With its game mechanics and spunky badges, Foursquare could easily be mistaken for a frivolous mobile application with little to no value for businesses. As the startup races to the million member milestone, however, nothing could be further from the truth.
We’ve already written about Foursquare’s savvy relationships with major media and entertainment brands and even talked about how it’s changing the world as we know it. In this post, we’ll delve deeper into the big brands and businesses ..   show all text

I've spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really exciting stuff hasn't come from big corporations with enormous budgets, it's come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were able to make stuff and put it in the public's eye and even sell it without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology.
Danny O'Brien does a ver..   show all text

Think the distinction between Facebook profiles, Pages and Groups is confusing? Add a new wrinkle to the mix: the Facebook Community Page.
The new feature looks a whole lot like the Facebook Pages businesses and brands create, but there’s one key difference: It’s for the hordes of “unofficial” Pages that have been created by users in support of topics or causes (like “Can this pickle get more fans than Nickelback?”).
There’s a big difference in functionality too –- Facebook says that if a ..   show all text

Apple’s iPad (coming soon) seems to be hated by technical types and loved by everyone else. Here are separate reviews for the two audiences.

Twitter lists are a great way to find new groups of people to follow on Twitter, and share your favorite follows with friends. To help you find and follow interesting lists, we’ve created the Mashable Twitter List Directory.
The idea is pretty simple: With help from our partners TLISTS, we’ve organized Twitter lists into 10 categories (plus hundreds of subcategories!), creating a comprehensive directory of people to follow on any topic.
The Mashable Twitter List Directory is a place to fin..   show all text

Press Release: For Immediate Release 1 April 2010
MELBOURNE, Australia. (April 1, 2010) – ProBlogger, the web’s #1 Blog Tips site, today announced that it has been acquired by Google.
This acquisition will be a part of Googles extension of the ‘Blogger’ brand and a precursor to their new professional blogging suite of applications – ProBlogger.
“Blogging continues to grow in popularity, not only for personal use but by entrepreneurs and businesses around the world. Once seen as a ‘fools game’ ..   show all text

If you love Posterous but want to use it with a customized domain name (like say, ChristinaWarren.com), it just got really, really simple. Posterous has just rolled out the ability to register your own domain name for your Posterous blog and get it set up correctly in one step. Posterous has offered support for custom domains for some time now, but it still required the user registering a domain with a registrar and then altering their A records with the registrar to point to Posterous.
L..   show all text

Twitter's homepage is a work-in-progress. Today, we're testing a new design that bubbles up more of the information flowing through Twitter. This builds on a series of changes starting last year when we redesigned the homepage to make search and trending topics more visible and easily accessible to everyone. With that version, we brought the power of search.twitter.com to the homepage and let people explore the value of Twitter without an account. With the new design, we're intentionally ..   show all text

“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” ~Lao Tzu
Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on twitter or identica.
One of the best things I did when I decided to simplify my life was to simplify my workday — first at my day job and later, by quitting my day job, in the work I do now as a writer and entrepreneur.
I’ve eliminated most of the routine, boring, administrative tasks with a f..   show all text

It's a Boy! (The Latest Gray Family Member) A little over two years ago, I shared with you the news that my wife and I were expecting twins, a boy and a girl, to add to our family. At the time, I referred to this as an expansion plan with 2 new hires. On June 20th of 2008, the twins, Matthew and Sarah, arrived and doubled our family overnight, from two to four. They turned a year old in June of last year, and are rapidly approaching their two-year mark. Now, while the family doesn't have ye..   show all text

Don’t spend money on marketing, do offer flexibility and data exporting to eliminate buyers’ regret, make sure to capitalize on and value goodwill, and only charge for things that are hard to do. That’s what some startups say is the key to success in the freemium business. But the biggest reason the five presenters this morning at the Freemium Summit in San Francisco — Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic (see disclosure at the bottom) and MailChimp — are doing well is because they have grea..   show all text

I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.
So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curat..   show all text

If you’re looking to pre-order an iPad today, you’ll notice that shipping dates have been pushed back to April 12th. What’s more, Apple has removed the option to pick up your iPad in-store. It appears Apple simply can’t supply the demand for the first week of iPads, writes 9to5Mac, suggesting high demand for the device.
How many iPads have been sold so far? Some estimates say around half a million – a higher demand than many expected.
If you’ve pre-ordered an iPad for in-store pickup, y..   show all text

Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore have just launched a social and global campaign to raise awareness about child slavery in Haiti with the goal to completely ban the “restavec” system that is promoting it.
In an exclusive interview with Mashable, the couple explained to us exactly what is happening in the earthquake-devastated country, what they hope to accomplish through their foundation, and how people can use social media to spread the word.
Here is what they had to say, as well as ways you..   show all text