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TechCrunch

Secret Windows 8 Weapon: Kinect Built Into Your Laptop: The Windows release of Kinect is coming up in a couple days, but for most people that wont be a major event: the Kinect

Twitter Puts Its DMCA Takedown Requests Up For All To See: Yesterdays announcement that Twitter would be selectively censoring tweets based on country was not well-received. But part of that announcement was the assurance that

Y Combinator Names Seasoned Entrepreneur Geoff Ralston As Its Newest Partner: Y Combinator has just announced the newest partner to join the prestigious firm: Geoff Ralston. Ralstons previous credentials include founding Four11, which was acquired

Gillmor Gang Live (TCTV): The Gillmor Gang - Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Doc Searls & Steve Gillmor - is recording

Flurry: Amazon’s Kindle Fire Is Already Starting To Smoke Samsung’s Galaxy Tab: Wuh oh, Samsung — better watch your tail. While Apple might not be seeing any impact (be it positive or negative) on iPad sales

Android Smartphone Round-Up: December/January Edition: We took a break from the Android round-up in December because, well, to be honest I was on vacation. But January gave us a

Davos: BraveNewTalent Allows Job Seekers To Follow Their Future Employers: BraveNewTalent is a social recruitment platform operating in the UK and moving into the US. I

Mashable

Newly Discovered Asteroid Narrowly Misses Earth: It isn’t just the sun’s radiation storm getting all up in Earth’s face this week. An asteroid the size of a school bus, disco…

Facebook IPO: Everything You Need to Know: By now you’ve probably heard the news: Facebook could be filing its papers for IPO as early as next week. A Wall Street Journal re…

Relax: Twitter’s New Censorship Policy Is Actually Good for Activists: A lot of digital ink has been spilled about Twitter’s announcement that it can now censor tweets on a country-by-country basis. The move…

Angry Birds on Facebook Launching Your Way on Valentines Day: What could be more romantic than playing Angry Birds on Facebook with your sweetheart or with a social network of relative strangers? The highly ant…

Can Regular Investors Buy a Piece of Facebook?: Now that it looks like Facebook is (finally!) going to file for an IPO, plenty of potential investors want to know how they can get in on the ac…

Ex-Palm Chief Says Goodbye to HP, WebOS: Jon Rubinstein, the former CEO of Palm and co-developer of the Apple iPod, has left Hewlett-Packard, the company confirmed to Mashable. Rubinste…

Why Facebook is Really Worth $100 Billion: You know what hurts? Being wrong, that’s what hurts. Not just a little wrong, but $85 billion wrong. Five years ago I laughed — dare I…

Read/WriteWeb

Thought SOPA Was Bad? 10 Reasons to Oppose ACTA: So, weve shot down SOPA and PIPA. Congratulations Internets for a job well done. Mission accomplished, right? Not so much. While thats two bad pieces of legislation pushed back, theres much more

Top Tech Video of the Day: Entrepreneurs Say: Connect it to Facebook, viral spread, boom, boom. I have no idea what that means but I do know that for some reason, Im still not tired of the Sh*t Says meme.

Google Maps vs. Do-It-Yourself: Which Is Better for Business?: As mobile becomes normal for the Web, location becomes key. The next phase of location apps are live, right there with the user as she goes about her business. When it comes

Facebook Could be the Biggest Tech IPO in History: People familiar with the matter say that Facebook could file for its initial public offering as soon as next week, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal. The source also

What You Should Know About ACTA and Your Rights: The most controversial measures of concern to Internet users in the final version of the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for most Internet users are

How To Learn Who Has You In Their Google+ Circles: The second-most important thing about social media is talking to people. The most important thing is to know whom youre talking to. We cant have a conversation about authenticity or realness or

When's the Best Time to Blog & Share?: Anyone who spends their day on the Internet inevitably wonders this question. Should I start publishing later in the day, to hit the after-work traffic? Should I publish earlier in the morning,

Amateur Food Porn Has Got To Stop: We eat with our eyes, Iliana Regan told me, and then it travels to our brain, and we love the sensation of the taste and the hot. I think it does a

Does An Open Source webOS Have A Legitimate Future?: This week, Hewlett-Packard announced the open source roadmap for webOS along with the next edition of it application framework, Enyo 2.0. As we wrote yesterday, the time for webOS to shine may

People Are Actually Paying For Spotify After All: When Spotify first launched in the U.S. over the summer, few doubted that the service would be popular among music fans. The real question has always been whether the companys freemium business model would manage to convert enough

The Cost of Doing Business: Foxconn, Apple, and the Fate of the Modern Worker: Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. - Immanuel KantOurs is an imperfect society. The nature of our reality, our desires, and our need to possess

Like a Gangly 8-Year-Old, the Mobile Web Needs to Grow Up: Well, here we are in Twentytwelve. Supposedly its the year of the mobile and all of our predictions about how we are going to use our mobile phones will finally come true.Although

Facebook Sues Spammy Ad Network: Yesterday Facebook and Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna filed dual lawsuits against co-owners of Adscend Media, LLC, which Facebook Security claims is an ad network that is alleged to develop

Ethiopia Sentences U.S. Blogger to Life in Prison: The Federal High Court in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa sentenced expatriate journalist and blogger Elias Kifle to life in prison yesterday. Kifle is the editor of the Washington D.C.-based blog, Ethiopian

Is Twitter Helping Users Get Around Its New Censorship Rules?: Some of the messages Twitter is sending about its new policy on censoring tweets in certain countries seem ambiguous at best.Perhaps the biggest piece of confusion for people trying to make sense of yesterdays announcement is Twitters inclusion

Daily Wrap: Ruby, PHP and Python Compared and More: Ruby, PHP and Python are compared in an infographic by Udemy. This and more in todays Daily Wrap.Sometimes its difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so

It's Like Facebook For The Art World: Forget the random pictures of babies and puppies, alarming status updates from family members and political rants. On My-ArtMap, you will be immersed in art. Its as simple as that. The site,

How To Find That 1 Thing You Lost Online: Argh! What was that video called? Was that on Twitter or Facebook? Where did I save that article? Who was it who made that joke about the Edsel? Do you find yourself

Cloud Roundup for January 26, 2012: On tap for today, weve got a new jQuery Mobile release, a look at Tendril Connect, and the latest BitNami Stack for Ruby on Rails.jQuery Mobile 1.0.1 Released – The jQuery Mobile

Thursday's Top Tech Video: How to Translate Your Voice to More Than 30 Languages Using Siri: Just to be clear, Lingual is an extension for phones and iPads that are jailbroken (big surprise), but as you can see from Jeff Benjamins preview, its pretty remarkable. Not only will

GigaOM

Gaiman: SOPA and PIPA are on the wrong side of history: Author Neil Gaiman said in an interview this week that the media industry is trying to put genies back in bottles with laws like SOPA and PIPA, and that the internet has fundamentally changed the landscape, just as Gutenbergs invention

Would you cut Facebook a privacy pass if it paid you?: Rightly or wrongly, Facebook catches a lot of flak for impeding on privacy by selling user information to advertisers and generally enabling too much sharing. But would users care so much if Facebook gave them a cut of the profits

Analytics startups sweep the field in IBM contest: Nine out of the nine finalists for IBMs Global Entrepreneur of the Year title are analytics startups. Thats either an anomaly or proof that analytics is hot. The winners will converge on San Francisco next week to meet with IBM

Yahoo kills a bunch of mobile apps you’ve never used: Yahoo is cleaning house in mobile product, announcing that it is decommissioning a long list of mobile apps youve probably never heard of. Unfortunately, Yahoo! Sketch-a-search is one of the apps being culled, as well as things like Yahoo! Meme

Wi-Fi Alliance: There’s nothing “Super” about white spaces broadband: The Wi-Fi Alliance, the keepers of the Wi-Fi brand, have come out swinging against the characterization of white spaces broadband as Super Wi-Fi. The Alliance issued a press release Friday saying it likes the tech, but the name will lead

Kindle Fire edges Galaxy Tab as most used Android tablet: The Kindle Fire in just a couple months has barely edged passed the Samsung Galaxy Tab as the most popular Android tablet with 35.7 percent of application user sessions, according to Flurry. This is despite the fact that the Fire

Google Videos eating up GBs? Here’s how to fix it: I love watching high-definition movies on my Galaxy Nexus because the phone actually has a true high-definition display. Theres a problem though: after watching the rentals, the massive media files arent disappearing from my phone. Heres the quick fix which

Hey ladies, does Google think you’re a guy?: Thanks to Google trumpeting its new privacy policy and inviting users to explore their profiles with the search giant, there have been a few giggles as my female friends check their Google ad preference manager to discover that Google thinks

With webOS put out to pasture, Jon Rubinstein exits HP: Jon Rubinstein, the man who helped oversee Palms move to a new webOS operating system and later sold the company to Hewlett Packard, has quietly exited the company. Its an unsurprising move, but one that further signals the end of

Apple buy Hollywood? Not a chance: Could Apple spend its $100 billion in cash to create a virtual cable operator to compete with Comcast and the like? Sure. But it would have a really hard time offering a competitively priced service and building a profitable business

For Apple, iCloud is just the beginning: Apple CEO Tim Cook said iCloud is not just a product, its a strategy for the next decade. What will that mean for a company trying to lead us all into the post-PC world? We look at possible future applications

Samsung probably sold the most smartphones in 2011: Trying to count who sold the most smartphones is a difficult business. But based on clues from Samsung, IHS iSuppli says Apple was No. 1 in the last quarter of 2011 sales of smartphones, but Samsung took the crown for

How much should we trust our new information overlords?: The news that Twitter will be censoring tweets has reinforced for many the fact that our freedoms exist at the mercy of the companies whose networks we are using -- and being used by. How much trust should we have

Turing Fellowship works to fill New York’s engineering pipeline: New Yorks got an abundance of most everything but engineers are increasingly a precious commodity. But the NYC Turing Fellows Program is revving up in its second year to really take on the problem and start feeding more tech talent

Forget e-books; are you ready for virtual books?: As an avid e-book reader and lover of gadgets, I love the concept of this virtual book. Siglio Press is offering 250 copies of a print book that requires a webcam and computing device to actually be read.

Why the iPad is a salesperson’s best friend: Recent studies show that Apples iPad is doing very well in the enterprise, with new activations soaring. One company just deployed 1,300 of the Apple tablets across its salesforce, because combined with the right software, it believes theres no better

Siri is not a bandwidth hog and users are not the problem: The sky is falling again in cellular land and this time Siri is to blame. At least that’s the assessment form this opinion article in the Washington Post this morning claiming Siris piggy ways will destroy our cellular networks. But

Samsung Galaxy Note teardown shows small LTE chip: We often see third-party device teardowns but Samsung bucks the trend by showing breakdown of its 5.3-inch Galaxy Note. Those who say Android screens are getting larger mainly because of LTE radio size need to take a closer look at

The simple secret to beating clones and copycats: Startups often rail against copycat companies, arguing that they steal their business and their ideas. But maybe the secret to beating clones isnt to waste time trying to shut them down -- its to accept them and focus on being

KeepRecipes creates an iTunes for cookbooks: KeepRecipes is launching an “iTunes for recipes” on Friday, in hopes of building an online marketplace for buying and selling culinary ideas. Its starting small but KeepRecipes hopes to show cookbook publishers they can money online and show consumers that

TNW

Google+ adds ‘What’s Hot’ stream to web app, lets you see who +1′d your posts: Google has announced a couple of new features for Google+, including a ‘What’s Hot’ stream that allows you to see the ‘most interesting’ content being shared throughout Google+. In addition,...

Late March is reportedly crunch time for the EU’s Google anti-trust probe: It seems that late March is when the European Commission is set to decide if it will move ahead formally with its anti-trust probe into whether Google has abused its...

Google launches its 2012 ‘Doodle 4 Google’ contest, this time each US state has a winner: Google is kick-starting its fifth Doodle 4 Google contest, giving K-12 students in the US the chance to have their artwork seen by millions. In a blog post today, Marissa...

How to get your plants to start tweeting: This morning, San Francisco based blogger Brit Morin caught our attention with this DIY Self-Tweeting Plant Kit. Developed by SparkFun, the Botanicalls Kit connects house plants to Twitter so they can tweet...

Google and Amazon top the UK’s healthiest brands list for the third year running: Internet companies Google and Amazon have ranked as the UK’s healthiest brands for the third year running, standing out of the most recognisable companies and presences in the eyes of...

Rummble Labs’ new Social Predictions can turbo-charge Facebook integration for publishers: Rummble Labs, which specialises in recommendation technology, is rolling out a new product today that promises to offer online publishers a new way to recommend content to users based on...

KDDI set to become Japan’s first operator to introduce NFC: Japanese mobile operator KDDI has revealed plans to introduce Near Field Communication (NFC) services to its customers before the end of this month, making it the first carrier in the country...

37signals

Basecamp Next's caching hardware: From the very start, we wanted Basecamp Next to be fast. Really, really fast. To do so we built a russian-doll architecture of nested caching that I’ll write up in detail soon. But for now I just wanted to share

Three years later, Mr. Moore is still letting us punt on database sharding: Three years ago, I wrote about how improvements in technology keep allowing us to punt on sharding the Basecamp database. This is still true, only more so now.We’ve grown enormously over the last three years but RAM keeps getting cheaper

REWORK passes 200,000 copies sold!: We just got our royalty statement from Crown and are pretty excited about the fact that we’ve sold over 200,000 copies of REWORK now. About three quarters of the sales have been hardcover books with audio and ebook splitting the

Basecamp Next: A peek at early iterations of the Projects screen: We’ve been working on Basecamp Next since March 2011 and we’re getting close to the public release. The private beta is now in full swing.Early iterations on the Projects screenWe thought it might be fun to share some of the

Give me spark: Some of the best decisions and designs at 37signals have emerged from intensely contested debates. Not just between Jason and me, but from anyone in the company. When sparks fly, some truly great ideas come to light.The catch is that

Watching Apple win the world: Apple’s last quarter was the second most profitable quarter of any company ever in US history. Only ExxonMobile topped them slightly in 2008 when oil was at an all-time high. That’s an astounding and awe-inspiring accomplishment.But that’s not why some

Watching Apple win: Apple’s last quarter was the second most profitable quarter of any company ever in US history. Only ExxonMobile topped them slightly in 2008 when oil was at an all-time high. That’s an astounding and awe-inspiring accomplishment.But that’s not why some

LINK: Why we're building a whole new Basecamp: Why were building a whole new BasecampMy latest Inc. article explains why we’re building a whole new version of Basecamp from scratch. Sign up for an invite to the private beta.

INSIGHT: There’s a movement in the art world…: There’s a movement in the art world called Outsider Art. Art that’s produced by people outside of the “mainstream” art world. It rejects common art conventions established by popular artists of the past. It is raw.Web design is at a

Refusing administrative minutiae: When I worked with clients on a time and materials basis, I hated logging hours. I hated having the stop watch’s tick tock over me, being forced to account for every increment of time. Or, as it often happened, trying

Flipping the day: Working US hours from Europe has flipped my day. Mornings are now for leisure and evenings for working. This completely changes what that leisure time is spent on.Most days I work from 1pm to 9pm here in Spain, which translates

Rekindle my love of reading: When the iPad first came out, I somehow convinced myself that the Kindle was dead. Apple had managed to create something where you could not only read books, but also do everything else. Why on earth would anyone still cling

Trust is fragile: Taylor’s post about our growth in 2011 included a bunch of numbers showing how the pistons inside the 37signals engine are pounding faster, but it all got swept away by what seemed like an innocent side-note: The 100 millionth file

Kicking the tires: My trial month: I saw some questions on David’s last posts about remote work and hiring asking how we evaluate potential employees. Racing metaphors aside, tossing new developers on real projects is a time honored tradition here, and one that we haven’t written

I heard you like numbers...: In 2011Our support team responded to 100,000 casesOur syslog server logged an average of 1,500,000,000+ messages each dayOur solr indexer processed 428,000,000 indexing requests for Highrise aloneWe hit our 100,000,000th person/company creation in HighriseAnd a Basecamp user uploaded the 100,000,000th

2011 Year-End Campfire Feature Blowout!: All features must ship! There’s been some improvements to your 2011 Campfire lately, and it’s time you came on down and tried them out.Per-Room PermissionsFirst up, we’ve added per-room permissions settings. Previously, permissions could only be changed

Automatically save your work in Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Writeboard: Today we’re bringing autosave to Basecamp (for messages and comments), Highrise (for notes), Backpack (for messages, comments, and notes), and Writeboard (for documents and comments), as well as right here on SvN.Autosave keeps a local copy of your work in

Seven degrees of slip: If you want to reach peak performance, you have to find the limit. Finding the limit means stepping over the limit. Going too far, going too fast. It means taking a good idea to the extreme to learn just how

Restoring deleted data in Basecamp: Remember when you accidentally deleted that master to-do list in your Basecamp project? Or when Bob thought he was looking at the old Sales project and deleted the new one by mistake?These things happen, and they definitely used to ruin

INSIGHT: Jamie: Human nature is odd. We crave new…: Jamie: Human nature is odd. We crave new things, but simultaneously dislike change.Phil: Not that odd; we like to choose and hate to have things forced on us. We usually embrace the changes that we have chosen for ourselves.

O'Reilly Radar

Publishing News: Ereader ownership doubles, again: Here are a few of the stories that caught my attention this week in the publishing space.Two surveys indicate a bright future for digital publishingBack in June, a survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed ereader

Top stories: January 23-27, 2012: Heres a look at the top stories published across OReilly sites this week.On pirates and piracyMike Loukides: Im not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare

Visualization of the Week: Politicians' word counts: Tis the season for political infographics, what with the 2012 presidential election well underway, as well as this weeks State of the Union address. All of that speech-making provided plenty of opportunity for data visualization.Following the State of the Union

ValoBox wants to reward content creators and consumers: Earlier this year, I chatted with Anna Lewis (@anna_cn) and Oliver Brooks (@cn_oli) about their new startup, ValoBox — a platform that allows readers to consume books by the page, chunk, or as a whole. The duo has been hard

Developer Week in Review: Sometimes, form does need to follow function: It was 56 degrees in Boston on Tuesday. It wasnt a record (you need to go back to 1999 for that, when it hit 62), but it definitely is another page in what has been a very, very bizarre winter

Four short links: 27 January 2012: Data Jurisdiction -- information from the NineFold hosting company in Australia. Has some Aussie-specific content, but would be great to see this internationalized. (via Lachlan Hardy)Anatomy of an Idea (Steven Johnson) -- people who think the Web is killing off

Strata Week: Genome research kicks up a lot of data: Here are a few of the data stories that caught my attention this week.Genomics data and the cloudGigaOms

Commerce Weekly: Target doesn't want to be the showroom for online retailers: Here are a few things going on in the world of online commerce this week.Target wants to fight scan and scramRemember all that talk before the holidays

Why the fuss about iBooks Author?: This post originally appeared on Joe Wikerts Publishing 2020 Blog (iBooks Author: Appreciating Apples Intent). Its republished with permission.Apples recent announcement and release of its iBooks

Transforming data into narrative content: One of the largest by-products of the digital revolution is data, and entrepreneurs are finding new ways to harness and make use of the increasing variety of data. In the following interview, Kristian Hammond, CTO of Narrative Science, talks about

Four short links: 26 January 2012: Every Day, More iPhones Sold Than Babies Born -- Malthusian explosion of iPhones predicted once theres an iPhone-to-3D-printer dongle. (via Luke Wroblewski)No Safe Harbour -- a collection of political essays, texts, and discussions that help explain and educate about Pirate

Coming soon to a location near you: The Amazon Store?: This post is part of the TOC podcast series. You can also subscribe to the free TOC podcast through iTunes.Jason Calacanis (@Jason), co-founder of Weblogs, Inc., and currently host of This Week in Startups is never afraid to voice his

In the case of interactivity, we're still at the phase of irrational enthusiasm: When it comes to including interactive features in books, just because you can doesnt mean you should may be your best rule of thumb. Wolfram Research, Inc., co-founder and author of The Elements Theodore Gray will address the finer points

Microsoft's plan for Hadoop and big data: Microsoft has placed Apache Hadoop at the core of its big data strategy. Its a move that might seem surprising to the casual observer, being a somewhat enthusiastic adoption of a significant open source product. The reason for this move

AI will eventually drive healthcare, but not anytime soon: TechCrunch recently published a guest post from Vinod Khosla with the headline Do We Need Doctors or Algorithms?. Khosla is an investor and engineer, but he is a little outside his depth on some of his conclusions about health IT.

Four short links: 25 January 2012: Mobile Overtaking Web -- provocatively packaged extrapolations of ComScore and similar numbers to conclude that Americans spend more time interacting with mobile apps than with web sites. Im sure you could beat an iPhone developer to death with the error

"The President of the United States is on the phone. Would you like to Hangout on Google+?": Were suddenly very close to science fiction becoming reality television, live streamed to large and small screens around the world. On Monday, January 30th, 2012, the fireside chats that FDR hosted on citizens radios in the 20th century will have

O'Reilly Radar 01/24/12: Info overload vs over-consumption: Below youll find the script and associated links from the January 24, 2011 episode of OReilly Radar. An archive of past shows is available through OReilly Medias YouTube channel and you can subscribe to episodes of OReilly Radar via iTunes.Do

The five things you need to pay attention to at TOC 2012: This post is part of the TOC podcast series. You can also subscribe to the free TOC podcast through iTunes.The 2012 edition of the Tools of Change for Publishing conference will open its doors on February 13 in New York

Four short links: 24 January 2012: fbootstrap (GitHub) -- HTML, CSS, and JS toolkit for Facebook apps based on Twitters popular Bootstrap library.Focus on the User -- adds a bookmarklet Dont Be Evil which shows your Google search as it would have been before Google+ began

Micro Persuasion

The Clip Report - Volume 1 In the early 1990s when I began my...: The Clip Report - Volume 1In the early 1990s when I began my career in PR there were clip reports. These were physical books that contained press clips. It seems downright

It was a sizzling summer for social media. As we move into fall,...: It was a sizzling summer for social media. As we move into fall, here’s a look at some of the major milestones.

¶ Could Mobile Apps Be Wilting in the Heat of Summer?: Image credit: Financial TimesIt’s hard to believe, but mobile marketing didn’t really get going in earnest until Apple launched its App Store in 2008. Three years later there are now marketplaces on all five major device platforms

It was a sizzling summer for social media. As we move into fall,...: It was a sizzling summer for social media. As we move into fall, here’s a look at some of the major milestones.

¶ Could Mobile Apps Be Wilting in the Heat of Summer?: Image credit: Financial TimesIt’s hard to believe, but mobile marketing didn’t really get going in earnest until Apple launched its App Store in 2008. Three years later there are now marketplaces on all five major device platforms

→ Media Tops in Corporate Social Media: → Media Tops in Corporate Social Media: Fire up the PowerPoint. Here’s a fantastic, data-rich report (PDF) from Netprospex on the state of social media adoption in Corporate America. What’s notable is that the media continues

¶ Three Key Things Google Is Doing While We Focus on Google+: The following is also my AdAge column…With all of the attention that’s being paid to Facebook and Twitter it’s easy to forget that no single company impacts media and marketers the way that Google does. Even small changes in Google’s

→ How Journalists Engage Readers on Facebook: → How Journalists Engage Readers on Facebook: Great and very thorough analysis from Facebook on how news organizations are using their platform to engage readers. It looks like the platform is being used more for consumption rather than engagement… “In

Google Deep Shot: Google Deep Shot: Google has a research project underway to help users easily migrate tasks across devices… “Deep Shot remains a research project at Google. With increasing capabilities of mobile phones and fast growing web applications, we hope to explore

The Google+ Census: The Google+ Census: This site is a fantastic resource that you can search to find public profiles on Google+. Don’t miss the stats page. It’s clear from the data that G+ is unabashedly tech-centric right now. It’s heavy with engineering

¶ Twitter, Not Facebook, Should Fear the Google+ Beard: This was cross-posted on Google+A lot of the hoopla over Google+ has been whether it’s a threat to Facebook. However, it’s Twitter who should fear the Google+ beard. Here’s why…Social media networks have typically have one of

How Google+ and Twitter Influence Search: How Google+ and Twitter Influence Search: A fascinating and thorough experiment to see what influence social has on search. Key quote… “The more retweets a link receives, the better it seems to perform in search results and the more visibility

The Top 100 Google+ Users: The Top 100 Google+ Users: It’s not even a week old and already there’s a power list out of Google+ users. You know you’re curious - so go on and click.

A Budget Brand Digital Dashboard: A Budget Brand Digital Dashboard: Fantastic overview from Google on how to create a brand dashboard on the cheap, albeit very limited.

Media Set Up Camp on Google+: A few media companies have started to set up camp inside Google+. They include Mashable (an Edelman client) and The Next Web. Right now most of these are digitally native media companies. Could the big

¶ Consumers Maybe Nonplussed Over Google+: Google yesterday launched The Google+ project - an ambitious new product that aims to take on Facebook. Now that I have had a preview, below is a brief POV of my initial impressions.1 In short, I believe that once it

The Social Media Probook: The Social Media Probook: The gang at Eloqua and JESS3 have compiled an awesome resource that’s definitely worth a read. It was an honor to be a contributor. Free PDF is here.

Google's "What do you Love?": Googles What do you Love?: Great new site from Google that helps you track any topic in one place.

¶ Google Social Network Nears, Aims to Preserve the Searchable Web: ¶ Google Social Network Nears, Aims to Preserve the Searchable Web: Danny Sullivan: “Google’s long expected second shot at taking on Facebook in the social networking space has arrived in the form of the Google Project. It has some interesting

BreakingNews to Curate Local News Tweets: BreakingNews to Curate Local News Tweets: breakingblog:“We’re excited to announce a new feature that allows news organizations to fast-track news tips straight to BreakingNews.com and potentially, @breakingnews on Twitter.Here’s how it works. Once we’ve whitelisted a news organization’s Twitter account,

CenterNetworks

API Hackday Comes to Austin This February: It seems these days hackdays, hackathons, hack this, hack that events are popular across the world. Some of these developer events have created very successful startups and some of the companies have been acquired. Austin will be holding an API

Newbie PhoneGap Training Coming to Austin: This Saturday, January 28, 2012, the LoneStar PhoneGap group will hold their first meetup. PhoneGap is a mobile platform that helps you easily create mobile applications and more importantly helps you distribute one set of code to all of the

Web Jobs – January 21: Check out some of the latest web technology and business jobs posted for January 21, 2012 on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered directly to you.

Does Your Startup Have a Disaster Plan?: Last weekend our hosting company moved the physical location of their servers — from San Antonio to Chicago. There were a number of very serious issues that appeared post-migration caused by the hosting company. I will address the issues and

Startup Weekend Coming Back to Austin This March: I’ve covered the worldwide Startup Weekend events over the past couple of years. The concept behind Startup Weekend is to bring the community together in a different city each weekend to create a startup (or multiple startups) during the weekend.

Here’s Why Zazzle Bests Vistaprint: About two months ago I wanted to print some very simple round stickers for CloudContacts. In the past I’ve used Sticker Robot which produced some absolutely awesome vinyl stickers for CN. This time I just wanted something basic – the

Does Twitter Own Facebook and LinkedIn for Status Updates?: Alternative title: Are Facebook and LinkedIn the largest Twitter aggregators? Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all provide streams of content – the content can either be created on the service or the content can be posted automatically from outside sources –

Is There Consumer Confusion Between Barnes & Noble Nook Color and Tablet?: This year I believe we will see a lot of 7″ “tablets” hitting the market from the top manufacturers (i.e. Apple, Samsung, etc.). Amazon has their Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble has their Nook Color and Nook Tablet. Over

Web Jobs – January 1 – Free Startup Job Posts This Week!: Happy New Job! Check out some of the latest web technology and business jobs posted for January 2, 2012 on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered

Did Judge Judy Just Sum Up Social Media?: During one of the cases on Judge Judy, the plaintiff provided a printout of some messages from Facebook. After the judge went over the messages related to the case, she spent the next 30 seconds providing possibly a great overview

Web Jobs – December 27: New Year, New Job? Check out some of the latest web technology and business jobs posted for December 27, 2011 on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs

Google Offers Millions of Songs for $0.49: Google is currently offering “millions” of music singles for $0.49/track or $4.99/album. Usually this type of music sale is just a bunch of unwanted tracks but so far the selection for this sale is far and wide! The music is

Web Jobs – December 20: Happy Hanukkah! Check out some of the latest web technology and business jobs posted for December 20, 2011 on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered directly

Today is the Best Day to Buy the Kindle Fire: Last week I was shopping at Staples and I played with the Amazon Kindle Fire. It really is a nice looking device, it’s thin and the 7″ size seems like a good portable tablet compared to the Galaxy Tab 10.1″

Best Prices for the Google Galaxy Nexus Smartphone: Google has apparently released a brand new smartphone called the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. This device has the new Android 4.0 software on it which is codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich. It runs on the Verizon network and has the ability to

The Latest iPod Touch Holiday Deals: The most popular deal request I am asked for help with continues to be the Apple iPod Touch. Even with this year clearly being the year of the tablet, it seems like everyone still wants to get an iPod Touch

Moving to Stripe: Fixing the Biggest Mistake I’ve Made to Date: A month ago, we switched our payments on CloudContacts from Paypal and Google Checkout to the new payments service from Stripe. I’ve been meaning to post about why we switched and since Greg Taylor posted today about his switch to

Web Jobs – December 5: Check out some of the latest web technology and business jobs posted for December 5, 2011 on the CenterNetworks Job Board. It might be a good time to consider a new job since you need to pay off all the

Screw Living Social? Shoprunner Undercuts Black Friday Deal & Goes Free on Facebook: One of the deals that Living Social ran on Black Friday was a deal offering a year of the Shoprunner service for $30 with a $20 rebate for a net price of $10. Shoprunner is a service that is similar

Upcoming Austin Tech Events: Here are some groovy web tech events coming up in Austin that are worth checking out: 1 Semester Startup Demo Day Fall 2011 – December 1 From the event registration, “1 Semester Startup invites you to Demo Day where we

Webware

Wikipedia losing contributors, to streamline editing: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says the user-generated encyclopedia is losing volunteer contributors, and must simplify its editing procedures. Originally posted at News - Digital Media

See what's new in Thunderbird: As Thunderbird joins Mozillas rapid-release program, the e-mail client re-orients itself for a new roadmap. But wheres it going? See what the Outlook alternative offers in this new First Look video. Originally posted at The Download Blog

Twitter revamping mobile site for iPad users: The company is tweaking its mobile twttter.com site using HTML5 to make it more user-friendly for iPad users. Originally posted at News - Digital Media

How to tweet like a man: Sociolinguistics gives us the keys to more masculine or feminine tweeting. Hint, guys: Google my jeep my ni$$@, http it up, bro. 4 sale. need $. Originally posted at Crave

72 people charged in online child porn ring: 52 people have already been arrested as part of an investigation that launched in December 2009. Originally posted at The Digital Home

Yahoo Mail suffers outage; users react: The service has been unavailable for many, and affected users are taking to Twitter to complain. Yahoo says it has fixed the issue. Originally posted at The Digital Home

Gmail voice calling offering lower international rates: Accessible through Gmail, Googles phone call feature is now available in 38 different languages with cheaper rates across more than 150 international regions. Originally posted at News - Digital Media

Yahoo Mail suffering outage; users react: The service is currently unavailable, and users are taking to Twitter to complain about the apparent outage. Originally posted at The Digital Home

Google+ speeds to 25 million users in first month: Growing at around 1 million members per day, Google+ had captured 25 million visitors as of July 24, becoming the fastest site to reach that level, according to ComScore. Originally posted at News - Digital Media

Twitter ready to close the door on old site: Popular microblogging site says it will migrate users still on old home page interface to the redesigned home page this week. Originally posted at News - Digital Media

Start-up ZocDoc announces $50 million funding round: The medical appointment booking service plans to use the DST Global investment to expand its presence to more cities nationwide.

Start-up ZocDoc announces $50M funding round: The medical appointment booking service plans to use the DST Global investment to expand its presence to more cities nationwide.

The major players in mobile payments: A whos-who of the most recent partnerships for the hot, and rapidly growing, mobile payments sector.

Chrome 13 delivers Instant Pages: The latest update to Google Chrome brings the new Instant Pages feature to the stable version of the browser, along with print preview--but not for all. Originally posted at The Download Blog

Facebook buys digital bookmaker Push Pop Press: Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, but the social network makes it clear that it wont be getting into the book-publishing industry. Originally posted at The Digital Home

Facebook acquires digital bookmaker Push Pop Press: The companies did not say how much Facebook acquired the firm for, but the social network made it clear it wont be getting into the digital-book publishing industry. Originally posted at The Digital Home

Airbnb revamps policies in response to vandalism: After a customers home was vandalized by a guest, travel marketplace Airbnb makes a slew of changes to its policies to help guard against future incidents. Originally posted at News - Digital Media

Airbnb revamps its policies in response to vandalism: Responding to the case of a customer whose home was vandalized by a guest, travel marketplace Airbnb has rolled out a slew of changes to its policies to guard against future such incidents. Originally posted at News - Digital Media

Firefox could get even more Chrome style: Preliminary designs for the nightly build of Firefox indicate that future versions of the browser could look even more like its Google competitor. Originally posted at The Download Blog

Square handling $4 million daily in mobile payments: The mobile payments company says that its credit card-reader attachment for mobile devices has raised daily transactions by another million since late May. Originally posted at News - Wireless

Museum of Modern Betas

zeighted: zeighted(email waitinglist)Zeighted is a Mobile App that gives you traveler super-powers. | | |

Karl: Karl(arriving February 2012)net-a-porter | | |

iLert: iLert (german)iLert erweitert Ihre Monitoring-Tools um Sprach- und SMS Benachrichtigungen sowie Push Notifications auf Ihrem iPhone oder Android Smartphone. | @iLertTweets | |

One Time Secret: One Time Secretshare a secret one time.OneTimeSecret, envía información a través de enlaces encriptados | | |

MentorMob: MentorMobOrganizing the How-To’s of the web, so you don’t have to. | | |

SurDoc: SurDocSurDoc keeps your documents safe with automatic backups to the cloud. It allows you to view your documents from any device, and share them with the click of a buttonSurDoc – copias de seguridad de tus documentos

ZoomSphere: ZoomSpherehere you will find especially detailed statistics for major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or LinkedIn.Facebook Statistics Portal ZoomSphere Debuts | |

MyValue: MyValue (spanish)todos tus bancos en una sola webmyvalue – Las cuentas de todos tus bancos en un único lugar | |

Capsule: Capsule(you can sign up using the beta access code ‘betavip’)Capsule is a tool that allows users to plan, share, and remember experiences with friends and family. Users can create a capsule for an event or a group

Digioh: DigiohSell eBooks, videos, mp3 music files, and other digital products on your Website, Blog, Newsletter, Twitter and Facebook. | |

7Moments: 7Moments(email waitinglist)Create a free private group collection for travel, family and fun. | Blog | @7momentscom | | |

Time Out Tel-Aviv: Time Out Tel-Aviv (hebrew)(h/t handmade2.0) | | |

Vumero: VumeroVumero is the global marketplace for businesses and entrepreneurs to outsource projects and exchange quality templates with finance, financial modeling and spreadsheet professionals around the world. | Blog | @vumero |

Tweet4me: Tweet4mePost scheduled Tweets from any Twitter client. | | |

Tuyyou: Tuyyou (spanish)Tuyyou es la red social, profesional y comercial donde, además de ahorrar, ganas dinero. Puedes formar parte de este proyecto empresarial con derechos sobre el valor de la compañia denominados ‘U-share’.Una red social que paga a

montatuconcierto: montatuconcierto (spanish)Comprando tu entradas serás promotor del concierto y tendrás beneficio.Montatuconcierto, música en directo donde tú eres el promotor | |

Wahooly: Wahoolya group of socially-connected individuals that together, help launch startups.Wahooly, the Klout and Kickstarter hybrid, opens to startups | @teamwahooly | |

Golem API: Golem API (german)Unter api.golem.de bieten wir ab sofort eine Programmierschnittstelle zu den Inhalten von Golem.de an, so dass diese sich leicht in andere Applikationen einbinden lassen. |

Fonicle: FonicleMake a Book of your Facebook Updatesfonicle – Transforma tu Facebook en un libro o documento PDF | |

TestYou: TestYouWith testyou you have a lot of control over the tests that you create with testyou. | | |

ProgrammableWeb

Developers Make a Difference at CleanWeb Hackathon: The CleanWeb Hackathon wrapped up this weekend in New York City, with the goal of building apps that explore sustainable business models leveraging the mobile and social web, challenging developers on what they can do in 24 hours with utility,

Best New Mashups: Book Mashups using Freebase, Google Maps and Amazon: Recently we have seen some imaginative mashups centered on books. From mapping story locations, building communities around book genres and even discovering the most obscure connections between details in your favorite stories, these mashups are nothing short of creative. In

AllTrails Drops Google Maps in Favor of NatGeo’s TOPO: Google Maps API has become so entrenched in developer minds, that if you are looking for a mapping feature in your application, you did not look beyond them. But ever since Google

APIs Enables Alaska Airlines to Fly Higher and Grow Faster: Even though Alaska Airlines was one of the first airlines to offer an iPhone application, allowing travelers to check-in and use their phone as mobile boarding pass, early efforts were essentially just screen-scraped

Today in APIs: Facebook Subscribers, Google SOAP and 6 New APIs: Facebook added subscriber data to its Facebook Graph APIand the Google AdWords API updated its SOAP validation. Wait, people still use SOAP? Plus, two sides to API frustration, a mobile app contest, HTTP API evolvability

50,000+ Radio Stations in One API: Shoutcast maintains a radio directory of 50,000+ radio stations from all around the world. The company, owned by AOL, released its first Shoutcast API a few years ago, but has since released version 2.0.

Cloud Assault: a Sledgehammer for Your APIs: Theres a difference between knowing and hoping your API can handle any traffic you send to it. The premise behind the new performance testing service Cloud Assault is that testing scale should be part

21 Upcoming Hackathons: HTML5, Kinect, Hardware and Education: Hackathons are a fast growing phenomenom where developers come together, usually in short periods up to 72 hours to submit ideas, form teams and hack together applications, data visualizations and sometimes form

37 Food APIs: Menu Mania, Beer Mapping, FatSecret: Our API directory now includes 37 food APIs. The newest is the Food Genius API. The most popular, in terms of mashups, is the Menu Mania API. We list 6 Menu Mania mashups. Below

Today in APIs: YouTube History, Amazon Cloud Updates and 19 New APIs: The webs largest video site has added a new personalization feature to its YouTube API. Sure to be misunderstood as a privacy concern, the service now lets applications access viewing history for authenticated users. Amazon

Twilio Adds Volume Pricing for SMS: Telephony-as-a-service company Twilio (a ProgrammableWeb sponsor) is set to announce new volume pricing for heavy users of its Twilio SMS API. The company had previously dropped the price for SMS twice, but did not yet

An API That Makes Life More Fun: Some tasks in life are so boring that they could never be fun, just don’t tell GreenGoose that. GreenGoose is a real life “gamification” company, using small sensors and accelerometers on stickers to track everyday

84 Education APIs: DonorsChoose, Forvo, Dipity: Our API directory now includes 84 education APIs. The newest is the CollegiateLink API. The most popular, in terms of mashups, is the DonorsChoose API. We list 10 DonorsChoose mashups. Below youll find some more

Dashing Analytics for Publishers Shows Value of APIs: High traffic, content-rich sites want to slice their analytics in different ways than, say, an e-commerce site. Thats the concept behind Parse.ly Dash, a new product to provide fresh insights to these publishers with a

Stripe, a Payment Service by Developers for Developers: The key to any transaction whether in the online or physical world is the payment process. Payment is a common feature across desktop, web and mobile applications. PayPal is often the first choice that springs

Today in APIs: Picnik Replacement, Ethics API and 11 New APIs: On Friday Google closed two APIs, including the online photo editor, Picnik. To fill the void, Aviary has launched a new photo app using its Aviary Suite API on Facebook meant to be a

Civic Commons Marketplace Gets an API: Civic Commons, a non-profit initiative that aims to help cities and local governments harness the power of shared technologies and adapt to a more collaborative software development methodology, recently released an app store

Foursquare API Billionaire: “Thousands per Second”: Every day Foursquare users create millions of check-ins using the location-sharing platform. Those may be only a small fraction of the traffic seen by its API, which weve estimated receives at least 5 billion requests

81 New APIs: Boliven, DealsGoRound and Open Government Data: This week we had 81 new APIs added to our API directory including an online repository of medical device information, address book contacts import service, open government data database and sharing platform, online marketplace for daily

42 APIs Used in 7 Days: Twitter, Bandcamp, Klout: This past week 17 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 42 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include 7digital, Bandcamp, Bol.com ,

All credits go to the authors of these sites. Without their hard work Original Signal would not exist. Last updated on January 28th 2012 00:45 | Contact