Shoot Down Friends’ AR.Drones With Parrot’s Augmented Reality iPhone Game [Video]

Posted by on Nov 18, 2010 in Personal Search Engines Optimized | Comments Off

Remember Parrot’s awesome iPhone-controlled AR.Drone? Of course you do. Grab an AR.Drone-owning friend and when the augmented reality app hits the App Store, get downloading for some healthy Bluetooth-based competition.

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Gizmodo

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More PlayStation Phone Details and Pics Emerge

Posted by on Oct 31, 2010 in Personal Search Engines Optimized | Comments Off

More pictures of the rumored PlayStation Phone have shown up, and the device looks as

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sleek as ever. Details about the device’s software and Sony’s plans have also been revealed through an earnings call and sources close to the project.

But first let’s deal with the question of the device’s authenticity. When we reported on the PlayStation Phone last week, it was the culmination of a long series or rumors about an Android-powered, Sony-designed gaming device. The source for this big development was gadget blog Engadget, which simply posted pictures and details under the headline “The PlayStation Phone.”

When some gadget enthusiasts questioned whether or not the device was real, Engadget staked its reputation on the news and followed up with a claim that multiple, reliable sources very close to the project were behind the leak. Furthermore, Sony was asked about the leak in an earnings call and while its executives didn’t confirm it, they assured listeners that something similar was inevitable, and that prototypes exist.

Engadget believes this is one of those prototypes, and it acquired new photos, some of which we’ve included here. It also reports that the device’s codename is “Zeus,” and that while it runs Android, different prototypes seem to be running different versions. One prototype carries an 8 GB SD card to supplement “at least” 512 MB of internal data storage.

As we reported before, the device has a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, a touch pad, and a 5-megapixel camera. Those specs should be more than enough to play classic PlayStation games and new games alike. Here are the pics; head over to Engadget for more.

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White iPhone 4 Delayed Until Spring 2011

Posted by on Oct 27, 2010 in Personal Search Engines Optimized | Comments Off

Apple confirmed Wednesday that the long-awaited white iPhone 4 won’t be available until spring.

“We’re sorry to disappoint customers waiting for the white iPhone yet again, but we’ve decided to delay its release until this spring,” said Apple spokeswoman Trudy Miller.

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Apple had previously stated that the white iPhone 4 would “not be available until later this year.” This latest statement comes one day after we reported that the white version of the iPhone 4 had appeared in the Apple Store.

[via CNN]

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The Empire State Building Is Now on Twitter (and Facebook)

Posted by on Oct 27, 2010 in Personal Search Engines Optimized | Comments Off

New York City’s landmark skyscraper, the Empire State Building, is now a part of the social media revolution with a newly launched Twitter account and Facebook Page.

The Empire State Building Company is behind the ESBObservatory Twitter and Facebook accounts. The accounts will be used to post photos, share building information, highlight pop culture tidbits and update fans on fun factoids about the famous office building.

The building is also fast-approaching its 80th anniversary, so the accounts will post updates in anticipation of the monumental day.

There’s something to be said for such a famous building having a social media presence, even though it isn’t necessarily breaking new ground here.

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The building company’s recognition of social media as important distribution and fan engagement channels certainly speaks volumes to how pervasive social media has become.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Magnus Nordstrom

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HOW TO: Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Posted by on Oct 27, 2010 in Personal Search Engines Optimized | Comments Off

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ly”>

Josh Peters is a social media and Internet marketing consultant and the co-author of Twittfaced. He blogs at Shuaism and can usually be found hanging out on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

There’s nothing like the basics to help bring things back into focus when you feel lost. In “Marketing 101,” the acronym AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. This is the most simple and rudimentary of sales and marketing funnels and is still incredibly relevant today when it comes to social media and Internet marketing strategies.

Each section of AIDA represents a section of your sales and marketing process and can help you set your expectations, decide what to monitor, and visualize the relationships between each part. Understanding the flow of the tools and tactics will also help you get your measurements and analytics in line with your goals.

Here’s a closer look at the breakdown of this marketing funnel, some tips on how to apply it to your social media strategy, and a look at how the model is evolving in the social media age.

Awareness

Awareness is social media’s bread and butter. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and other networks are built for this. You can’t easily display your inventory via Twitter, set up a shopping cart on LinkedIn, or fill orders through YouTube. These networks are not going to be your point of sale. Instead, they are your communication and outreach tools — the spokes that lead back to your hub (sales page, blog, site, etc.) where you will be making your conversions.

Awareness can take many forms, but its main goal is getting people to know you exist and that you can solve a problem they might have. At this level, conversations, interaction and content are king. A few metrics you might want to measure around your brand are conversation frequency, increased mentions and sentiment.

Interest

Now that you have their attention, you need to get customers interested in your product. You can bolster interest with offers and compelling reasons why you’re better than the competition, and how you can solve customers’ problems. Features and benefits weigh heavily in this level, and social media can help you kick their interest into high gear.

If you’re running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and have some targeted landing pages set up for your products or services, those are what you want to link to — not your homepage. Even if you’re not utilizing paid ads, the same strategy of linking to targeted pages through social media is applicable. A few of the metrics you will want to look at here are CTR (click through rate), retweets (of deals and links), and conversations about specific products.

Desire

Social media can help bolster desire through communication and engagement, but to fully satisfy someone’s desire to buy, you need to have a site that is streamlined and optimized. Recently, I tried using a popular car rental site to make a reservation, but it was so difficult to navigate that I gave up, despite having a great discount code. The unmanageable user interface killed my desire in two minutes flat, and my business went straight to the competition. Your site makes a huge impression, and people will judge your company by it.

Take the time to go through your site and optimize the presentation and the shopping cart experience. Testimonials gathered from linkable social profiles are a great asset.

Take the customer from interest to desire with a clean, easy to navigate, info rich, and functional site. Some of the metrics that matter at this level are bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed and incoming links.

Action

Now that your customers are itching to buy your product, and their money is burning a hole in their PayPal pocket, you need to seal the deal. At this point, your site is your number one tool, and while social media can influence the action through the previous levels, it’s not going to have the same influence here. You need to make it easy and obvious for your customer to complete your desired action (purchase, sign up, lead form, etc.).

The action is also where you can finally calculate some of your end metrics, like conversion rate and ROI. This is where you can see how everything is performing and the final impact your work is having. Often, these are the metrics that your boss (and your boss’s boss) are looking for.

New Additions to the Marketing Funnel

Over the years, the traditional AIDA has evolved and added two extra levels. These levels represent not only a shift in the technology and methods that are used to market, but the people behind it.

Loyalty

How are you getting your customers to buy from you again? One very simple way to stave off any buyer’s remorse is to follow up via the same social media you used to get customers in the first place. If you know they purchased via a link on Facebook, send them a Facebook message saying “thanks,” and provide them with your customer service contact info. 

Perform customer service on Twitter. Monitor the online conversations around people who are already using your product and see if they have any questions or problems that you can resolve quickly. You can build social loyalty programs and use the communities you create to keep customers coming back. This is where CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can play a leading role, and many social CRM solutions are emerging to fill that need. A few things you might want to monitor here are repeat buyers, the use of loyalty codes, sentiment of mentions post-purchase and sentiment of specific products.

---

Advocacy

Advocacy is the dream of any marketer. It’s the “sweet spot,” where your customers do your marketing for you. It’s when customers love your products, brand, services and people so much that they can’t help but talk about you. This is why you want to make it easy for people to share your brand. Any hindrance to this — be it a bad website interface or an anti-social company ethic — will really discourage this extremely valuable source of traffic and interest.

If it’s an option, I’m far more inclined to click on a “Tweet This” or “Like” button than I am to take the link, shorten it in bit.ly, and post it to my various social networks. Remove any barriers to advocacy and then both encourage and reward it. Some metrics to look at here are mentions, conversations and referrals.

The problem with AIDA

As you can see, the levels of our old friend AIDA can get a bit muddy, especially when it comes to the areas of awareness and interest. This has given birth to dozens, probably even hundreds, of fresh interpretations. The main thing to remember is how the funnels flow and to set your measurement and expectations accordingly.

You also don’t need to live and die by this funnel. People can easily skip a level or go through multiple levels at once. It’s not a perfect model, but then nothing is. But keep AIDA in mind as you shape your social marketing strategy. It should help you focus and prioritize your goals for success.

More Business Resources from Mashable:

– Social Media Marketing 101: In-House Team, Agency or Consultant?
– Why Social Media Is Perfect for Brand Ambassador Campaigns
– 4 Winning Strategies for Social Media Optimization
– Why Twitter Is a Big Win for Small Businesses
– Should Your Company Have a Chief Marketing Technologist?

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Yahoo Search Ads Now Served by Microsoft

Posted by on Oct 27, 2010 in Personal Search Engines Optimized | Comments Off

As of today, ads on Yahoo are now being served by Microsoft, the latest integration to come of the search and advertising partnership the two companies signed last year.

What that means is that all advertising on both Bing and Yahoo search is now powered by Microsoft’s adCenter (in the U.S. and Canada for now). That gives advertisers access to the combined inventory of both services, which accounts for about 27.9% of all searches according to the latest numbers from comScore.

Yahoo started serving search results powered by Bing back in August. However, it’s important to note that the two companies are continuing to develop their own features around the same set of algorithmic search results. For instance, Bing recently launched Facebook integration that surfaces results based on what your friends have “liked.”

For its part, Yahoo says that it “remains focused on delivering unique consumer experiences … and on increasing user engagement in our owned-and-operated search products to help drive high-quality traffic into the combined marketplace.” To that end, the company unveiled some big changes to its interface earlier this month.

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Crowd-Sourced Johnny Cash Music Video Is a Work of Digital Art

Posted by on Oct 27, 2010 in Personal Search Engines Optimized | Comments Off

If you’re a Johnny Cash fan and you have some time to spare today, we highly suggest heading over to The Johnny Cash Project’s website to take part in the making of a truly innovative, crowd sourced music video dedicated to the Man in Black.

File this under: Amazing things that crowd sourcing can do. The Johnny Cash Project is a collective music video, fashioned from drawings done by you, the denizens of the web, to accompany Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave,” his final studio recording.

Visit the site to check out the video so far, and add to the project. The site features a drawing tool, which allows you illustrate a frame from the video. These images weave together to create an ever-changing work of art.

The brains behind this project, director Chris Milk, also spearheaded the HTML5 masterpiece “The Wilderness Down,” a music video created for Arcade Fire’s newest album, The Suburbs. This time, however, Milk appears to have used Flash to create his video.

This kind of visual storytelling hints at a truly interesting future when it comes to musical experience on the web. Yes, video may have killed the radio star, and the web might have killed the video star — but is there another kind of star on the horizon?

[via hypebot]

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HOW TO: Make Your WordPress Blog More Like Tumblr

Posted by on Oct 27, 2010 in Personal Search Engines Optimized | Comments Off

The Web Development Series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.

Tumblr is becoming an increasingly popular platform for blogging and personal publishing, thanks to its growing collection of themes, simple posting style and plethora of mobile options.

Although Tumblr has continued to beef up its feature-set, adding support for pages, user questions and user submissions, the platform isn’t as extensible or customizable as something like WordPress or Drupal. In a perfect world, there would be a way to combine the simplicity of Tumblr’s posting types and styles with some of the deeper customizations and options of WordPress.

We might not have reached the Holy Grail of Tumblr Meets WordPress harmony, but we’re a lot closer, thanks to a new plugin and iPhone app from WooThemes, a WordPress theme development firm.

Earlier this year, WooThemes started experimenting with bringing Tumblr-styled themes to WordPress. Tumblr-inspired design is taking off on lots of platforms, but what made Woo’s approach unique was the addition of a special QuickPress widget seated on the WordPress dashboard that made posting specific types of content — a la Tumblr — very easy.

Over the past few months, Woo has released more Tumblr-style themes using this QuickPress widget. Even better, WordPress 3.0 was released with support for custom post types, which makes adding special elements like a category icon or post-specific styling more automated.

This is great if you are starting a new site or want to redesign your blog – but what if you already have a pretty established site and a design you quite like? Wouldn’t it be great if you could add some of that microblogging functionality into your existing WordPress site? Read on for details on how to do that.

The Woo Tumblog Plugin

Last week, Woo introduced its free Woo Tumblog plugin. This plugin makes it possible to turn an existing theme into a Tumblr-like tumblelog.

You will need to do some editing of your theme files to get the Woo Tumblog plugin to work, because the plugin changes the way post title, thumbnails and post types are displayed. WooThemes has provided extensive documentation showcasing what you need to edit and add and has also included contextual help.

Woo also includes specific examples for what you need to do to add support for the plugin to the new TwentyTen theme included with WordPress 3.0.

You’ll need to change your permalink structure and add a few lines of code. It’s actually pretty straightforward. Our hope is that in the future, more theme developers will consider adding these hooks into their themes automatically.

The QuickPress Widget

Once you’ve enabled the plugin and made the changes so that different post types will appear a certain way, you can then post these types using the QuickPress widget on the WordPress dashboard.

This is what that looks like:

The end result is this post:

Express: The iPhone App

Beyond the plugin, WooThemes has also released Express [iTunes link]. The app is $ 4.99 but it is far and away the best WordPress mobile experience we’ve had to date.

You can use the app with any of the Woo microblogging themes or with your own theme if you install and enable the Tumblog plugin.

The app is super simple to use and you can easily post various types of content. It doesn’t support video uploading — something that the latest version of the WordPress iPhone app recently added, but it does make it easy to post various types of content and to moderate comments.

The app has already generated a lot of excitement in the WordPress theme community and lots of developers are signing up to add support for the app to their themes.

What’s Missing

As awesome as the new Woo Tumblog plugin and Express iPhone app are, there’s still a missing component that prevents true WordPress Meets Tumblr bliss from taking place. The bookmarklet.

I would argue that the bookmarklet is a huge reason why Tumblr and Posterous are so accessible. It’s just so easy to quickly post a link or an image or a brief comment when you can auto-generate that content from your web browser. Furthermore, the iOS bookmarklets make it possible to do this from within the Tumblr iPhone apps too.

WordPress has its own bookmarklet — Press This — but frankly it’s not very good. It’s buggy, it doesn’t give you all the options you have in the main editor and it certainly doesn’t easily support custom post types.

There are rumors that better Press This and QuickPress functionality will be coming to the next version of WordPress, but at this point, users are on their own. I’ve become so despondent with the lack of a real bookmarklet solution that I’ve toyed with creating something myself that will also work with WooThemes’ plugin. Sadly, I just don’t have a ton of time.

I’m not alone. I’ve received e-mails based on comments I’ve left regarding the need for a bookmarklet from others indicating that this is a must-have killer feature.

We’re so close — we just need this next piece to really make microblogging on WordPress viable and enjoyable.

WooThemes has done a lot of the heavy lifting by releasing the free plugin and also creating the iPhone app. Wouldn’t it be great if the open source spirit could help come up with a bookmarklet solution?

Do you use a microblog like Tumblr? Would you be interested in having more of those features natively in WordPress? Let us know.

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More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:

– 11 Trends in Web Logo Design: The Good, the Bad and the Overused
– Top 5 Web Font Design Trends to Follow
– 5 Tips for Aspiring Web App Developers
– Flash vs. HTML5: Adobe Weighs In
– 6 New Mac Apps for Designers and Developers

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Top 5 Location-Based Services [Mashable Awards]

Posted by on Oct 27, 2010 in Personal Search Engines Optimized | Comments Off

As part of the ongoing Mashable Awards, we’re taking a closer look at each of the nomination categories. This is “Best Location-Based Service.” Be sure to nominate your favorites and join us for the Gala in Las Vegas! Sponsorships are available. Please contact sponsorships@mashable.com for more information.

While location-based mobile applications and services have been around for years, 2010 is proving to be a big breakout year. Trend benefactors include Facebook, Foursquare and big brands willing to take risks with location-based campaigns and checkin rewards programs.

We’ve rounded up what we believe to be the top five location-based services in a list that includes predictable names and lesser known upstarts. You’ll also notice that Facebook Places and Gowalla are both absent from our list. We found the former’s entry into the location space to have been more fanfare than substance and the latter struggling to emulate the rapid growth rates of its competitors.

Treat this list as a countdown beginning at the fifth most significant service and arriving at our top pick for location-based innovation. We encourage you to support your favorite location-based services by voting for them in the Mashable Awards.

5. Yelp for Mobile

Yelp is the original location-based service that redefined “local” for small businesses and their online customers. In 2010, Yelp continues to remain relevant with mobile applications that reach BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, PalmPre, Windows Phone 7 and most other smartphone users.

Yelp Mobile may not be the trendiest location-based service, but it’s arguably the most practical. Stats from September of this year show that Yelp Mobile generated 3 million unique visitors for the month and more than 1 million people created point-to-point directions to a local business.

We’re not partial, however, to Yelp’s also-ran checkin features. The startup should stick to what it does best — convenient and replete location-based business listings and reviews.

4. Neer

Newcomer Neer brings ingenious innovation around personal and private automatic location-sharing to Android device owners.

The startup launched earlier this year after incubating inside Qualcomm Services Labs. Creator Ian Heidt describes Neer as occupying “the middle ground between Foursquare and Google Latitude.” That’s a technologically sound description, but we see Neer as the most practical application of location for actual real-world scenarios — like knowing if your kids made it to school.

Neer doesn’t bother with checkins, badges or other kitschy game mechanics. The service is designed so that you know where your loved ones and friends are, and vice versa. Since users have complete control over who can see their whereabouts — in place names, not physical addresses — there’s little to worry about on the privacy front.

The application is also designed with the average user in mind, meaning the user interface is both slick and uncomplicated.

As the space matures, location-based services will take inspiration from Neer and evolve past the pure novelty of checkins and location-sharing.

3. Loopt

Once the location app on everyone’s lips, Loopt has lost some of its luster to more buzz-worthy incumbents. But, Loopt continues to innovate around location and just last week updated its iPhone app to include deep integration with Facebook Places.

Loopt’s application is also the most aggressive of the big name players when it comes to automatic location-sharing, meaning it supports background location and proximity alerts for nearby friends.

There’s also the branded-rewards Loopt Star application, which has already demonstrated that it can push users to take action and drive them to their partners’ physical locations. With this formula, there’s certainly real revenue potential beyond just advertising.

2. SCVNGR

In just a few months time, SCVNGR has gone from an obscure mobile app for iPhone and Android to a formidable player in the location space with upward of 500,000 users. Now the Google-backed startup is said to be making millions thanks to more than 1,000 paying enterprise clients, which include the likes of Sony and Warner Bros.

As a service, SCVNGR differentiates itself with point-based challenges on top of checkins and interesting partners such as The Boston Globe, Minnesota Vikings, AT&T and the Smithsonian museums.

Just recently, the team redesigned the mobile apps to better surface user activity. Sophisticated Facebook Places integration also plays a significant role in the application experience and on the Facebook Place Pages for business owners.

Perhaps more interesting than the service itself is the 21-year-old whiz kid at the helm (pictured left in the photo above). Princeton dropout and serial entrepreneur Seth Priebatsch is barely old enough to drink, but this youngster is one huge overachiever with a grandiose vision for SCVNGR and the passion to make it happen.

1. Foursquare

Despite the emergence of Facebook Places months ago, Foursquare is still very much alive with its 4 million registered users. We think it’s safe to say that this startup continues to thrive because it’s more about people and places than it is about location.

We could rattle off Foursquare’s numerous partnerships, highlight its quirky badges or talk about its battles for mayorship, but what puts Foursquare atop our list is the fact that the service has created a phenomena around checkins, badges and rewards that’s been copied and adapted by countless other web and mobile services all trying to emulate Foursquare’s magic.

Foursquare’s recent restructuring of its iPhone and Android apps to highlight tips and to-dos point to a not-so-distant future when, co-founder Dennis Crowley explained, Foursquare will “reinvent what happens after the checkin.”

In many ways, Foursquare already reinvents what happens both before and after the checkin. Just look at how Jimmy Choo employed a pair of trainers to inspire a three-week frantic offline shoe hunt in London — with shoe sales jumping 30% around the time of the campaign — as proof of the concept. It’s the one campaign that Tristan Walker, Foursquare’s director of business development, speaks most highly of, even though the startup didn’t directly participate in the sale.

What’s Your Take?

Which location-based services do you use and recommend? Let us know in the comments or nominate them for the Mashable Awards.

The Mashable Awards Gala at Cirque du Soleil Zumanity (Vegas)

In partnership with Cirque du Soleil, The Mashable Awards Gala event will bring together the winners and nominees, the Mashable community, partners, media, the marketing community, consumer electronics and technology brands and attendees from the 2011 International CES Convention to Las Vegas on Thursday, January 6, 2011. Together, we will celebrate the winners and the community of the Mashable Awards at the Cirque du Soleil Zumanity stage in the beautiful New York New York Hotel. The event will include acts and performances from our partner Cirque du Soleil Zumanity. In addition, there will be special guest presenters and appearances.

Date: Thursday, January 6th, 2011 (during International CES Convention week)
Time: 7:00 – 10:00 pm PT
Location: Cirque du Soleil Zumanity, New York New York Hotel, Las Vegas
Agenda: Networking, Open Bars, Acts, Surprises and the Mashable Awards Gala presentations
Socialize: Facebook, Foursquare, Meetup, Plancast, Twitter (Hashtag: #MashableAwards)

Thanks to our sponsors:

Mashable Awards Gala Partner:

From a group of 20 street performers at its beginnings in 1984, Cirque du Soleil is now a global entertainment organization providing high-quality artistic entertainment. The company has over 5,000 employees, including more than 1,200 artists from close to 50 different countries.

Cirque du Soleil has brought wonder and delight to nearly 100 million spectators in 300 cities on five continents. In 2010 Cirque du Soleil, will present 21 shows simultaneously throughout the world, including seven in Las Vegas.

For more information about Cirque du Soleil, visit www.cirquedusoleil.com

Mashable Awards Online Partner:

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Mashable Awards Partner:

Join us at the 2011 International CES®, the global platform for inspired ideas and innovation. With 2,500 exhibitors, CES continues to be the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow and always reflects the dynamic consumer electronics industry. The International CES is not open to the general public and all attendees must be in the CE industry to be eligible to attend the show. Register FREE for the 2011 CES with priority code MSHB, an exclusive promotion for Mashable Readers.

Mashable Awards Gala VIP Lounge sponsor:

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Sponsorships are available. Please contact sponsorships@mashable.com for more information.

Images courtesy of Ed Yourdon, MariShiebley, Flickr

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Google Releases Search for Database of 50 Million Places

Posted by MC on Oct 27, 2010 in Personal Search Engines Optimized | Comments Off

Google Places is coming into its own with the just-introduced Place Search functionality that finally adds local search to Google’s growing database of places — more than 50 million locations, to be exact.

Place Search is built into the standard Google search experience, so a search for something like “Chicago museums” or “vegan restaurants” will return local Place Page listings that match those queries.

Listings now group all relevant links, and also include informational text snippets and highlight the number of reviews — on Google, Yelp and elsewhere — for each Place.

The technology is capable of predicting when your searches are for local, place-based information, but you can also manually start a Places search via the left-hand sidebar.

“We’ve made results like this possible by developing technology to better understand places. With Place Search, we’re dynamically connecting hundreds of millions of websites with more than 50 million real-world locations,” explains Product Manager Jackie Bavaro. “We automatically identify when sites are talking about physical places and cluster links even when they don’t provide addresses and use different names (’stubb’s bbq’ is the same as ’stubbs bar-b-que’).”

Place Search is interesting for a number of reasons, but most significantly, Google searches are now more efficiently serving up local business listings. This makes Google’s Places database more visible than ever and more on par with Yelp.

Place databases are increasingly important as more mobile applications attempt to offer localized information. Yelp, Google and Foursquare all have their own database of places — each valuable in their own right. Then there’s the crop of services such as SimpleGeo and Twitter-owned GeoAPI, which outsource their own place databases to developers looking to build features on top of them.

Google will be rolling out Place Search in more than 40 languages over the course of the next few days.

Image courtesy of Flickr, kylesteed

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