| Text Your Friends From Facebook With HeyWire's New App Another company in the very crowded but very popular messaging space, HeyWire is launching a Facebook app today that will allow users to send both texts and tweets from within Facebook. Like other text-messaging services, HeyWire gives you a real phone number to use in order to send and receive text messages. Messages that are sent also sync with the company's iOS and Android apps, so you can read and respond via multiple devices.
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Samsung and Visa Team up to Bring NFC to London 2012 Olympics NFC-enabled mobile payments are coming to the London 2012 Olympics, thanks to a new partnership between Samsung and Visa, both sponsors of the upcoming Games. In addition, Samsung will launch a specially branded "Samsung Olympic and Paralympic Games" mobile handset in conjunction with the sponsorship, which will include the technology necessary for making mobile payments happen - NFC and Visa's contactless payments technology. With the device, and any other NFC-capable phone, mobile users can pay for purchases using only their phone at over 60,000 locations in London. NFC, or near field communication, is a short-range wireless communication technology that allows for data exchanges between short distances. It's a key component to the upcoming mobile wallet solutions now being designed by handset makers, carriers and other third parties.
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Mobile RSS Readers: What's Popular & What Works RSS feeds were a big driver of innovation in the Web 2.0 era. RSS Readers like Bloglines, Newsgator and Google Reader became the go-to services for people to subscribe to the latest news and blog posts. Over the past couple of years, mobile phones have become a major content consumption device. Yet RSS Readers have struggled to make the transition. In part this has been due to the increased importance of Twitter and Facebook for circulating news and information. But it's also because tracking RSS feeds on your smartphone is a user interface challenge - and few, if any, startups have solved it. This is the third post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. The first post explored the thriving world of music on smartphones and yesterday we looked at news apps on the iPad. Today we analyze RSS on smartphones.
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How to Track the Future of the Music Industry There is simply nothing like Twitter for being a fly on the wall. People sit at work and tweet about what they're doing. They tweet at night, they tweet in the morning and they tweet a lot on the weekends - find a vein of good tweets from a group of people you want to learn from, watch it over time and the world is your oyster. That's my theory, anyway. One of the things I'm interested in tracking are the streaming music services. So tonight I built a Twitter list of people who work at Rdio, Pandora, Mog and Spotify. (Then I remembered Grooveshark!) Give it a click and you can follow it too. I'll show you how I made it below - and of course this process could be applied to any field.
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Facebook Acting Buggy? You Could Be a Test Subject Have you ever been using Facebook and randomly found that you were suddenly unable to do some very basic thing, like update your status? Or comment on and "like" your friends' statuses? Maybe the design suddenly changed slightly and you were the only one seeing it? Don't worry, Facebook is a website and websites aren't haunted, so there's nothing supernatural at play. Rather, it could be that someone at Facebook is intentionally messing with you to see how you react...but in the end, it's all for a better user experience.
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If You Like Flipboard, Check Out Zite - It's Easier to Use The iPad was made for magazines but very few existing magazine publishers are making good use of it. Instead, a new class of startups have begun to build magazine-like apps for reading links from around the web. Flipboard is the best known and best funded, but there are others. One that's new to me and is in the news today, for reasons good and bad, is Zite. If you've used or heard of Flipboard, you should check out Zite: it's easier to use and easier to personalize. The trade-off is that it's easy to personalize, but not to customize with a lot of control. It's more like Pandora than it is like iTunes. Zite lets you sign in with your Twitter, Google Reader or (as of tonight) Delicious account and it learns what you like by seeing what you share on those other services. It doesn't display your subscriptions from there, it just uses that information as inspiration. Then it learns from your behavior with the magazine it creates. It's like Pandora for web magazine reading, but smarter.
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FullyFollow.Me: Follow, Friend & Connect with a Click Nowadays, meeting someone in real life is just the first step. What's their phone number? Email address? Do you follow them on Twitter already? Are you Facebook friends? What about LinkedIn? Maybe they could write you a stellar recommendation somewhere down the line! Following someone on all the proper social networks can be a confusing and time consuming effort. Maybe they're easy to find on one, but not another. If you want to make sure that others can follow you across multiple networks, then FullyFollow.me makes it as easy as a single click.
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Samsung Laptops - Now With Secret Keyloggers? In Network World's Security Strategies Alert newsletter, Mohamed Hassan details his discovery of StarLogger keyloggers on several different Samsung laptops. Keyloggers record every keystroke on a computer's keyboard and email them to a recipient. This keylogger was hidden and pre-loaded on the computers he tested, making it a significant step beyond the "Sony BMG rootkit fiasco" from 2005. There, keyloggers were loaded onto users' computers from music CDs with the ostensible goal of limiting illegal music use.
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Twitter Enables Fully-Functional, Embedded Tweets Until now, there has been no quick and simple way to embed a functional Tweet in a blog post. That is, most of us bloggers simply took a quick screenshot, uploaded the image and used that, meaning that users were left looking at the picture of functionality without any of the benefits - they couldn't follow, retweet, reply or favorite a thing. Today, Twitter has released a new set of developer tools that will make it easier for bloggers and others alike to embed fully-functional Tweets on the Web, with WordPress leading the pack.
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Founders & CEOs on Jack Dorsey's Return to Twitter While Twitter's "days of imminent technical meltdown" may be in the past, the company has run into a host of other troubles in recent months. As a part of its efforts to monetize and stabilize its once shaky servers, the company has sent signal after signal that developers should watch where they stand, lest they be squashed in future developments. The effect has been one of creating a great deal of fear, uncertainty and doubt amongst those - the developers, founders and CEOs - who have elevated Twitter to the height it enjoys today. This week, however, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced his return and these self-same members of the Twitter ecosystem have renewed hope that they and Twitter could work together again.
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