Twitter has announced a new partnership with major satellite providers to give their subscribers access to Twitter SMS, the original text-based Twitter service. According to a statement released Thursday, the company has partnered with Iridium and Thuraya, the world’s two largest satellite providers, to increase the number of people that can use Twitter SMS worldwide. The company said the new partnership will help guarantee greater global access to the microblogging network. “Now, even if phone...  show all text

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Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high...  show all text

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The new stable release of Google’s web browser Chrome brings several improvements, most importantly faster browsing and more protection from malicious downloads. From now on, when you start typing in Chrome’s address box (or omnibox, as Google calls it), as soon as Chrome autocompletes the URL you’re likely to visit, it will prerender the page, making your overall browsing experience faster. As far as security goes, Chrome now does checks on executable files you’ve downloaded from the net. It m...  show all text

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Facebook revealed its roadmap for social games and mobile apps for the rest of the year at the Inside Social Apps 2012 conference on Wednesday in San Francisco — and it’s good news for app developers. Want to create an app for Facebook’s Open Graph? The mobile space presents a huge opportunity to create cross-platform social games, said Carl Sjogreen, director of product management at Facebook, who spoke to a packed conference center filled with IT insiders about Facebook’s projections for the ...  show all text

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First the news: Yes, the rumors are true. We are indeed buying the assets of ContentNext Media from Guardian News & Media Limited. And no, we are not disclosing the terms of the deal, except that we are buying the entire group of properties — paidContent.org, mocoNews.net, contentSutra and paidContent:UK and that a representative of Guardian News & Media will join our board of directors as an observer. A few weeks ago when Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM, came to the board and suggested that we ...  show all text

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Even if you haven’t ever visited popular visual bookmarking site Pinterest, you might recognize its design elements — which have been popping up everywhere since the startup burst onto the mainstream scene in 2011. The site doesn’t use traditional web building blocks. “It’s almost like a window-shopping mode,” says Khoi Vinh, the former design director for NYTimes.com. “It puts the ball back in the user’s court,” muses Andrew Beck, a web designer at Blue Fountain Media. “It flattens the informa...  show all text

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It’s beautiful, it’s addictive, and now Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment. TechCrunch has attained exclusive data from comScore showing Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. Who’s propelling its rise? 18-34 year old upper  show all text

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In his annual letter and related events, Bill Gates encouraged students, advocates for the poor, and global leaders to keep the dialogue alive about the value of development aid and the 1.4 billion people still living in extreme poverty.

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Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the 200th birthday of writer Charles Dickens. Born on Feb. 7 1812 in Landport, England, Charles John Huffam Dickens grew in tough, working-class conditions. At age 12, after his father was thrown into a debtors’ prison, he was forced to work at a blacking factory. This experience later influenced many of his famous novels, including Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Starting his career as a journalist, Dickens eventually started writing lit...  show all text

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Social media analytics provided to Mashable show which endorsers — and endorsees — won biggest on Super Bowl Sunday. Getting a celebrity to shill products during the game’s valuable advertising time can do wonders to imprint a brand in consumer consciousness. But that plan can also backfire, with the celebrities themselves overshadowing the products they promote. Overall, David Beckham dominated Super Bowl XLVI. More than 85,000 tweets mentioned him over the course of the game, according to Sim...  show all text

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When Reading Rainbow ended its 26-year run in 2009, it left behind decades of preschoolers for whom its theme song will forever surface nostalgia: Take a look, it’s in a book, a reading rainbow. The PBS program was cut because nobody would fund it. But John Grant, who was at the time in charge of content at Reading Rainbow’s home station, told NPR that a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming was also to blame. He said the Bush administration believed in funding programs ...  show all text

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Phone Innovators: Official 2012 Best Buy Game Day Commercial Watch as phone innovation meets phone-buying innovation, at Best Buy. Choose Phone Freedom and get any phone, any carrier, and all of their plans, with lots of unbiased advice. Reserve a $50 gift card at http://www.bestbuy.com/phonefreedom now for your next upgrade. Click here to view this gallery. There are two kinds of Super Bowl fans: those who watch for the football and those who watch for the advertisements. For those who prefer...  show all text

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The band OK Go is known for their imaginative and original videos, and their latest, for Needing/Getting, is no exception. This time the folks from OK Go decided to play the instruments used in the song – with a car. They outfitted a Chevy Sonic with retractable pneumatic arms, and then drove it around with the arms hitting more than 1,000 actual instruments posted on the side of the road in a desert near Los Angeles. What makes the entire project really amazing (and a bit crazy) is the fact th...  show all text

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Samsung has made one thing clear in its “Next Big Thing” Super Bowl spot — it wants to be the anti-Apple. The South Korean electronics maker is marketing it’s 5.3-inch smartphone with stylus as the latest player in the world of connected devices. The ad — as we already new from its teaser released last week — pokes fun at Apple fanboys and fangirls who notoriously camp out in anticipation for iDevice launches. The towns of San Francisco, Calif, Boston, Ma. and Denver, Co., erupt in non-choreogr...  show all text

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So you’ve got a great job that’s waiting to be filled at your company, and you decide you want to tap into the already measured power of social media recruiting. You start to wrestle with the big kahuna, LinkedIn, and you’re also covering niche social media sites for your industry. But you may be ignoring an intensely powerful tool hiding right under your nose — Facebook. The social media mega-site has proven successful for snapping up young professionals, but it can be a great resource for fin...  show all text

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Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

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Super Bowl 2012 is blitzing us like a crazed linebacker, coming up in a matter of hours, and the numbers are stacking up quickly. It’s a weekend of superlatives, with astonishing numbers swirling around those brave warriors on the field. In the Super Bowl, everything is larger than life. Instead of a dozen TV cameras for normal football game broadcasts, NBC rolls out 57 cameras. Instead of betting a couple of bucks on the game, people bet hundreds. And instead of eating a couple of chicken wing...  show all text

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If Internet memes were turned into movies, their promotional posters might resemble the designs London-based Stefan van Zoggel conjured up. “I took the context of the usually short-lived internet memes and virals, and translated that to simple film poster designs,” says van Zoggel on his Meme Movie Posters blog. He has designed 29 meme-inspired posters so far. Below, you’ll find posters about Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” planking, Nyan Cat, Double Rainbow, Keyboard Cat, Shake Weight and a slew of ...  show all text

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The New York Giants official website accidentally announced the winner of Super Bowl XLVI more than 24 hours before Sunday’s big game even started, by the look of images floating around the web. The error was immortalized Saturday in this TwitPic screenshot (above), which Jeff Frias posted to Twitter. No signs of the mistake are left on the team’s site other than a reported link that leads to the image below: The Giants have yet to publicly confirm whether this whammy is real or the handy-work ...  show all text

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This year’s Super Bowl marks a digital first: The game will be the first Super Bowl that you can watch online — legally. NBC, the broadcast partner for this year’s game, is going to stream the game live. NBC has actually been streaming some NFL games online since 2009, though never the Super Bowl. While it opens up the game to a whole new online audience, NBC sees it as a “second screen” experience — a complement to the TV broadcast rather than an alternative. Still, streaming an event as huge ...  show all text

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Stylitics Quick Pitch: Mint.com for your closet. Genius Idea: A new way to organize your wardrobe and track your spending. If you’re like me, your sense of your wardrobe is slightly nebulous. You might be able to recall half the brands and items in it, but you wouldn’t be able to tell...  show all text

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This funny little piece of email just got forwarded to me … From: “****, ***” Date: February 3, 2012 10:11:04 AM PST To: Greg Barto [@ TechCrunch] Subject: NapQuest Hey Greg It is one of our goals to get a “nap room” set-up in every location. Basically, it’s a closed room where we would put a chaise or couch, darken the windows and allow people to nap as the [sic] like. This is high on the priority list for Arianna and your office is one of the few where we don’t yet have it in place. When I vi...  show all text

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Schools are on a short list of organizations that have been notoriously slow to adopt emerging tech. But within the last few years, as social media becomes more integral to students’ lives, educational institutions are finally catching on, and catching up. When it comes to higher ed, there are not only opportunities for digital learning, but digital marketing too. Some schools have taken the reigns on both sides, with mixed results. SEE ALSO: 5 Free Homework Management Tools for the Digital St...  show all text

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จู่ๆช่วงเย็นวันศุกร์ก็เกิดเสียงร่ำลือว่า กระทรวง ict ของไทยทำอะไรกับ simsimi หรือเปล่า ผมเลยคันมือส่งเมล์ไปถามทีมงาน (ซึ่งคนในวงการมือถือก็เมลล์ไปหลายคนมาก) แล้วนี่คือคำตอบจากทีมงานนะครับ “Actually,There was a problem about languages confusion in SimSimi. We solved it today and you can talk with SimSimi in your language when you change device language(apps) or browser language(web) as before. We will update language selection feature in app (or website). If all conditions are good, you can use ...  show all text

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If you live near a Microsoft retail store, you can now pre-order a Nokia Lumia 900 with a $25 down payment, the Verge reports. Unfortunately, even if you do that, you still won’t know how much the device will cost when it finally arrives, probably in March. The Lumia 900 sports a 4.3″ AMOLED ClearBlack display with a 800×480 pixel resolution, an 8-megapixel camera (as well as a 1-megapixel front-facing one for video chat) and LTE/HSPA+ support. With a 1.4 GHz processor, an Adreno 205 GPU and 512  show all text

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The explosive growth of social media over the past four years has drastically changed how the Giants and Patriots market themselves and connect with fans compared to the two teams’ most recent Super Bowl trips. “It’s a whole new world compared to last time,” Nilay Shah, the Giants’ director of digital media, said in an interview. When the Giants and Patriots reached the Super Bowl in 2008, Twitter barely existed, Facebook had less than 100 million users, and Google+ wasn’t even a gleam in Larry...  show all text

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Zynga, aiming to expand its advertising revenue without annoying users, is quietly experimenting with “reward advertising” on CityVille that lets players earn energy by interacting with a sponsor. Sponsors for the program, which rolled out in December, include Coca-Cola, MasterCard and the DVD release of the 20th Century Fox film What’s Your Number?. When players got to a point in CityVille where they needed more energy, some had the option of “interacting” with the advertisers in various ways....  show all text

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One of NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecrafts has captured a video of Moon’s far side for the first time. Earth’s tidal forces have slowed down Moon’s rotation so that it always presents one side to us. The other side, although receiving as much light as the front side, is called the far (or, more poetically, dark) side of the Moon, notably giving the name to one of Pink Floyd’s most successful albums. The far side of Earth’s only natural satellite has been photographed before (by Apollo 16, for example...  show all text

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