| Survey Finds Local Marketing Dollars Go To Facebook Places Over Foursquare, Groupon When Facebook Places launched last summer, one of the first questions (other than "how will this impact my privacy?") was "How will this impact other location-based startups?" While Foursquare was gaining tractions and users, some questioned if Facebook's entry into "location" would serve to squash it. Foursquare has hardly been squashed. The startup ended 2010 with over 380 million check-ins and now boasts over 6 million users. But a new survey from MerchantCircle suggests that while users may be flocking to Foursquare, businesses' marketing dollars are going elsewhere.
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Subscriptions Come to Apple's App Store: Good News or Bad News for Movies, Magazines? Apple announced the availability of its new subscription service in the App Store today. This service extends the billing service made available with the recent launch of News Corp's The Daily. That means that subscriptions purchased from within the App Store utilize the same billing system that's used to buy apps and in-app purchases. Publishers will be able to set the price and the length of the subscription - weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly, or yearly. Apple touts this one-click subscription and renewal option, that will give customers the ability to manage all their subscriptions - including cancellations and payments- from within their iTunes account page.
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Will Twitter Become the New "Voice of America" Propaganda Arm? Sometimes the US government dumps paper pamphlets out of airplanes over places it wants to see people challenge their governments. How 20th century! This weekend the US State Department started something new: Tweeting in Farsi through an account set up to speak to the people resuming protests in Iran. @USAdarFarsi, as the account is named, now has nearly 3,000 people following it. What is it Tweeting? Calls to support public demonstrations, like in Egypt. Referencing Egypt at this point sounds like a call to overthrow the government, does it not? Decades of historical tension between the US and the Middle East, when it comes to communication policies and technology in particular, give reason to pause before assuming the State Department's social media campaigns will be received as benevolent.
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SongKick Raises Nearly $2m More for Concert Alerts, Music History & More There are many different services that let you sign up to get an email alert when your favorite band is coming to town, but UK-born SongKick keeps innovating and keeps finding more support for its efforts. A 2007 graduate of tech incubator program YCombinator, SongKick has raised $1.8 million in its 4th round of funding, according to an SEC filing posted online tonight. SongKick lets users collaborate to create a shared memory of all the live music shows they've attended, complete with multimedia and set lists. The company has said it wants to build something like IMDB for the musical history of musicians. Beyond alerts, ticket sales and a historical resource, SongKick's biggest ticket to success has probably been its Application Programming Interface, which allows other partner websites to automatically display upcoming concert dates on artist pages. The biggest partner? Music industry approved YouTube sister-site Vevo, which started using SongKick to power its concert listings this summer.
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Tonight on Jeopardy: Man vs. Robot in a Fight to the Death...of Humanity! Here at ReadWriteWeb we are, I think you can safely say, obsessed with the upcoming robot-man slugfest on Jeopardy. We've covered it three separate times already. Tonight is the first of three nights where the IBM supercomputer Watson fights it out against Jeopardy's two biggest champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. So why are we so into it?
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What Do 24 Hours of Mubarak Tweets Look Like? On February 11, nearly three weeks of protests in Egypt culminated with the country's president of 30 years finally stepping down. The day before, then-president Hosni Mubarak was expected to make his announcement and much of the Twittersphere was abuzz in expectation. When he didn't step down, the Web erupted. Before he ever said a word, however, Stanford computer science graduate student Rio Akasaka pointed his server at Twitter and captured every Tweet with the word Mubarak and turned it into a video of Tweets around the world.
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From #Jan25 to Tahrir: What Comes Next for the Internet Revolution? Guest author Ahmed Zidan lives in Egypt and is the editor of Mideast Youth. The Egyptian protesters have overthrown Mubarak after nearly 30 years. Egypt has come second in row after Tunisia. The two revolutions, the Tunisian and the Egyptian, have succeeded. Egypt has seen its first people's revolution, and over 18 days many things changed until the regime was totally uninstalled. Let's trace the protests back across the Mediterranean. The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid was the spark for the massive Tunisian protests that overthrew then-president Ben Ali. The Tunisian protests, in turn, were the spark for Egypt's #Jan25. And it's very relevant to name it #Jan25, because it was totally Internet driven. (Other names include the Jan. 25 Revolution, Revolution of Anger, and lately Tahrir Revolution, an Arabic equivalent for Revolution of Liberation.) It's not an overstatement to say that #SidiBouzid is the sole parent of #Jan25, and created a domino effect that will not stop in Egypt.
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Report: Mainstream Media Still Drives the Discussion on Twitter When you think of Twitter and influence, you might think that the most obvious metric used to measure would be the number of followers a user has. Time and again, influence on Twitter has been shown to be not a direct function of how many followers one has, but a number of other factors. One of those factors, according to a report by HP, may be just as obvious as follower numbers: long-standing status as a source of information and news. Having millions upon millions of followers may be fun, but it doesn't set the Trending Topics.
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AT&T Makes App Creation Easier for Home Appliances, Other Objects Wireless connectivity: it's not just for cell phones anymore. Why then should apps be thought of as just for phones? A fast growing number of non-phone devices is coming online and publishing data about their surroundings and activities to the internet. From e-readers to bathroom scales to traffic signals and connected home sensors, the network enablement of formerly disconnected devices is just beginning. The Internet of Things, Web of Things, or Machine to Machine (M2M) communication are the names many people have applied to this trend and it's widely expected to be one of the next major technology disruptions. How will the data be interfaced with by users? In large part, through apps. AT&T announced four new partnerships today with Machine to Machine application development platforms, aiming to make it easier for device manufacturers to build apps that get their devices onboard with what used to be known as a giant phone company. AT&T was reported this month to have added more connected non-phone to its network last quarter than any other network provider.
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Google Releases Chrome Extension to Block Spam from Search Results Are you tired of eHow articles dominating your Google searches? Sick of that same site showing up every time you search for something? Had enough with Yahoo Answers and the inane, unending drivel it seems to drum up from the dregs of the Internet? The Google Web search team has launched a Chrome browser extension today that will likely become your best friend then. The extension lets you block search results from showing up, meaning you never have to trudge through the murky depths of content farms again.
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