.

“Epitonic became like that band that was on a major label that was super cool that everyone loves, but is not making that label any money,” says Sinkovich. “So at a certain point you have to drop that band.”

Now, apparently, that band is having its reunion tour, as Sinkovich decided in 2010 to bring the site back — with all the original members on board. The team launched a successful Kickstarter campaign that yielded $5,000 in seed funding, as well as the key to the site’s resurrection.

Upon deciding to reenter the music discovery space, Sinkovich knew that he was no longer the only innovator in the space. Since Epitonic’s demise, sites like Pitchfork started offering free downloads, and the aforementioned RCRD LBL and The Hype Machine popped up. Indeed, countless sites serving up free music have hit the scene since Sinkovich’s venture came out of the gates.

“I had to sit down and look at those sites and really think about what everyone was doing and how I was going to become interesting and compelling to users,” Sinkovich says. “[Back in 1999], the difficulty wasn’t in the competition, it was in getting the licenses to offer the music, because for a lot of the labels, this was their first foray into giving away music.”

“Today the challenges have changed. Now it’s filtering through all the free music to find the very best,” he adds. “There’s still no ultimate destination for all of that free music within a certain aesthetic, and that is what I feel like we’re back to doing.”

Twelve bands are premiering new music today exclusively at Epitonic, including The Wrens, Marissa Nadler, Bloodiest, STRFKR, Withered Hand, Restorations and more.

The first thing one notices when visiting the new site is that it focuses more on playlists than individual downloads. One can stream or download entire playlists, or an individual tracks. This is rather divergent from many other sites, which often offer a download a day (MP3s that can easily be added to one’s music library and forgotten).

Personally, I’m really into the playlists from individual labels (many of which, like Beggars Group, tout a lot of bands that I like).

As of right now, the site isn’t all that flush with music — understandably, considering it’s relaunch day — but we think that the format that Sinkovich has chosen (curated playlists that are now organized by editors, genres, artists and labels) makes for an easy way to discover new music.

What do you think of the Epitonic relaunch? Do you think the site has the potential to reclaim its former glory? Or do you think that another music discovery site will take the crown?

Image courtesy of Flickr, craigCloutier

More About: epitonic, mp3, music

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New York-based interactive agency Breakfast (of auto-Foursquaring “Conan blimp” and Precious-the-tweeting-bike fame) released Monday the beta version of Instaprint, a lunchbox-sized device that turns photos modified with the iPhone app Instagram into physical prints.

The device can automatically detect and print photos (comments included) tagged with a particular location or hashtag. That makes it ideal for an organized gathering of iPhone-wielding tech enthusiasts, which is why the agency is taking two of the devices down to the SXSW conference in Austin this week.

Each photo is printed with an ink-less printing technology called Zink to more closely mimic the authentic Polaroid experience. Like traditional Polaroid photos, the color comes from the paper instead.

Processed photos will be posted in real time and collected in an archive at Instaprint.me. From now until March 10, users can tag Instagram photos with #instaprint and watch their photos get printed live on the site.

The finished version of Instaprint will be released to event organizers and other interested parties on March 18. (So, you know, if you’re throwing a party with one of these, toss me an invite.)

To learn more, check out the teaser video below.

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Video

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More About: breakfast, instagram, instaprint, sxsw 2011

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Kraft Foods is resurrecting a childhood game and adding a modern social media element — Twitter — to get people talking about macaroni and cheese.

Under a new program quietly rolled out over the past few weeks, any time two people individually use the phrase “mac & cheese” in a tweet, they'll each get a link pointing out the "Mac & Jinx." The first one to click the link and give Kraft his or her address gets five free boxes of Kraft’s mac and cheese and a T-shirt.

The Mac & Jinx promotion is the latest offbeat effort for the brand from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the envelope-pushing ad agency behind Burger King's advertising over the past decade or so and Microsoft's "Laptop Hunters" campaign, among others. Crispin's other work for Kraft includes TV ads showing kids complaining that their parents eat their macaroni and cheese dinners and outdoor ads that reacted to consumers' facial expressions.

The agency and the brand's entry into Twitter comes as marketers have been generally slow to realize the platform's potential, usually tacking on a Twitter component to a Facebook-heavy campaign. One exception is Energizer, whose fall 2010 campaign sought to respond to and alleviate irritated Twitter users on behalf of the brand's Edge Shave Gel.

More About: crispin porter + Bogusky, Kraft, Twitterl

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International Women’s Day is a big deal. And this year it is celebrating its 100th birthday. International Women’s Day (IWD) takes place on March 8, every year. It’s a time not just to celebrate the achievements of women worldwide but to raise questions about discrimination, equality and basic human rights.

The day’s etiquette, like most holidays, is understandably vague: How do you publicly show your support? Is there a color to wear, petition to sign or event to attend? While some may choose to shower appreciation on their female loved ones, social media offers a bunch of ways to show your support for a variety of social good initiatives focused on women’s rights.

Below you can find some interesting social good campaigns ranging from Twitter auctions to Daniel Craig dressed in drag (yes, really). The common thread, however, is the desire to not only “love” but to make an impact. Let us know in the comments what other sites and campaigns you’ve found, and share how you’ll be celebrating International Women’s Day.

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What You Can Do

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• Equals: Equals is a community of charities rallied under music super-mega-star and activist Annie Lennox. The coalition has some heavy hitters like Oxfam, Care and Amnesty International. Focused on equal rights for women, they’ve released a series of striking ads like the above, asking James Bond (Daniel Craig) to consider some of the imbalances and unfair gender expectations, ending with a very serious Craig dressed in drag. The site also has an interactive timeline of events filtered by geographical region.
• Twitchange: This social media celebrity auction house launched a short-term campaign in partnership with Tony Rocha and CARE to help young girls and women around the world. If you don’t feel like jumping into an auction, Twitchange lets you skip and donate directly to the charity.
• Vivanista: This site based around philanthropy has teamed up with CARE and Sprinkles Cupcakes to host “Cupcake Parties For A Purpose” through Meetup Everywhere. For anyone unsure of how to host a party around cupcakes, the site has put together a downloadable tool kit including a social media guide to help promote and raise awareness. Money raised through Vivanista will be donated to CARE.
• Oxfam Photobook: Oxfam America has created an interactive photobook called “Ending Hunger Starts Here.” While the site is focused around hunger issues, Oxfam has added more than 100 events having to do with International Women’s Day and included a call to action featuring women. To participate, Oxfam asks that you take a picture holding a sign saying “Ending Hunger Starts with Women” and then upload it to the site. The photobook has already attracted activists, congress members, musicians and everyday people.
• Google: It wouldn’t be a major international day if Google didn’t create a doodle to celebrate. Clicking on the image will take you to an international events page asking you to join women on the figurative (and literal) bridge. Events will take place on bridges world wide, including London’s Millennium Bridge and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. If you can’t make it in person, you can show your support by checking in virtually. You can also donate directly to a variety of causes or women’s rights charities listed below the map.
• InternationalWomensDay.org: Finally, head on over to this site devoted to IWD 2011 for a slew of resources. You can purchase tickets, donate, read up on different organizations, see photos and videos, and learn how you can help beyond March 8. There is also a handy social media page with tips on how to promote and get involved on Facebook and Twitter, including suggested posts. Try searching for hashtags like #internationalwomensday, #iwd or #iwd2011 to find conversations.

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More About: #internationalwomensday, #iwd, charity, international women's day, non-profit, social good

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The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, which offers inbound marketing software that helps small and medium sized businesses get found on the Internet by the right prospects and converts more of them into leads and customers. Learn more.

Mobile is an area of intense fascination for marketers and advertisers, partially because it’s so confounding.

Ideally, mobile marketing can be even more effective than search. Its targeted consumers are not sitting on their couches thinking about buying something — they’re out in the real world and are open to suggestions about where to go next. A well-timed coupon or even just a reminder that a store is nearby can create a sales opportunity out of thin air.

That said, there are huge barriers to getting an effective mobile campaign underway, including privacy issues, wireless carriers’ individual policies and the still low rate of smartphone adoption in the U.S.

Nevertheless, here are five mobile campaigns that worked within those limitations and showed the industry the potential of the mobile medium.

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1. PowerMat on MyTown

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If you haven’t heard of Booyah’s MyTown, imagine if Second Life was overlaid on the real world. Considered the world’s largest location-based game with 3.3 million players, MyTown offers virtual rewards when players check in to real locations. In early 2010, the game’s zealous user base caught the attention of PowerMat, a consumer electronics firm known for its wireless charging devices. In May 2010, the brand launched the first-ever sweepstakes on MyTown, offering virtual items when players checked in to a PowerMat retailer like Best Buy, Target or Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Results: PowerMat virtual goods garnered nearly 15 million interactions during the program. The clickthrough rate to PowerMat’s sweepstakes page was 1.8%, compared to an industry average of 0.1%. Players submitted more than 21,000 entries.

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2. InterContinental Hotels Group Boosts Mobile Search

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What’s the best mobile marketing tool: a mobile website or an app? For InterContinental Hotels Group, it’s no contest: a mobile website is much more valuable, according to Interactive Marketing Manager Marco De Rosa. Why? In a case study published by Google about IHG’s European mobile program, De Rosa points out that websites are more flexible across different platforms. Of course, apps have their place, and IHG launched one — called the Priority Club Reward app — which lets customers book hotel rooms, check their points balance and view reservations. IHG got the word out about its expanded mobile offerings via old school media, including print and on-premise signage.

Results: The push resulted in a 91% year-over-year increase in mobile search revenues, and traffic to the company’s mobile site jumps about 20% every month. In the U.S., the mobile program added another feature: Click-to-Call from Google AdWords. Click-to-Call now accounts for 40% of IHG’s mobile web revenue globally, according to De Rosa.

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3. Buick, Disney Try Google Goggles

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For the uninitiated, Google Goggles is a technology from the search giant that uses smartphone cameras to read signs as well as recognize landmarks and icons. The marketing potential of the technology seemed obvious, so last year Google launched a pilot program with Buick, Disney, Diageo, Delta Airlines and T-Mobile using Google Goggles to translate advertising messages.

Here’s how it worked: The advertisers produced ads with images that could be recognized by Google Goggles. For instance, a Buick print ad could, when photographed, lead to a dedicated website, a la a QR code. Michael Slinger, director of mobile ads for the Americas at Google, says he’s still analyzing the results from those campaigns, which launched late last year. “We’re continuing to assess the data, and we’re basically figuring out what the next stage in our beta is,” says Slinger.

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4. A Bunch of Carrot Farmers’ Xtreme Xrunch Kart

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Ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky made a name for itself over the last decade with some offbeat, sometimes envelope-pushing work on behalf of Burger King, Microsoft and others. Last summer, the agency went on a crusade for, of all things, baby carrots. The agency’s strategy was to pit the carrots, which are marketed by a consortium called A Bunch of Carrot Farmers, as an alternative snack with slick packaging and a $25 million ad campaign.

Part of the push also included Xtreme Xrunch Kart [iTunes link], a mobile game that — get this — is powered by the sound of carrots crunching. A Crispin rep says the agency “used lots of complicated science to develop an algorithm that turns the sound of carrot crunches into nitro boosts in the game.” (Internally, this is known as “Crunchonics Technology.”) The crunches guide a guy in the game in a rocket-strapped shopping cart through an urban wasteland. Gamers can get speed boosts and catch air by crunching real carrots into their phone.

Results: A Crispin spokesman says the app got 13,000 downloads in the first week, but current figures weren’t available.

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5. Intel’s Rich Banner Ads

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Clickthrough rates for banner ads are notoriously poor, but Beth Lubov Butrymowicz, Intel’s global media manager, thought mobile banners might work better, particularly if they were able to be manipulated — hence Intel’s expandable rich banners that expand when users click on them. After users expand the ads, they see three icons than can be dragged and dropped to the bottom of the screen. Then they’d be asked three quick questions about their technology needs. After qualifying themselves, users would then be led to an Intel mobile site providing more information about what they were looking for.

Results: Interaction rates within the rich banners were five times higher than for in-app placements. Lubov Butrymowicz attributed that difference to behavioral targeting — since users identified themselves by their interests, they were more likely to respond to the ad messages. Behavioral targeting reached users as they were researching computers. “We delivered a utility that helped a user in their decision making process,” she says. “Additionally, this was the first banner of its kind — this level of interaction within the banner had yet to be seen prior to our campaign launch.”

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Series Supported by HubSpot

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The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, which offers inbound marketing software that helps small and medium sized businesses get found on the Internet by the right prospects and converts more of them into leads and customers. HubSpot’s software platform includes tools that allow professional marketers and small business owners to manage SEO, blogging, social media, landing pages, e-mail, lead intelligence and marketing analytics. Learn more.

More About: Digital Marketing Series, disney, Google, intel, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, online marketing

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Europe-based music subscription service Spotify has reached a milestone today, announcing that it now has 1 million paying subscribers — a base it has accrued since launching almost two years ago.

The news was announced today on the Spotify blog.

The “paying” is the key here — as Spotify has 10 million subscribers across the U.K., Finland, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Spain (that means that about 9 million use the free service).

The Swedish music-streaming service provides users with unlimited streaming of songs (on-demand) from major and indie labels, with more than 10 million tracks available. It has two kinds of subscriptions: free with ads, or paid sans ads.

For comparison’s sake, Rhapsody — the veritable grandfather of the music subscription sphere — has 750,000 subscribers. Many other services such as MOG and Rdio decline to release details about their user bases.

This news comes at a time of possible change for the much buzzed-about service. For a while now, users in the U.S. have been waiting for the service to breach their borders, an event that could soon be on the horizon. There have been numerous reports of late that Spotify is close to or has already closed deals with major U.S. labels, and then there’s the rumored (and supposedly sizable) funding round.

We wonder what effect this news will have, if any, on a possible U.S. expansion as well as the service’s profitability — the service apparently lost $26.7 million in 2009.

Photo courtesy of Flickr, Andreas Blixt

More About: music, spotify

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

Showing people what a product does is a better way to catch their attention than telling them about it. Car salesmen encourage test drives, ice cream stores give out free samples, and I’d be willing to bet that few people purchase a Hanger Cascader without watching the infomercial first.

Your digital product is also more appealing when demonstrated. And the most affordable way to show people what your software does, even if you’re also offering a free trial, is often to produce a short screencast. These five free tools can help you get started.

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1. Screenr

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Screenr helps share your screencast videos over Twitter. After you make up to a five-minute-long screencast using the simple web tool, a shortened link to the video is automatically provided. You can add a message and post the video link to your feed with the push of a button. There are also options to post to YouTube or embed the video in your site.

While other screencast tools, like Jing (see below), have Twitter sharing options, Screenr distinguishes itself by also creating a YouTube-like profile for each user. All of your videos are saved on your profile, and a public feed of other users’ videos makes for interesting browsing. If you like an idea that you see, you can click the maker’s profile photo to see other videos they’ve uploaded.

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2. Overstream

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Basic, free screencapture software programs, like Wink, do a pretty decent job at creating videos, but few of them include features that allow you to add text easily. Overstream allows you to pull a video from a supported site like YouTube or Google Video and add your own subtitles to it.

CaptionTube is another free captioning web app that you can use your Google account to log into.

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3. Jing

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Downloading Jing puts a sun-shaped icon in the upper-righthand corner of your monitor. When you want to grab either a screenshot or a screencast, hitting the icon opens up a tool that you use to mark the perimeter of your shot and start recording. If you’re recording a screencast, audio will automatically be recorded.

You can choose to upload videos to screencast.com, which is run by the same company. Once you’ve done so, it’s easy to share the provided URL or embed the video in your site. Alternatively, you can customize share buttons on your Jing dashboard for sharing directly to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

The free version of Jing records in SWF format. Jing pro subscribers can record in SWF or MPEG-4 video, make unbranded videos, record from their webcams and upload videos directly to YouTube.

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4. GoView

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Unlike most free options, GoView provides some editing capabilities. After you record your screencast and audio using the downloaded screen capture software, you can cut portions out and add title pages. Saved videos are automatically uploaded to the GoView site, and links are provided for easy sharing.

The software is free for now while the product is in public beta. But unfortunately, its early stage of development also means that it’s available on only Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

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5. Screencast-o-Matic

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The free version of Screencast-o-Matic captures screencasts, audio and video from your webcam at the same time without downloading any software. Finished videos, which can be up to 15 minutes long, can be exported as MP4, AVI or FLV files, uploaded to YouTube, or saved to the Screencast-o-Matic site. A note-taking option can be used to link directly to a specific moment in your video.

Videos made using the free version have a “Screencast-o-Matic” watermark on them that can only be removed by ponying up $9 to download the pro version.

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More Business Resources from Mashable:

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- 4 Web Apps For Managing Job Applications
- HOW TO: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
- HOW TO: Create Your Own Customized Short URL
- 7 Services to Find and Reserve Your Name Across the Web
- 10 Essential Tips for Building Your Small Biz Team

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL

More About: business, free tools, goview, Jing, List, Lists, overstream, product demo, screencast, screencast-o-matic, screencasting, screencasts, screenr, small business, video

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