Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers 8 Feb 2012 – Singapore [Update] Dave Morin, the CEO of Path has responded in the comments and I’ve pasted it below. As an aside – never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this to blow up like this. I hope we can keep calm and continue to discuss this sensibly. Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help t...  show all text

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Rule one: You can build a business on the foundation of great customer service. Rule two: The only way to do great customer service is to treat different customers differently. The question: Who is your customer? It's not obvious. Zappos is a classic customer service company, and their customer is the person who buys the shoes. Nike, on the other hand, doesn't care very much at all about the people who buy the shoes, or even the retailers. They care about the athletes (often famous) that wear t...  show all text

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Rate the ads from the 2012 Super Bowl, and see which commercial America picked as the favorite commercial

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Tech writer MG Siegler just noted a remarkable fact: Apple's iPhone business alone is now bigger than Microsoft. Not Windows. Not Office. Microsoft. Think about that. The iPhone did not exist five years ago. And now it's bigger than a company that, 15 years ago, was dragged into court and threatened with forcible break-up because it had amassed an unassailable and unthinkably profitable monopoly. The iPhone also appears to be considerably more profitable than Microsoft. In the December quarter,...  show all text

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1. Hands Pinterest via Edris Kim. Click here to view this gallery. If you’re like us, you’re obsessed with Pinterest. You get excited when you find pictures you love and pin them to your online bulletin boards with a sense of pride that they are yours. With so many photos on the two-year-old social scrapbooking site — and countless more added each day — it’s common for some to only get a handful of re-pins. Meanwhile, other images pick up so much popularity that they go virtually viral, get...  show all text

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Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Facebook Seeks to Raise $5 Billion in IPO: “Social networking titan Facebook filed to go public, seeking to raise $5 billion in the largest flotation ever by an Internet company on Wall Street.” Facebook shares are not expected to begin trading for several months.  Experts expect this initial public offe...  show all text

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Tweet Let me guess, you heard about Pinterest. Or more like, you can’t spend 15 minutes online without hearing about it… And now you’re thinking, “should I jump on the wagon too?” or “another social network to keep up with?” and on top of that, everybody is talking about using it for marketing and getting tons of traffic and, you just don’t see it. Alright, I hear you. I’ll give you everything you need to know about Pinterest and a bunch of resources so you can decide if you or your business ...  show all text

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UPDATE, 12:32 p.m.Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, said during a Friday conference call that her understanding of Komen's announcement is that it's a complete reversal of the decision to bar funding to her group. "It's quite clear that Planned Parenthood and our health centers and our doctors are eligible now to work with Komen foundation again," Richards said, before adding that she hasn't actually talked to Komen leaders about the decision. "I certainly take them at their wor...  show all text

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Google has been busy documenting how the 2012 Republican primary affects search results. Newt Gringrich, for instance, experienced a huge surge in searches before winning in South Carolina. Stephen Colbert search traffic jumped ahead of all candidates after he announced his exploratory committee. And before the Iowa caucus, Iowans were searching for Ron Paul more than any other candidate. All of this has been brought to our attention by Google’s new elections dashboard and its politics blog. On...  show all text

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Warning: self-promotional Blog post to follow... I am very excited to announce that the name of my next book is: CTRL ALT DEL - Reboot  Your Business (and Yourself) in a Connected World. The official press release went out this morning via my publisher, Business Plus (an imprint of Grand Central Publishing - Hachette Book Group USA). This is the same publisher as my first book, Six Pixels of Separation, who had the option to pick-up my sophomore business book effort, and I am really (and sincer...  show all text

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Facebook just filed the preliminary prospectus for its long-awaited initial public offering (IPO). As rumored, the company is seeking to raise $5 billion. If Facebook manages to raise this capital, it will be on a shortlist of biggest tech IPOs of all time. Investment bank Morgan Stanley will act as lead underwriter, with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan and others to take secondary positions. Shares are expected to hit the market in May. For longtime followers of the social network, this is an ex...  show all text

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To those of you who lead “the Pinteresting life,” you’ve contributed to a phenomenon that is certainly putting its clicks where the hype is. By that I mean, Pinterest is a two-year old cultural sensation that is borderline causing dependency among its users and the rabid audiences they’re developed. This rapid fire network has pinned itself to a rocket with estimated unique viewership ascending 429% from September to December 2011…and I’m not even sure if the sky’s the limit here. For those who...  show all text

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This year’s fifth annual Crunchies Awards has just finished up at the classy Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and it was a smashing success. We poked fun #humblebraggers, got cussed at by Siri, honored former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, and gave wild monkey trophies to tech’s greatest innovators. If you missed the event or our livestream, check out the full list of nominees and winners below. The world owes a thank you to Jack Dorsey, the “Founder Of The Year” and leader of Twitter, win...  show all text

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Are you wondering what to do with the new YouTube look and feel? Many people either love or hate YouTube’s platform facelift. Whatever your preference, in this article I’m going to outline some of the best ways to optimize the new YouTube layout. Frankly, YouTube’s new design is turning out to be a step in the right direction. YouTube has managed to add a layer of user experience and brand factor, which are only getting better. This evolution will soon prove highly beneficial to YouTube channel...  show all text

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Pinterest, a two-year-old social bookmarking site that lets users collect and share things they like on the web, is driving increasingly significant amounts of traffic to retailers’ websites. The service enables users to create online bulletin boards, or “pinboards,” for popular categories such as home decor, food and wedding inspiration. Members can use Pinterest’s “Pin It” bookmarklet tool and iPhone app to save things they see online and offline, and explore and repin the images their friends  show all text

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Sure, it's easy to grab a first name from a database or glean some info from a profile. But when you pretend to know me, you've already started our relationship with a lie. You've cheapened the tools we use to recognize each other and you've tricked me, at least a little. Direct mail used to take advantage of this technique a lot, and since they measure everything, they knew when it worked. Online, though, we're seeing less disciplined marketers (big and small) continually mess it up. The clues...  show all text

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Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Google+ Allows Nicknames: Over the next week, Google+ will provide “support for alternate names—be they nicknames, birth names, or names in another script—alongside your common name. This name will show up on your Google+ profile and in the hovercards which appear over your name.” To add an alternate n...  show all text

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A lot of digital ink has been spilled about Twitter’s announcement that it can now censor tweets on a country-by-country basis. The move has prompted a growing number of users to organize under the hashtag #TwitterBlackout and pledge to boycott the service on January 28 by refusing to tweet. But these users are misguided — Twitter’s new policy is actually good for activists. For a number of reasons, Twitter’s new policy is a win for freedom of speech advocates. The first thing to keep in mind is  show all text

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Jason Keath is the CEO of Social Fresh, the leading social media education company for marketers. He works with industry leading brands, agencies and vendors to produce social media conferences and online social media training programs. Follow him on Twitter @jasonkeath. Human beings are social by nature, and not surprisingly, we choose to spend much of our talkative time on Facebook. Comscore released data in December 2011 that showed Facebook is virtually synonymous with social media. Worldwi...  show all text

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Content Marketing Not Performing? Troubleshoot SEO Basics. This post is a preview of a new downloadable guide I will be offering for those who pre-order Optimize by March 13, 2012. The full guide will have screenshots, examples and more “SEO Deep Dive” advice. If you want the full, illustrated Content Marketing SEO Troubleshooting Guide, visit OptimizeBook.com to pre-order and subscribe to our mailing list for more details. Content Marketing at it’s core is about planning information that is th...  show all text

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I asked this simple, yet somewhat tricky question about Happiness that has a wide range of perspective — to my awesome friends on social networks. Here are their inspiring/motivating thoughts to the million-dollar question: What is the Key to Happiness?

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You can run, but you can't hide. Facebook's biggest user interface overhaul since the Wall, the Facebook Timeline, is now becoming mandatory for all users. According to the company, over the next few weeks, everyone will get the new Timeline. And here's the important part: when you do, you'll have just seven days to preview what's there now, and hide anything you don't want others to see.

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Come join us for casual drinks at The Ranch- all types are welcome! We are technologists, authors, fashionistas, foodies and more. It's a FREE event with no dumb games, no self-important lecturer, no entry fee pocketed by anyone, just good old fashioned getting to know Austinites over a drink. Just...

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Every 4th Monday of January social media professionals gather around their warm, cozy monitors to toast Starbucks and sing viral video carols — all to

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Editor’s note: Mark Hendrickson is the founder and CEO of Plancast, a social site for planning events, which he has decided to stop working on full-time. In this guest post, Hendrickson takes us through a detailed analysis of why it never took off and what he learned. He is also a former TechCrunch writer. Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than  show all text

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News spread quickly Saturday evening that former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno had died. Except, he hadn’t. Here is an account of how it happened. [View the story "False reports of Joe Paterno's death" on Storify]

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