Favtape Creates Mixtapes from Your Pandora and Last.fm Accounts -
Favtapeis another new mixtape creation site, but its standout feature is its automation process, which creates a mixtape based off songs you've listened to onPandora, or those you've favorited onLast.fm. Provide Favtape with your Pandora URL or your Last.fm username, and a mixtape will automatically be created for you with a unique URL that can be accessed anytime.
Will FriendFeed Forever Be a Niche Service? -
Just to get this out of the way right from the start– I am a big fan ofFriendFeed. It is one of the primary tools I use every day as a blogger. It is a tool that I would sorely miss if it ever went away for whatever reason. That said I don't think that FriendFeed as it is now will ever make it past being an excellent niche service and into the eyes of the mainstream Web user.
Facebook Updates Platform Policies and Issues Ultimatum to Developers - 
Fresh on the heels of rolling out the public beta for itsnewly designed homepage and user profiles, Facebook has issued a new set of policies for application developers, many of which are related specifically to the site changes.
Will the iPhone Kill Radio? Will Qik Kill the Competition? (video) -
Can a phone kill an industry? What's Qik offering, now that they're in public beta? These are the questions we tackle on today's Mashable Conversations. Sean and I were both intrigued by the fervor and discussion generated around my recent editorial on whether I thought theiPhone would kill terrestrial radio. The response to the article was thunderous and inconclusive. Just as many folks thought that I was right as thought that terrestrial radio has done a decent enough job of killing itself.
It's a popular topic, too. This weekend's Elite Tech News show focused on this topic as well for a good portion of the program, and most of the panel disagreed with me on my hypothesis, though for a number of reasons ranging fromLouis Gray's opinion that no technology ever truly kills another toSteven Hodson's proposition that mobile smartphone technology will never be truly ubiquitous.
Sean and I spend a good deal of time hashing out the various thesii put forth here and there before taking some time out to speak with Qik co-founder Bhaskar Roy about today's launch of Qik into open beta status.
He told us about a number of new upgrades that come out with this version of the service, including what was most exciting to us, a number of new distribution partners. As we've talked about before, CoverItLive now supports Qik (amongst a number of other live streaming ser
Ori Brafman, Co-Author of 'Sway' Live Q&A Tuesday at 2pm PDT -
Tomorrow, Tuesday, July 22 at 2:00PM PDT (5:00PM EDT),Ori Brafman, co-author of Sway, will be chatting live with Authors@Mashable onMashable’s Y! Live channel.
This is the third installment of our Sway three part series. If you missed the first two be sure to check out Brafman’spersonal introductionand post onVC Irrationality.
Anyone who has not yet read Sway, can check out thefirst chapter for freeor purchase it onlinehere.
*The video will be broadcast live on Mashable, but you must log intoMashable’s Y! Live Channelto chat with Ori and Rom Brafman.
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Docoloco Simplifies Location-Based Recommendations (The Startup Review) -
Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the detailshere.
STARTUP DETAILS:
Company Name:Docoloco
20 word description: Recommendation lists written by friends and
Web Directions Hits Sydney in September -
Returning to Sydney Australia in September for the 5th year,Web Directions South‘08once again features a two day conference of leading international and local experts in web design and development, two days of in depth workshops, parties, receptions and other networking events. Featured speakers this year include
Speakers include Jeffrey Veen, Derek Featherstone, Daniel Burka, Douglas Crockford, Jeff Croft, and Lynne D Johnson, who will cover front and back end web development, web app security, web design, interaction design, and much more.
Come and join fellow web professionals from all over Australia and all over the world in Sydney. The conference and expo will be held on September 25th and 26th at the Sydney Convention Centre, Darling Harbour Parkside. There will be relevant workshops on September 23rd and 24th at the PowerHouse Museum.
Mashable readers will receive a further $50 off the already great value price, making it just $795 before July 23rd. Just use the code WDS08-Mash when registering.
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Is Internet Radio on its Last Legs? -
Choosing a radio station was once a right of passage for the American adolescence. It was what bound you to your friends, disassociated you from your parents and attracted to you whatever partner had the misfortune to have you. Regional in range, determined by frequency, traditional radio was completely national in scope, cities to suburbs, Natick to Nashville. And then, like with the overnight successes the medium helped popularize, everything seemed to decline.
Traditional radio has been in a steady fall for nearly a decade. While it still remains a 21 billion dollar industry, the time spent listening to radio has fallen somewhere to the tune of 8 percent since 2000, according toArbitron, a firm that measure radio audiences. This steady drop in listenership has forced terrestrial radio stations to program music that can appeal to the broadest of audiences, disenfranchising both music fans and emerging artists, and helping to foster the growth of satellite and Internet radio.
“Internet radio has redrawn the whole radio landscape,” said Tim Westergren, a founder ofPandora, a leading Internet radio company.“It provides a more fulfilling radio experience and a mass promotion for artists being shut out of terrestrial radio.”
The metrics are in agreement with Westergren, Internet radio captures 33 million listeners per week, according to Arbitron, and nearly 15 % of 18 to 49 year olds tune in to Internet radio on a weekly basis. Internet radio companies, such as Pandora,Last.fmandSlackeroffer a personalized radio experience which gives its listeners
GoDaddy on .ME: 'The Most Successful New Domain Launch in History' -
Talk about bravado. Four days after launching the .me domain extension and inciting a virtual riot among customers,GoDaddyis toting the success of what it calls“the most successful new domain launch in GoDaddy's history.” The basis for that claim? More than 20,000 .Me domain names were registered in the first 24 hours of availability, according to the company.
As we reported last week, the.Me launch was riddled with technical problems, including as many of 8 or 9 people claiming to hold receipts for the domain name Aweso.me. To its credit, GoDaddy responded quickly to the problems, issuing refunds to effected customers and making personal phone calls to many of them (a voicemail from a GoDaddy rep left withAndy Bealcan be heardhere). But that has done little to qualm the anger of many of those that thought they were the new owner of potentially lucrative .Me names.
In a press release this morning, the company acknowledges the technical issues they encountered upon launch, but actually uses the“it's a nice problem to have” cliché, with CEO Bob Parsons stating “In spite of a few early difficulties - GoDaddy.com successfully processed a huge, record-setting level of registrations. To the best of our knowledge, there have never been more registrations handled in one day during theordinary course of businesses by any registrar in history.”
Realistically, I don't think there is that much GoDaddy could have done to prevent the issues it encountered as domain speculators raced to buy up premium .Me domains upon launch. However, given the frustration and confusion caused on launch day, I think the celebration dance would've best been kept internal.
Go Daddycompany profile provided byTradeVibes
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In 1939, Bob Kane created“The Bat-Man” for issue #27 of Detective Comics, and as they say, the rest is history. This past weekend the highly anticipated film The Dark Knight was released in theaters, setting a record for biggest three-day take with $155.3M in tickets sold. To celebrate we’ve rounded up 25 sites where you can learn more about the Batman series and its characters.
Below you can find showtimes and buy tickets to the film, read about how the movie was made, explore close to 70 years of Batman’s history, and more.
Fan Sites
Batman-Dark-Knight.MovieChronicles.com- An unofficial site following all the news related to the hot film’s release.
Batman-on-Film.com- For ten years, Batman-on-Film has covered all Batman film related projects as well as reviews of the comics.
BatmanFanFilms.com- A large collection of fan films based on the Caped Crusader with some being of amazingly high quality.
BatmanYTB.com- Batman Yesterday, Today& Beyond gives you a history of Batman as well as information on collectibles, television shows, films and more.
ComicVine.com- ComicVine has a very detailed history of Batman comics, movies, television appearances and even touches on the 1950’s book, Seduction of the Innocent, which caused many to question Batman’s sexuality.
DCDatabaseProject.com- Part of the Wikia network, this wiki aims to index all of the DC Universe, but has lots of information on Batman.
GoldenAgeBatman.com- A site dedicated to the Batman comics of the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s.
Legions Of Gotham- A large message forum dedicated to discussing every aspect of the Batman universe.
News
AintItCool.com- Well known site for film gossip of all kinds.
Chud.com- Short for“Cinematic Happenings Under Development”, CHUD is also the name of a 1980’s horror film, but this site is all about movie rumors and new
Company:Outbrain
Founded: 2006
Located: Netanya
I had the opportunity to meet with John LoGioco, VP of Business Development at Outbrain, the free service that offers bloggers and publishers a ratings widget that can be used by visitors of their sites to rate their content. The service, which serves as a recommendation engine for readers allowing them to discover new content they might like based on the ratings they give, recently announced ananalytics dashboardfor bloggers and site publishers. Outbrain is signaling a trend towards offering higher quality, more personalized Web content based on reader response and giving readers more power over the content they are viewing.
In our interview below, I speak with John about Outbrain’s philosophy and goals.
Ayelet Noff, also known as bloggerBlonde 2.0, is a social marketing strategist and consultant who has been an influential force in the Israeli tech scene for many years. Noff specializes in helping companies strategically market their brands online.
[Disclosure: Outbrain is a past sponsor of Mashable events]
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Adam DuVander over at WebMonkey has compiled a list of their five favorite Firebug extensions. The ever-popular YSlow tops the list, but to that they add: Firecookie for easy access to cookie information FirePHP to integrating server-provided PHP debugging information with the Firebug UI Pixel Perfect for overlaying mock-ups on top of the real thing to ensure you’ve [...]
John Resig continues his streak of compelling blog entries with "DOM DocumentFragments" where he shows that: A method that is largely ignored in modern web development can provide some serious (2-3x) performance improvements to your DOM manipulation. The technique shown is compatible across a large swath of modern browsers, including our friend IE6. Here's an example of [...]
John Allsop wrote a long piece over at Web Directions South with some thoughts on writing native iPhone apps versus web-based iPhone apps. The obvious flaw in his piece is that he only looked at free iPhone applications and from that subset concluded that almost everything the native apps do could be done with web applications [...]
Edward Tufte has long had a following of fans in the field of information visualizations. Among his interesting taxonomy of visualization types is the "Sparkline", which he describes as "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics". While Tufte originally suggested that computer displays are too low-resolution to effectively make use of Sparklines (vs. printed page), James Dempster pointed us [...]
AdBriteannounced it will use its large online advertising marketplace (70,000 active websites) to unveil a new behavioral targeting product, currently available as invite-only to a select group of advertisers.
The new service allows advertisers to display ads to users based on their interests and habits, and however freakish this may seem to some users, we all know that it works well in practice. There are 14 major interest categories which are subdivided to over 3000 subcategories; these include Automotive, Business& Finance, Careers, Consumer Electronics, Dating& Singles, Health, Music, and Travel.
Prices for the behaviorally targeted ad inventory are determined through a real-time auction, and advertisers are able to view detailed reports on the performance of each subcategory, thus enabling them to precisely adjust bids and placements of their ads.
There is some serious competition in this field; one company that comes to mind iseXelate, which was funded with $4 million in 2007; also, pretty much every big player has its own behavioral ad network in stock already. AdBrite hopes to leverage its large inventory to draw advertisers; as Ignacio Fanlo, AdBrite CEO puts it,“AdBrite's mix of high-reach publisher brands and engaging specialty content sites is an unbeatable combination for advertisers and publishers alike.”
AdBritecompany profile provided byTradeVibes
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Yahoo! reached an agreement with Carl Icahn: eight members of Yahoo’s current board of directors will stand for re-election; the board will be expanded to 11 members, Icahn will take one, and the other two will be chosen based on his recommendation.
Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang said this of the agreement:
“This agreement will not only allow Yahoo! to put the distraction of the proxy contest behind us, it will allow the Company to continue pursuing its strategy of being the starting point for Internet users and a must buy for advertiser.”
Icahn’s statement is more revealing:“I am very pleased that this settlement will allow me to work in partnership with Yahoo!'s Board and management team to help the Company achieve its full potential. While I continue to believe that the sale of the whole Company or the sale of its Search business in the right transaction must begiven full consideration, I share the view that Yahoo!'s valuable collection of assets positions it well to continue expanding its online leadership and enhancing returns to stockholders.”
Bascially, Icahn backed down in exchange for three seats on the board; and will not be pushing for the sale of Yahoo or its search business…for a while. Does it mean that the Microhoo soap opera is finally at an end? Far from it: this is just one little (costly) victory for Yahoo. If there is a clear“winner” in this story when the dust settles in the end, I bet it will be a Pyrrhic victory.
Read the official statement by Yahoohere.
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Jajah, which has been on the fast track to expansion by way of several partnerships, has just teamed up withPageonce’s Personal Internet Assistant service so users can keep track of their Jajah activity at any time. This comes with additional alerts from Pageonce for account updates like a low balance or other changes that have occurred to their account. As with all other service partnerships included in Pageonce, the Jajah account access and alerts are free.
This is different than most Jajah partnerships you hear about, as most announcements regarding Jajah integration involve the ability to make VoIP calls within a particular social network. But the remote access to your Jajah account activity through Pageonce is an important partnership as well. As Imentionedin previous coverage of Pageonce, through its virtual service you can access your various accounts securely, without having to log in, once your account has been confirmed.
We’ve seen several developments moving towards just this type of a partnership, with advances from Pageonce, LiquidTalk, SkyDeck, Chase and also Jajah, to name a few. So I’m not surprised to see Jajah make your account activity available through the Pageonce Personal Internet Assistant program, and extend it to all their users. Not only are more companies making their content accessible remotely through plug-ins and third-party services, but others like Pageonce are turning this into a highly personalized service that aggregates nearly everything in your life, from your cable service account information to your checking account balance, your Netflix queue to your airline mileage points.
Pageonce is one of the most comprehensive tool of its kind that I’ve used so far, and the company has worked hard to make as many services as possible available directly through its service. I think the next major step for this particular space is continued growth through user and B2B adoption, and we’ll likely see some indirect recommendations as a result, on a very personalized level.
As services like Pageonce become a platform for centralized custom content, we’ll also likely see some indirect marketing from third party services come about, as services find that Pageonce has the potential to become yet another way in which they can reach out to consumers, as well as an integrated service that can be offered as a perk for their existing customers. The beauty of it is that it works across a myriad of services and industries, even those outside of the Web-based service realm.
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I loatheMTV. It’s not because they’ve gone from music television to let’s-hypnotize-teens-and-turn-them-into-some-sort-of-zombie-army television (they have), and it’s not because the music there sucks most of the time (it does); it’s because every time I find a link to some video that resides on their site I get the following message:
COPYRIGHT RESTRICTS US FROM PLAYING THIS VIDEO OUTSIDE OF THE US.
Now, I know all you US folks aren’t familiar with these sorts of messages, but can you please take a second and imagine how it is for the rest of us? You feel stupid: you’re willing to spend some of your precious time and see some content, and then you’re told that you can’t, because you’re located on the wrong spot of the globe.
If MTV was completely unavailable in my country (Croatia) and I were unfamiliar with the brand, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Don’t know them, don’t care. But I am a user; they’re very much available here (and pretty much everywhere else) on satellite TV, and I’m seeing those same videos I’m unable to see online on my telly every day (actually, I don’t, cause I rarely watch television; but you get the idea).
I know why this is: copyright problems. As I statedmany times before: I don’t care. Solve it. Do something. I’m obviously able to see the content elsewhere (be it on YouTube or TV), so it’s not impossible.
Don’t do it because I tell you so, MTV. Do it because you’ve got millions of visitors hating you more and more each day; they’re your users because they’re familiar with your brand, and you’re telling them to buzz off? Gee, let me guess how that one is going to end up.
It’s one thing when you don’t let users see the video. It’s bad, but it can be worse. By chance, I’ve stumbled into some niche social network calledVirtual Rush. I can’t even open the site, as I’m greeted with the message:“Sorry! Virtual Rush is only available within the United States.” They didn’t even create a nice“sorry” page, it’s just ugly, .85em sized, black Arial letters on white background. I can’t imagine why can it be necessary to keep users from even seeing the front page of a social network, regardless of how country-specific it may be.
Let’s do this once again for those companies who haven’t been paying attention: the internet is global. Anyone can be your user, regardless of where they physically are. Hiding stuff from users based on their location is stupid, and it’ll make your users hate you. Get it?
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