| Google Takes Social Search Global, +1 Coming Soon The latest battle in the land of search engines is social search - the addition of signals from social graphs to bring users increasingly personalized search results. To that end, Google has been working on its offering the longest, first introducing the idea back in 2009 when it launched in the U.S. Today, the company announced that it is "bringing Social Search to more users around the globe" and that it has plans to bring its most recent social addition - the +1 button - with it.
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63% of Younger Generation Eager for NFC & Mobile Payments According to a new survey, 63% of 18 to 34 year-olds would be comfortable using their mobile phones to make purchases, versus the older generation (35 and up). This "younger" generation is highly attached to their mobile devices when compared with the older group, too, with 65% reporting they "feel more naked" without their phones than their wallets. Meanwhile only 34% of the older group could say the same.
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Mobile Payments Company BilltoMobile Goes Global Mobile payment outfit BilltoMobile is today launching its service globally, covering over 200 mobile carriers in more than 60 countries worldwide. The service allows customers to pay for online purchases using their mobile phones. Currently, the company has relationships with three of the top four U.S. carriers (Verizon, AT&T and Sprint) for its direct carrier billing service. It's also popular in the Asian market, thanks to key investor Danal Co., Ltd. from Seoul, South Korea, a company with a long history in this market. Through a newly announced partnership with Mobile First, the company will now reach billions more subscribers in the EU, Asia and South America, it says.
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Kindle E-Books Now Outselling All Paper Books on Amazon Amazon announced a bell weather moment for electronic books today - Kindle e-books now completely outsell hardcover and paperback copies combined. We are not going to sit here and say anything foolish like "the paper book is dead." It most certainly is not. Since April 1, 2011, for every 100 paper books that have been sold on Amazon.com, there have been 105 Kindle books sold, Amazon says. It is not like the e-book has killed the paper book and it probably never will. But, e-books are growing and Amazon's simple formula is driving the pace. Device ubiquity plus low prices and popular content equals: one killer platform steamrolling the competition.
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The Future of the Smartphone: Holograms & Folding Screens eYeka, a crowdsourcing company that specializes in "online co-creation" of products, has published some intriguing concepts for future smartphones. eYeka's community came up with the following list of requirements for a next generation smartphone: a minimalistic, non-complicated design; more features (which may clash with the previous requirement); a design which feels like an extension of the human body; the ability to be a "life guide" (Chandler, anyone?); eco-friendly; transparent (meaning to project information as a hologram). Mobile companies like Nokia and Ericsson have been inventing next generation prototypes for years. But it's the breakout products like Apple's iPhone that ultimately win out. Some of the features shown below may be in whatever is the next iPhone, whether it be created by Apple or another company. You be the judge: videos of the two winning concepts are embedded below.
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Second Life Co-founder's New Project CoffeeandPower: Exchange Virtual Currency for Real-World Tasks CoffeeandPower, the latest project from Second Life co-founder Philip Rosedale has launched in test-mode in the San Francisco area. The service describes itself as a "sort of live version of Craigslist." There have been a number of startups take aim at Craiglist as of late. That's no surprise, really. The UI is wretched, there's no social sharing component, and there's no mobile Website and no mobile app. There's definitely room for disruption here, right?
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Instapaper May Add Blogging Support Popular mobile app Instapaper isn't just a great way to catch up on reading when you're spending time offline. It's also a little bit of magic that blends the quiet of time disconnected with the buzz of the social web. It looks like that may become all the more true with the addition of a blogging tool to the Instapaper app, if a public conversation about the matter can be taken literally. Instapaper stores stripped-down copies of articles you select from the web, but offline on your device so you can read without connectivity. With the latest version of the app launched a few months ago, you can designate an article for sharing out on Twitter or Facebook once you get back online later. Today WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg asked Instapaper founder Marco Arment to enable posting to a WordPress blog from inside Instapaper. "I'll make it happen," was Arment's response. Cool!
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Google Places Now Imports Your Foursquare Check-Ins Google Places just announced a new feature that lets you import the places you've checked-in to on Foursquare into Google to rate and review. It's as simple as finding the feed from your Foursquare profile, copying its link and pasting it into the search box in Places. It's really easy! Places is fast becoming one of Google's most social new services and to be honest, I think I like it better than Foursquare's celebrated new recommendations feature - at least as that feature is implemented right now. Regardless of which you prefer, as Google's announcement of the new feature says in its title "Better access to your content is, well, better." Wouldn't it be nice if all the related services we used made it this easy to port data around from one to another so that each could make its unique value add to the common data that is the foundation of our online lives? It sure would.
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New WordPress App for iOS is a Knock-Out Blogging platform WordPress just announced a major upgrade to its long-beleaguered app for the iPhone and iPad. The new version is awesome. (iTunes link.) The company says it's now solved most of the major problems, squashed the bugs that caused 75% of the apps crashes and now it's time to add new features. New features added in the version now available in the App Store include: a "Quick Photo" feature that lets you snap and post a photo very fast, a mobile stats display, localization in 10 langues and more. This new version is the first one I've downloaded for awhile and I was thrilled to see how easy it was to add a self-hosted WordPress.org blog to the app now, too!
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International Museum Day: The Year's Tech Today is International Museum Day. Celebrated annually on May 18 since its inception in 1977, the day seeks "to raise awareness on how important museums are in the development of society." Well, ReadWriteWeb is lousy with museum-goers, and we have paid attention to some of the technological advancements and experiments that museums have seen over the last year. We thought we would celebrate by bringing some of those to the fore.
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