Saturday, December 18, 2010

18 new stories on The Next Web today

18 new stories on The Next Web today

Link to The Next Web

Bank of America now refusing to process payments believed to be for Wikileaks [TNW Media]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 10:47 PM PST

MasterCard, Visa Europe, PayPal and now Bank of America. Add another to the list of financial businesses that are now refusing to process payments directed toward Wikileaks support. The bank chooses an interesting way of stating its actions, based on what we’re reading from The Kansas City Star, saying that it will refuse payments that it believes to be supporting Wikileaks.

Which of course makes us wonder exactly how broad the bank intends to spread its reasoning. With services such as Flatter still taking payments for the Wikileaks support, will BofA soon cut off payments to Flatter entirely or are the payments going to be investigated to ascertain the true recipient of the funds?

The bank’s full statement, emphasis added by TNW:

Bank of America joins in the actions previously announced by MasterCard, PayPal, Visa Europe and others and will not process transactions of any typethat we have reason to believe are intended for WikiLeaks. This decision is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.

One thing is for certain — Bank of America has likely set itself directly in the crosshairs of attackers that have brought down the websites and payment processing abilities of other financial groups worldwide. Though the bank has declined to comment, we’re betting that we’ll start hearing a lot more from BofA quite soon.

Of course there’s also, as the Star noted, the chance that Bank of America could be the target of te next Wikileaks release. While Assange has stated that the release would involve a major bank, no names were said. While it’s likely that it will be a bank more directly involved with the present US lending crisis, there is still much speculation to be made until the time comes.

We’ve contacted Bank of America and are awaiting any comment that it might have.



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1R7: A tasty clone of Delicious, built in 24 hours. [TNW Apps]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 06:29 PM PST

What happens when the rumors start spreading about a virally delicious website like Delicious? The alternatives come to light and the programmers start to get antsy. One programmer, from a thread that we found over on Hacker News, decided that it was high time to build his own Delicious clone, obscurely named 1R7.

The site, which looks like Delicious took on a diet to remove the images, works just as you’d think it would. Bookmarks are saved, tagged and shared around the Internet. Caveat emptor, though:

How stable is it?

Not at all! This project is still extremely young, so don’t go betting the farm on it yet, but please use it, break it, and figure out what could be done better. Call it an early alpha.

It’s easy to get started. You can sign up via Twitter, and there are apparently more OAuth options in the near future. You can even import your Delicious bookmarks, so make sure to give a read of our other article about getting started with exporting and importing.

Though we’ve now been told that Delicious will live, the past couple of days have been enough to raise the question of viable options, While 1R7 is still very young, it’s easily on the right track. Give it a shot, let us know what you think.



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Sitesimon encourages you to spy on your friend’s web activity [TNW Apps]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 05:57 PM PST

Sitesimon is a clickstreaming service that keeps users connected with the sites their friends are visiting in real-time.

Clickstreaming is a bit different from bookmarking. Using bookmarking services, users are required bookmark and often tag sites in order to share them with friends and save them for later. However with clickstreaming, it's more of a real-time stream of your web activity and browser history, a process that usually works automatically.

With the use of clickstreaming, services such as Sitesmon can offer their community a more intimate experience between users. It's cool because you can discover new websites that your friends possibly wouldn't normally share. The site will also give you recommendations based on the sites your friends say you'd enjoy.

Sitesmon shares your visited sites passively, allowing you to surf the web as you normally would without hitting a share button. It posts the visited sites to the network with the use of a browser add-on available for both Firefox and Chrome.

The user interface of the network displays the activity in a news stream, somewhat similar to the news stream feature found on Facebook. If you find something great and think it demands a comment, you can do so by appending a note to any link. I found that browsing friend pages is highly addictive, there's something extra fun about creeping someone's web history and I honestly discovered some interesting stuff.

Sitesimon

You might be thinking this service sounds a tad obtrusive or creepy and it's understandable that the idea of clickstreaming may worry you. But, Sitesimon gives users control with a series of privacy options such as manual sharing, blocking sites and additional settings that limit who can see your stream. Any post or link can also be deleted, so in the event that you visited LOLCats and you don't want anyone to know, you're completely safe.

The biggest drawback of this service is the lack of users. There's an option to import friends from Facebook although I was only able to add one single friend. Like most social networks, Sitesimon won't survive without the support of the community and it’s hard to expect people to use your service if there’s no one there. But, to be fair, it’s still a very new service. Overall it’s a pretty great place to discover new sites.

Sitesimon is currently in private beta but I requested an invite today and received it within a few minutes. And, make sure to check your spam folder because that’s where my invite ended up.



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Cab Match: Find people, share cabs, save money [TNW Apps]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 05:31 PM PST

TNW Quick Hit

Cab Match, a new app for the iPhone, allows you to find people to share taxis with to mitigate the cost of getting home from the airport.

Hits: Very useful product, especially at this time of year. Takes the awkwardness out of what can be an awkward process. Free for the first 100k users.

Misses: Very small user-base at the moment. App occasionally got confused and would hang or crash between tabs.

Overall: 3/5

The Details:

Cab Match, the sophomore app by developers Minh Tran and Cab Match LLC, is a utility to pair travelers together so that they can split the expense of a cab into the city from the airport.

Tran, who is based in Washington DC, was inspired by the long haul from Dulles International Airport into the city proper. Such a trip can run a minimum of $55, and can stretch even higher if there is traffic. As a result, sharing a cab is usually the best solution, but looking for someone to share with is awkward, to say the least.

The app allows users to post cab sharing requests in the app. The requests are sortable by city and destination, and there are many selectable destinations that can be picked.

The secret sauce of the app, though, is that it matches users who have made requests in the same place. It then with the means to contact each other and organize a shared cab through a rudimentary chat system within the app.

The problem, at least right now, is that the user base of the app is tiny. It just released today, and as is expected of an effort by a small, not many people are aware that the app even exists. This limits its usefulness to a certain degree. However, as time goes on, the app should gain more traction outside of Washington, which will make it far more useful.

Another more immediate issue for the developers are stability issues that occasionally popped up while testing the app. While the app worked as advertised for the most part, it occasionally would hang while switching between the New Post and the My Posts tabs. I once had the app lock up to the point where I was forced to switch apps to kill it. It seems to be a rare occurrence, but this is a mistake that hinders the app.

It is still a quite useful app, though, and will gain functionality as its user base expands.

Thanks to New York City Taxi Online for the image.



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The internal memo sent to Gawker staff after the attack [TNW Media]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 02:42 PM PST

The internal memo pasted below, sent to the Gawker staff from their chief technology officer Thomas Plunkett, reveals that the Gawker Hacker disaster happened in large part due to a lack of preparation and commitment by the media giant’s tech team. He apologizes to the staff and promises to be much more communicative in the future.

From: Thomas Plunkett

Subject: The Gawker Media security breach — status and moving forward
To: [Gawker staff]
Date: Friday, December 17, 2010, 4:43 PM

Everyone -

As you know, this has been the Gawker tech team's most difficult week ever. This note has been too long coming, but the following is meant to communicate several things: what happened, our current activities, and our plans for moving forward. I suggest you read all of this as I am making several recommendations below, and we are implementing some changes that will affect all of you.

What Happened
Gawker Media servers and some company email accounts were compromised by hackers at some time during the last few weeks; the compromise was made public to us (and everyone else) this past weekend. In recent weeks, intruders were able to gain access to our web servers by exploiting a vulnerability in our source code, allowing them to gain access to user data and passwords. With this information, they were able to gain access to the editor wiki, some Gawker Media email accounts, and other external resources.

It is clear that the Gawker tech team did not adequately secure our platform from an attack of this nature. We were also not prepared to respond when it was necessary. These things can be attributed to several factors.

First, we never planned for such an event, and therefore had no systems, or processes in place to adequately respond. Our focus as a team (and company) has been on moving forward. This put up blinders on several fronts. As a result, numerous wrong decisions were made by me this past weekend in responding to the security breach.

Further, attention to completed work is every bit as important as attention to upcoming work. Our development efforts have been focused on new product while committing relatively little time to reviewing past work. This is often a fatal mistake in software development and was central to this vulnerability.

Finally, we have not only seen tremendous growth as a company, we have never been afraid to take an unpopular or controversial stance with regard to individuals or organizations. Let's face it: we draw the ire of many. This creates a unique set of demands to meet rapid growth as well as threats that often specifically target us. We did not establish standards and practices to handle growth and the fact that we have a target on our back.

On several fronts — technically, as well as customer support and communication — we found ourselves unprepared to handle this eventuality. The tech team should have been better prepared, committed more time to perform thorough audits, and grown our team's technical expertise to meet our specific business needs. As a result of not having done these things, we have not adhered to standards expected of us, and our response was inadequate. The remedy to this situation will not be immediate, but it will be swift as possible.

Current Activity: Regaining Control
The tech team have moved our operation to the third floor of the Gawker Media office in order to focus on the work that needs to be done. We are currently in the process of performing a complete review of what happened with an independent security firm.

Here's what we've done so far to regain control:

We have been able to establish a fairly complete timeline of intrusion activity, and have identified compromised assets within Gawker. We have re-established control of compromised systems including our Google Apps accounts. As a result, you will have to reconfigure your Google Apps access (more on this below).

In addition, we have addressed all known vulnerabilities and will continue auditing our system for security flaws, and we have made appropriate changes to administrative accounts to our web and application infrastructure. There are many people reviewing our code base, and because of this, we will also reach out to members of the technical community to harness their expertise. This process will continue as we move to an entirely new, hardened web infrastructure.

We have introduced a help desk to address commenter concerns related to the breach. This will continue to exist as long as it is needed. Scott, Greg, Jeremy, Nick and a host of interns, and many of you, have been active in the threads, and communicating as much as possible as we work through this event.

Moving Forward
We've learned many lessons from this experience, both as a tech team, as a company, and as individuals. If there's one lesson nearly all of us learned, it's that we can and must be smarter with passwords. Lifehacker is a great resource for password advice (and there are many others). I suggest you start here: http://lifehacker.com/184773/geek-to-live–choose-and-remember-great-passwords.

Efffective immediately, we have enabled SSL, a more secure method of communicating over the internet, for all users with Gawker Media accounts on Google Apps (this does not affect your personal Gmail). Those of you not using web-based Gmail will have to reconfigure your clients (this includes any desktop mail client as well as other devices). The attached document provides instructions to make this easier, and includes information to configure different devices including iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones.

Also effective immediately: If you require access to sensitive materials (legal, financial, or accounting documents) on Google Docs, you must have two-factor authentication setup on your account. No documents will be shared with personal Gmail accounts. We are also strongly encouraging all staff to setup two-factor authorization even if you do not require access to sensitive material.

We will enforce a policy that sensitive information not be posted to the editor wiki. This policy will also apply to chat communications (e.g., Campfire, AIM).

On all of our sites, we will be introducing several new features to our commenting system to acknowledge the reality that we have lost the commenters' trust and don't deserve it back. We should not be in the business of collecting and storing personal information, and our objective is to migrate our platform away from any personal data dependencies (like email & password). We will push further integration of external account verification sources using OAuth (like Facebook, Twitter, and Google) for those that want to use them, and we'll also be introducing disposable accounts. Disposable accounts are similar to the service a pre-paid phone offers to drug dealers (a disposable, untraceable communication device). Commenters seeking anonymity will be able to do so confident that when necessary they can simply toss out the account and there will be no connection to the individual. They will work like this:
- no password will be stored
- no email will be stored
- account can be used as long as you have the key code; lose or delete it, the account is abandoned.

In addition, we are establishing a public Gawker Tech & Product blog (a long time coming) from which we will communicate product information as well as product plans to our readers. You can expect to see it by early next week.

This has been a very unfortunate event in Gawker Media history, and we have learned much from it. Above all, this has been an enormous inconvenience for everyone affected, and for this I apologize. You can expect a much more responsive and proactive technology and product team for 2011. You can also expect a much more public me — if there is one critical thing that has been missing, it is a lack of consistent communication from me. That will change.

Regards,

Tom Plunkett

Techmeme



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Hacker changes the way people with colour blindness see the world [TNW Apps]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 02:00 PM PST

Dan Kaminsky, the hacker responsible for saving us from some major DNS flaws has created an app to change the way colour blind people see the world. And he’s done so with an app.

The Story

This morning, Kaminsky tells us the story of the app’s creation, which started with none other than the Star Trek movie…

To set the scene: one year ago, a hacker and his engineer friend are at the theater in Taiwan watching the movie when his friend mentions he is colour blind. Dan inquisitively asks his friend "What did you think of the green alien in the movie?" His friend had no idea the alien was green and in fact thought the alien was more of a tan colour. Dan, who is admittedly not a graphic designer, decided to fire up Photoshop and experimented with different colors.
Dan, by nature, can't help but fixate on problems until he’s found a solution so he continued working until finally an idea was born.

Over the last year or so (in addition to being a security expert) Dan worked on the initial coding to make an app. He first coded a PC version then brought in additional developers to port it to the iPhone and Android.

The App

Dan's app, which he called DanKam, is an augmented reality experience for the colour blind. The app uses the devices camera to augment a colour blind person's perception of colours by enabling users to differentiate between tones, hues and colours that would normally be invisible to them. After launching the app, it automatically allows you to view the world through the camera while overlaying different colour schemes.

DanKam has a series of different modes such as converting all colours to red, showing only a few colours at once, increasing saturation or adjusting white balance. The user can play with the modes and sliders until they're able to capture the colours properly. While the colour modes are a bit complicated to explain, the key is to play around with the modes until it works, just like adjusting the reception on your TV.

The user has a choice of using the app with the device's cam (live view) or pulling in an image from the devices photo library. After a pic is selected, the settings and modes can be tweaked in the same way as the live view mode.

This is the first app I’ve ever seen that has potentially far reaching medical benefits and it's a fascinating new experimental technology. I'm not personally colour blind so I can't test the app effectively, from what Dan told me, the positive responses from the community have been overwhelming. The app is available on  iTunes and through the Android Market for $2.99

If you're colour blind or you know someone who is, I'd love to hear about your experiences with the app.

Image: eye, Download Squad



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An Evernote user once saved the company with a last minute $500,000 check [TNW Entrepreneur]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 01:02 PM PST

Evernote, the popular note-taking service, was once so short on cash and possibilities that it was facing the very real possibility of shutting down.

After the market collapsed and a promising round of financing fell through, Phil Libin the founder of Evernote was determined to wake up and ‘do the adult thing’ the next day: wind down the company before it could no longer make payroll.

Just before going to sleep a Swedish user sent Libin an email praising the service, and offering to invest in the company if they needed money. Libin naturally said yes.

$500,000 later the company was recapitalized and able to get back on financial track. Of all the last-minute bits of ‘saving grace,’ this one has to take the cake. Watch the clip below for the full, amazing story:

Top Image Credit



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One man’s dream of how multitasking should work on Windows Phone 7 [TNW Microsoft]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 12:31 PM PST

If it does not exist, you can always build it yourself, right? That was the mindset behind Jeremy Bell and his most recent creation, a mock-up of what “a proper task switcher and notification/background-service manager” would look like for WP7.

We like what he has put together very much, if for no other reason that we feel the features that he is tinkering with are sorely needed in the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Mr. Bell’s designed user interface would be loaded by “press[ing] and hold[ing] the back button from anywhere,” which would bring up the following screen:

The developer described the above video with the following bullet points, outlining what his idea would do:

  • The UI would allow the user to manage live tiles and toast notifications from one place. Very handy!
  • It would allow the user to view, pause, and cancel any background services currently running, including (hopefully) any custom background services initiated by a third party app.
  • The little bars next to each service represent the amount of CPU usage that service is taking up.
  • When a user clicks on an app to switch to it, the idea is that it would be moved to the top of the back stack after it is re-launched. That way you wouldn’t go back to it again if you hit the back button normally.

We like what he has come up with, and besides bringing you the interesting project, we do sincerely hope that Microsoft gives the clip a watch and a think. Windows Phone 7 is an excellent platform, but it is also one that can be improved.

This sort of work ‘on the side’ is exactly what Microsoft should encourage for the WP7 platform.Top Image Credit, Via WMPoweruser



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The TNW Microsoft Week: Free Xbox 360s, Bing walks inside, and a giant keyboard [TNW Microsoft]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 11:25 AM PST

If you can really believe it, another week has slipped through our fingers and that means that it is time to take stock of the last seven days’ Microsoft news.

Before we jump into this week’s column, next Friday is Christmas Eve, a day that a good number of us will be taking off. That in mind, I am planning to do this wrap up a little early next week. I’ll keep you posted. Let’s get into it.

Bing Walks Into A Bar

Microsoft is continuing to push as hard as possible on the search front with Bing, and this week in its continuing war with Google released several new features that are sure to raise some eyebrows around the world of technology.

Bing has implemented Open Table integration into its local pages for every single restaurant that OT works with. Bing also started to take inside panorama shots of popular haunts to let searchers ‘walk around’ inside before going.

Oh, and the company is working on real-time transit information along with a refresh of their map interface to make it easier to read. Not bad for a week’s announcements.

This Week’s Top Kinect Hack

Have you seen the movie Big? Remember the scene with the giant keyboard? Yeah, you can use your Kinect to do the same thing, but in your living room. Watch it!

Microsoft Tablets Make My Head Hurt

Microsoft is going to release new tablets at the upcoming CES. They are not going to succeed. Microsoft needs to take a new direction with tablets, just like it had to with Internet Explorer 9, Windows 7, Bing, Office, Xbox 360 and so forth.

I have some thoughts on the matter that I think are pretty fair: use the Windows Phone 7 touch-interface combined with Office Live for a portable, simple, and powerful cloud-based tablet. Sounds cool right?

We’ll see if anyone at Redmond is listening, but we doubt it.

Buy A Phone, Get An Xbox 360

We are deliberately trying to mention Windows Phone 7 as little as possible today, to give you a break from our nearly ceaseless coverage of the phones, but we need to sneak in this promotion we found.

Do you live in Canada? If you pick up a new Windows Phone 7 from TELUS before Sunday you should be getting a free Xbox 360. Yeah, how cool is that?

Microsoft Security Essentials Goes 2.0

Yesterday Microsoft released an impressive update to the very useful Security Essentials product that is both free and excellent. Why didn’t the company trumpet the news from the hills? As we said:

Microsoft sometimes does not speak above a whisper when one of its products is updated. This is usually the case when the product in question could get them into anti-trust problems, and so the company wants to fly under the radar.

You can pick up the update here if you are so inclined. That’s all for now folks, be sure and follow us on Twitter.Top Image Credit



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Milestone: Dropbox 1.0 Released [TNW Apps]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 11:08 AM PST

Dropbox has announced the release of Dropbox 1.0 bringing Selective Sync (choose which folders get downloaded to which computers) and Extended Attribute Sync (improved support for Mac apps like Quicken and Quark whose resource forks bedevil most sync applications and corrupt data in the process).

The size of the application has been reduced significantly, and it uses fewer system resources to operate. Dropbox also redesigned the appearance of the desktop clients, has enabled selective syncing, and added support for more file types. The software is free to download and use.



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Official: Delicious is NOT Shutting Down [TNW Media]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 10:48 AM PST

In a blog post today, Delicious says “No, we are not shutting down.” But they aren’t staying at Yahoo either.

Yesterday, it was all but confirmed that Yahoo! was sunsetting Delicious, one of the most popular social bookmarking services. They do admit that they are not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, and are looking for a home outside of the company.

From the blog, “We're actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We're in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we'll share our plans with you as soon as we can.”

In the words of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, “Don’t Panic.” Delicious says they are maintaining the site and encourage users to stay active.

Yesterday, Yahoo made an official statement:

Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.

Why would Yahoo want to sunset (a.k.a. kill) Delicious? The domain name itself may be worth $1million, although serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis disagrees. While Yahoo might not want it, the Internet support for Delicious has been phenomenal. In fact, yesterday supporters created the Twitter account, “Save Delicious,” which already has over 400 followers.

What do you see in the future for Delicious?



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The Importance of Being Prepared [TNW Entrepreneur]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 09:37 AM PST

Startups need to be flexible to confront the many different challenges along the road to success, any experienced entrepreneur will tell you that. However, one challenge you might not consider is overnight success.

When it was revealed that Yahoo planned to shut down social bookmarking tool Delicious, users rushed to find a replacement. It was a dream scenario for the other bookmarking services out there – their chief competitor killed off in a stroke. However, one of those competitors, the gorgeous-looking Zootool, wasn’t quite prepared enough it seems.

After a rush of traffic from people reading articles like our 6 Solid Alternatives to Delicious, Zootool is down and out. Visit the site now and you’ll be hit with nothing but a message saying: “The Delicious rumors hit us pretty hard. We are currently working on the import system and the whole infrastructure to be able to handle that better. Sorry for the downtime and thanks for your patience!”

While it’s too soon to write off Zootool completely, the initial surge of interest in Delicious replacements is sure to wane soon and the service’s chance of capitalizing on that will be wasted.

The sad thing is that Zootool really could have got a huge boost in its audience out of this episode. As we described it: “A creative and awesome web application places an emphasis on saving visual content, so it's pretty much like if FFFFound, Tumblr and Delicious had a baby.”

What’s the lesson? If you’re not prepared for the unexpected, your big shot at getting the attention you need may be wasted.Image source



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Amazon Introduces “Buy Once, Read Everywhere” Magazine and Newspaper Subscriptions on Android [TNW Media]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 09:07 AM PST

Announced this morning, Amazon’s first “Kindle for the Android” app will be available for users to buy, read, and sync over 100 Kindle newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, and many more. This is the first time we’ve seen magazines available on Kindle’s app for mobile devices. The Android app will include features like automatic overnight delivery of subscriptions, buy once and read across multiple devices and platforms, full text search, instant Wikipedia and dictionary lookup. No word yet on when it will be available on the iPhone as well.

“We want to give customers the freedom and flexibility to buy their newspapers and magazines once, and read them everywhere across the devices and platforms they chose–just like they do with Kindle books today,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “Kindle for Android is our fastest-growing application, and we’re excited to launch over 100 newspapers and magazines for our Android customers.”

For a full listing of newspapers and magazines available on Kindle for Android, click here. Version 2.0 offers several new features, including access to over 100 newspapers and magazines. Users can now share their reading progress with others, while the integrated store can be used to sample and purchase content without leaving the app.

According to Amazon, they’ve been building and introducing a wide selection of free Buy Once, Read Everywhere Kindle apps for iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, BlackBerry and Android-based devices for over two years.



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Rupert Murdoch’s iPad Newspaper, “The Daily” Set To Launch January 17th [TNW Media]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 08:41 AM PST

One month from today, Rupert Murdoch will unveil “The Daily,” his much-discussed iPad newspaper.

While the date has been pushed back a few times now, inside sources tell us that reporters are mobilizing to start work at the New York offices in January. News Corp has already hired over 100 journalists for The Daily including three managing editors: Mike Nizza, a veteran of The New York Times, AOL News and The Atlantic; Steve Alperin, a producer at ABC News, and Pete Picton, an online editor at UK Newspaper, The Sun. Also on the list is Wired’s Danny Dumas. The iPad newspaper will include a large video and multimedia department as well, including rumored 3D effects, (perhaps in the advertising?).

The Daily is expected to cost .99 per issue and will implement a new “push” subscription feature from iTunes that automatically bills customers on a weekly or monthly basis, with a new edition delivered to your iPad each morning. The Australian mogul is entering the iPad publishing race with Richard Branson, who launched Project magazine on the iPad last month.AllThingsD



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New Media: Your Social Media Strategy in 60 Seconds [TNW Social Media]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 07:37 AM PST

Imagine you’ve been hired by a new media company such as a small news or news aggregation site to spearhead their social media efforts. You’re either running the site with a small team of reporters and unpaid contributors and it may feel like a one man show. Time management will most likely be your number one priority so implementing an effective social media strategy will come down to efficiency and a seamless integration of a few choice services- namely Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and social news sites.

Here’s your social media strategy in 60 seconds:

1. Twitter: Twitter is a more engaged and responsive audience, even more so than Facebook, according to a recent study by Postling. Set up a Twitter account and read up on our 6 Twitter Tips for newbies. Follow your peers. When you send a Tweet make sure it has a “stickiness factor.” And remember to keep conversation two way. Your followers are just as important, if not more important than your mainstream audience, i.e. those people who visit your site daily. That’s because your followers have the unique ability to rapidly spread your content across the most viral platform on the Internet. Great services to manage your Twitter accounts include HootSuite, TweetDeck, ChromeBird, TweetDeck and Echofon.

2. Facebook: Set up a Facebook Fan page, (which should be receiving a shiny new update soon) so that the 500 million users on Facebook can “Like” your content. Pushing content from your Facebook to your Twitter is easy. Simply search for Twitter in Facebook and install the Twitter app. This will update your Twitter status with your Facebook Page updates.

3. LinkedIn A few of us here at The Next Web aren’t big fans of LinkedIn, and some publications go so far as to even call the LinkedIn user base, “losers.” So if you’re skimped for time, and unsure of what exactly to use LinkedIn for, skip it. But if for some reason you still really like it and want to give it a shot, check out The Huffington Posts’ LinkedIn page, which is a great place for their army of bloggers to reach out to their peers.

4. Social News Sites: Since you will be distributing newsworthy content, and this is your social media strategy in 60 seconds, it’s vital to plug into various social news networks- namely Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. To generate traffic and lead people back to your site, set up accounts with each one of the aforementioned services. And if your content is particularly visual and engaging, you may want to set up a Tumblr account too. Adding share content plug-ins on your site for all of the aforementioned services is a must. Depending on what CMS platform you use, each one has a variety of different plug-ins and widgets available.

Lastly, a skillful way to ace time management is to sign up for a social media platform service that lets you manage all of your accounts from one portal. I am a big fan of Postling, which I wrote about last November. Their service tracks Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Typepad, Squarespace, Drupal, Flickr and Bit.ly, among others, with publishing to YouTube coming soon. With Postling, when you wake up in the morning you get an email listing every new social media related comment, such as new Yelp reviews or new comments on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. The e-mail is an easy way to scan through them and then decide what you need to respond to, if anything.SocialMediaSEO



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When a great idea isn’t enough: Why the “Last.fm for news” died [TNW UK]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 06:43 AM PST

We wrote about Readness back in June when it launched as a “Last.fm for news”. Making news reading a real-time social activity was a truly original idea and we wondered why no-one had done it before. Surely it was destined for success? Sadly not; this week the service was shut down. What happened?

If you never used Readness and you love reading news stories online, you really missed out. It used a Chrome extension to record all the news you read at a wide range of websites. This was then displayed on your profile in real-time (or with a delay if you chose) for your followers to see.

It kept charts of the types of stories you were reading and the news sites you visited most. There were even news reading ‘missions’ you could undertake where you got awards for reading up on certain subjects.

In short, it was an idea with real potential to attract legions of news-hungry users who wanted to share stories and see what others were reading. For months I recorded the news that I read into Chrome, all the time waiting for some news on new developments from the company. This week I fired up the website to discover that it had been closed down.

So, what’s the story? Speaking to Lee Mallabone, one of the service’s founders, I discovered an all-too common tale. Funding, or rather the lack of it.

“After launch we continued to work on various improvements, particularly to make the first-user flow easier and to generally make the service feel faster and more real-time”, Mallabone explains. UK broadcaster Channel 4′s 4iP venture fund had been a supporter of Readness, but that was closed down recently, leaving a real hole in the UK digital media sector. The team then headed out from their Cambridge, UK base to San Francisco and interviewed to take part in the YCombinator startup seed investment scheme but without success.

After that knock, it was game over. “When we returned from San Francisco, we realised that the funding and resources required to iterate Readness into something that could attract hyper-growth, were far higher than we had available.”

So there we go, lack of funds kill a startup. It’s a very common scenario for sure, but when that startup had great potential to do something news, creating a new kind of social activity around online news , we can’t help but shed a tear for those occasions when hard-nosed business realities crush a really good idea.

In memory of Readness, here’s the screencast we included in our original review.



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Comparing the Two Fastest Selling Gadgets of All Time [TNW Gadgets]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 06:12 AM PST

As 2010 draws to a close, we can reflect on another fantastic year for gadgets.

Technology has advanced to a point where we can now watch 3D programming in our living rooms, computers have reduced in size, increased in power and can now be placed on our laps. We are even able to control a Parrot A.R. Drone with our smartphone.

This years two fastest selling gadgets, the Apple iPad and Microsoft’s Kinect, also happen to be the two fastest selling gadgets of all time.

With that in mind, we immediately set to work creating an infographic that could represent the sales of both the Kinect and iPad, focusing specifically on how many units were sold and how much money they made for both Microsoft and Apple.



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Ofcom looking to abolish 0800 number call charges from mobiles [TNW UK]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 04:44 AM PST

Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, is to submit new proposals stopping mobile operators charging customers for making calls to 0800 numbers, looking to make calls to these numbers free like they are from landlines.

Changes to 0800 call charges are just one of a number of sweeping changes Ofcom is looking to make to reduce customer confusion and uncertainty when making calls. It proposes to make calls easier to understand, simultaneously lowering costs.

With this in mind, Ofcom intends to simplify number ranges to so that 01, 02, 03 will be geographic rates, 07 for mobile rates, 0800 will be free for for both mobile and landlines, with 083/4/5, and 0871/2/3 being a lower cost business rate and 090, 091 and 098 becoming higher cost premium numbers.

The regulator will seek to change the pricing structure of non-geographic calls, separating the phone company’s charge and the charges made by businesses. By doing this, customers would then be able to see the differences between phone packages, obtaining a better sense of value as a result. The pricing of 118 services would also come under review.

A review of phone charges would help organisations, especially charities. Rekha Wadhwani, chief executive of The Helplines Association notes:

“We welcome Ofcom's plans to tackle these issues and agree there is significant confusion around call costs.

We have been campaigning on the cost of calling freephone numbers, especially charity helplines, from mobile phones since 1999. It is also important that answering calls from mobiles remains affordable for charities.”

ExpertReviews, Image Credit



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Apple dominates US digital music market with 66.2% share [TNW Media]

Posted: 17 Dec 2010 04:29 AM PST

The Apple money-making machine shows no sign of slowing down. Its hardware is selling like hotcakes and now we get word that the iTunes Store holds a 66.2% share of the digital downloads market, up from 63.2% from last year.

The figures from NPD and first reported by the Wall Street Journal, see Apple’s dominance of the market continue. Meanwhile, competitor Amazon is struggling to compete. The retailer’s digital music market share rose in Q3 2010, up too 13.3% from 11% at the same time last year.

The news could be especially galling to Amazon as it appears that its chief method of competing with iTunes, price, isn’t having a significant effect. Amazon offers ‘Daily Deal’ discount albums, which the WSJ reports it often sells at a loss. Meanwhile, it appears Apple’s tightly integrated ecosystem of hardware and music store continues to pay off with consumers seemingly unswayed by cheaper prices on rival stores.

Overall, the digital market continues to grow.CD sales have fallen 20% this year, with digital sales up 13%, to over 75 million.



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