By wide request, the lovely TNW virtual holiday franchise continues on. After the smash hit Thanksgiving and Christmas guides, we are proud to bring you the Virtual Valentine’s Day Guide.

If this post is to simulate  the holiday, it should be a tract of over-hyped piffle that leads one along only to be left unsatisfied and alone at the end clutching a box of tissue, eating chocolate while drinking flat champagne, all the while bitterly complaining about another human, and their previously hidden, and now obvious, shortcomings.

I hope that this post does, well, in light of all that, disappoint. Shall we?

Read the rest of this post »

According to some excessively well paid bloggers (read: analysts) at Barclays Capital, Apple will probably choose to extend the iPhone exclusivity agreement with AT&T for this coming fourth generation of the popular handset.

The reasoning behind this is that the data plan for the iPad will be through AT&T, which is taken to mean that Apple is continuing its relationship with AT&T. From a behavioral standpoint, this makes sense: when Steve Jobs is done with you, he really gets done.

Another factor in the analyst speculation (and it is very much speculation as only Apple and AT&T know for sure right now) is AT&T’s recent drive to beef up their networks. AT&T’s long-standing inability to provide the data that iPhone users demand is one of the biggest complaints about the iPhone experience.

Read the rest of this post »

With the launch of Google Buzz, Google is sticking social into the full Google empire, pulling social interaction away from the periphery of social  startups.

Instead of going around to different startup companies to get your social fix, Google will sell you that drug in Gmail, no work needed. They will even auto-follow people for you, just to get you hooked.

We have just seen the giant Google step upon the VC-backed social village. What startups are going to take it on the chin? Let’s take a look.

Twitter:

While Google today made huge overtures to the Twitter community, bringing Twitter up at various times, always discussing integration and nice playing. Real story? Google just created their own way to update your status. Twitter will be there for the comfort of its fans, but Google wants you to use Google. This is a serious hit to the future of the Twitter ecosystem.

Read the rest of this post »

In a move sure to please opponents of news site paywalls, The McClatchy Company has come out in favor of keeping an ad-supported online model.

Speaking at the Local Online Advertising Conference, McClatchy Chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt said that he did not support a paywall model for McClatchy’s papers’ online editions. In addition, he predicts that online advertising revenues will continue to grow as newspapers continue to shift towards a digital-centric business model.

Read the rest of this post »

Buzz will begin to roll out in the next 9 – 10 minutes. Full roll out over the next few days. – We are updating, bear with us.

As we expected after yesterday’s breaking news, Google has officially announced a new product called Google Buzz, a real time status and filtering feature for Gmail.

Buzz is how Google wants to bring you the news, and keep the chatter to a minimum.

Google Buzz is a new way to share and discover  inside of Gmail. It is akin to a whole new environment inside of Gmail, a “new world” in Google’s words. Buzz has  a feature called auto-following (sound familiar?), to let you find a new social graph without all of the work behind actually looking for those people. Buzz will follow all of the people that you already email with, building on your current Gmail contact list.

In a move in support of privacy, Buzz will also allow for private and public sharing of updates.

Read the rest of this post »

I’ve been in the social media space now for quite a few years and I meet with at least 5 companies each week who have understood the importance of utilizing social media for their businesses but are still afraid of entering their brands into the new media age.

What are they worried about? Here are the top five concerns that I’ve heard from executives and my response to them:

1) They’re afraid they’ll lose control of their brand and open themselves up to negative feedback.

When you open a business and start marketing your services and exposing your brand to others, people will start talking about your brand. And this is what you wanted right? This is why you exposed them to your brand in the first place. People are going to be talking about your brand no matter what.

The question is:

Read the rest of this post »

Last night at the monthly Tokyo 2.0 event, Google Mobile Product Managers  Riku Inoue & Brad Ellis from Google Japan, gave a presentation entitled Convergence and beyond.

In my opinion the most interesting part was during the Q&A session that followed, I asked if Google had plans to add people or face recognition to Google Goggles? This would be possible since: Picassa has face recognition, Flickr has added people tagging, and of course Facebook has support for tagging people in photos.

Riku and Brad’s response was Google has person recognition working in a Google internal build of Goggles, but the feature was removed in the publicly released version due to privacy concerns.

However they also said, Google hasn’t given up on the feature and are trying to find the right approach to make sure people’s privacy is taken into account. When they do, the People recognition feature will be added to the public version of Goggles.

The 14 min. Google Japan presentation can be watched below in full

Read the rest of this post »

Those of us immersed in social media know it can be a bit dry at times. Digital agency and marketing firm Dotbox stepped up to the plate and spiced things up when Parfums de Coeur approached them with their new fragrance, BODY HEAT. The catch though, was forgoing traditional marketing practices and instead going viral with the campaign.

Sure, there are many companies that’d like to go viral with their campaigns, but it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. Dotbox decided to put a face — and body — behind the brand, and organized an online competition backed by the power of social media to choose just that, dubbed the “Hottest Bod in the World.”

Read the rest of this post »