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6 Brands Get It Right on Viddy

Viddy, the hot social video editing and sharing app, has racked up millions of ordinary users and a whole host of celebrity participants. Perhaps leery of video, brands are not signing up to the network quite as fast. Nonetheless, there are some early-adopter corporate Viddy accounts worth checking out. We’ve taken a look at six brands currently using Viddy in smart and savvy ways. SEE ALSO: How to Get Started With Viddy Discover which brands we’re highlighting and why. We have included a sample clip from each, so have your say in the comments below: which brand is using the service most effectively and why? 1. DVF The Diane von Furstenberg fashion brand is a big user of the social video platform. As well as using Viddy to show mini-clips of Diane and “everyday” footage, DVF joined forces with Viddy during New York’s Mercedes Benz Fashion Week. DVF staffers used the app to shoot exclusive behind-the-scenes footage as they prepped for the show, encountered celebs. The event highlights were then cross-posted to the DVF Facebook page. Giving fans an insider glimpse is a clever way to make the most of short-form video — viewers feel like they can enjoy special access to a brand they admire. 2. Red Bull UK Because it only recently added its Viddy account, Red Bull UK has only created a handful of viddys, but every single one is worth watching. The beverage brand keeps tight to its sports/action message with footage of the recent Red Bull-sponsored Empire of Dirt BMX contest. Such events are ripe for the “highlights reel” treatment. The content is incredibly shareable, and Red Bull’s editing of the clips is simply superb. We hope to see more of the same in the future from Red Bull — we think the brand has found a match made in heaven with Viddy. 3. General Electric General Electric has made great use of Viddy with its small selection of well-edited clips, which offer viewers a peek at its cool technology and premises. While the company has only posted three clips so far, they are perfectly suited to Viddy’s 15-second format. Each provides a visual insight to the brand in a format that is accessible and fun for Viddy’s youthful audience, especially when longer, more explanatory YouTube videos might not. 4. Warner Bros Records Warner Bros. Records appears to be testing the Viddy waters. It has created a dozen clips, featuring just one artist: American rapper Waka Flocka Flame. The clips are primarily behind-the-scenes footage from music video shoots. They are surprisingly effective, thanks to Viddy’s cool filters and music effects. While we like the style the Warner Bros. viddys thus far, we might question the need in the future for separate Viddy accounts for individual artists. Perhaps the brand can reserve the main account for a “best of” collection of curated content. 5. Southwest Airlines Southwest Airlines has uploaded a variety of content to Viddy, from light-hearted “guess the airport” challenges to in-flight footage to what can only be described as good, honest plane porn. Recently, the airline used Viddy to host fun competition. It challenged users to create a Southwest-themed Viddy for the chance to win roundtrip plane tickets to the Sundance Film Festival. With fresh content every few weeks or so, it seems Southwest plans to use the platform as one tool in its wider social media dashboard, taking advantage of the unique proposition Viddy offers brands. 6. The Muppets Finally, The Muppets brand is no stranger to social media, and it got in on the Viddy action quite early on. Ahead of the release of The Muppets movie in November 2011, the Disney-owned entertainment brand teamed up with Viddy for a production pack, which contained content and special effect filters that featured The Muppets. The super-shareable clips featuring each of the main characters were also posted online to promote the movie. The Muppets-Viddy partnership is particularly exciting, as it shows how the tool could play a part in movie marketing. For example, it would be the perfect platform to issue a series of teaser clips. We look forward to seeing how other brands use Viddy, as more sign up to the service. Have you seen any other interesting uses? Have your say in the comments below. More About: apps, Business, features, General Electric, Marketing, red bull, Social Media, Southwest Airlines, the muppets, viddy, Video, warner brosFor more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Facebook May Launch Smartphone by Next Year [REPORT]

Facebook may be gearing up to launch its first-ever smartphone by next year, a new report suggests. According to The New York Times, engineers have been sought by recruiters to work on building hardware for a Facebook smartphone. This would be the social network’s third attempt to develop a smartphone, the report said, citing sources close to the matter. The news comes as search engine giant Google completed the acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion earlier this week. This move could help Facebook counter that with its own foray into the smartphone hardware business. SEE ALSO: Motorola Under Google: 3 Possible Futures Rumors about a possible Facebook phone have been circulating for the past few years. Although Facebook was reportedly first working on a smartphone in 2010, sources said the initiative stopped due to development complications. Meanwhile, AllThingsD has reported Facebook and manufacturer HTC were working together to develop a mobile device under the code name “Buffy.” It’s believed that “Buffy” may still be in development. Hiring engineers to work specifically on building Facebook phones would position the company to explore other smartphone projects, as well. Do you think a move into the smartphone business would be smart for Facebook or would it overextend itself? Would you buy a Facebook phone? More About: Buffy, Facebook, mark zuckerberg, smartphone, smartphonesFor more Social Media coverage:Follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Social Media channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Tell-Tale Signs Your Employee is Overworked [INFOGRAPHIC]

Are you stressed at work? You’re not alone: A recent Gallup poll indicates that on-the-job pressure is the top reason for employee dissatisfaction in the American workforce, and nearly half of American workers say their job is “very or extremely stressful.” And whether you notice it or not, you’re broadcasting clear signs that should indicate to your employer that you are overworked and need a change of pace. The infographic below, developed by Column Five in conjunction with employee wellness company Keas, shows exactly how employees behave when they’ve been pushed to their limits. Workers tend to develop classic symptoms when their workload gets too much to bear, such as poor memory, fatigue and bad time management. They also exhibit odd behaviors, working too much or too little in response to the level of stress in the workplace. Employers should be watching for these key symptoms and redirecting overworked employees to a more manageable situation. Of course, the consequences of ignoring these signs can be major — 66% of employees suffer from stress-induced health issues, including but not limited to high blood pressure, headaches, sleeplessness and more frequent periods of sickness. Overworked employees are also more likely to have drastically decreased productivity and play hooky than those who are satisfied with their workload. The overall result is clear: Overworked and stressed workers are never good for a company. Check out the infographic below for an inside look into how overworked employees behave — and how it all can be fixed. Do you ever feel stressed at your job? Let us know in the comments. Infographic research and design by Column Five Social Media Job Listings Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting! Social Media Strategy Director at Likeable Media in New York City Online Marketing Manager at USA Football in Indianapolis Social Outreach Manager at Awesomeness TV in Los Angeles More About: features, infographic, job search series, jobs, mashableFor more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

10 Funniest Tweets of the Week

@JoseConseco "Jose Canseco is the Brian Wilson of Twitter and this is his Pet Sounds."Click here to view this gallery.What better way to enhance this three-day weekend than to enjoy a raucous roundup of Twitter comedy? Internet LOL-curator and comedian Jake Fogelnest has selected his favorite hilarious tweets of the week. Whatever you do, don’t google “Neil Young Dubstep.” — Jake Fogelnest (@jakefogelnest) May 20, 2012 “I don’t know how other people use Twitter, but for me it’s a constant stream of entertainment and jokes. It’s also become my first news source,” says Fogelnest. “Sad as it may be, the reality is I find myself seeing ‘OMG DID U SEE THE NEW YORK TIMES?‘ before I actually see The New York Times. This is because I am a ridiculous person and part of the problem!” Fogelnest has requested that all of you retweet the tweets above and favorite them — in some cases, he would like you to print the tweets, take them to a laser cutter and engrave them on the Vietnam memorial. “Some people may say, ‘It’s not appropriate to put a bunch of dumb tweets on the Vietnam Memorial,’” says Fogelnest. “To those people I say, ‘It’s not appropriate to be such an killjoy. Lighten up, you dweeb!!’” (Note: If you have access to a laser cutter, please do not actually vandalize the Vietnam Memorial.) More About: funniest tweets, trending, Twitter

12 Ways to Optimize Your Resume for Applicant Tracking Systems

Mona Abdel-Halim is the co-founder of Resunate.com, a job application tool that tailors and optimizes your resume for a specific job. You can find Mona and Resunate on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. You filled out the job application, updated your resume and clicked “Submit.” But as the days or weeks pass, you never receive a phone call or email from the employer. What happened? Unbeknownst to many job seekers, a whopping 72% of resumes are never seen by human eyes. Why? Well, employers large and small now use applicant tracking software to parse the information from your resume and map it into a database called an ATS (applicant tracking system). From this information, the system will assign you a score based on how well you match the job the employer is trying to fill, and then rank and sort all candidates. Naturally, the potential employees with the highest scores move on, while others are left in the dust. Wondering how you can optimize your resume and rank highly in the employer’s ATS? Here are several tricks to improving your resume’s score. 1. Use Language from the Job Description: Look through the job listing to determine the skills required. Identify industry terms, buzzwords and jargon the hiring manager uses most frequently in the description and incorporate these words into your resume when possible and applicable — the ATS is looking for these keywords. 2. Get Rid of Images and Graphics: Remember, the ATS is breaking down the information you’re providing and sorting it into different “buckets.” It will not be able to read or understand an image. 3. Choose Fonts Carefully: Stick with standard web-safe fonts like Arial, Georgia, Impact, Courier, Lucinda, Tahoma or Trebuchet. 4. Don’t Hide Keywords: Think adding in a bunch of keywords in white text is the best way to rank highly? Think again. 5. Get Rid of Irrelevant Information: Only include past positions and skills that are relevant to the job at hand. Irrelevant positions just end up as filler — a waste of valuable real estate on your resume. 6. Don’t Use Any Special Characters: Standard bullets are fine, but other characters (such as arrows) can cause issues that could prevent the ATS from correctly parsing your information. 7. Avoid Fancy Borders and Shading: Stick to simple templates that are easy to read. 8. Pump Up Your Skills Section: Most employers use their ATS to search by specialized or technical skills. Make sure your resume includes any special skills you’ve attained, such as computer programs, strengths, competencies and other abilities. Spell out your skills and include industry-specific abbreviations or acronyms that the employer may also search for when finding candidates with the right experience. 9. Create a Customized Professional Summary: Include a list of bulleted achievements and qualifications that relate to the job description and desired skills. 10. Ditch Spelling Errors: The ATS will miss important keywords when they are misspelled. Avoid mistakes: Spell check, read your document backwards and have a friend (or two) look it over. You can never be too safe. 11. Place Contact Information at the Top: Don’t forget to include vital information, such as your phone number and email address. The ATS may even send an email after you’ve applied to the position with additional instructions — so check your spam folder religiously to ensure you don’t miss further communications. 12. Tailor Each and Every Resume: Different ads will contain different keywords and phrases. If you want your resume to be one of the top rated for each position, you must tailor your skills and experience to each opportunity. Unless you know your highly stylized resume won’t be taking a trip through an ATS, it’s best to save your infographic resume for the in-person interview and upload a .doc or PDF instead. Do you use the above tricks to avoid the resume “black hole”? Let us know in the comments. Social Media Job Listings Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting! Associate Product Editor at Rodale in New York City Online Marketing Manager at Warner Bros. Home Entertainment in Burbank, Calif. Membership/Community Manager at Word of Mouth Marketing Association in Chicago Image courtesy of iStockphoto, vicky_81 More About: contributor, features, job search series, mashable, resumes, trending

Hey Kids, Get Off My Lawn: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Kwindla Hultman Kramer, who is the CEO of Oblong Industries — the company known for developing the gestural interfaces in the film Minority Report. The company’s current customers and partners include Boeing, SAP, GE, and others. When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years Mark Twain, ”Old Times on the Mississippi” Atlantic Monthly, 1874 When I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab fifteen years ago, my research group went on a retreat every year with Famous Computer Scientists from Xerox PARC. I greatly admired these people and their work. But I was young and in a hurry to get where I thought I was going. And it sometimes seemed that every time us young folks talked about our research, or showed a demo, someone would say something like, “oh, that’s very nice, when we did that at PARC ….” Fast forward to the present. For the last few years, every time I see a new piece of small, open, hackable, networked hardware, or a new reputation engine, or a generative art piece, or a product built around location tracking plus real-time information push, or — well, you get the idea — I have to bite my tongue and think of the PARC folks to keep myself from saying, “oh, that’s very nice, when we did that at the Media Lab ….” All of which just proves that the wheel of history revolves. New work is always new, by definition, even if it’s not entirely new (which nothing can ever be). That’s a long introduction to a short essay on programming tools. In particular, I’ve been intrigued by the online discussion recently around some very nice work on interactive development environments by Bret Victor and a related Kickstarter project — and now YCombinator company — called Light Table, by Chris Granger. Bret’s stuff is great. And Light Table is great. If you’re anything like me, you want to use the tools these two people are building. Go contribute to the Kickstarter project right now. The funny thing is, though, that we had pretty interesting versions of these tools twenty years ago. By the late 1980s, professional LISP and Smalltalk environments were more than a little like Light Table. When I discovered Visual Age Smalltalk in 1996 I was blown away. Visual Age (and other Smalltalk tools) were built around snippets of code representing objects and methods. There were very few file operations. You could run your code and make live changes to the source, which were reflected in the running process. There was no distinction between the development environment and the runtime. You could save out your working “image”. There were good tools for managing forks, versioning and merge — not just of source code, but of the full system image. If you were writing a GUI application in Visual Age Smalltalk, all the elements on screen were interactively inspectable from inside the debugger. And all the system internals, including the virtual environment, the compiler and the debugger, were introspectible and hackable just by writing a little more Smalltalk code. When I raved about this to my friends, some of whom had old SparcStations sitting in their coat closets running their home networks, they said, “oh yeah, that’s nice, when we built all that stuff into our LISP machines ten years ago at Symbolics ….” So one question we might ask is why programming tools like this haven’t taken over, if we’ve had them for a long time and they are, indeed, generally better in objective or widely agreed upon ways? I can think of a few possible reasons. First, the requirement of a dynamic runtime to build these dynamic environments on top of is actually quite a big deal. Bret’s work is in JavaScript. Light Table targets JavaScript, Clojure, and Python. These days, we have two classes of languages. We use heavily engineered languages that are very, very static in their aesthetic and implementation choices. Truly interactive development environments are difficult to build for these C-family languages. And C-family languages have remained dominant until very recently, because they have both real advantages and “worse is better,” inertial advantages. On the other hand, we have dynamic languages that, relatively speaking, are really just prototypes. Javascript and Ruby and Python are useful and interesting. But much of the work on the dynamic languages side of the fence seems to go into tweaking syntax, reinventing the wheel at the VM level, and community-based library development. All of which I’m actually a big fan of, but goodness, it does sort of make me pine for that 200-person (I’m guessing) crackerjack team working on VisualAge for ten years at IBM. Maybe Google — in some ways the IBM of 2012 — will get us there again with JavaScript and V8. Then we’ll have a dynamic language stack that is fully engineered in the same sense that IBM Smalltalk and Symbolics LISP were. Second, I think that the web-enabled explosion of programming and programmers has set back the development of software tooling just as it (temporarily) set back user interface design. Again, I hasten to make clear that I think what the web hath wrought is wonderful, on balance. But there’s no free lunch, and for ten years most of the tech world turned its attention to building out a new global platform that could not, in its early days, support very much in the way of new user interfaces or sophisticated runtime architecture work. The web has grown up, though. The capabilities of modern JavaScript frameworks attest to that, as does the low-level work on implementations like V8. Third, screen real estate matters. The traditional “everything is a file” approach is wonderfully portable. You can build an environment for working with files even for a very small display. Heck, you can work with files if all you have is a line-mode terminal. But flexibly arranged code snippets and fully interactive graphical debuggers require a lot of pixels. And there aren’t always enough pixels. I’m amazed at how often I visit Big Companies and see full-time programmers working at their desks on single, 15″ monitors. That’s an enormous missed opportunity to enable productivity. Pixels have gotten really cheap, though, and come in more and more form factors. We actually could build, today, a development environment designed to make use of a laptop screen and a tablet screen, simultaneously. A MacBook Air and an iPad, used together, would give me more pixels than I had on my dual-monitor desktop back when I fired up Visual Age Smalltalk every day. Finally, if we really want to get away from files and static representations of programs, maybe we want to get away from text altogether. There’s been lots of good academic work on graphical — as in, really, graphical — programming environments over the years. But that’s another entire conversation. Here are a couple of good pages on LISP Machines, which really were the future before the future was quite possible to build. And, as far as I know, the closest anyone has ever gotten to creating a full dynamic environment for a C-language platform is Alexia Massalin’s Synthesis operating system. If you are a programmer of any kind, I’ll wager that Alexia’s dissertation will blow your mind. So, let’s make the old tools new again. I want to use Light Table, and whatever Light Table catalyzes that we can’t yet imagine. But I do promise that when that new thing comes along, I’ll tell you we built an early version of it at the Media Lab at the tail end of the last century.

Emergency room doctors

It's a mindset, not just a job. You can pitch them as hard as you like about having them work to persuade their patients to give up smoking (after all, it saves lives in the long run), but I think you'll find that they're a lot more interested in stopping the bleeding. We need emergency room doctors, no doubt. I just wonder if we have too many of them in your organization. If all we do is reward fast first aid in what people do at work, is it any wonder we don't have enough attention to the strategy and choices that would eliminate the need for all that running around in the first place? It helps to know how prevalent the "emergency room" culture is before you start training your people on a new long-term strategy.

Facebook’s Plans for the World Wide Web

When you’re the world’s largest social network you find it difficult to let defeat slow you down. Facebook may be autocratic in the way it deals with its membership base and it may want to own the web and all its content but it is also the place where everyone goes to hangout online with their friends and it just keeps on growing

HTC Canada Announces the Launch of their Thinnest Smartphone HTC One S with ... - San Francisco Chronicle (press release)

HTC Canada has finally announced the availability of HTC One S in Canada with Virgin Mobile, Bell, Telus, and Fido, according to a recently released market survey report from Internet Marketing Services. The Ontario based market survey company is well known for their unbiased review of different popular products. HTC Canada has just strengthened their position in the Canadian market with the launch of their slimmest Smartphone HTC One S. This new series of Smartphone is reported to have an authentic sound and amazing camera, according to a recently published market survey by Internet Marketing Services. The market research company also reports that this highly anticipated Smartphone is now available on mobile networks from Bell, Virgin Mobile, Fido, and Telus. HTC One S is an integrated form of HTC Sense 4 and Android 4. The thorough survey from Internet Marketing Services suggests that the introduction of this advanced Smartphone would certainly strengthen HTC's position in the Canadian market. HTC Canada was launched for the first time by AT&T, and since then the company has introduced some of the most beautiful Smartphones in Canada. During their survey, Internet Marketing Services has found that most of the Smartphone users prefer using slim handsets without compromising on features. HTC One S has been designed specifically for these users. The handset features HTC ImageSense to improve all parts of the camera including the software, sensor, and lens. A custom HTC ImageChip has also been introduced to ensure best possible image quality even in adverse conditions and super fast image capture. The report also reveals that the HTC One S handset is equipped to shoot unlimited photos without a break just by holding the shutter. Integration of BeatsAudio provides a superior audio experience. The phone is powered by advanced Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and offers a qHD screen measuring 4.3 inch. The Smartphone users in Canada have welcomed the release of HTC One S with great enthusiasm. The launch of this innovative new handset by HTC Canada is expected to have a serious impact on the Smartphone market in Canada, suggests Internet Marketing Services. About Internet Marketing Services: Internet Marketing Services is a private market research company that conducts market research on various topics. The company is based out of Ontario. For the original version on PRWeb visit: www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/5/prweb9548452.htm

Never Take Your Eyes Off This Hacker Metric

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal. If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. That’s why when my friend Andrew Chen posted an insightful analysis of Facebook user data, I was happy to get back to learning from what the company did right instead of debating what its bankers did wrong. Chen calculated Facebook’s historical ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) and the stats are startling. Since March 2009, when the earliest data is available, approximately 50% of Facebook users logged in daily. As other technology companies struggle to maintain DAU to MAU ratios of 5% or less, Facebook’s numbers appear stratospherically high in comparison. But what is equally surprising is the consistency of that ratio over time. Despite periodic user revolts in reaction to changes in the site, the ratio remained strangely stable. In fact, the number has risen over the past year and is now hovering at 58% as of March of this year. It’s as if Zuckerberg has steered the company by this golden ratio. Which begs the question: is there some wisdom here regarding this ratio as a predictor of Internet success? Obviously, there are no guarantees and starting cutting edge tech companies will always be risky business. But, assuming you have a solid business model, there are good reasons to believe that if there is one metric to focus on while building your business, it’s the percentage of users who come back daily as expressed by this ratio. As I’ve written previously, I believe a mastery of the mechanics of habit design is increasingly deciding startup winners and losers. Not only because habits cement user behavior in an increasingly cluttered digital world, but because a high-engagement product is also a high-growth product. The two are one and the same. A high DAU to MAU ratio is a great indicator of the strength of user habits and, ceteris paribus, I’d bet on a business with the higher ratio over a competitor every time. Here’s why: More is More When it comes to web and mobile startups, high DAU to MAU is more important than the size or growth rate of an entrenched competitor. Case in point, Facebook defeated much earlier competitors like MySpace and Friendster, both of which had healthy growth rates and millions of users by the time Facebook got started. This is because of what I call the “more is more principle.” High user engagement has an exponential effect on user growth. As David Skok points out on his blog, “The most important factor to increasing growth is not the Viral Coefficient, but the Viral Cycle Time.” Viral Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to complete a viral loop and it has massive impact on user growth. “For example, after 20 days with a cycle time of two days, you will have 20,470 users,” Skok writes. “But if you halved that cycle time to one day, you would have over 20 million users! It is logical that it would be better to have more cycles occur, but it is less obvious just how much better.” Having a greater proportion of DAUs dramatically increases Viral Cycle Time for two reasons. First, daily users initiate loops more often – think tagging a photo on Facebook. Second, more daily active users means more people to respond and react to each invitation. The cycle not only perpetuates; with high DAU to MAU, it accelerates. One Way to Grow Those who talk tech split into two dogmatic camps. Some prioritize growth and accept low engagement, while others believe a company needs to nail engagement before focusing on growth. I believe this is a false dichotomy. If you have only one or the other, congratulations, you’ve got squat. Let’s first take a look at user growth. Distribution, of course, is critically important and no company can survive without a sound customer acquisition strategy. Not only is growth essential but it is something engineer-driven companies love to work on. In fact, the title of “Growth Hacker” has recently become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley digerati. Tweaking viral coefficients and instantly seeing the results is intoxicating. It’s startup feedback at its finest. But optimizing growth without engagement has its pitfalls. As Peter Thiel recently told his class at Stanford, the effectiveness of distribution channels tends to follow a power law. Just as businesses tend to have only one revenue stream, they also have only one good growth strategy – the effectiveness of which is 10x the results of other distribution channels. The problem with having only one real way to grow is that the method becomes obvious to others and is quickly copied. For example, in its early days, Facebook capitalized on users importing their email contact list to drive growth. But soon thereafter, so did everyone else. But having competitors copy you is a high-class problem. It means something is working. Worse yet is discovering a fantastic viral loop that drives growth only to see engagement crater when users realize there’s little long-term value in the service. Ringtone businesses, sheep-throwing Facebook games circa 2008, and today’s social video sharing apps using questionable growth tactics, are just a few of the “leaky bucket” businesses that occur when distribution outpaces engagement. When it comes to building a big business, clearly a good acquisition channel is mandatory, but not sufficient. Given the power law of user growth, you will likely only have one major way of acquiring customers and it won’t be much of a secret. You’ll need some other competitive advantage. Engagement as Advantage As opposed to distribution channels, the mechanics driving user engagement do not follow a power law. In fact, it is the nuances of user behavior that make the competition irrelevant, just as it did in the case of Facebook’s early rivals. Discovering non-obvious user needs and creating accompanying habits is accomplished through deep observation grounded in solid behavioral theory, followed by methodical trial and error. It takes time to create new habits and getting the user to act the way you’d hoped is accomplished by uncovering a thousand tiny insights into the user’s psyche. The process of uncovering latent needs is characterized by understanding more about users than they know about themselves. The distribution strategy will always be obvious, but the behavioral insights are important secrets that can only be discovered through rigorous testing. Zynga had one obvious way to acquire users, namely Facebook ads. But the company has a cadre of behavioral insights it uses to craft addictive games. It collects terabytes of information daily to alter game dynamics to boost user engagement. Quora primarily drives users to its site through Google search traffic. But the conjecture about all the reasons why the service is so sticky spills over a long question thread. Instagram posted images to Twitter and Facebook to drive user acquisition, placing its growth strategy in plain sight. However, the founders, one of whom studied psychology as a Symbolic Systems major at Stanford, acquired a deep understanding of what makes users tick and click. But why can’t behavioral design be copied like a distribution strategy? Because competitors are not able to recognize and act upon these kinds of insights. You can know the competition’s product feels better to use, but you won’t know why. Engaging products gain their advantages by leveraging tiny improvements, which together create huge advantage. From the outside, you can’t tell what’s working and what isn’t. For example, the iPhone is objectively a better designed, more user-friendly, and ultimately more engaging product than the Android experience. But why? Nearly everyone, when given the choice between an Android interface and an iPhone, chooses the iPhone. There are plenty of good reasons to own an Android, but intuitive interface ain’t one. Google knows this and yet they can’t replicate Apple because they don’t know the answer to “why?” You can’t make decisions between seemingly identical interface choices unless you’ve walked the path of user behavior. Without this knowledge, copying the competition becomes a game of throwing darts at features. Habit design requires a fundamentally different, though complementary skill set to growth hacking. Designing high-engagement products is an art which is increasingly becoming a science. The craft crosses the disciplines of psychology and design – both fields which are hard to learn in a short period of time. Unfortunately, designing habits often falls in the organisational abyss between the founders’ vision and what is technically feasible. But those companies able to habituate users quickly enjoy massive advantages. Not only does engagement drive growth for the reasons stated above, but users tend to shut out other, sometimes superior, solutions. In fact, business history is peppered with technically inferior products beating competitors because of the fierce loyalty of habituated users (I’m looking at you Apple addicts). Users only have time and brain cycles for a limited number of services. If a high proportion of users are using your service daily, they aren’t using the competition’s. Can’t Have One Without the Other But focusing on engagement without growth is also a losing proposition. For one, virality is not something that can be bolted on to a product after it is in the wild. Distribution is not an afterthought and it needs to be built into the core of the experience. Either the company has a viral growth mechanic or it doesn’t. So no matter how engaging your service is, it will remain niche unless there is a way to get it in front of new users en masse. Creating a company with both high engagement and high growth requires a sound distribution engine fueled by active users. Both engagement and growth are essential to a company’s viability and by adhering to the tao of DAU and MAU, founders have an accurate point of focus to increase their odds of success. Thank you to David King for reading early versions of this essay Photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

Spanish Soccer Scores a Goal on Social Media

When Mashable took a look at the English Premier League’s social media side last week, the main takeaway was that the 2012 season marked the big social push of the world’s most high-profile soccer league. But Spain’s LigaBBVA — considered a tier below the EPL on the pitch, although it’s home to powerhouse clubs Real Madrid and FC Barcelona — actually looks to be world soccer’s digital leader. To get the fuller picture, we scoured social media sites, and consulted LigaBBVA as well as the Spanish sports and social media site Sportwist. Perhaps the place where La Liga’s social media dominance shines most is with its biggest stars. Three of the top four sports-related Twitter accounts are from Spanish soccer — Real Madrid stars Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo have 10.7 and 9.9 million followers, respectively, while the FC Barcelona club account claims almost 5.2 million. Last month, Kaka became the first sports figure ever to break 10 million followers on the the network. Fellow LigaBBVA stars Andres Iniesta, Cesc Fabregas, Gerard Pique, Carlos Puyol, Xabi Alonso and David Villa each top one million followers as well. The league itself maintains profiles on pretty much all the social web’s major networks — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest and multiple Chinese services. LigaBBVA engages fans extremely well on Facebook in particular. The league’s official page has more than 1 million fans. During a stretch in April, engagement peaked according to Sportwist, with more than 55% of those fans “talking about” LigaBBVA teams, matches and players — an outstanding level of engagement for a brand in any industry. SEE ALSO: English Premier League: The Social Media Season LigaBBVA also dominates world soccer leagues on Twitter. The @LigaBBVA profile counts more than 280,000 followers there, compared with the official @premierleague account’s approximately 209,000 followers. LigaBBVA also has a Klout score of 74, compared to the EPL’s score of 70. The German Bundesliga — considered by many the world’s third-best league in overall quality of play — has a Klout score of 49. On the Chinese social network Sina Weibo, Spain’s soccer league has 155,000 followers, as well as an additional 106,000 fans on the similar Chinese network Ren Ren. What powers LigaBBVA’s social media popularity? Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, arguably two of the world’s three most popular club teams. Consider this, for example: Barcelona has more than 31 million Facebook fans and about 5.2 million Twitter followers; Real Madrid has over 28 million Facebook fans and 4.7 million Twitter followers. No other LigaBBVA team approaches a combined total of 500,000. Why do you think LigaBBVA beats out the EPL on social media? Let us know in the comments. Image via iStockphoto, mikkelwilliam More About: Facebook, Social Media, sports, Twitter, YouTubeFor more Entertainment coverage:Follow Mashable Entertainment on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Entertainment channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

7 Top Mashable Comments This Week

Mashable comments this week were more than fun to read. Our readers found many ways to express entertaining opinions while creating heated conversations. Top stories included the rumored Facebook Timeline redesign, a fake Facebook suicide video, as well as Facebook’s new iPhone camera app. Outside the world of Facebook, other popular stories included Google Chrome surpassing Internet Explorer as the most used browser. Commenter, TileGuyJesse, made a joke about Internet Explorer being the number one Internet browser…for downloading other browsers. Also, earlier this week Guy Kawasaki attended Google+ Photographer’s Conference where he spoke and compared Google+ to Apple in how they’re both a religious experience. At Mashable, we’re always on the lookout for thoughtful, insightful comments that add to our stories or further the discussion. Take a look at this week’s top comments and let us know what you think of the readers’ opinions. FCC Data Rate Regulation Mike Ensley comments with questioning the idea of the data rates a cable company would charge if data was charge per usage as opposed to a flat fee. Comment originally seen on FCC Boss: You Should Pay for Internet By How Much You Use [POLL] Click here to view this gallery. If you haven’t commented on a Mashable article before, check out Mashable Follow, our content curation and social tool, as well as our comment guidelines to learn more. We’d love for you to join the conversation. More About: comments, community, mashable follow, top commentsFor more Social Media coverage:Follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Social Media channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Who’s Up Late Booking Memorial Day Weekend Hotel Rooms Online? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Did you impulsive book a hotel for Memorial Day weekend late at night, tired and groggy eyed? Whether it was because you needed an emergency place to crash for a night or you’re a budget-conscious traveler who spotted an excellent last-minute deal, you’re not alone. It turns out plenty of hotel patrons are reserving rooms after-hours. Hotel Tonight, an Apple iOS-powered accommodations booking service, did some research to figure out what types of people are booking rooms late at night and why they’re doing it. Who are these late night crusaders of last-minute late-night reservations? 24% of them are workaholics, 22% are tired drivers who need to get off the road and 20% are “thrill seekers” who crave the adrenaline rush of an impulsive escape. What kind of hotels are late-night bookers looking to snag? 40% of them want a hip joint — no-frills roadside motels won’t do it for them. It turns out that Washington, D.C. is home to the greatest number of bookings past 10 p.m. — and you’d think visiting foreign dignitaries would be a little more prepared! Meanwhile, Las Vegas, Nev. had the earliest bookings, so while visitors to the strip want to gamble on the craps table, they’d rather have their hotel confirmed nice and early. Find out more in the infographic below, then share with us your story of a last-minute online hotel deal in the comments below. Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, fototrav More About: hotels, infographic, online booking, travel

How To Organize A Social Media Day Meetup

Mashable‘s third annual Social Media Day is on Saturday, June 30, 2012! Social Media is quickly changing our world by bringing people closer together. So, in true Mashable style, we celebrate it! In previous years, we have had incredible Social Media Day Meetups created by event organizers around the globe. To keep that tradition alive, we invite you to once again bring your fellow social media enthusiasts together in person by hosting a Social Media Day Meetup in your area. Like any event, Social Media Day Meetups require planning. If this is your first time organizing one, here’s a couple of tips to get you started. If you have organized one in the past, here’s a refresher course! Step by Step Because we use the Meetup Everywhere platform, there is already a Social Media Day event set up for the over 1,500+ Mashable Meetup Everywhere communities. Here’s how to find and edit your local Meetup: 1. Visit Mashable’s Social Media Day 2012 Meetup Everywhere page. 2. Find the Meetup community nearest you and click on the city name to find the Social Media Day event page. 4. To be the sole organizer, give a date, time, venue and short description of the Meetup. 5. To be a co-organizer, leave other fields blank to allow another Meetup community member to fill them in, which will make him or her your co-organizer. 7. Check the meetup page frequently to answer questions and start conversations on the comment boards. Find a Meetup Community Near You Browse through this list to find a Meetup near you! If you can’t find your city, it may be up to you to create the event! Get The Word Out Make sure your community knows about your Mashable Social Media Day Meetup! Here’s a few ideas to get you started promoting: 1. Create a Twitter account and Facebook page for your event 2. Find something that makes your event special, and let your local media know about it. 3. Alert local organizations that have similar interests about the event. 4. Encourage attendees to share the details, both online and by word of mouth! Gather Organizer Tools Our Social Media Day website is a one-stop-shop for everything you may need to plan your Social Media Day event. On it, you will find Social Media Day logos, tweets, photos and videos from events around the globe, and helpful videos such as this one: Connect with Fellow Organizers The Mashable Meetup Organizers Facebook group is an incredible community of 250+ organizers who plan Mashable Meetups of their own. They’re a friendly, active bunch who are always willing to extend a helping hand to people treading the waters for the first time. Inspiration To get an idea of what a great Mashable Meetup is like, check out the photos below. Good luck planning your Social Media Day 2012 Meetup. We can’t wait to see what you’re able to put together! Photos: Cincinnati An awesome Social Media Day cake was made for #SMDay Cincinnati, the winners of our Most Social City contest. Photo by Christiaan Todd Photography.Click here to view this gallery. For more Social Media coverage:Follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Social Media channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

School Cellphone Ban Spawns Thriving Niche Storage Market

Mobile devices have become like wallets — among the must-have items on your person when you leave the house. Teens are no exception to this rule, but for New York City’s students, this poses a real problem. The New York Board of Education has banned the use of electronics in public schools since the 1980s. For years, there was an “out of sight, out of trouble” policy. Recently, new safety precautions such as metal detectors and backpack checks upon entry, have made it harder for middle school and high school students to smuggle their gadgets into classes. Electronics are confiscated on sight. Two years ago Vernon Alcoser, a Bronx businessman and federal correctional officer, came up with a unique solution for the problem. His big idea — to provide mobile storage for students to store gadgets during the school day. In 2010 Alcoser and his sister Theresa bought a white truck and painted the side with a blue “Pure Loyalty Electronic Device Storage” decal. Parked outside Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx, high school students flocked to the truck’s small window to turn in their electronics for $1 — two gadgets for $1.50. “A friend called me and said her daughter was storing her cellphone in grocery stores and bodegas in the area,” Alcoser tells Mashable. “[Students] were going away from the direction of school in order to do that. I thought if we brought storage closer to the schools, it would be a favor to the kids.” The mobile gadget storage business is now booming and the owners expect to expand. There is certainly a ready market for school-day cellphone storage: The NYC Department of Education (DOE) serves 1.1 million students in over 1,700 schools. And unlike their suburban counterparts, New York City students generally take public transportation to school. Their commutes can rival those of adult workers in length and complexity. Every day, Roci Cepeda travels 30 minutes each way from Brooklyn to Washington Irving High School in Manhattan.Students come in to this school from all other boroughs, arriving as early as 7 a.m. “I need it [my phone] in case I need to communicate with someone,” Cepeda says. “In case of an emergency.” Parents often want to be able to communicate with their children. Many are enthusiastic about Pure Loyalty’s service. “We have a lot of parents that call us and ask if we can come to a particular school because they want to stay in contact with their kids that are going and coming home from school,” says Alcoser. SEE ALSO: Is Total Gadget Immersion Good or Bad for Kids? [INFOGRAPHIC] Jose Garcia, a business student at Bronx Community College, works in the truck each weekday from 7 a.m. to around 5 p.m. — or when the last phone is returned. At schools where metal detectors have been installed at entrances, current students reported having leaving their cellphones at corner stores, delis and markets nearby where owners would watch them for $1. It’s a system Garcia is familiar with. “When I was in high school, we used to leave our phones in grocery stores,” he says. “This is a brilliant idea.” The trucks are staffed with two employees at all times. Once the truck is parked and collecting phones, the vehicle never leaves, so students may retrieve their property whenever it’s convenient. Phones are stored in sleeves and students are given security cards with a unique word or code to ensure correct returns. At Washington Irving, roughly 300 to 400 phones are stored each day. A other locations, Pure Loyalty collects an average of 500 to 700 gadgets a day. Another sign of the venture’s success is the number of copycat services that have sprung up since its inception. “A lot of competition has formed based on them seeing us on the news,” Alcoser says. “There are a few other companies — I don’t know licensed or insured like us.” Pure Loyalty pays insurance that protects phones if truck is lost, stolen or damaged. It has a $2 million insurance policy that covers just the phones. NYC DOE officials conducted thorough background checks on the company its staff, according to Alcoser. He says Pure Loyalty is welcomed by the city’s public schools because the service keeps the students and their property safe. “The school doesn’t want the kids to leave,” he said. “For them, to send the child who came to school away with a phone is not in the school’s best interest.” Check out these photos of the Pure Loyalty storage truck outside Washington Irving High School: Pure Loyalty Electronic Device Storage A team of two parks outside Washington Irving High School in Manhattan -- one of the eight NYC locations. Click here to view this gallery. More About: Business, cellphones, new york city, Social Media, startupFor more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

SpaceX Dragon Opens at ISS

A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft rendezvoused with and was berthed to the International Space Station on

Facebook Camera App: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.What’s New This Week?Facebook Releases Camera: The new Camera Facebook app has similar features to Instagram which was recently purchased by Facebook for $1 billion.The new Camera app enables you to "share photos on Facebook faster than ever, and see all your friends' latest shots in one place."Play Games Directly in Your Facebook News Feed: Facebook is launching “the ability for people to try games directly in news feed. Feed gaming enables developers to share a playable version of their game within news feed and timeline stories, reaching new users through some of our main distribution channels.”You will be able to play games in one click, try games out and convert trials into new installs right from your Facebook news feed.Discussion From Our Networking Clubs: Thousands of social media marketers and small business owners are asking questions and helping others in our free Networking Clubs. Here are a few interesting discussions worth highlighting:How do you create passive streams of income?Is a Facebook page necessary?Advice on choosing a WordPress themeYouTube Turns Seven: YouTube was launched in May 2005. And today, 72 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. YouTube users are watching longer videos and spending more time on the site.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLQDPH0ulCgYouTube Opens Merch Store to All Partners: Last year, YouTube launched the Merch Store. Now other YouTube partners in good standing can offer their fans products they have on Amazon, iTunes, Topspin, Songkick, Google Play and CafePress.The YouTube Merch Store is now open to all YouTube Partners. This enables them to have a Store tab on their YouTube channel.Android Phones Get a New Google+ App: “The update includes lots of highly requested features—like the ability to start a hangout on the go, and to edit posts inline—as well as a stream that celebrates the rich content shared across Google+. ”You can start start a hangout directly from your mobile device.Facebook Gives Open Graph Developers More User Data: Facebook now gives developers the information they need to understand how people are using their Open Graph apps.Facebook app developers can consult the Installs dashboard to see the number of unique user views, acceptances and the associated conversion rate.Twitter Supports “Do Not Track”: The Do Not Track feature allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt out of being tracked by third parties. It’s “like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users,” and Twitter has opted in.The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.— Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012Facebook Adds Option of Liking Brand Pages Directly From Posts: AllFacebook reports that “some Facebook users are seeing the option of liking a brand page directly from a post due to the addition of a new Like button near the top, next to the name of the page.”Facebook Provides Reach Data Directly on Timeline Posts: “Some Facebook page owners can now view certain post metrics directly from their Timeline, including the percentage of fans that saw a given post and the percentage of those who saw the post as a result of paid promotion.”Facebook Launches Promoted Posts: Facebook has started rolling out Promoted posts for some Pages in the US. “This means Pages can now pay to “promote” a post from their Timeline so that it will reach a greater percentage of their fans on Facebook.”Here’s a useful social media tool worth noting:SpotOn: A new social media loyalty card to help small businesses drive traffic and create happy, loyal customers. .What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below. Tweet

What are you leaving behind?

I love watching contrails, those streams of white frozen exhaust that jets leave behind. It's a temporary track in the sand, and then the sun melts them and they're gone. Go to Montana and you might see the tracks dinosaurs left a bazillion years ago. Same sort of travel, very different half-life of their passage. All day long you're emailing or tweeting or liking or meeting... and every once in a while, something tangible is produced. But is there a mark of your passage? Fifty years later, we might hear a demo tape or an outtake of something a musician scratched together while making an album. Often, though, there's no trace. I'm fascinated by blogs like this one, which are basically public notes and coffee breaks by a brilliant designer in between her 'real' work. Unlike tweets, which vanish, Tina's posts are here for a long time and much easier to share and bookmark. Her trail becomes useful not just to her, but to everyone who is interested. What would happen if you took ten minutes of coffeebreak downtime every day and produced an online artifact instead? What if your collected thoughts about your industry became an ebook or a series of useful instructions or pages or videos? What if we all did that?

Startup Partners With Top Designers, Celebrities on High-End Capsule Collections

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: Edition01 Quick Pitch: Limited-edition capsule collections from celebrities and some of the world’s most recognizable designers. Genius Idea: Making luxury even more exclusive. Since sites like Gilt and Groupon took off in the U.S. at the end of the aughts, the number of online businesses offering limited-time discounts, particularly on luxury goods and services, has proliferated. This has been a worrisome trend for many a luxury brand anxious to preserve the price integrity of its wares. Edition01 is part of a small but growing flock of young startups, including retailers Moda Operandi and AHAlife, developing new models for full-priced retail. And it’s landing partnerships with some major brands as a result. It’s current list includes Donna Karan, Anna Sui, Zac Posen and Prabal Gurung. The one-and-a-half-year-old company has also done sales for vintage handbags and a private label collection of fur vests and scarves. How has Edition01 been able to land all of these designers? In addition to the appeal of selling at full-price, cofounder Estefania Lacayo has been working with many of them for years through consulting jobs at Rent the Runway and ideeli, where she worked on designer acquisitons. Before those, she worked as a retail buyer. Items are produced in limited editions of up to 80 and, if very expensive, as few as three. And most of these items are expensive, relatively speaking: Dresses on the site typically carry price tags between $1,000 and $2,500; jewelry and clutches typically cost between $300 and $600. Cofounder Estefania Lacayo says the company plans to launch more collections priced under $300 “for the woman who appreciates craftsmanship but doesn’t have the resources for a $3,000 dress.” Edition01 works with designers at different stages in the production cycle. Sometimes, both parties will meet when a designer is choosing fabrics for his or her own collection; other times, they’ll meet when a designer is placing orders, and develop something from the fabrics he or she has already ordered. Between now and the end of the summer, Edition01 is launching a line of sporty legwear with actor Gwyneth Paltrow and her trainer, Tracy Anderson, as well as a five-designer collaboration in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the CDFA and the New York Mets. A collection with jewelry designer Pamela Love will go live in September. Edition01 raised around $500,000 in seed funding from venture capitalists David Tisch, Ken Lerer and Ron Conway’s SV Angel in August 2011. Lacayo says the company has raised a bridge round with existing investors and also struck a licensing agreement with a luxury store in Qatar. Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark 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: bizspark, edition01, fashion, luxury, retailFor more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Can Online Video Marketing Rescue Businesses from Google's Panda & Penguin ... - San Francisco Chronicle (press release)

PR WebCan Online Video Marketing Rescue Businesses from Google's Panda & Penguin San Francisco Chronicle (press release)With the recent updates and changes coming out of global search engine Google, the online world has had to review their marketing methods across the board. Many traditional techniques of gaining rank position and driving web traffic have become Google Enemy #1ForbesPractical Post-Penguin Marketing Ideas for Small BusinessSearch Engine Watchall 46 news articles »

Google Pushes First Penguin Algorithm Update 1.1

No matter that it’s late Friday night on the start of a three-day holiday weekend in the U.S., Google has just pushed out the first update to its recent webspam-fighting Penguin algorithm. Google’s Matt Cutts announced the news a short time ago on Twitter, calling it a “data... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Startup Partners With Top Designers, Celebrities on High-End Capsule Collections

10 Ways to Bootstrap Your Startup Office Decor

Mashable’s new video series, Behind the Launch, follows Vungle on its startup journey toward a June launch. Each week on Mashable, the Vungle team offers tips and lessons learned from its own startup experience. This week, we saw Vungle take a break from their computers and head into nature, giving us a peek into Vungle’s company culture. Watch the episode above, and then check out Jack’s tips below to find out how to make your office embody your culture. Want more? Tune into Behind the Launch every Monday and Wednesday. Building a great company culture is really important to motivate your staff and to get everyone working toward a common vision and feeling a part of something big. Decorating your office is a fun and cool way to build culture, and though most startups don’t have the budget to compete with Facebook or Google, there are lots of things that you can do to add flair on the cheap. Below, you’ll find 10 ways to bootstrap your office decor, from a stuffed honey badger to a 22-inch gong. What “pieces of flair” do you have in your office space? Let us know in the comments. 1. Paint a Mural on Your Wall Murals are an inexpensive way to add color and personality to a room. Recruit a local artist or art major to do the job. Cost: $240 and a creative friend to helpClick here to view this gallery. More About: Behind the Launch Series, features, mashable, office decor, startup, VungleFor more Startups coverage:Follow Mashable Startups on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Startups channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

App Helps Steer You to Lowest Gas Prices [VIDEO]

More than 30 million people will drive at least 50 miles over Memorial Day Weekend, according to results a survey from the AAA. No matter where they fill up their tanks along the way, they’ll likely spend less money on gas than last year. National gas prices on Friday averaged $3.67 per gallon, down from $3.81 a year ago. Those who still want to beat the average, however, can get some help from an app called GasBuddy. The app, which is available for both Android and iPhone devices, crowdsources gas prices and directs users to the stations where they’re lowest. Watch a demo of the app in the video above and tell us in the comments where you’ll be headed this weekend. Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, aydinmutlu More About: gas, gas buddyFor more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Facebook Pushes ‘Close Friends’ List, Becomes More Like Google+

Facebook is testing a new feature called Close Friends, which lets you know every action the people you add to the list take on the social network. Facebook told Mashable it began the push to some users Thursday. When you sign into Facebook, you’ll be prompted to “Star Your Close Friends” to guarantee you don’t miss their important moments. In other words, you can now stay close to people you indicate as high-priority friends without ever interacting, visiting their profile or catching an update in your news feed. Facebook’s explanation of the new features emphasizes organizing your friends into Smart Lists, based on where you work, live, went to school or family, to ensure you share with just the right people. You can also view a news feed of your Close Friends update — much like a feed of a certain Google+ circle — by selecting the list from below the Friends tab on the left-hand side. I decided to try out the new feature Friday morning, by adding about 20 friends to my Close Friends list. I added stars — Facebook conveniently suggests a pretty good idea of who you consider your close friends based on your interactions — and was ensured my friends wouldn’t know they’d been added to my list. Within an hour, I’d received a handful of notifications — only none of them had anything to do with me. My friends had joined events, shared stories and posted to their Timelines and I didn’t miss a beat. I was eager to test out the feature because it seemed like an easier way to create lists — something I’ve been meaning to do on Facebook since Google+ rolled out its Circles feature. But the Close Friends feature became annoying as soon as my phone was flooded with status updates that looked like this one (taken from the phone of someone who put me on their Close Friends list): If you receive mobile notifications from Facebook, it will send you an update every time someone you add to the list takes an action. If you’ve never restricted your push notifications on mobile before, this feature might be the one to drive you to cut some of them. Do you organize your Facebook friends into lists? If so, do you only share certain posts with certain people? BONUS: 10 Facebook Tips for Power Users 1. View Photos Full-Screen You can browse Facebook photos in full-screen mode, making for a better gallery viewing experience. In an album, click on the first image, then hover over the photo. A floating menu will appear along the bottom of the image. Click on "Options" and you'll see the ability to "Enter Fullscreen." Now you can browse with a clean, black background. To return to normal mode, simply hit the Escape key or the "X" on the top-right of your display.Click here to view this gallery. More About: Facebook, GoogleFor more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Grown Woman Watches ‘Star Wars’ for the First Time [LIVE BLOG]

Against all odds, there are people on Earth who haven’t seen Star Wars. And I’m not talking about hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest. I’m talking about people who enjoy indoor plumbing, like my colleague Christine Erickson. For 24 years, she’s been bombarded with quotes, jokes, memes, toys, commercials, sequels, prequels, parodies, marketing and countless cultural references that fly right over her ignorant little head like the Millenium Falcon making the Kessel Run. (She has no idea what I’m talking about there.) Today is auspicious. Thirty-five years ago, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope debuted in theaters, blowing the sideburns off countless ’70s sci-fi nerds. George Lucas created an institution — dare I say, a cultural prerequisite — upon which all subsequent sci-fi owes a debt. How dare you, Christine Erickson, work at a nerd emporium like Mashable having never seen this seminal space opera. Do you think you’re better than us or something? Well, do you? To remedy this affront on humankind, we’ve locked Christine in a windowless storeroom asked Christine to watch Episode IV for the very first time and share her experience live on the web. At 2:00 p.m. ET, we launch her into a galaxy far, far away, and you can follow her journey right here in this very post. You can also play along on social media: Follow Christine’s tweets: @christerickson. Follow the official hashtag: #StarWarsVirgin. Lots of awesome people will be chiming in! Follow the plot of the movie in real time as it unfolds: @StarWarsPlot. Lots of people have RSVPed for the event on Facebook. See what they’re talking about! Check in to Star Wars and follow along with Mashable on GetGlue. Be sure to use the hashtag #StarWarsVirgin when you share your updates. We want to hear from you! Are you shocked that someone has never seen this movie before? Are you a Star Wars virgin yourself? Every tweet with the hashtag #StarWarsVirgin will be seen by our team, and the funniest, nerdiest, craziest ones will be included in our live blog, right here on Mashable. So, fire up your hyperdrive and join us for this special, social experiment. A huge thanks to Nick McKaig for providing the soundtrack to our video above. If you haven’t checked out his amazing acapella arrangement of the Star Wars theme, you’re really missing out. You can also download the track from iTunes. What better way to geek out on this holiest of holidays? More About: Entertainment, features, Film, humor, live blog, Movies, Sci-Fi, Social Media, Star Wars, trending, TwitterFor more Entertainment coverage:Follow Mashable Entertainment on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Entertainment channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

MIT Scientists Develop a Device for Needle-less Injections

MIT scientists are developing a needle-less injection that could make getting a flu shot as painless as a mosquito bite. The device shoots a tiny, high-pressure jet of medicine through the skin as fast as the speed of sound. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, hospital healthcare workers incur about 385,000 needle-related injuries every year. Meanwhile, fear or discomfort from needles prevents many patients from complying with doctors’ orders. MIT isn’t the first institution to experiment with needle-less injections that may help solve these longstanding problems. The concept has been around since the 1860s. The U.S. military developed high-speed models in the 1950s for use in mass-vacination programs. And modern pharmacists have offered needle-free flu shots. The prototype injection system that MIT has created, however, allows for more precision in needle-less injections than has previously been possible. According to MIT News, it allows healthcare workers to adjust a range of doses at various depths. If giving a shot to a baby, for instance, the shot administrator can use less pressure than he or she would to breech the skin of an adult. Flexibility in dosage and depth also makes jet-powered shots viable for a wider range of treatments. MIT researchers have experimented with using the device to deliver drugs through the eye or ear, and are working on a version that can inject powdered drugs as if they were liquid drugs — something that could be useful in places where proper refrigeration of liquid drugs is impractical. Thumbnail courtesy of iStockphoto, numbeos More About: mit, needleless injections, vaccines

Obama and Romney Go Head-to-Head on Twitter [INFOGRAPHIC]

One of the battles in the war for the White House is being fought on Twitter. It’s common knowledge that Obama’s beating Romney hand-over-fist in followers: the president has more than 15 million followers, compared to Romney’s half-million. However, the number of social followers alone doesn’t mean much — instead, the key to waging a successful political campaign on Twitter is engagement. Along those lines, how does President Obama’s Twitter presence stack up with that of Republican rival Mitt Romney? PeekAnalytics, a social audience measurement service, did some digging to find out. President Obama has more than 5,000 times the “pull,” or influence, than the average Twitter account, compared to Mitt Romney at 466 times the average. That means Obama has 12 times the influence of Romney. That seems like a clear win in the Obama column — until you consider that Obama has 30 times the followers that Romney does, meaning Romney is doing a better job of influencing his smaller audience. SEE ALSO: Obama vs. Romney: The Social Showdown Breaking down both presidential contenders’ followers into demographic categories, PeekAnalytics says Obama’s followers are more international (48% of Obama’s followers live abroad compared to 10% for Romney), they’re younger (58% are between the ages of 18-25, whereas 43% of Romney’s followers are in that bracket), and female (47% for Obama, 29% for Romney) than Romney’s social audience. Meanwhile, Romney’s followers tend to have higher incomes (30% of Romney’s followers make more than $100,000 a year, that category makes up 22% for Obama). Can the candidates’ Twitter following tell us anything about their chances come Election Day? According to PeekAnalytics, a higher percentage of Romney’s followers come from crucial battleground states, save Ohio. For more, check out PeekAnalytics’ infographic below. Do you think presidential campaigns are using Twitter effectively? Sound off in the comments below. Disclaimer: Mashable and PeekAnalytics have a commercial relationship, but Mashable did not pay for this report. More About: 2012 presidential campaign, barack obama, Mitt Romney, Politics, Social Media, Twitter, US

Facebook Camera and Two Other Stories You Need to Know

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at three particularly interesting stories. Facebook Launches Camera App Facebook has released Facebook Camera for iOS, a camera application with a close resemblance to Instagram, which Facebook recently acquired for $1 billion. The app’s claim to fame are photo filters, which should — in theory, at least — make your photos look more attractive, but we’re not too sure Facebook Camera can compete with Instagram, whose filters are arguably much better. In any case, it’s a win-win situation for Facebook which owns both apps, and it can choose whether to push them both at the same time, merge one into the other or completely abandon one and put all its photo-nicefying eggs in one basket. SpaceX Dragon Docking Attempt SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is attempting to dock with the International Space Station today. If successful, SpaceX would become the first private company to achieve such a feat. Watch the live video stream of the docking here. Google Announces In-App Subscription in Google Play Google is adding an in-app subscription option for Android apps offered through the Google Play store. Starting today, developers can use in-app billing to sell monthly or annual subscriptions from inside of their apps. The subscriptions are auto-renewing, and developers just need to set the price and billing interval, with Google Playing managing the purchase transactions for them. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock More About: android, Facebook Camera, features, first to know series, Google, mashable, SpaceX DragonFor more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Watch the SpaceX Dragon’s Historic Docking Attempt Live [VIDEO]

Live broadcasting by Ustream SpaceX’s Dragon capsule will today attempt to dock with the International Space Station. If everything goes as planned, SpaceX would become the first private company to ever complete such a feat. The docking manuevers have already started — the Dragon is currently some 350 meters from the ISS — and the ISS’ robotic arm is expected to grab hold of Dragon at 9 a.m. EDT. Full berthing is expected two hours later. Following a successful docking, the astronauts aboard the ISS will open the Dragon’s hatch the next day and unload the supplies the spacecraft is carrying. The mission has initially suffered a series of setbacks, with several launch delays happening virtually at the last second. After the launch, however, everything else seems to be on track. You can follow SpaceX’s docking attempt in the live video above and on Twitter. More About: ISS, NASA, SpaceX, SpaceX Dragon, trendingFor more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Ketchup Slides Out of Bottles With LiquiGlide [VIDEO]

Smacking the ketchup bottle to get that last dollop out is a (small) but wide spread problem most people would rather avoid. Scientists at MIT did just that and created a secret substance they dubbed LiquiGlide. Bottles are coated in the FDA-approved substance, and the ketchup just slides right out when you tilt the bottle. The team would like to put the “super slippery” substance on numerous other bottles. The bottles for sauces alone is a $17 billion market, one of the scientists said to Fast Company. Another substance with a similar sounding name — Liquipel — debuted at CES earlier this year. It is used for waterproofing cellphones, but like LiquiGlide, it has numerous other intended uses. Would you like to see bottle companies adopt the LiquiGlide technology? What else do you think this could be used for? Tell us in the comments. ‪Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, fotobazilio ‬ More About: Inventions, mitFor more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

The Game Mechanics of Customer Loyalty

by Gabe Zichermann is a public speaker, designer, and author of the books Game-Based Marketing and Gamification by Design. Follow him @gzicherm Most of the interest in gamification and user engagement for startups centers on customer acquisition. This is partly because of the short time around startup planning, but also the strong need to show and grow traction as quickly as possible. With startups like Foursquare, Codecademy and StackOverflow using gamification to build unprecedented early customer engagement, it’s no wonder so many founders want to talk about virality. But while some startups exit within 12 to 18 months without having to prove revenue models or market opportunity, many other breakthrough entrepreneurs are still running their companies after three or four years in increasingly crowded markets. These organizations must get serious about marketing, especially when subscription drives their revenue. And nothing is more important to serious marketers than loyalty — or its

The Game Mechanics of Customer Loyalty

Pinterest Users: Find Out When Your Items Are on Sale

Want to know when items you pin on Pinterest go on sale? Now you can — up to a point — thanks to a new feature launched this week at a site called Lyst. Lyst, a London-based startup, is a little like Pinterest. The site invites you to follow designers, stores, bloggers and your friends, from which it creates a feed of clothing and accessories you can add to your own “lyst.” If an item on your lyst is discounted, you’ll be notified by email. Now, if you connect your Pinterest account, you’ll receive an email notification when an item you’ve pinned on Pinterest goes on sale, too, so long as that item is also indexed on Lyst. Lyst’s index is limited largely to fashion brands and retailers — so if you mostly pin books or furniture, this tool isn’t going to be terribly useful to you. To see which of your pins are recognized by Lyst, check out your “Collections” under “My Lyst.” A bonus: If an item you’ve pinned from one retailer (say, Neiman Marcus) goes on sale somewhere else (at Nordstrom, or Endless), you’ll still get notified. Lyst also offers a Runway Tracking tool that lets you know when your favorite runway looks arrive in stores. The tool was launched during New York Fashion Week last September. The London-based startup is currently exploring additional methods for tracking the fashion goods you may be interested in purchasing. More About: fashion, lyst, pinterest, shoppingFor more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

SpaceX Tweets Photos of Historic Flight to International Space Station

1. Watching the Launch "So, what were the ISS astronauts doing during @SpaceX's historic #Dragon launch this week? The same thing we were!" - @NASAClick here to view this gallery.It’s been two days since private spaceflight company SpaceX launched its Dragon capsule to dock with the International Space Station, and it’s already captured and tweeted dramatic pictures of its flight. SpaceX and NASA have tweeted a series of photos taken by the unmanned Dragon, which could become on Friday the first ever privately built spacecraft to dock at the habitable artificial satellite. The mission is part of an effort to test Dragon’s reliability to transfer supplies to the station. By 2015, SpaceX aims to have a certified commercial spacecraft to send passengers to Earth’s low orbit. SEE ALSO: 7 Things You Need to Know About SpaceX Launch Over the past few days, the Dragon has successfully completed a series of tests to determine if it’s ready to berth at the station. As of now, it’s on track to attach to the facility on Friday morning — a process that SpaceX says will take “extreme precision.” SpaceX tweeted on Thursday that the most difficult part of mission is on the horizon. #Dragon has been performing well, but the most difficult aspects of the mission are still ahead. — SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 24, 2012 Astronauts already on board the International Space Station will activate the space station’s robotic arm that will reach out and attach the capsule. The following day, they will open Dragon’s hatch and unload the supplies that the Dragon is carrying. Image courtesy of SpaceX More About: Dragon, elon musk, space, SpaceX

Did Yahoo Rush Axis Out the Door Before It Was Ready?

Yahoo’s new Axis browser has a problem. It was released last night as both an app for iOS and as an add-on for desktop browsers, but Yahoo may not have dotted all the “i’s” before launch in the latter case. The Google Chrome extension for Axis appears to have launched with a security hole, identified by self-described “entrepreneur, hacker and blogger” Nik Cubrilovic. After downloading the extension with the intention of checking out the source code, he found that the private certificate the extension uses to authenticate itself with Google — essentially the code that performs the “handshake” that lets your computer know the download is safe — could be easily accessed by anyone. That means if a hacker wanted to create a piece of malware that infects Chrome, they could use the certificate to make the malware seem authentic. Once it saw the certificate, Chrome would think the forged extension has been approved by Yahoo. Cubrilovic says he tested the vulnerability by cloning the Axis extension, then emptying the content (i.e. Axis itself), replacing it with a Javascript alert. Sure enough, the extension installed perfectly as if it were a real Yahoo extension. SEE ALSO: Yahoo Axis Shines on iPad, an Afterthought on Desktop [REVIEW] If a hacker were to use the certificate, they could theoretically create a piece of malware that could capture all the sites a user visited, including passwords and cookies, Cubrilovic writes. A commenter on Cubrilovic’s site claims to be Ethan Batraski, Yahoo’s director of product management. He said the company would release an updated extension that would resolve the issue. Responding to a query from Mashable, a Yahoo spokesperson said, “We recently learned of a vulnerability with Yahoo Axis on Chrome. We worked quickly to resolve the issue and have issued a new Chrome plug-in. Users who downloaded Yahoo Axis on Chrome between the hours of 6 and 9 p.m. Pacific Time on May 23, 2012, are encouraged to uninstall the previous version and reinstall the new version.” A blog post from Sophos, a digital-security company, confirms Yahoo did replace the Chrome extension. However, the post says it’s unclear whether Chrome will actually know that the earlier certificate has been revoked if a user tried to install a cloned extension using it. The site recommends waiting a few days before trying out Axis for Chrome. What do you think about how Yahoo handled the Axis launch and the security hole? Have your say in the comments. BONUS: A Tour of Yahoo Axis Yahoo Axis, Splash Screen The screen that greets you when you launch Axis on iPad.Click here to view this gallery. More About: Axis, Chrome Extensions, cybersecurity, google chrome, Yahoo

Facebook Releases Instagram Clone

Less than two months after announcing its plans to acquire photo app company Instagram for $1 billion, Facebook has released an iOS app that looks and functions almost identically to Instagram’s. Facebook Camera, which is now available in the App Store for free, sincerely improves upon the photo capabilities offered by Facebook’s primary app for iPhone and iPod touch devices. Like Instagram, your friends’ latest photos are displayed in a single scrolling feed. You can also now simultaneously upload multiple photos to Facebook; Facebook’s main app only allows you to upload photos one at a time. And like Instagram, the app allows you to crop, rotate and apply filters to your photos. Interestingly, none of the app’s 15 filters were developed by the Instagram team, Facebook product manager Dirk Stoop told The New York Times. The app, the Times suggests, has been in development for much longer. The Camera App is the second mobile app dedicated to one of Facebook’s key features. The first, a dedicated messaging app, was released last April. These apps, we feel, are smart ideas: Facebook simply has too many features and tools to bundle into a single mobile app. It’s likely more such apps will be released this year. In an address to 200 investors leading up to Facebook’s IPO earlier this month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that mobile is Facebook’s number-one priority. More About: camera app, Facebook, instagram, iphone app, trendingFor more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Facebook Tells Brands the Percentage of Fans Who See Their Posts

Facebook has rolled out a new feature for some users that shows the percentage of brand page fans who saw as well as Liked recent posts. The average post from a brand page only reaches 16% of fans, Facebook revealed earlier this year. The feature, which also includes a breakdown of organic and viral responses, comes as Facebook begins to provide more analytics to advertisers looking to track their ROI across the social network. Post-IPO, the company is under pressure to monetize its huge reach for advertising purposes. The new feature appears to be available only for brand pages. SEE ALSO: How to Use the New Facebook Page Admin Panel Facebook reps could not be reached for comment. More About: Facebook, Marketing, trending

CEOs Are Finally Warming Up to Social Media [STUDY]

CEO’s are finally embracing social media’s role in engaging business and customers, according to a recent IBM Global CEO Study. For businesses, social media is currently the least-utilized method for connecting with their audiences. The hierarchy of connecting is as follows: face-to-face interactions, websites, channel partners, call centers, traditional media, advisory groups, and then, finally, social media. However, social media is expected to jump to the number two spot within three to five years — and traditional media will plummet to the bottom of the list — according to IBM’s report of their findings. Out of the 1,709 CEOs interviewed for the study — hailing from 64 countries and 18 industries — only 16% currently participate in social media. However, that percentage is expected to grow to 57% within the next five years, according to the IBM analysis. As Mashable previously reported, these numbers coincide with the “conservative optimism” regarding social media engagement for businesses. More than half of business owners (64%) believe in social media as a useful tactic for marketing — they just aren’t willing to jump into it full-force yet. SEE ALSO: Does Social Media Marketing Really Work [INFOGRAPHIC] Despite that hesitation, more and more CEOs are recognizing the potential for social media to change how their companies and organizations can communicate with the world. “One of the most compelling findings [of the survey] is how in tune CEOs are about the implications and impact of social media,” stated Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, in the press release of the study. “Rather than repeating the familiar lament about de-personalizing human relationships, this view leans heavily in favor of deepening them, and using dynamic social networks to harness collective intelligence to unlock new models of collaboration.” Personalizing these relationships with customers is the top priority for these CEOs. Nearly three-quarters of those polled (73%) are investing significantly in ways to better gain meaningful insights from their customers. Openness and interaction — not just advertising — on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter just might be at the heart of this more individualized interaction. As one CEO interviewee put it, the idea is to use social media as a crowd-sourcing mechanism and means of collaboration: “We use social media less as a marketing or distribution channel and more as a knowledge platform to obtain information about customers,” said an insurance CEO from Switzerland. The takeaway? With a stronger presence on social media sites and more personalized interactions with customers on these channels, “control is shifting from institutions to individuals,” the report stated. If you’re a CEO or leader in business, do these findings agree with your experience? How else are you looking to engage with customers? Let us know in the comments. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, courtneyk More About: Business, Marketing, Social MediaFor more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

One Million E-Readers Headed to Africa With FC Barcelona’s Help

Non-profit Worldreader kicked off a campaign Thursday aiming to put 1 million e-books in the hands of children across the planet, with a little help from players on one of the world’s most popular sports teams. This may sound like a crazy goal, considering the widespread absence of books from African classrooms, but the organization is aleady well on its way. So far, Worldreader has donated 100,000 books to 1,000 students in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. The non-profit now wants to expand its reach throughout sub-Saharan Africa and has enlisted some capable help — the world-renowned players on FC Barcelona (Barça). “We’re trying to get them to do something radically different,” David Risher, CEO and co-founder of Worldreader, and a former Microsoft and Amazon executive, told Mashable. “When a student sees the image of a player he idolizes, it brings a whole new culture and habit, associating reading with a hero. Using these tricks we can get kids to read more, making it more fun and a bigger part of their lives.” The organization believes the popularity of Barça will inspire students to keep reading, when they see personalized messages on their e-readers from some of the team’s biggest stars, including Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernandez, Eric Abidal and Seydou Keita, encouraging them to “score big” and continue their education. The donated e-books include classic literature, local African textbooks and story books, and newspapers from around the world. To help reach this distribution goal, Worldreader is seeking donations of $5, which pay for one e-book. In addition to putting books in the hands of students, Worldreader gives local authors and publishers access to a larger market. E-Readers Impact on Students in the Developing World When Worldreader began delivering books to Ghana in November 2010, the non-profit launched a study, funded by USAID, measuring the first implementation of e-readers into classrooms in under-previledged areas. The study found performance on standardized test scores jumping between 12.9% and 15.7%. While Worldreader’s mission is to put a library of books in the hands of every kid on the planet, distribution isn’t the only challenge. Half the effort is getting kids excited about doing something new. “To classroom teachers, e-readers just feel like having more books — they’re not significantly new technology to adopt,” Risher says. “I’ve had young boys come and say to me, ‘I’ve always found books kind of intimidating, but this feels like a gadget because it’s something I can play with.’” Another advantage to e-readers, which can be often overlooked, is that the font sizes easily increase, making a big difference for students without proper eyewear. Worldreader mostly distributes books on Amazon Kindles, because they work well outside of the U.S. and because of Risher’s history with the company. The organization recently began venturing beyond e-readers and onto feature phones, through an e-book app created by developer biNu. Are e-readers a game-changing technology for students in the developing world? Let us know what impact you think technology could have on the developing world. Interested in technology’s role in sustainable development? Join Mashable and partners in Brazil for Rio+Social. If you can’t make it to South America, you can join in the discussions on Facebook and Twitter. Click on the image below to learn more. More About: ebooks, education, ereaders, Social Good, WorldFor more Social Good coverage:Follow Mashable Social Good on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Social Good channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Obama Wants Government Agencies to Focus on Mobile Apps

President Barack Obama has ordered all government agencies to offer more of their services in the form of mobile apps. A new memo called “Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People” requires each agency to make at least two services, used by the public, available on mobile devices within 12 months. “For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different Government programs in order to find the services they need,” says the memo. “Americans deserve a government that works for them anytime, anywhere, and on any device,” Obama said in a statement. Agencies are also required to provide online resources for third party developers, and make their data open and machine-readable by default. Finally, agencies are required to create a page on their websites (URL format being www.[agency].gov/digitalstrategy) within 90 days and publicly report on progress in meeting these new requirements. “The initiatives we’re launching today will make government data resources even more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs who can turn these data into services,” said U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park. The new White House directive is available (in PDF format) here. More About: agencies, apps, Mobile, obamaFor more Mobile coverage:Follow Mashable Mobile on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Mobile channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Art Galleries Embrace Animated GIFs

Animated GIFs may be the latest way to crack a joke, but at one London exhibit, they’re also an art form. Born in 1987: The Animated GIF, a recently launched project at The Photographers’ Gallery, features more than 40 animated GIFs created by artists of various disciplines — many of whom were working with the medium for the first time. The gallery has dedicated a garage-door-size screen to the digital creations, which include a woman in a sarong twirling a hoola-hoop, a shifting block of squares and a landscape with three trees that subtly sway with the wind. “In a world where most Digital SLR cameras can shoot high definition video, digital technology raises questions concerning what a photograph is and how we make sense of it,” said Katrina Sluis, the curator of a digital series that begins with the animated GIF exhibit, in a statement. “Our opening show embraces the animated GIF as a uniquely screen-based image.” In this GIF by Seán Hillen, a woman raises a cigarette to her mouth. See more here. As the title of the exhibit suggests, animated GIFs were introduced in 1987. Recognizing the portable color image files as a medium for artwork, however, is a practice that has only recently surfaced. The curator of another aniamted GIF gallery at Denison University, Paddy Johnson, put the appeal of animated GIFs as art like this: “They attract attention. They flicker and undulate. They stutter. Graphics Interchange Format (GIF unabbreviated) surveys a small subsection of fine art workers within this growing culture of image-makers.” Some brick-and-mortar galleries have pulled animated GIF exhibits directly from the Internet. The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, for instance, recently created an animated GIF exhibit called “Who Tripped El Hadji Diouf” from an online forum in which participants manipulated the image of the Scottish soccer star being “clattered.” Sluis’s exhibit focuses on animated GIFs created specifically for the gallery, but it has integrated this open-submission spirit of the Internet. Throughout the final weeks of the show, animated GIF submissions from the public will be included in the display. You can submit yours here. More About: art, GIFs

Yahoo Axis Shines on iPad, an Afterthought on Desktop [REVIEW]

It’s been a while, but Yahoo just made some noise again in the search business. With the release of Axis, a new search app and add-on for both iOS and desktop browsers, Yahoo aims to make browsing the Web a more visual and convenient experience. And it succeeds — at least on the iPad. This is surprising, since on iOS Axis is essentially running a skin over top of Safari — similar to what the Atomic browser does. In Yahoo’s case, though, it’s a powerful skin, filled with features you won’t find on Apple’s browser, such as easy toggling between regular and image searches, and instant syncing of bookmarks and tabs between desktop, iPhone and iPad. At the same time, the app isn’t cluttered. It’s nice and minimalist, combining the search and address bar into a single field similar to how Chrome works (seriously, why don’t all browsers do this?). And your bookmarks conveniently appear in every new tab you open, letting you instantly tap to go somewhere familiar. However, it doesn’t put your most recent bookmarks first, which is a bit annoying. Searching With Gas One of the major thrusts of Axis is that it makes search more visual. It delivers pretty well on this promise, displaying a strip of site preview thumbnail images whenever you input a search term. This is quite handy even if the sites themselves aren’t particularly visual. For example, for most subjects, a Wikipedia entry is one of the first to appear. While Wikipedia pages tend to be mostly text, they’re instantly recognizable, even as a thumbnail. The thumbnails tap out after you swipe through the first 20 or so, though, getting replaced with basic text summaries. The most powerful feature of Axis, though, could be its near-flawless device syncing. Open a page on your iPad, and you can pick up right from there on your iPad or any major desktop browser (via an add-on or extension). All your bookmarks are synced, too — Yahoo even conveniently names one of your folders “Read Later.” SEE ALSO: Google Search Just Got 1,000 Times Smarter As I said, though, it’s only near-flawless. You can only see the last tab you had open on whatever device you’re picking up from. It also doesn’t sync your search history (though it will pass along the last search you performed on the other device). Social networkers will appreciate that Axis integrates Pinterest. Whatever page you’re on, you can tap a virtual button to instantly switch over to the Pinterest iOS app and pin the page, although you’ll need to switch back to Axis manually. It’s a convenient addition that Safari doesn’t have — although Axis has no “Print” or “Add to Home Screen” options. Desktop Blues In all, though, the Axis experience on iOS is compelling, which is in contrast to the underwhelming desktop integration. To be fair, it would be expecting too much of Yahoo — who doesn’t make any kind of desktop browser — to come up with something groundbreaking here, and Axis ends up being not much more than an impressive syncing tool. There seemed to be technical difficulties with the pre-release Chrome extension, and I never got it to work. It did better on Firefox, though, but I was disappointed that I had to wait for pages to finish loading completely before I could use Axis. Regaled to a small search box on the bottom of your browser, Axis is more of an unwanted intruder on the desktop, and its abilities didn’t provide much in functionality that I couldn’t get from any of the many add-ons in my browser. It’s also more limited than the iOS version — your Axis search history, for example, is nowhere to be found. Axis is a worthy experiment, though, and I hope Yahoo quickly iterates its iOS app. It’s quite simply one of the best browsers you can get for your iPad, and if it keeps improving and adding new abilities, it could help define how we consume the web on tablets. Just as long as Apple doesn’t kill it. What do you think of Axis? Check it out for yourself at the Axis site, and let us know in the comments. Yahoo Axis, Splash Screen The screen that greets you when you launch Axis on iPad.Click here to view this gallery. More About: Axis, Browsers, search engine, Yahoo

6 Spotify Apps for Finding New Music

Nick Cicero is a social media strategist at On Ideas, an integrated creative agency. Follow him @nickcicero. In the never-ending quest to keep our ear buds satisfied, Spotify has emerged as a leader in bringing the social graph to the music listening experience. And with the introduction of Spotify Apps in November, developers were given the option to create new and exciting ways to make that experience even better. The result? A host of great apps that will enhance how you discover music. Here are six we like. 1. We are Hunted The science of social music, We are Hunted pulls in sentiment data from social media, blogs, P2P networks, and message boards to create a playlist of the 99 most talked about songs from emerging and mainstream artists. Click here to view this gallery. More About: contributor, features, online music, spotify, Spotify apps

Facebook and TBS Announce Branded Comedy Partnership

Cable channel TBS is teaming up with Facebook to add more branded comedy entertainment options for advertisers. The high-rated comedy network is utilizing Facebook to extend distribution with another recent partnership — Jason Bateman and Will Arnett’s digital ad and production company, DumbDumb. TBS will work with DumbDumb to give six brands up to six short-form customized comedy videos. According to Facebook, the TBS and DumbDumb partnership will help brands distribute and promote content across multiple platforms, while engaging with Facebook’s 901 million active users. “Facebook and television work perfectly together, as Facebook has become the location where viewers discuss, experience, and share what they watch and what they love, creating true word of mouth at scale,” says Carolyn Everson, VP, Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook. Sources close to Facebook said that the content is going to live on a variety of channels, but the brand sponsors will ultimately decide where that content lives — whether that be on their own sites, on TBS.com, or the brand or TBS’s Facebook page. Commercials will also air on TBS to drive viewers to the brand’s web and social platforms. Turner Broadcasting announced a partnership with Funny Or Die earlier this month, forming a strategic alliance between the comedy website, TBS and Adult Swim. Funny Or Die is well-known for helping advertisers provide branded entertainment, and other companies like Buzzfeed are using emotional intelligence to help marketers engage in social media. Increasingly, branded content partnerships are proving to be a smart way to build virility and shareable content with a targeted audience. It’s a smart — and forward-thinking — approach for TBS to offer these branded spots to their advertisers. At the television upfronts last week, lots of networks talked about giving advertisers more value across multiple screens, but few offered concrete examples of how they planned to do it. If TBS succeeds, this could become more common across the television landscape. “We are not just talking the talk about innovation; we are actively developing ways for our advertisers to creatively immerse their brands through a multi-screen approach that delivers great video to an engaged and interested audience on Facebook,” says Donna Speciale, president of Turner Entertainment and Young Adults Ad Sales. What do you think about comedy ad production companies like DumbDumb or Funny Or Die? Would you like to see more marketers approach this method of advertising? Let us know in the comments. More About: branded entertainment, Dumbdumb, Facebook, funny or die, TBS

ModCloth Launches Clothing Collection of User-Generated Designs

ModCloth, an online retailer of affordable women’s clothing and accessories, has launched a private label collection made up mostly of designs submitted and voted upon by its Facebook community. The retailer posted a call for design sketches on its blog and social channels in late November. ModCloth cofounder and chief creative officer Susan Gregg Koger then narrowed the pool of 1,900 entries to 90, and put them to a vote on ModCloth’s Facebook page in December. The winners — a diverse lot that includes high school students, aspiring fashion designers and costumers — were announced later that month, and now those pieces are available for purchase on ModCloth’s website. The collection is a step up from ModCloth’s Be the Buyer Program, which invites shoppers to vote and leave feedback on a rotating selection of samples from emerging designers. Both are part of the company’s mission to involve customers in the production process, and have done much to foster an engaged, evangelistic community. Another collection of user-generated designs has already been voted upon, and will launch in September. A third, holiday-themed contest will be announced this summer. More About: community, fashion, modcloth, retailFor more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Facebook May Unfriend Nasdaq, Hook Up With NYSE [REPORT]

If Facebook and Nasdaq were in a relationship, the status would likely read: “it’s complicated.” The relationship was on a rocky road from the start. The Nasdaq exchange, home to many tech stocks, had an unplanned 30-minute delay in offering Facebook stock on its IPO day, which may have contributed to the stock’s meager performance. Nasdaq declared itself “embarrassed” by the glitch, and earmarked $13 million to cover “bad trades” made by investors whose schedules were thrown off. But that face-saving gesture may not have been enough for Facebook. According to a Reuters source, the social network is mulling a breakup with Nasdaq — and a hook-up with the New York Stock Exchange. SEE ALSO: What Went Wrong With Facebook’s IPO? The report says Facebook sat through a pitch from the NYSE, and is mulling the option to switch its official listing exchange. In a statement to Bloomberg, a NYSE representative indicated reports it was in talks with are false. “There have been no discussions with Facebook regarding switching their listing in light of the events of the last week nor do we think a discussion along those lines would be appropriate at this time” No further comment was offered by Facebook or Nasdaq. Although unusual, such a move would not be entirely unprecedented. Viacom went in the other direction recently, switching from the NYSE to Nasdaq to save fees in November 2011. Should Facebook consider switching exchanges so early, or dance with the one who brung it for a while longer? Let us know your take in the comments. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AUDINDesign More About: Facebook, nasdaqFor more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Fake Facebook Suicide Gets Teen Suspended From School

A Facebook page and a six minute video tell the story of a 12-year-old girl whose mother died when she was 3 years old, grew up being abused by her father and bullied on her Facebook page. Eventually, the girl commits suicide. There’s just one problem: this is all fake. The story was fabricated by a high school student who said she created the Facebook page and video for a class project asking students to highlight an important issue. The project resulted in 15-year-old Jessica Barba being suspended from school for five days. A concerned parent saw the Facebook page after Barba posted a message pretending to be the made-up 12-year-old saying, “I wanna be dead.” The police contacted the school and the teen was brought to the assistant principal’s office. Barba said she included a disclaimer on the Facebook page and video, but when school officials confronted her with printouts of the pages, they did not include the disclaimers, she told Matt Lauer on TODAY. The teen’s mother tried to show school officials that the pages included disclaimers, but that didn’t get Barba out of trouble. Here’s the video Barba released: There have been numerous stories of people creating fake Facebook pages to impersonate, bully or humiliate others, and in these cases all involved ended up in legal trouble. Barba says she was coming from a good place when she created this project to bring attention to the issue of bullying. Do you think school officials overreacted or should Barba be punished? Sound off in the comments. More About: cyberbullying, Facebook, Teenagers, teens

Does Social Media Marketing Really Work? [INFOGRAPHIC]

From Twitter to Facebook, to Google+, to YouTube, to Foursquare and more, social media use is the hottest thing in marketing. But does it really work? Brands and businesses are certainly making a stronger push than ever on social media, which makes sense — that’s where the people are. Figuring out just how much social media marketing returns on investments of time and money, however, is harder to do. Facebook marketing company Pagemodo recently pulled research from sources around the web to produce the infographic below, looking at just how much faith marketers have in social media. The aggregated data shows a sense of conservative optimism. 64% of business owners say social media marketing is a promising tactic and they believe it provides returns — but they aren’t willing to go all in with it just yet and favor a more cautious approach. 20% are more bullish on its potential, according to the same study, while just 6% are hardcore skeptics. How do marketers and entrepreneurs measure whether social media marketing pays off? Most do so by measuring the accumulation of friends, likes, followers and other online connections. 39% look at shares of brand content, while 35% measure actual leads from social media. Just 18% measure success by overall brand awareness and favorability as gauged by consumer surveys. Check out the infographic below for more on how much faith businesses put in social media as a marketing tool, and for tips on additional ways to maximize results and measure influence. Then let us know in the comments — do you think social media marketing provides real results? Thumbnail image via iStockphoto, courtneyk More About: infographics, Marketing, social media marketingFor more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

The Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn

LinkedIn is considered the non-sexy, sleeping giant of social networks. It keeps a low profile, perhaps due to the professional nature of its users. Nonetheless, LinkedIn continues to exert a powerful influence on connected job seekers, brands, recruiters and industries. Founded by Reid Hoffman in 2002, LinkedIn has grown to 161 million members in over 200 countries, making it the world’s largest professional network on the Internet (by comparison, Twitter has 500 million registered users, and Facebook has 900 million). Currently available in 17 languages, LinkedIn remains a relevant platform the world over. That being said, we doubt you spend 20 minutes on LinkedIn per day, like Facebook’s power users do. So, if you need a crash course on what LinkedIn has to offer, browse the network’s most prominent features below. Or send this to your recent grad as he or she prepares to enter today’s daunting job market. SEE ALSO: The Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Have you used LinkedIn to find a job, network with professionals or research hot topics in your industry? Please share your own tips in the comments below. 1. Profile Like most social networks, LinkedIn hosts your personal profile, a page on which you may list information like job experience and professional skills. However, unlike many other social networks, it’s important to complete your profile to the best of your ability — especially if you’re using LinkedIn for the job hunt. LinkedIn measures your “profile completeness” from 0-100%. The higher your profile completeness, the more likely you are to appear in search results. For instance, when you list skills like “Final Cut Pro” and “Photoshop,” potential employers may come across your profile when they perform an advanced search based on those keywords. Handy. To ensure that your profile is 100% complete, LinkedIn recommends including the following information. Industry and postal code A current position with description Two more positions Education At least five skills Profile photo At least 50 connections A summary For more information about optimizing your LinkedIn profile, see these additional resources: 6 Things on Your LinkedIn Profile That Shouldn’t Be on Your Resume 8 Job Search Tips From the Co-Founder of LinkedIn The 10 Most Overused LinkedIn Profile Buzzwords of 2011 2. Connections Of course, to get those “50 connections” mentioned above, you’ll have to expand your network on LinkedIn. Don’t worry — LinkedIn’s algorithms and data mining make it pretty easy. I recommend first performing a series of basic searches to find people you know by name. (See the search box at the top of each LinkedIn page.) Click the “Connect” button next to people’s names to add them to your network. You may send a custom message along with that invitation to make the connection more personalized. Once you have made several connections, head to the “People You May Know” page. LinkedIn’s algorithm will likely have begun determining additional suggestions based on your connections’ networks. LinkedIn labels these connections by degree. People you’re already connected to are “1st degree” connections. People you’re not yet connected to, but who are linked to your 1st degree connections, are 2nd degree connections. And so on. You’ll see a blue icon that says “1st,” “2nd” or “3rd” next to their names. You may also choose to connect your email’s contact list to LinkedIn for the purpose of finding additional connections. Head to “Import Contacts” and allow access your contacts to pull up a list of potentials. Be aware, however, that this may generate a huge list of people, especially if email services like Gmail tend to save every address you’ve ever contacted. 3. Groups LinkedIn groups are spaces in which professionals and experts can share content, ask advice, post or search for jobs and network with others. Groups are tailored to brands, associations and societies, support groups, causes, publications and industries in general. That can mean anything from “On Startups – The Community for Entrepreneurs” to “Cal Alumni Association | UC Berkeley.” On the other hand, don’t confuse LinkedIn “groups” with “companies.” Coca-Cola has a “Coca-Cola Current & Former Employees” group, but its business lives on “The Coca-Cola Company” company page. More on that later. With over 1.3 million groups to choose from, you’re likely to find at few that fit your field and interests. Keep in mind that many groups require authentication before the manager permits you to join. However, nearly one-third of groups don’t require review, and are labeled “open.” Once you’re familiar with group functions, you may choose to create your own group. That means you’re the group owner, but you may also appoint a group manager and moderator, who are responsible for supervising discussions, subgroups, settings, etc. To get the most out of your LinkedIn group, take a look at the following features: LinkedIn Rolls Out Polling for Groups LinkedIn Unveils Dashboard for Groups Statistics 4. Companies Just as you have a personal profile page, many companies choose to represent themselves on LinkedIn, too. Like Facebook brand pages, you may choose to follow the activity and updates of companies on LinkedIn. Company pages contain general information, such as a business overview, list of employees and press mentions. Many companies also choose to list job openings on their pages, and some even encourage applicants to apply through LinkedIn, a very handy tool of the network. Once you follow a company, you’ll see its updates appear on your LinkedIn homepage alongside those of your connections. Mashable, for instance, tends to post business-related articles on LinkedIn, since that seems to be the content most pertinent to the network’s audience. Businesses also use LinkedIn to post company announcements, such as acquisitions, new hires or updated policies. LinkedIn warns against update spam, however: “Businesses that post updates excessively are subject to review by LinkedIn and could risk having their page deleted.” If you’re interested in adding your own company to the network, LinkedIn advises you take the following steps. You’re a current company employee and your position is on your profile. A company email address (e.g. john@companyname.com) is one of the confirmed email addresses on your LinkedIn account. You associate your profile with the right company. You must click on a name from our company name dropdown list when you edit or add a position on your profile. Your company’s email domain is unique to the company. Your profile must be more than 50% complete. You must have several connections. If you’re interested in learning more about how companies can use LinkedIn, see the following resources: 9 Ways to Add LinkedIn to Your Company Website 5 Ways to Market Your Brand on LinkedIn Why Your Non-Profit Needs to Stop Ignoring LinkedIn 5. Jobs Job search and recruitment tools are among LinkedIn’s most valuable features. More and more companies are encouraging candidates to apply for jobs via LinkedIn, due to the social network’s credibility and ease-of-use. Head to the “Jobs” tab, where you’ll find options for applicants. Perform an advanced search for available jobs by keyword, title, location, company, salary and industry. (A search for “developer” within 50 miles of Manhattan turned up 488 results.) Save jobs to review later, and even save searches to check back later for updated results. As an employer, you may post an available job to LinkedIn for $295 for a 30-day period. (Bulk packages are available for better deals.) Once posted, these jobs will not only appear in search results, but also in the “Careers” tab on your company page. Finally, recruiters may “find talent” on LinkedIn, but they must upgrade to a premium subscription plan to search for potential hires. 6. Updates Unlike content shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn updates tend to be industry- and professionally-focused. Keep that in mind if you’re attempting to increase engagement. You can share updates from a number of different places, both on LinkedIn.com and from outside web properties. Post a status update from the LinkedIn homepage, and it will be shared as well as posted to your profile under the activity feed. Also, when you engage in discussions in LinkedIn groups, that activity counts as an update. Post updates from sites like The New York Times by clicking the LinkedIn social share button next to an article. Or add the LinkedIn sharing bookmarklet to your browser toolbar to quickly share most sites as an update. Finally, you may also connect your Twitter account to LinkedIn. This not only expands your network, but allows you to post tweets on LinkedIn as if they were status updates. Once tweets post to LinkedIn, users can interact with them as if from Twitter.com, by retweeting, replying and favoriting. Like updates, tweets post to the homepage and live in the activity feed on your profile. Just as LinkedIn advises brands to cool it on excessive updates, you should practice the same self-control. Users appreciate information, not excessive traffic on their feeds. That being said, you can mute certain connections, if you choose. Hover over a user’s update on the homepage and click the “hide” button to stop receiving updates from that user. 7. Applications Applications allow LinkedIn users to customize their profiles and share content in different ways. For example, you may choose to add the WordPress app so that your latest WordPress blog posts share with your LinkedIn network. Do the same for SlideShare presentations you or your company have created. Keep in mind that most apps require permissions to access some of your basic profile information, such as your name or job title. However, all applications must abide by LinkedIn’s privacy policy, which means they’re not allowed to reach any private information not easily accessible by browsing the site. Learn about some of the top LinkedIn apps here: 5 Essential LinkedIn Apps for Sales Teams 8. Mobile LinkedIn has mobile applications for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Palm devices. The app is useful for posting status updates and checking group updates on-the-go, but its inherent advantages lie in networking. Pull up the mobile app to find LinkedIn connections and exchange information at events. After meeting someone, you may choose to email that person a link to your profile, so he or she may connect with you later — no business cards needed. Or search for that person on your LinkedIn mobile app and add him as a connection then and there. You may also choose to download LinkedIn connections to your smartphone’s address book for later contact. For more information on LinkedIn’s mobile presence, see below: 5 Tips for Using LinkedIn’s Mobile Site LinkedIn Launches iPad App, Takes New Direction 9. Upgraded Account Once you’ve explored LinkedIn Free, you may choose to upgrade to a LinkedIn account with more features. Starting at $15.95 per month, LinkedIn has premium subscription plans for businesses, job seekers, recruiters and more. One of the distinguishing features of most upgraded accounts is the ability to send InMail to anyone. InMail is an internal LinkedIn message sent to a person with whom you are not connected. You can message people you are already connected with free-of-charge, but you can’t message non-connections; you must InMail them — and those InMails are limited. The Basic business premium account allows you three InMails per month, while the Business Plus plan allows 10, and the Executive 25 per month. So, choose your InMails wisely. Upgraded accounts also have access to more search results, which can be a huge bonus for LinkedIn recruiters. You also have access to additional tools for saving and organizing profiles, and you can view the full list of people who have viewed your LinkedIn profile. Image courtesy of Flickr, Coletivo Mambembe. More About: Business, features, jobs, linkedin, Social Media