Today’s web review…

J.C. Penny’s paid link blow-up: do you know what your SEO is doing?
Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia
Wikipedia’s Notability Requirements And The Slash
“Move” — a simpler programming language as a subset of JavaScript
StartupBus community is about to explode
Morphic for JavaScript
Quora Raises Questions
Zynga Valuation Rises to Over $7 Billion
London Stock Exchange in historic Linux go-live
Gemalto squeezes Facebook onto a SIM
Adobe Flash: 20m phones flip Steve Jobs the bird
O2 to raise broadband prices by up to 76%
Microsoft’s IE9: Don’t believe the hype
Surviving the cloud computing boom
Microsoft, Nokia, and MeeGo: Are they all doomed?
D-Link Boxee Box DSM-380 media streamer: How does it measure up?
Intel pushes password-pumping mojo
Patent attack launched on Google’s open video codec
Nokia’s 15-year tango to avoid Microsoft
Vodafone squeezes internet into TV
Egyptians and Tunisians Collaborated to Shake Arab History
Facebook tagged with $60bn valuation
Time Inc. gambles with multi-platform bundled subscription model for Sports llustrated
Majority of smartphone users have bought physical goods via mobile: Adobe
L’Oreal drives Facebook Likes via Vanity Fair app takeover
Barneys New York spring campaign provides intimate view of fashion through images
Missoni stays true to brand image with new iPhone app
Prabal Gurung builds community via online contest
Five predictions in marketing from a lawyer
Android launches lead mobile show
LG Optimus 3D features YouTube 3D app for multi-dimensional sharing
Sony reveals PlayStation phone
Motorola Pro: the Droid Pro takes a European vacation
Will a UK content site ever sell for as much as the Huffington Post?
The iPlayer’s future is mobile, says BBC
Why Canada’s newspaper industry still has faith in print
RIM PlayBook tablet now in delicious LTE and HSPA+ flavors
Richard Hammond to front online TV show
Digital or bust: the story of a new media startup
Benrik Pitch: Google-Twitter Synergy
Close or View: Push vs. Realtime
Search Still Sucks
“Resistance is futile!” – Resistance to Cloud; Change – Friend or Foe?
Apple Works on Line of Less-Expensive iPhone
PayPal’s Micropayment Solution Opens to the Public
Adobe says Flash 10.2 coming to handsets soon, offers roundabout confirmation of Honeycomb for smartphones
HyperCities Maps and Archives the Tweets from Cairo #Jan25
Pandora, Innovative Internet Radio Station, Files For $100M IPO
Amazon Forces Kindle Lending Club to Rebrand – Now BookLending.com
TweetDeck Acquired by Ubermedia: What Are the Implications for the Twitter Ecosystem?
Smartphone users ignore mobile ads
HANDS ON: MiMedia Backup Now Shares With Facebook, More
Nokia CEO makes the case for Microsoft deal
The Economics of Blogging and the Huffington Post
iOS developers making leap to the Mac, thanks to Mac App Store
12 Ways to Use Quora For Your Job Search
Grammy Buzz: Social Media Monitoring Says The Winner Is …
4 Small Business Mobile Predictions for 2011
Webby is the Android-powered Chumby thing that hasn’t won any awards — yet
Digg Bans RSS Submissions
Can Cable Block the Google TV Revolution?
Social Networking Americans’ Valentine’s Day Plans [INFOGRAPHIC]
iPad to lead 400 percent surge in NAND flash use
Instagram, Is Taking Off
Skip Craigslist & Strangers, Sell Your Stuff to Friends With Keepio
How We Use Social Media During Emergencies [INFOGRAPHIC]
Hands-On With Sparrow, A Gmail Desktop Client for Mac
Twitter Kills the API Whitelist: What it Means for Developers & Innovation
Camera Mic adds acoustic remote shutter to your iPhone
Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) Adds 10 New Members Ahead Of MWC
New Facebook Messages To Be Available To All Users
MTV Joins Instagram for Grammy Coverage
Facebook Updates Fan Pages (Finally Does Something Right)

Everyday at Vexed we round up the industry stories that we find interesting and insightful. These are sent round in an email digest, helping to inform the work we do for our clients and keep us at the forefront of digital. If you have questions about any of these stories or would like to talk to us about projects based on any of them, drop us a line at info@vexeddigital.com

Today’s Web News…

5 Reasons Why Music Games Are Dying
Google Rolls Out Two-Factor Authentication For Everyone
Opera Browser Now Boasts 100 Million Monthly Users
Amazon Brings Mobile Shopping App to Windows Phone 7
Microsoft Unveils Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate
Gartner: Symbian Is Still the Number One Smartphone Platform
The Psychology of Facebook: Implications for Social Commerce
Report: Jobs still very involved during medical leave
Gaming social network Raptr hits 6 million users
Nokia and Microsoft Announce Plans for Mobile Partnership
3 mobile payment products hint at the future
How to Reuse Your JavaScript as jQuery Plugins
SEO Competitive Analysis: Your Roadmap to Ranking #1 On Google
Threatened BBC websites crawled and shared as 1.88GB torrent
RIM Said to Plan PlayBook Software to Run Google’s Android Apps
British Airways mobile email campaign garners 250K app downloads
Google’s Boutiques.com Gets Analytical
Land Rover claims 50pc engagement rate for The Daily iPad ad campaign
Louis Vuitton targets affluent travelers with augmented reality iPhone app
Net-A-Porter taps Google TV for commerce-enabled video

Everyday at Vexed we round up the industry stories that we find interesting and insightful. These are sent round in an email digest, helping to inform the work we do for our clients and keep us at the forefront of digital. If you have questions about any of these stories or would like to talk to us about projects based on any of them, drop us a line at info@vexeddigital.com

Today’s web news…

Add Offline Reading to Any App With Instapaper’s New API
How did WordPress win?
Twitter Finds Itself Between A Facebook And A Google
Android Developers Blog: Introducing Renderscript
Object Oriented CSS
Google, antitrust, and the ‘Copygate’ hypocrisy
Sony tweets ‘secret’ key at heart of PS3 jailbreak case
Oracle patches decade-old ‘Mark-of-the-Beast’ bug in Java
Starbucks’ iPhone barcode app easily scammed by screengrab
Universal Pictures uses mobile to link static print ads to interactive content
Marc Jacobs drives consumers in-store via Foursquare push
INQ announces ‘Facebook phone’ ahead of Mobile World Congress
Facebook Ads Can Now Specify Any Page Landing Tab as a Destination
Rovi Connected Platform brings another flavor of Android-to-anything streaming
Guitar Hero Gone: What Went Wrong?
Facebook Rolls Out Ads With New Photo Album Layout
Hipstamatic To Debut New Lens During New York Fashion Week
HP brings WebOS to phones, TouchPad (photos)
How 3 Companies Are Using NoSQL Database Riak
The BBC Shows by Example Why Apple Is Right to Keep Flash Off iOS

Everyday at Vexed we round up the industry stories that we find interesting and insightful. These are sent round in an email digest, helping to inform the work we do for our clients and keep us at the forefront of digital. If you have questions about any of these stories or would like to talk to us about projects based on any of them, drop us a line at info@vexeddigital.com

Today’s web news…

French Connection joins Asos in opening Facebook store
Cost-per-engagement online ads most effective metric for luxury brands: expert
Microsoft re-org: more code, less death by PowerPoint?
Google Translate for iPhone: hits and misses
Firefox 4 goes to 11 (betas)
VMware hooks up private and public clouds
Nokia’s ‘Burning Platforms’ memo warns of cheapies threat
Mobile data streaming overtakes downloading
Facebook exploit toolkit dumbs down rogue app creation
Android goes virtual
A brief history of the BlackBerry UI
HTML5 Is An Oncoming Train, Native App Development An Oncoming Rocket Ship
Breaking the web with hash-bangs
How ThatHigh solved the chicken and egg problem and grew to 1 million pageviews with no SEO
How Rails Developers do Ajax in 2011
JQuery 1.5 released: .sub(), ajax rewrite, speed improvements, more
Near Field Communications: a technology primer
CardStar to distribute Groupon location-based mobile deals
PennySaverUSA.com lets consumers access thousands of coupons via mobile site
Applebee’s, American Eagle boost revenue via Valentine’s Day mobile gift cards
How to compromise the Starbucks Rewards Card app in 90 seconds
TripAdvisor, EveryTrail partner to expand mobile travel offers
BBC iPlayer app coming to Android as well as iPad by the end of this week
Facebook Rolls Out Major Upgrades To Ad System
Netflix API Requests Grew 4X in 4 Months

Everyday at Vexed we round up the industry stories that we find interesting and insightful. These are sent round in an email digest, helping to inform the work we do for our clients and keep us at the forefront of digital. If you have questions about any of these stories or would like to talk to us about projects based on any of them, drop us a line at info@vexeddigital.com

Today’s web news…

Google Hotpot Spreads to a Global Scale
NoSQL Consolidation: CouchOne and Membase Merge to Form Couchbase
Smartphones ‘out sell’ PCs for first time
Oracle and Java: Mobile dev FAIL dooms Ellison’s future
Google open sources Chrome port machine
Mozilla plans four Firefoxes in 2011
VMware takes on Google Apps with Zimbra 7
‘Mark-of-the-Beast’ bug topples Java apps
Google keen to settle antitrust investigation
Last.fm charges for mobile
A More Open Platform: The Instagram API
Finally: Facebook Co-Founder Opens the Curtain on Two-Year Old Asana
FareBot: Read data from public transit cards w/ your NFC-equipped Android phone
JCPenney integrates iPads in-store to influence purchase decisions
API of the Week: Convert HTML to PDF with Joliprint’s API
The Details of Google Honeycomb Spread
Gmail Improves Its Contact Groups
Bing and Google Stand Together for IPv6
Interesting Google Statistics from 2010
Sage Launches Mobile Payments for Small Businesses
Using Public Data to Fight a War
CollabraCam offers real-time, multi-camera shooting on iOS
Kindle 3.1 software preview brings real page numbers, more
Uh Oh, Instagram: PicPlz Launches API, Creative Commons & Brand Dashboards

Everyday at Vexed we round up the industry stories that we find interesting and insightful. These are sent round in an email digest, helping to inform the work we do for our clients and keep us at the forefront of digital. If you have questions about any of these stories or would like to talk to us about projects based on any of them, drop us a line at info@vexeddigital.com

Over the last 3 months there has been a lot of noise and debate about Quora and other Q&A social media platforms, are they going to be the next big thing? So we thought we’d take a closer look …

The concept of online Q&A is not a new one. Yahoo Answers has existed for many years, but quality has been an issue; forums are also well established, but can be verbose and stray “Off Topic”. Wikipedia has developed as the most credible socially curated knowledge base.

The current opportunity would seem to be to apply social media tools to “turbo charge” online Q&A. Ask the community a question and get an answer, or a stream of answers tailored to the specific question you, the user, has posed. The process is collaborative, answers are rated so the service becomes more than just a knowledge base, but have the potential for all users to gain perspective, understanding and insight on an array of subjects.

A number of players have gained prominence during 2010 and look set to grow further in 2011. Quora, launched at the end of 2009, the user base is small but includes names such as Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify, and Werner Vogels CTO of Amazon are amongst the many well-informed contributors. In contrast Formspring, which launched around the same time, has experienced rapid growth with a “ask me anything” mantra. A third name to conjure with is Stack Overflow, intended initially for programmers to share tips, but has fuelled its growth via separate topic-specific sites covering everything from cookery to photography.

The challenges are to balance quality on the one hand with usability and scale on the other. Quora has been obsessive about quality but some argue, for instance, emphasis on correct punctuation and grammar in posing questions detracts from the immediacy of social media and does not address the real issue of encouraging questions that will stimulate genuine insight over simply fact-based knowledge. Conversely, Formspring, which has pursued more aggressive growth has been criticized for its decision to allow users to pose questions anonymously, many feel has resulted in cyber bullying.

Are Quora and the like going to be the next big thing? In some ways it depends on how useful they become to individuals and business.

The concept of collaborative Q&A is established, doing this in real time is where it becomes interesting. Facebook , Twitter and location based social networks have established ‘real time’ activity. Applying the Q&A format provides structure to this.

Benefits to the individual are fairly obvious, provide insight, connect with a wider network by ranges of topics and an opportunity at some levels to demonstrate your expertise and knowledge in areas (it could be a natural extension to your linked in profile).

For business, there is a role to play in supporting customer services with more intelligent realtime replacement for FAQ’s. They enable brands to address questions directly, but also benefit from the contributions of independent individuals many of whom are consumers that offer the benefit of impartial brand advocacy. Formspring, used by Fiat Brazil, and Get Satisfaction, used by EasyJet, are two good examples of services that can easily plug in to a brand’s site, blog or social network.

Finally an area to watch is the role Q&A social media community’s start to influence search results, particularly with Google’s growing emphasis on social search.

Certainly an area to watch in 2011.

Author – Andy Edwards

To spare you another set of trend forecasts, we thought we’d take a different tack. We’ve looked at the opportunities that the technology will create and picked what we believe are the top 5 …

1. Gain a customer channel. We’ve already talked about social commerce – and seen initiatives from ASOS and The Conran Shop in recent weeks. Facebook commerce is simpler than you think and offers some unique opportunities to leverage the social nature of the site. Don’t take our word for it though. Booz & Company’s white paper on the subject in recent weeks provides a good introduction on the subject.

2. …but it’s not just Facebook you should be looking at. The big screen in your room (TV) is about to join the host of other devices in your house connected to the internet. With the launch of Google TV set top boxes and Apple TV rumoured to be joining the App Store this year, the kind of custom content that’s already a feature of games consoles could soon be sitting on the big screen.

3. Provide your customers with more precisely targeted offers and information. While we at Vexed have been excited about the possibilities of location based social networks for marketing, unfortunately they’ve been quite basic in how they serve offers. Until now it’s been difficult to target people in specific geographic regions – for example, a high street, a city shopping centre or even a particular region. However with geofences, a developing technology that can now be placed into iPhone and Android apps allows you to do just that by creating geographical fences that trigger your marketing messages at precise barriers.

4. Gather more customer information than ever – without running into privacy pitfalls. Many bigger businesses have huge stores of customer data, but increasingly this has led to questions over customer privacy. Yet with every piece of information is a potential competitive advantage, how do you gather more data without alienating customers? Well the answer possibly lies in a new adjunct to CRM, VRM – Vendor Relationship Management.

The idea is that by providing your customers with access to the data you have about their purchases, they can make more intelligent decisions about how they use your products. Look at Nike Plus; the idea of tracking how someone uses their running shoes would’ve been an incredible privacy breach before digital. Nike Plus’s community and dashboard provides the customer (and Nike) with unmatched levels of information on how they use the product. With many more tracking apps and services now appearing, the time has come for firms to start working in partnership with the public with how to exchange and share data.

5. Simpler more effective customer service and feedback. Q&A site Quora has been getting a lot of buzz from social media types recently but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Read on to find out more.

If you haven’t had time to read through all the predictions for 2011, here’s the round up of the top ten trend predictions, from Mashable to JWT and e-Consultancy …

1. 2011: The (actual) Year of the Mobile (27 votes)
Industry experts have been frantically talking about the year of the mobile for what seems like forever, but now it seems like it’s finally arrived. With an increase in the power and scope of smartphone functionality, coupled with the growth of mobile applications, searches will also become more relevant as users merge their social media profiles to provide a more personalised experience and realize the benefits of using applications for searches. Mobile marketing will also become a force to be reckoned with, as the use of applications grows at an exponential rate. Prime example? Apple reaching 10 Billion downloads on their App Store and the uptake of contactless payments at major retailers, Starbucks and McDonald’s.

2. The rise of geolocation tools used for marketing. (19 votes)
Not just all about checking in with your friends; the growth of Foursquare and the launch of Facebook Places means more brands will use location as a marketing feature; offering loyalty points, coupons or deals based on localisation. Brands such as Gap have already ran a location based campaign giving away free jeans using Facebook Deals. Expect 2011 to bring in a more seamless experience with Facebook’s increased presence in the social commerce sector.

3. Quality content and engagement strategy (14 votes)
With a plethora of information bombarding the user from all angles, it’s more important than ever for brands to keep their customer engaged with content of calibre via various online and offline touchpoints. For businesses and brands, it’s highly imperative to be the leader in their field with rich long-lasting content that can be reshuffled and reworked. If context is Queen, then content is King (again!). Using marketing as customer service, through social mediums is the way forward, Naked Wines does that brilliantly by knowing their product and being customer-centric.

The rest of the top ten…

4. Social commerce and group buying – Groupon have established the sector but are now challenged by Google and possibly Facebook (10 votes)
5. Cross-channel customer engagement – getting the same user experience across all channels (9 votes)
6. Gamification – using gaming mechanics to engage consumers. (8 votes)
7. Google’s continuing dominance – As shown up by a recent chart, Google has a plethora of services. With more planned, Google’s disruptive dominance is likely to continue to grow this year. (6 votes)
8. HTML5 Increased uptake of HTML5 in apps and music. (6 votes)
9. Digital downtime – the privacy backlash between users and social networks and emergence of “walled gardens.” (6 votes)
10. The shift towards social networks as search engines – in particular, YouTube creating huge organic searches opening a whole channel for sharing and connecting. (4 votes)

Author: Sabrina Bangladesh

Today’s web news…

AOL buys Huffington Post for $315m in cash
Android’s on top – will Nokia and RIM let it in?
Google to site devs: ‘Please code for Google TV!’
Chrome 9 debuts with WebGL, app store, instant annoyance
Apple’s app store policies: What will they provoke?
Japanese hacker earns $13,174 for reporting Google security holes
Treesaver.js – JavaScript library for creating magazine style layouts
How to monetize mobile video
Showtime for F-Commerce: Dexter’s Valentine’s Day Wall-Store
Quora’s New Algorithm for Ranking Answers
Why Fashion’s Top Brands Are Flocking to Tumblr
The Cost of Egypt’s Internet Blackout: $110 Million+
2,000 New Archaeological Sites Found Using Google Earth
Fun With Twitter: 5 iPhone Games Made of Tweets
The State Of Brands On Facebook
Control, play torrents via uTorrent on Android
Google Launches Contracts for Java
7 Years of Facebook: A Retrospective

Everyday at Vexed we round up the industry stories that we find interesting and insightful. These are sent round in an email digest, helping to inform the work we do for our clients and keep us at the forefront of digital. If you have questions about any of these stories or would like to talk to us about projects based on any of them, drop us a line at info@vexeddigital.com

Today’s web news…

UK’s Supreme Court greenlights Twitter usage
Mercedes-Benz builds hype for Fashion Week with Foursquare push
Crocodile keyboard becomes top Android app
iPad pub The Daily pops up on PCs
Binpress Is a Marketplace for Buying & Selling Source Code
Foursquare’s Super Bowl Campaign to Test Badge Redemption Codes
Yet another delay hangs over release of Firefox 4
New auto-crowd tech writes better articles than pro writers TRUE
Blogger Gets an Android App
Mac App Store: Developer godsend or Evil Empire?
Google Pushes Web Apps with Chrome 9 Release
Big Biz keep Cloud thoughts private
JQuery Mobile Alpha 3 Released
Twitter Offers Metered Pricing for Firehose of Tweets
Citi relies on multiple mobile channels for customer engagement – Mobile Commerce Daily
PyBrain: The Python Machine Learning Library
Curveship, a new interactive fiction framework
Hands-On With The Daily (Sure Doesn’t Feel Like The Future of The Newspaper)
Facebook Connect Integration Best Practices from the Platform Showcase
Three keys to building a mobile-optimized Web site
“Groupon for Moms”: Plum District Finds a Following
Hex values for Crayola colors
GetGlue Now Seeing 12 Million Checkins and Ratings Per Month
MC Hammer To Release Latest Song Through Flipboard

Everyday at Vexed we round up the industry stories that we find interesting and insightful. These are sent round in an email digest, helping to inform the work we do for our clients and keep us at the forefront of digital. If you have questions about any of these stories or would like to talk to us about projects based on any of them, drop us a line at info@vexeddigital.com.