Mobile marketing solutions provider Blue Bite and digital media company Reach Media Group (RMG) are teaming up to deploy NFC technology to over a third of RMG’s 200,000 digital screens over the next six months.  In addition, Blue Bite is working with other partner networks to bring its total NFC deployment to 200,000 screens across the U.S. These digital screens, such as those found in malls, theaters, bars, clubs, gyms, airplanes, taxis, and elsewhere, allow advertisers to display video ads to millions of viewers per month. RMG, in particular, provides access to over 70 million viewers monthly.

Now those viewers will be able to learn more about any given advertiser using NFC technology. Simply put, it’s one of the largest commercial rol-outs of NFC-based advertising this country has seen so far.

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This post is part of a series on NFC here on ReadWriteMobile which will serve to get you up to speed on what NFC is, what notable developments are underway and what commercial programs using NFC will arrive this year. You can follow this series by clicking the tag (or bookmarking the tag) “NFC 2011.”

This post assumes you are familiar with the term NFC as well as the technology’s use in the mobile industry. If you’re just starting to learn about NFC, you should begin here with the first post in the series to get caught up.

San Francisco, Other Major U.S. Cities a Part of Initial Rollout

The initial rollout with RMG begins San Francisco, where viewers will see a call-to-action appear onscreen after the ad, asking them to tap their NFC-enabled phone or scan the barcode located on Blue Bite’s “mTAG” found at or near the point-of-sale. The inaugural sponsors of the new program are Hotels.com and The New York Times. (Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner with ReadWriteWeb.)

Future RMG rollouts will reach New York, L.A., Chicago and Boston, while partnerships with other vendors will help Blue Bite reach even more regions across the U.S.

mTAG: Combo QR Code and NFC Tag

The “mTAG” is a trademark owned by Blue Bite which combines an NFC tag with a scannable QR code into a placard, allowing those familiar with NFC to tap their NFC-enabled phone on the tag, while also providing a way for those with older phones, or those unfamiliar with NFC technology, another way to access the same content.

In this particular campaign involving Hotels.com and NYT, end users will see the RMG screen branded like NYT’s website, displaying news headlines, articles and ads. When the ad for Hotels.com appears on the sidebar of the screen, there will be a call-to-action to viewers to “find the mTAG” in order to access exclusive content. In future campaigns, this content could be a special, discount, coupon, or something else the advertiser wants to offer viewers.

After the user either scans the barcode or taps their NFC-enabled phone on the mTAG, they’re taken to a proprietary webpage on their mobile phone, which thanks them for either scanning or tapping, as the case may be, then provides access to that exclusive content. It will also showcase links that allow users to download Hotel.com’s and NYT’s mobile applications. The platform can detect the phone being used in order to point the customer to the correct mobile app. Currently, Blue Bite supports all the major smartphone operating systems, including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows phones.

NFC: A “Silver Bullet” in Mobile Marketing

Of course, NFC technology is not available to all mobile users at this time, though there are some high-profile devices which are out there or coming soon. Notably, Google, in partnership with Samsung, released the NFC-enabled Nexus S, and RIM (BlackBerry), HTC and Nokia have all announced plans for NFC devices in the future.

According to Dan Trigub, VP of Business Development at Blue Bite, his company believes NFC has a lot of value to the marketing and advertising industry going forward. “NFC has the potential to be the silver bullet in mobile marketing,” he says. But unlike Google, which recently discontinued the use of QR codes in favor of NFC in its business listings service Google Places, Blue Bite thinks that QR codes will still be essential for many months, even years, as the transition to NFC occurs.

Currently, 40% of the phones in the market are smartphones, and fewer still are NFC-enabled smartphones. This will change in time, of course. However, Blue Bite says that full NFC market penetration among smartphones is still 2 years out, citing research from Juniper Research. The analysts at Juniper claim that by 2014, 300 million phones will be NFC-enabled, the majority of which will be in the U.S.

To reach other mobile audiences, Blue Bite also offers tools to deliver content via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WAP sites, mobile apps and SMS. Bluetooth has proved especially effective, but marketers tend to want to go with what’s being “buzzed” about, which, these days, are mobile apps. NFC is starting to get buzz, too, which is one of the reasons why Blue Bite believes in NFC’s potential.

You can see Blue Bite’s mTAG technology in action here on YouTube.

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Google and Facebook are now some of Intel’s biggest customers for server technology, which is significant in a few ways.

It shows the fast adoption of Web-based technologies that have bloomed in the past several years and the rise of mobile in the marketplace that in turn fuels the demand for Intel processors that are used in the data center.

It also marks the rise of the “micro server,” designed for Internet services that have a deeper need for a scaled out architecture to quickly serve up streaming video, pictures and billions of updates. Micro servers are an emerging type of shared infrastructure designed for data center workloads where many low-power dense servers may be more efficient than fewer, more robust ones.

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Stacy Smith, chief financial officer at Intel said in an interview with Bloomberg that Google and Facebook each buy Intel chips which they use to fashion their own servers. I find that interesting. It is exactly what we heard from Facebook when it announced OpenCompute. Google, though, is quite secretive about its server technology. This news shines a bit more light on Google, though hardly not surprising considering the sophistication of its architecture for serving data.

The large purchases by Facebook also reflects on its micro server approach, which it developed with Intel. Facebook has decided not to use virtualization for its data centers. It finds that it is far less disruptive to the social network if one server goes down. Virtualization would put an elevated level of importance on the server that is not needed with the kind of tasks that Facebook requires its servers to perform.

Microservers are an emerging category for Intel. Logically, they are most popular with Internet services. From an Intel fact sheet:

Since late 2009, early adoption in the micro server category has been and continues to be in large Internet datacenters and service providers where compute density and electricity savings are critical for such applications as low-end hosting, lightweight Web servers and simple content delivery servers.

Intel sees the micro server category, in aggregate, making up less than 10 percent of the overall server market for the next 4-5 years. By offering server-optimized processors for this emerging category, Intel helps its customers deliver new levels of power efficiency and density while allowing them to also benefit from common software compatibility across Intel-based micro servers and traditional servers.

So what does that mean for virtualization? Virtualization has more relevant uses in enterprise settings. In that environment, companies do not need a scaled out node-based environment that leverages the microserver technology.

Intel is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.

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City-jumping, history-loving, smartphone-toting nerds are getting a fun new tool for Android and iOS today. .Location discovery app It Happened Here has updated its catalogue today to bring rich information to users in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

It Happened Here shows users interesting factoids about locations close to them. Kicking it in Georgetown in D.C. and want to see the infamous stairs that Father Karras threw himself down at the end of The Exorcist? The app uses Google Maps and will show a pin with your location and a pin for the nearest events around you. Just follow the map on your phone and you will soon find yourself standing at the bottom of the steps of cinematic lore.

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With a degree in history and the natural curiosity of a journalist, I often times feel that I am not getting the most out of a city when I travel. I know there are supposed to be cool things around, but I am just not sure what they are. This is even more true since I live in the D.C. area, a region with its fair share of interesting history. Playing with It Happened Here I get a good snapshot of sites to visit based on where I am standing.

The app is kind of like having a location-aware guidebook in your pocket. Legacy guidebooks like Frommer’s have iPhone apps but they are nowhere near as intuitive as It Happened Here or Plnnr. For instance, the Frommer’s app provides a tip calculator, currency converter and time translator but is not location-aware and the purpose of the app is to get users to download Frommer’s city guides from the app store.

Plnnr is an interesting application in the location-discovery arena but, as the name suggests, it is more about planning a trip than learning the history around you. Plnnr is a tool that can help you create and track an itinerary to degrees of minutiae. That is the opposite of It Happened Here, which is probably better for more serendipitous discovery than for planning a trek around a city.

One drawback of It Happened Here is that you have to purchase cities one at a time. The initial download is $2.99 with each additional city costing the same.

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India’s New Laws Silence Online Speech. An innocuous-sounding set of rules called the “Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011” [pdf] went quietly into effect last month in India. These rules, possessing the force of law, practically guarantees that no user of electronic communications in one of the world’s largest countries will ever be completely safe from persecution again.

Under the new rules, anyone who objects to content online will be able to effect that content’s immediate removal. The justifications for removal are so extensive and so vague that virtually anything will qualify for removal.

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Sri Lanka arrests online journalist. Lanka eNews announced one of its journalists, Shantha Wijeysooria, was arrested by a squad of cops at the website’s Colombo offices on contempt of court charges. Wijeysooria had written about a Sri Lankan magistrate - the same he’ll be appearing before - accusing him of holding two suspects in custody illegally. The website later published an apology and said it was not true.

Photographers killed in Libya. Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed in Misrata, Libya, covering the uprising there. They were only two of the 192 who have died in the line of duty since 1992.

Syria. In addition to widespread casualties during the ongoing uprising in the streets, the battles against the Assad regime have been active online as well. This report from Global Voices outlines the high- and low-lights.

Sri Lanka photo by Bertrand Hüe

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We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. Today, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don’t necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.

Installation

Sweetcron is a self-hosted service, so you will need access to a server with PHP and MySQL running on it. After downloading the code, the install is pretty typical for that of self-hosted application. It’s a bit more complicated than installing Wordpress or OpenTape, because you have to enter your data in numerous places and you have to edit your .htaccess when you want to install Sweetcron in a sub-directory.However, if you just follow the steps in the documentation, you should be able to install Sweetcron in less than 10 minutes.

After this, you just start adding your RSS feeds, and you are ready to go.

Final Result

The lifestream itself looks and works just like you would expect it, with a number of little surprises. One of the nicest features of Sweetcron is that it can format every new entry according to where it came from. A digg item, for example, gets a blue background, a Flickr items shows the photo on a green background with the caption underneath, and Twitter posts show in a blue box with your avatar in the top left corner (as long as you uploaded your avatar into the right spot in Sweetcron’s directory structure).

By default, Sweetcron updates your stream every 30 minutes, but you can also set the cron service on your server to update more frequently.

You can write your own posts in Sweetcron as well, but the editor doesn’t handle anything else but pure text and HTML code.

Bring Your Own Services

As of now, Sweetcron only creates your lifestream - if you want to add comments, Sweetcron recommends you install Disqus, and if you want to have a contact form on your site, it recommends you head over to wufoo to create one.

The two default themes are nice, especially the “Boxy but Good” one you can see in the screenshots here. Over time, others will surely start developing more themes and hacking the existing themes doesn’t seem too hard.

Verdict

Sweetcron does exactly what it promises to do. It is important to note, though, that this is not a Friendfeed-in-a-box type service. Your lifestream stands completely separate from every other Sweetcron service (though you could create a master feed for a group by patching all the RSS feeds together and running them through another Sweetcron installation).

For those who just want to have a lifestream on their blog, for example, Sweetcron is a great solution, especially if you don’t mind hacking Sweetcron to fit your own needs.

There are, of course, various other self-hosted applications that have a similar feature set (see Mark Krysnky’s list here), and many of them come as Wordpress plugins, making their installation very easy. Few, though, give you the flexibility of Sweetcron.

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In Tampa, Florida, one of the cities that comprises the megalopolis known as the Tampa Bay area, home to Busch Gardens, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and only minutes from beautiful beaches on the Gulf Coast of Florida (oh, and this author’s stomping grounds, too), a local politician is giving credit to Facebook for his recent win in the primaries for the local County Commission.

On Facebook, the crowd is still very young, with an average age of 22.96 as of this February. Typically, the youth vote, although coveted, could not be counted on thanks to low turnout of young voters at the polls. However, this small time local election may prove to be one of the first examples of the huge impact Gen Y can have on the political process.

Now that many members of Gen Y are of voting age, their sheer numbers can no longer be ignored by politicians. The biggest generation since the baby boomers, Gen Y has been poorly characterized by some as lazy, unfocused, and self-centered - a generation that would just as soon stay home with mom and dad than go out and climb the corporate ladder. While it may be true that Gen Y has the good financial sense to maximize their time in rent-free accommodations, they are certainly proving themselves the opposite of lazy when it comes to involvement, be it social involvement, community involvement, or political involvement. Considering this recent “Facebook-powered” win, it could be that this generation is all talk and all action, too.

According to Rearden Killion Communications, the St. Petersburg advertising firm that handled the campaign of Kevin Beckner in the District Six democratic primary for the Hillsborough County Commission, the Facebook effort comprised of content, video production, and media buying valued at around $7000. There was also a Facebook app which let supporters put a campaign button on their own pages and provided a link to Beckner’s page. The overall effort increased Beckner’s Facebook group membership by 50 percent.

In this local election of this County Commissioner, you have to wonder if this is a hint of things to come in the upcoming presidential election here in the U.S. The Obama campaign has defined themselves by the way they have embraced technology. From blogs to social networks to even SMS text messages announcing the VP, the campaign is “a revolutionary shift in our country’s political media ecology,” says Andrew Rasiej over on techPresident. Although it has yet to be seen whether or not the use of technology will propel Obama into the Oval Office, the results of this local election prove that there is merit to targeting the online crowd and asking for their vote.

(Image credit: Zappowbang)

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When Google acquired the microblogging service Jaiku in October of last year, many people had high hopes for Jaiku’s future. Would a Google-flavored Twitter soon show up everywhere from iGoogle to the upcoming Android handset, we wondered? Instead, news from the company slowed to a trickle and the doors stayed locked to newcomers - signs that many took to mean Google had essentially abandoned the service. But today, things are happening at Jaiku once again - most notably, unlimited invites are now available. Is Jaiku poised to make a comeback?

At the time of the acquisition by Google, Jaiku was a promising competitor to Twitter. This was before presidential debates were taking place via tweets or the Mars Phoenix Lander was announcing the discovery of ice on Mars. In fact, in many ways, Jaiku was thought to be the superior service, considering its features like threaded conversations, easy group creation, and RSS import. But once Google got its hands on the service, a whole lot of nothing seemed to happen.

Now, we’re tentatively raising our hopes once again. As VentureBeat reports, Jaiku is back after several days spent offline in a move to Google’s datacenters as they continue their move to Google’s App Engine service, the Google answer to Amazon’s web services stack. In addition, there is now a brand-new TOS that existing users must accept upon login, which brings the original up to Google standards, presumably.

However, what’s most exciting is that users now have unlimited invites to share with their friends, a step we hope is just the first of many in Jaiku’s rebirth. Yet, as exciting as a Google Twitter-like service is, so much time has passed that Twitter has the market share and mindshare of those that want to participate in a micro-blogging community. Jaiku has a long battle ahead if they truly want to compete now.

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For all its supposed simplicity, Really Simple Syndication or RSS has continued to confuse and intimidate millions of people online years after its introduction. What can be done to make RSS more mainstream? Google plans to roll out a small but simple feature that could go a long way. We wouldn’t be surprised to see every blog publishing service follow suit.

“Follow this blog” is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they’ll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company’s RSS reader. It’s a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

What it Will Look Like

As this new feature is rolled out over the coming weeks, it appears that users will be brought to three key screens.

Blogger users will now see a mini version of Google Reader in their dashboards.

Apologies for the blurry pic, that’s what Google posted.

Google Reader users will get a new folder for “blogs I’m following,” and new users will apparently be shown Common Craft’s fabulous 1 minute introduction to Google Reader.

Why It Matters

RSS is life and work changing technology. It’s what makes an ecosystem of blogs possible by lowering the investment required by readers to follow and support a larger number of blogs than they would visit manually. It’s what keeps those podcasts coming after you might have forgotten to download episode after episode. It makes search an ongoing practice instead of a one-off shot in the dark. RSS is huge, but the name alone intimidates many people who ought to be diving into it.

Surveys over the years have offered a wide range of estimates of the extent of mainstream RSS adoption. We know, though, that many many people do not ever use the technology.

“Follow” is clear language that we expect to go over well. It aims at the long held goal of getting people to use RSS without asking them to embrace the acronym. Update: Several people have argued since we posted this that “follow” will be far more clear to young users of social media sites like Facebook than to older users. Do you think “follow” is still too unclear? We think it’s pretty good, but let us know in comments or the poll on the right.

We expect that Blogger.com blogs will see a big increase in subscribers following this change and we would not be at all surprised if other blogging platforms, Wordpress in particular, roll out “follow” language and links soon if the Google move is well received.

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While SMS has already become one of the most important forms of communication in many parts of the world, the U.S. is only catching up to this trend slowly. Part of the reason for this is the high cost of using SMS, not just for users, but also for developers who want to use SMS for their applications. In contrast to other SMS service providers, Zeep Mobile offers developers a free SMS API without volume restrictions, though in order to monetize the service, it will insert ads into the SMS messages.

Advertising

While having random ads inserted into their messages might not work for some developers, having access to a free SMS gateway is a very seductive proposition, especially for small developers who don’t have the resources to either establish relationships with the big mobile carriers, or who simply don’t have the money to pay a commercial provider for access to their SMS gateway.

We asked Zeep Mobile if it had any plans to share revenue from these SMS ads with developers or if it was going to give developers any influence over which ads it would display. However, as of now, Zeep Mobile is not planning anything in this direction, though it would seem reasonable to assume that they might start sharing revenue with developers at some point in the future.

API

Besides the standard web API, Zeep Mobile has also developed Python and Ruby libraries, which developers can use free of charge. As far as we can see, this API is pretty straightforward and well documented.

Still in Beta

It is important to note, though, that the service is still in beta right now and that developers are limited to sending out messages to no more than 10 recipients at a time. Also, while Zeep Mobile has plans to expand beyond the U.S. in the future, the service can only send messages within the U.S. for now and is also limited to a select number of carriers.

Overall, though, this seems like a service worth looking into for developers who wants to start adding some SMS functionality to their applications without having to pay some of Zeep Mobile’s competitors like SMS Everywhere, Clickatell, or Celltrust.

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There has been a lot of speculation recently about an impending update to iTunes. Version 8.0, among other things, is supposed to finally bring a recommendation engine to the digital media player application. While that’s interesting from a music discovery perspective, it is even more interesting to consider what this could mean in terms of an iTunes+iPhone based social networking experience.

iTunes (launched 2001) and the iTunes music store (launched 2003) have come a long way since they were first launched. The application has gone through various iterations, gaining significant features such as podcasts (2005), videos (2007), games, and applications (2008) along the way. In the process, selling billions of songs, millions of movies, and over 10 million applications in the first week of the app store’s launch. Needless to say Apple has built an experience that with all it’s parts combined is unparalleled in both its features and the breadth of its catalog of content.

The Software Side

While most of that is common knowledge, what most people overlook is the glaring lack of any community aspect to iTunes. There are millions of people, many of them with similar tastes, flocking to the same destination every day, yet they never interact with each other… because they can’t. If Kevin Rose is to be believed, however, (as discussed on TWiT 157) that all is about to change with iTunes 8.0.

He says, ‘… the one thing I hear about iTunes 8.0 is that it’s gonna do something along the lines of, um, looking at your music, and, uh, kind of recommendations based on certain things.’ In other words, the next version of iTunes will monitor your media purchasing and consuming habits and correlate them with everyone else using the system to figure out which songs you will probably like but haven’t bought/listened to. If you’re a fan of collaborative filtering systems or internet radio (Pandora, Last.fm, etc), you’re probably familiar with the idea already and that iTunes may be considering implementing this doesn’t come as a surprise (I found myself wondering why this wasn’t introduced 2-3 years ago).

While this feature itself isn’t social and can be implemented entirely on the back end, the implementation required for that functionality is so close to a networked experience (monitoring of habits and correlation across users) that they might as well take a small next step and add a visible social layer with which those users can interact. In fact, if you look at the results from a 2006 iTunes survey, you will see the people want to be able to see what people with similar interests and tastes (i.e. friends) are purchasing and consuming, so they can experiment with and pick from the same selection. More specifically, consumers want:

1. The ability to view a friend’s wish list, with permission.
2. The ability to view what a friend is currently listening to, with permission.
3. The ability to view a friend’s playlist, with permission.
4. The ability to view a friend’s recent purchases, with permission.
5. The ability to view a friend’s favorite artists, with permission

What’s also interesting about this approach is that it reaches the exact opposite conclusions of EMR’s UK social networking study [PDF]. The study implies that social networks will be the content distribution channels of tomorrow, but the relationship may actually work better in the other direction. With the addition of networking and recommendation features to iTunes, the application could become the most efficient, most engaging, stickiest (always-on), and most profitable social network almost overnight.

But Apple’s social networking potential doesn’t end there. Remember Microsoft’s ‘welcome to the social’ campaign that centered around the launch of its Zune digital media player? If you don’t, you’re not alone. The goal behind the campaign, ‘to create a shared, social experience that will be shaped by the collective imagination of consumers and will inspire discovery of new music and artists,’ was actually a formidable one. Unfortunately an inferior device, coupled with disasterous software integration made the campaign a $100 million failure.

Enter Apple.

The Hardware Side

With a formidable install base, great hardware and one of the most versatile mobile operating systems around, the iPhone is ready to herald in the future of mobile social networking. Furthermore, with 3G/EDGE/WiFi/GPS capabilities, the iPhone is a great tool for both networking as well as wirelessly sharing digital media like the Zune promised (but failed miserably at). Not only does the device work seamlessly with the iTunes software, but Apple’s DRM is more consistent and perhaps more forgiving that Microsoft’s (which was partly responsible for crippling the Zune’s ambitions).

The Cloud

With a firm grasp on the software side with iTunes and on the hardware side with the iPhone, Apple is in good shape. Their killer app, however, could end up being the cloud. Apple already operates MobileMe (previously .Mac) which faciliates the management of contacts, calendars (events), email, photos, and any other files or digital media. Admittedly the service has been an utter failure since launch, but Apple has acknowledge the failure and is on the path to fix its shortcomings.

The previously discussed iTunes social networking and collaborative filtering (recommendations) system, coupled with the iPhone’s versatile wireless communication and media sharing capabilities, topped off with media and information management (and sharing) in the cloud, the combo is no doubt ready to be our digital life (and relationship) manager. The only limitation of the network, however, (and it will be a deal breaker for many) is that unlike every other social network today, the experience will come at a steep cost. Knowing Apple though, I have no doubt it will be an experience worth the cost (especially considering what they had to deal with at the MobileMe launch).

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

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For most companies, having to deal with one piece of bad publicity in a day is already bad enough. Apple, however, has to deal with three pieces of bad publicity today. In England, the Advertising Standards Authority, moved to ban one of Apple’s ads for the iPhone because of misleading statements in it. Also, an embarrassing security hole in the iPhone firmware lets anybody bypass your security code, and Apple’s move to ban a violent comic book from the App Store has also set off a minor firestorm of protests.

iPhone Ad Banned

Apparently, two British TV viewers were unhappy about the fact that one Apple TV ad for the iPhone stated that the phone would give you access to the whole Internet. However, because the phone does not support Flash or Java, these folks argued that this is a misleading statement and the Advertising Standards Authority  agreed.

Security Hole

The gaping security hole in Apple’s firmware for both the iPhone and iPod touch is maybe the most embarrassing of these three stories for Apple, especially because the problem was already known and fixed back in the days of the first iPhone.

If you lock your phone with a security code, anybody can bypass that code by hitting the ‘Emergency Call’ button and then double tapping your home button (if it is still set to display your favorites, which is the default behavior). After that, you have full access to the contact list, email, web etc.

If you want to protect your self from this, just set the home button to do anything but display your favorites (Settings -> General -> Home Button.)

Comic Book Controversy

As if all of this weren’t enough, Apple itself created some more controversy after it moved to ban the violent comic book Murderdrome (which is based on the ComicReader app) from its App Store. As Apple’s SDK states, the apps are not to offend anybody and Apple itself is the sole arbiter of offensiveness, so the company was in its right to ban this book, which, after all, features a good number of beheadings and ripped out limbs, which might make some users feel a bit queasy about the comic.

Apple’s SDK states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

On the other hand, this is a comic book and, while a bit over the top, it doesn’t feature anything that other comic books haven’t shown before.

For developers, this once again shows the dangers of working within Apple’s closed off iPhone ecology, where Apple has the final say over what gets included and what doesn’t, with no place but the Internet to complain about it.

So What Does Apple Do?

In typical Apple fashion, the company has not made any statement about any of these issues yet - and is likely not to do so anytime soon. That, for better or worse, is the way Apple operates. At the same time, though, the disastrous launch of MobileMe forced Apple to issue repeated notices about the status of the service. Maybe (and just maybe) this current firestorm of problems might just force the company to open up a bit more, though we don’t expect Steve Jobs to start blogging about iPhone apps anytime soon.

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Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you’ve made that argument in conversation before (and we now many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you’d be wrong.

The official Google Blog made a post this morning following up on a New York Times story last week where the company claimed that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own when they find it using YouTube’s new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.

Argument: Content ID is Next to Impossible

Many have argued that YouTube wasn’t capable of finding all the pirated content uploaded to its site - that it’s been an arms race pitting human monitors and shoddy ID technology against a sea of users uploading content. Video maverick Mark Cuban has argued that YouTube’s claim it can’t identify content was refuted by the fact that it manages to keep porn off the site and thus that the company couldn’t plead ignorance about copyright either.

Right: We don’t know if there’s some direct financial overlap between Katy Perry’s publishers and the ringtone site advertising on this video of hers, but at 600K views we’re pretty sure the video’s rights holders have seen it and chosen to let it remain on the site. Is that “what good girls do?”

Now it appears that YouTube’s newest content ID technology is doing quite a good job of finding copyrighted content. That alone is a game changer.

Argument: Media Companies Don’t Want Low Quality Versions of Their Content on 3rd Party Sites

It’s also been argued that many media companies are unwilling to have their content appear online in any form other than high quality files on their own webistes. That way they can maximize ad revenue and protect their brands. YouTube’s claim that 90% of content owners who find their work on YouTube are running ads on the site instead of demanding it be removed indicates a sea change in big copyright holder attitudes.

Scarcity is no longer a tenable strategy in a world of digital content and file quality is clearly not as important to consumers as many content producers believed it would be. Imagine what the web would be like if music producers took a similar strategy with mp3 files on other sites. Those same parties are undoubtedly among the participants in YouTube’s new program, using the ID technology to find songs being used along with user created video. Unfortunately, the music industry may be too greedy to support this same kind of model throughout a whole ecosystem of websites. Witness the plight of Pandora, a wildly popular service that’s trying to play by the rules.

Argument: YouTube Wouldn’t Be What it Is Without Pirated Content

One of the most commonly made critiques of YouTube is that it was only able to ramp up fast because it caught copyright holders by surprise; that it was born of illigitimate uploads of pirated TV shows and movie clips.

The latest turn of events leads us to wonder whether this question was turned around the wrong way. Couldn’t we just as well assert that YouTube was lucky to survive before a time when copyright holders understood that they had options with content that they owned rights to on the site? Had copyright holders come down hard and fast in the earliest days, as they did in later months surrounding the Google acquisition, then YouTube wouldn’t still be pushing the envelope and opening new doors for distribution and monetization today.

There’s a world of possibilities beyond even what’s being done today by the most open minded copyright owners. The Times article mentions Electronic Arts, for example, who encourages users to upload Spore related content and then uses YouTube’s ID technology to find it and highlight the best stuff. Any number of other campaigns have tried to get people to use a common tag in their metadata or upload through a dedicated portal powered by the YouTube API. YouTube is a chaotic place, though - companies may get the greatest connection with their fans by letting those fans upload how they like and using YouTube’s ID tech to find them afterword.

This is Big

This isn’t just about copyright and advertising, this is about a new paradigm that big copyright holders may be catching up with. From video to user data, it’s not about scarcity and silos anymore. It’s about keeping your users and fans through better service and compelling value-ads. Let’s hope this YouTube experience is more than just a flash in the pan and that the industry is genuinely moving in this direction.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

Taking Notes

1) Evernote

Evernote is a great note taking application, but that only scratches the surface of what it can do. If you are in a lecture, for example, you can also take a picture of the blackboard with your phone, upload it to the Evernote server, and thanks to Evernote’s clever OCR algorithms, even pictures of handwritten notes become instantly searchable.

You can also use it to bookmark web pages and write down your own lecture notes. Best of all, you can use a web app, a Windows or Mac desktop app, or a Windows Mobile and iPhone app, all of which seamlessly synch with each other, so that your notes are always up to date.

2) Google Notebook

The Google Notebook is one of Google’s lesser know products, but, thanks to a very well designed Firefox extension, it’s a great tool for when you do most of your work in a browser already. If you do some of your research in Google Books and Google Scholar, you can also easily clip excerpts from books and articles into your Google Notebook.

One additional nice feature is that you can invite collaborators to work on a notebook with you. If you are doing a research project in a group, for example, you can easily share your research with your whole group.

Online Office Suites

3) Google and 4) Zoho

Word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are probably the single most often used tool among college students, and while none of the online offerings can yet beat Microsoft Office (which, for students, now only costs around $60 for the Ultimate Edition), the online office suites from Google and Zoho do have some distinct advantages. Office obviously has a lot more features, but not only are both Google Apps and Zoho free, they also allow easier sharing of documents and working on projects collaboratively.

And while the online tools to create presentations are still a bit crude compared to Powerpoint or Keynote, they are both worthy contenders, especially if you don’t feel the need to add lots of fancy transitions to your presentations.

If we had to choose between Google’s and Zoho’s offering, our vote would probably go to Google, as the Google apps have a slightly more organized and professional feel to them, which, in the end, is going to make it easier to focus on the content of your documents.

Bibliography

5) Zotero

The standard tool for doing extensive bibliographies in academia is Endnote. While that is a great tool if you are writing a dissertation, Zotero is a great choice for less extensive research projects - and it’s free. Zotero is a Firefox extension, so it is not technically a web app, but in its next version, the developers are promising the ability to synch your bibliographies to a web version of the tool, so that your books and notes will become available everywhere.

For now, Zotero lives in the status bar of Firefox, and it pops up a little icon in your URL bar every time it recognizes a compatible website. Zotero already supports the databases of a huge amount of libraries worldwide, as well as a lot of standard academic databases such as JSTOR, LexisNexis, InfoTrac, PubMed, or ScienceDirect. Besides curating your citations, you can also add notes, tag items, or add attachments (like pdf files of articles). Once you are done, Zotero will create a bibliography for you in most standard formats, including APA, MLA, or Chicago style.

6) EasyBib

If you just need to create a short bibliography, Zotero might be more than you need. EasyBib will just help you to quickly create a bibliography entry in MLA format - a favorite among literature teachers. It can also handle the APA format, but you will have to subscribe to the pro version of EasyBib.

If you really hate figuring out where to put a comma and where to put a semicolon in your APA style bibliography entries, those $7.99 a year for the pro version might just turn out to be a bargain.

Also, if you only need a quick bibliography entry for a book, check out OttoBib, where you just have to enter the ISBN number and it will give you a fully formatted citation.

Staying Organized

7) Google Calendar

There are lots of great online calendars out there, including 30 Boxes and Yahoo’s calendar app, but our favorite is the Google Calendar, simply because it is dead easy to use, integrates nicely with GMail, allows for importing and exporting your calendar, and lets you publish a site with your free/busy information with the click of a button, so that your friends know not to bother you while you are cramming for that test.

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk might just be the tool that will keep you on track. And to make things even easier, Remember the Milk also integrates nicely with Google Calendar, so you can manage everything in one place.

Picking the Right Class

9) Rate My Professors

As much as teachers don’t like sites like these, Professor Performance and Rate my Professors can be useful tools when you decide which class you want to take. While almost every university makes you rate your professor at the end of the semester, schools never make this data public, so whenever you get a choice between professors, you really have no idea who the better teacher is. We like Rate My Professors a bit more than Professor Performance, simply because its search is a lot easier and the site is a bit more up-to-date. The site now also features a Facebook application.

Keeping in Touch

10) Meebo

As much as your teachers would like to think so, college isn’t just about classes, papers, and long ours in the library. If you want to stay in touch with your friends no matter what computer you are on, Meebo is a great universal IM client that lives on the web. It supports, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, and Google Talk, as well as Meebo’s own IM architecture.

What are we missing?

Are there other tools you use in school that we missed here? Let us know in the comments.

Flickr image by laffz4k.

More: continued here
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RSS is the backbone for most things Web 2.0 but these days, it’s not always fast enough. Politeness limits ping times to every 15 minutes at best in most cases, string a couple of applications together and information will sometimes not arrive where you’re waiting for it for up to an hour.

A number of people are trying to speed up the feeds but today sees the first public mention of a new effort lead by the guys at popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed. FriendFeed is working on an open source add-on to RSS and Atom that will make it easier to discover when a feed has been updated. This could be a big deal.

What it Is

The FriendFeed crew is working on something called a Simple Update Protocol. It was first reported on by venture publication The Deal and subsequently by Venture Beat, leading us to believe the PR push is an effort to for the company to raise some more money.

In response to our questions, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit told us the following:

• RWW: How will it work?

  Buchheit: SUP is just a very simple extension to RSS and Atom that makes it easier to discover when a feed has been updated.

• RWW: Where is this relative to XMPP?

  Buchheit: It’s unrelated to XMPP.

• RWW: Gnip? (See our coverage of Gnip, a startup that appears to be aiming to do what SUP will do and more.)

  Buchheit: We’re talking with several companies about supporting SUP, but aren’t ready to announce anything.

• RWW: Open source?

  Buchheit: Yes, absolutely Open Source.

Not a whole lot of information is available about SUP, but we hope the above helps. We’re real excited to see what FriendFeed has under its hat. The company has done more interesting things with popular use of RSS than anyone else has in awhile.

The Simple Update Protocol is due to be released next month. We look forward to checking it out. Soggy feeds put a damper on our day far too often.

Interested in FriendFeed? Take a tour of the RWW writers’ activities on the site here. See also our months-old podcast interview with the founders of FriendFeed, still one of the best sources of in depth information available about this important service.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]

For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

Taking Notes

1) Evernote

Evernote is a great note taking application, but that only scratches the surface of what it can do. If you are in a lecture, for example, you can also take a picture of the blackboard with your phone, upload it to the Evernote server, and thanks to Evernote’s clever OCR algorithms, even pictures of handwritten notes become instantly searchable.

You can also use it to bookmark web pages and write down your own lecture notes. Best of all, you can use a web app, a Windows or Mac desktop app, or a Windows Mobile and iPhone app, all of which seamlessly synch with each other, so that your notes are always up to date.

2) Google Notebook

The Google Notebook is one of Google’s lesser know products, but, thanks to a very well designed Firefox extension, it’s a great tool for when you do most of your work in a browser already. If you do some of your research in Google Books and Google Scholar, you can also easily clip excerpts from books and articles into your Google Notebook.

One additional nice feature is that you can invite collaborators to work on a notebook with you. If you are doing a research project in a group, for example, you can easily share your research with your whole group.

Online Office Suites

3) Google and 4) Zoho

Word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are probably the single most often used tool among college students, and while none of the online offerings can yet beat Microsoft Office (which, for students, now only costs around $60 for the Ultimate Edition), the online office suites from Google and Zoho do have some distinct advantages. Office obviously has a lot more features, but not only are both Google Apps and Zoho free, they also allow easier sharing of documents and working on projects collaboratively.

And while the online tools to create presentations are still a bit crude compared to Powerpoint or Keynote, they are both worthy contenders, especially if you don’t feel the need to add lots of fancy transitions to your presentations.

If we had to choose between Google’s and Zoho’s offering, our vote would probably go to Google, as the Google apps have a slightly more organized and professional feel to them, which, in the end, is going to make it easier to focus on the content of your documents.

Bibliography

5) Zotero

The standard tool for doing extensive bibliographies in academia is Endnote. While that is a great tool if you are writing a dissertation, Zotero is a great choice for less extensive research projects - and it’s free. Zotero is a Firefox extension, so it is not technically a web app, but in its next version, the developers are promising the ability to synch your bibliographies to a web version of the tool, so that your books and notes will become available everywhere.

For now, Zotero lives in the status bar of Firefox, and it pops up a little icon in your URL bar every time it recognizes a compatible website. Zotero already supports the databases of a huge amount of libraries worldwide, as well as a lot of standard academic databases such as JSTOR, LexisNexis, InfoTrac, PubMed, or ScienceDirect. Besides curating your citations, you can also add notes, tag items, or add attachments (like pdf files of articles). Once you are done, Zotero will create a bibliography for you in most standard formats, including APA, MLA, or Chicago style.

6) EasyBib

If you just need to create a short bibliography, Zotero might be more than you need. EasyBib will just help you to quickly create a bibliography entry in MLA format - a favorite among literature teachers. It can also handle the APA format, but you will have to subscribe to the pro version of EasyBib.

If you really hate figuring out where to put a comma and where to put a semicolon in your APA style bibliography entries, those $7.99 a year for the pro version might just turn out to be a bargain.

Also, if you only need a quick bibliography entry for a book, check out OttoBib, where you just have to enter the ISBN number and it will give you a fully formatted citation.

Staying Organized

7) Google Calendar

There are lots of great online calendars out there, including 30 Boxes and Yahoo’s calendar app, but our favorite is the Google Calendar, simply because it is dead easy to use, integrates nicely with GMail, allows for importing and exporting your calendar, and lets you publish a site with your free/busy information with the click of a button, so that your friends know not to bother you while you are cramming for that test.

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk might just be the tool that will keep you on track. And to make things even easier, Remember the Milk also integrates nicely with Google Calendar, so you can manage everything in one place.

Picking the Right Class

9) Rate My Professors

As much as teachers don’t like sites like these, Professor Performance and Rate my Professors can be useful tools when you decide which class you want to take. While almost every university makes you rate your professor at the end of the semester, schools never make this data public, so whenever you get a choice between professors, you really have no idea who the better teacher is. We like Rate My Professors a bit more than Professor Performance, simply because its search is a lot easier and the site is a bit more up-to-date. The site now also features a Facebook application.

Keeping in Touch

10) Meebo

As much as your teachers would like to think so, college isn’t just about classes, papers, and long ours in the library. If you want to stay in touch with your friends no matter what computer you are on, Meebo is a great universal IM client that lives on the web. It supports, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, and Google Talk, as well as Meebo’s own IM architecture.

What are we missing?

Are there other tools you use in school that we missed here? Let us know in the comments.

Flickr image by laffz4k.

More: continued here

Popularity: unranked [?]