AllFacebook reports that it has noticed the new feature popping up on friends’ profiles. Facebook told the blog, “This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person they’ve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links or notes).”

In other words, when you click to subscribe to a user, you’ll get a new Facebook notification in your notifications bar at the top of the site or on the mobile device of your choosing any time that other user posts content. We’re not sure yet if you can subscribe to someone who’s not a friend, which is much more stalker-like, or if notifications include likes and comments (right now, it sounds like they won’t).

We at Mashable are hoping this is an opt-in (or at least an opt-out) feature. If Facebook thinks subscriptions are a useful for the majority of average users, people who might want to get special notifications for family members’ or loved ones’ activities, they’re also potentially damaging if rolled out to jealous “frenemies,” vindictive exes or nosy bosses.

What do you think of the “subscribe” button? Is there anyone in your life you’d subscribe to? What about others subscribing to you — would you like or dislike that feature?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

[img credits: AllFacebook and jvk]

More About: facebook, Subscribe

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Have you ever logged into your Facebook at a public computer, but forgot to log out when you left? What if you left your Facebook account open at home with a snooping brother, sister or spouse? They would have access to sensitive personal information or could wreak havoc by posing as you.

These are the problems that Facebook is attempting to address with the gradual rollout of remote logout. The new feature appears under the “Account Security” section of Account Settings. Account Security displays the most recent activity related to your account, including location, device name, time and device type/browser. This should give you a clue as to whether you left Facebook open at a public computer or just left it running at the office PC.

That’s not all, though. To the right of any active account is a link for remotely logging out of your Facebook account. “In the unlikely case that someone accesses your account without your permission, you can shut down the unauthorized login before resetting your password and taking other steps to secure your account and computer,” the Facebook team explained in blog post published earlier today.

This is a welcome security update from the world’s largest social network. For many, Facebook accounts hold information as sensitive as e-mail (and Gmail has had remote logout since 2008). Anything that provides more control over a user’s security is a win in our books.

Have you ever wanted a remote logout feature for your Facebook account? Let us know in the comments.

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That feature disappeared earlier this morning, as first noted by Peter Kafka. So where did the feature go and why did it disappear?

According to AllThingsD, Facebook was responsible for turning off Apple’s access to its Facebook Connect API. Typically this API is open to just about any application developer. However, with higher-volume apps (think social games and services with lots and lots of users), Facebook apparently requires a special agreement for these kinds of connections.

According to AllThingsD’s sources, an agreement between Apple and Facebook couldn’t be reached, so Facebook cut off access. Apple subsequently removed the feature from its service. Users can still be added by searching by name or via e-mail address. However, it’s important to note that the e-mail address is the one associated with a user’s iTunes account. I have a special iTunes-only address in place, which means that anyone who wants to follow me will have to use my name.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has turned off its data hose to another company. Twitter briefly introduced a Facebook follow feature before Facebook shut off access.

Apple and Facebook have worked together in the past, most notably with the Share via Facebook option first introduced in iTunes 9 and the App Store Facebook Page.

As it stands, if you did manage to use Facebook Connect with iTunes Ping last night, the app itself is still visible in Facebook and you can see which friends are also connected.

We would be surprised if this feature didn’t make a reappearance at some point. That’s a good thing, because Facebook is becoming the de facto social graph for many users and makes the friend discovery process much easier.

We’ve reached out to Facebook and Apple for comment on this particular issue.

More About: apple, facebook, itunes, itunes ping, Ping

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2,200 adults 18 and older in the U.S. and U.K were surveyed on their e-mail habits and attitudes. Most respondents — 72% in the U.S, 68% in the U.K. — indicated that they check e-mail during their time off. A large percentage of Americans also check e-mail in bed (19%), and while on vacation or during days off (50%).

When queried about their outside-the-workplace e-mail activities, nearly half (46%) of the American respondents indicated that they do so to ease their workload. Thirty-seven percent are afraid they’ll miss something important (guilty as charged), and 27% check work e-mail when off the job because it is expected of them. Another 26% keep up with e-mail while on vacation because they simply can’t handle the volume otherwise.

When comparing e-mail behaviors by gender, there are some subtle differences in habits. Men, for instance, are more likely to check e-mail in bed — 21% of men claim do so, while 16% of women admit to the practice. Of course, this bed-checking trend also skews toward 18- to 34-year-olds, who are twice as likely (31%) than 35- to 54-year-olds (15%) to do so.

The real-time nature of the web and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are likely contributing to our always-on attention spans, and hence, contributing to the e-mail overload problem. We can only hope tools such as Rapportive, Gmail Priority Inbox and Xobni’s add-ons will help our cause.

Image courtesy of revrev, Flickr

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Plenty of criticism has already been directed towards the new social network that’s baked into iTunes 10 — Ping — with an emphasis on the user (not to mention rumblings about a fleeting Facebook integration). But there’s one contingent of users no one has really mentioned yet: the bands, many of which are still unable to get in on the action as of this afternoon.

Immediately after hearing about Ping yesterday, I sent out a flurry of e-mails to band friends, urging them to, “Get on this now!” Everyone was stoked, ready to replace their MySpace pages with revenue-making destinations on the brand new iTunes social network. However, when they logged in and tried to figure out how to create said page, they were met with confusion.

I spoke with Eric Victorino, of the band The Limousines, and he said he spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to set up a page to no avail. And this is a band with music already available on iTunes. I also spoke with PR people who represent some other popular bands, and they were unclear as to how to get their bands on the service as well.

Bands usually don’t have direct contact with iTunes — musicians distribute their jams through services like TuneCore which then deal directly with iTunes — so perhaps this degree of separation is the issue. We’ve reached out to Apple to ask how a band goes about getting a page on Ping.

In the meantime, I remain unimpressed with Ping — unable to follow bands that I actually like. Currently, iTunes recommends I follow 14 bands, all heavy hitters like U2, Diddy and Lady Gaga. Yup, no Phoenix, The National or Arcade Fire (all indie bands of the less-than-indie persuasion — I wasn’t expecting Jeffrey Lewis to be up in there yet, anyway). No wonder iTunes was so off with its recommendations — none of the bands I like are currently on the service. I can follow Katy Perry, though:

Still, you can “Like” and “Post” a band’s album via the “Album” page, and check out some concert listings as a result of Live Nation’s recent partnership with Apple. In the example below, Mashable’s Christina Warren can show how much she digs Guster, despite being unable to follow them:

Now that doesn’t mean bands can’t get in on the action by creating a run-of-the-mill user profile. It seems that Ben Folds joined up this a.m. I followed him. As did more than 200 others. Too bad it’s not really Ben Folds. I know because I asked him this morning whether the profile was real and he replied, “Probably not legit.” We’ll probably see more faux artist pages popping up in the future, unless some kind of verification process is introduced. (That’s not really an uncommon issue. Facebook is crawling with fakes. Still, doppelgangers are doubly confusing when dealing with a new service.)

Yesterday, scads of publications — including Mashable — heralded “Ping as a potential “MySpace killer.” That doesn’t seem likely, however, until the service manages to make itself more accessible to the bread and butter of any music discovery service: the musicians.

MySpace is easy to join and is an admittedly simple way to get your music out there. It even recently introduced new profiles for artists, as well as the capacity to feature up to 25 songs on one’s profile. That’s a ton of music, and, come to think of it, something that Ping lacks: the ability to listen to full, streaming songs. Thirty-second clips aren’t going to do much for music discovery when it comes to bands in the “lesser-known” realm. (A musician friend even joked last night that he would have to compress all of his songs into 30-second dance jams if he wanted to get his tunes heard on Ping.)

Yes, Ping emphasizes the music fan’s experience — the experience of sharing music with friends and benefiting from their tastes — but how is one to expand one’s taste when access to less mainstream fare is so limited? Yes, we imagine iTunes will expand the service to more musicians as the days wear on, but we feel that in order to grab the populace at the onset, the experience of following and interacting bands should have been richer at launch.

More About: apple, itunes, music, Ping

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We were enamored of your childlike delight. We reveled in the remixes. But now, Double Rainbow Guy, we are less than amused. What’s the sure-fire way to kill a viral video? Festoon it with dollar signs.

Yup, the above video is a commercial for Windows Live Photo Gallery, and yup, the actor in said commercial is YouTube user Hungrybear9562 (a.k.a Paul Vasquez and the man behind the rainbow). Vasquez burst onto the scene back in July with a tripped-out vid featuring the man himself crying over a lovely pair of rainbows (the video has since amassed more than 13 million views on YouTube). Now, we’re crying over the end of innocence.

Yes, ad companies, it’s smart to hitch your wagon to what’s hot right now (i.e. the memetastic realm), but why not come up with something, well, new? The Double Rainbow guy was sooooo two months ago, guys.

[via Buzzfeed]

More About: double-rainbow, MARKETING, microsoft, money, viral video, Windows, youtube

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Skype 5.0 beta two is already available for download; it includes 10-way video calls, automatic call recovery and a cleaner user interface. The update is also said to improve call quality and includes a number of bug fixes to make the overall experience much smoother.

Of course, the standout feature is 10-way video calling, something that certainly one-ups their own previous offering and makes it suitable for even larger virtual team meetings and mini family reunions. Of course, it also makes Gmail’s video-calling functionality look like the ugly step sister — a proactive move on the part of Skype to combat recent buzz surrounding Gmail Voice Calling.

Still, Skype does caution that 5.0 is beta, and hence, very buggy. It’s also limited to Windows users, and 10-way video calls require all group chatters to be using the same second beta version of the app.

Have you tested out five-way video calls? Are you ready to upgrade to the 10-person variety? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Taking a business from idea to reality involves a good deal of attrition, ingenuity, and compromise. But no matter how much these three factors align in your favor, chances are you won’t get far unless you have some sort of funding.

Traditionally, you could get your hands on some capital by wooing the wealthy to support you, getting rich yourself, or persuading a venture capitalist that your idea has potential. But an increasingly available option is to enter a competition.

The following eight contests can supply some cash for your startup or, even if you don’t win, help you better prepare to seek funding from other sources.

1. MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition

Since 1989, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has hosted independent contests throughout the year that are collectively known as the “MIT$100K” (originally the MIT$10K). In the elevator pitch contest, competitors have 60 seconds to persuade judges of their business’ potential. The top prize is $10,000, which isn’t a bad pay rate for a minute-long performance.

The Executive Summary contest compares teams’ two-page summaries of their projects for a prize of “MIT$100K glory” and judge feedback that is helpful for the third contest: the flagship Business Plan Competition.

In the Business Plan Competition, semi-finalists are selected based on their executive summaries. They’re given mentors and expense accounts with which to prepare a 20-page business report and presentation. Only MIT students or teams that include an MIT student are eligible. The winner takes $100,000 in cash and prizes.

Other colleges like the New York University Stern Business School, Rice University, Duke University, and The University of California at Berkeley run similarly prestigious venture capital contests.

2. TWITCH

TWITCH (Twitter Pitch) is technically an add-on to the MIT$100K, but it’s cool enough to warrant its own place on our list. The contest asks contestants to convey their business ideas in 140 characters or less for a $500 cash prize. Entries are made by tweeting submissions that include the hash tag #100kTwitch, and votes are accumulated by getting others to retweet it.

The first contest took place this year, and the posted standings showed the first place tweet to be:

3. GE’s Ecomagination Challenge

GE teamed up with four venture capital firms to offer a total of $200 million to startups working on innovation in renewable energy, grid efficiency, or energy-efficient homes. Five $50,000 cash prizes will be awarded to winners of the two-round competition. Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired Magazine is the sole member of the judging panel who isn’t a GE executive.

4. Clean Tech Open

A great opportunity designed specifically for clean technology startups, the Clean Tech Open provides training and the chance to win up to $250,000 in investment money and services. Entrants work one-on-one with assigned mentors to write an executive summary, which is then used to select semi-finalists. Semi-finalists pay a fee for a training program that includes business clinics and mock judging. The teams submit full business plans and give a live presentation to determine five regional winners and one national champ.

5. PITCH: Women 2.0 Startup Contest

This contest literally asks teams to mail their pitch on a 7X7 napkin. Each team must have at least one woman and one technologist (defined as an “engineer, scientist, mathematician, biologist, etc.”), and their napkin must be accompanied by a two-minute video pitch. A handful of entrants are selected to present their pitch at the annual PITCH Night in San Francisco. Prizes include meetings with venture capitalists and other startup services.

6. Venture Labs Investment Competition

In 1993, BusinessWeek called the Venture Labs Investment Competition (originally the Moot Corp Competition) “the Super Bowl of World Business Plan Competition.” In 2004, Inc. Magazine called it “the Rose Bowl of business-plan competitions.” Whether that indicates a drop in professionalism or an increase in fun and enthusiasm depends on how well you know sports, but it’s hard to argue that the competition is anything but prestigious. Started in 1984 by two University of Texas MBA students, the Austin-based competition was attended by 40 teams from 12 countries in 2010.

7. Intuit’s Love a Local Business Competition

Once a small business registers or is nominated for the Love a Local Business site, customers and supporters can vote for them between July 1 and September 30. Votes function as raffle tickets: the more votes a company gets, the better its chance of winning a random drawing held at the end of each month (July, August, and September).

The winners of the monthly drawing each win $5,000 and advance to the final round in which a panel of judges selects the business most “loved by its customers, vendors, employees, or local community” to receive a $25,000 grant.

8. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Startup Challenge

Startups that use Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure to run their business can compete to win a global prize of $50,000 in cash or in AWS credits and mentoring support, including a year of AWS Premium Gold Support. Fifteen regional semi-finalists and six overall finalists will also receive prizes.

More Startup Resources from Mashable:

- 6 Ways to Recruit Talent for Startups
- 5 Lessons to Learn from Web Startups
- 40+ Essential Social Business Resource
- 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed
- 20 of the Best Resources to Get Your Startup Off the Ground

Image courtesy of Flickr, wwarby

More About: amazon, amazon web services, Business Lists, Clean Tech Open, Competitions, Contests, Ecomagination, entrepreneur, Entrepreneur contests, funding, GE, intuit, List, Lists, Love a Local Business, MIT$100K, Moot Corp, startup, TWITCH, venture capital, Venture Labs Investment Competition

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Every year, poison control centers get more than one million calls for pill identification. Each one of those calls costs nearly $50. Social software is helping biomedical researchers collaborate on better ways of identifying drugs. “Pillbox is a digital platform for communities to solve challenges related to pharmaceutical identification and reference,” says David Hale, the program manager. The National Library of Medicine’s mission is to gather, curate and distribute the world’s biomedical information, said Hale.

Pillbox is an open government initiative from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration that could transform how pharmaceuticals are labeled in the future. The interactive web application currently allows visitors to rapidly identify unknown solid medications, like tablets or capsules, based upon their shape, color and other markings. Pillbox remains a research and development project, so users should not be making clinical decisions just yet. Right now there are over 1,000 images of prescription drugs in the system, with many more to come in the next few months.

Beyond its usefulness, Pillbox is a public health platform that was created in a unique way — by utilizing open source data. Here are four ways the NIH approached this endeavor using the open and social web.

1. Connecting Open Data to Civic Hackers

Pillbox is a “collection of projects focused on a single goal: improving the health of citizens,” said Hale. That goal could be realized through social gaming mechanics, an area that’s familiar to Foursquare users and FarmVille players. “There’s a Facebook game in development based on the Pillbox API,” he said. After Hale attended Sunlight Labs’ Great American Hackathon last December, a developer took him to a D.C. Ruby users meeting. There, the civic hacking community got excited about using Pilllbox data in a game.

To move the game forward, the developers had to build a search interface in Facebook Markup Language (FBML) for Pillbox. “When they’re done, they’ll give the code for the pill ID interface to NLM,” said Hale. The game isn’t live yet, but Hale hopes to see an iteration online by the end of the year. As of the last build of the game, messages are scrambled between players “to protect privacy.” These messages come with a pill image. Players then have to use the Pillbox ID system to identify pills and unscramble message.

2. Sharing Code on GitHub

“When these developers were building [Pillbox], they found it didn’t have any wrappers for the API,” said Hale. “So they wrote them in Ruby, open sourced them and shared them in a Pillbox space on Github, an online open source code sharing community. Now the wrappers are there for anyone to use.”

Subsequently, a Python developer who was at the meeting working on another project at the Hackathon, took it as a challenge to do it in fewer lines of code, said Hale. He also created Python wrappers for Pillbox and posted them.

“That’s the power of open data, ‘coopetition’ and social media,” said Hale. “Consider the development of hundreds of lines of code, Ruby and Python wrappers, and that interface. How much would it have taken to do this otherwise?”

3. Connecting Washington to Innovation

Hale has used social media extensively to collaborate with clinical staff, patients, and developers, empowering and enabling communities to solve health challenges. In particular, Hale is active on Twitter as @LostOnRoute66, where he tweets about patient safety, biomedical informatics, social media strategy, user experience, music, and food. “Social media was the key channel. It was through Twitter that we maintained these relationships and built new ones.”

One of the challenges for the government research community in Washington can be its distance from the technology communities in Silicon Valley, Boston, Texas and Seattle. “Pillbox was built outside with the community,” says Hale. That’s an important shift from the way traditional projects have been approached. “Due to [conferences like] HealthCamp and to connecting in the Valley, we saw a different way of approaching the issue,” said Hale.

Initially, there were just giant institutions called Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacies taking pictures of the pills, said Hale. “We realized it wasn’t just the images — it was the data behind them, and access to that data. When I talked with the community in the Valley, I realized there was more that was possible. We’re not just putting up pictures of pills, we’re putting up a platform, and thereby changing the ways that people work with government. It’s the information that’s important, not the website. It’s about understanding the power of adding an open API to your data.”

Additionally, an increasing number of government agencies and civil service workers are using SlideShare to disseminate presentations. Hale is no exception. His presentation on Pillbox from January 2010 is embedded above.

4. Call for Participation Using the Federal Register 2.0

This summer, a team of developers and designers relaunched the FederalRegister.gov, the online presence for the legal newspaper of United States. The Federal Register 2.0 is one of the better recent examples of open government, as it makes the often arcane business of government more transparent and understandable to citizens. Hale says that the NIH will be posting a “Call for Participation” where they ask pharmaceutical companies to send them samples of their tablets and capsules.

If the public-private relationship bears fruit, they’ll take high quality pictures based upon Pillbox’s process, send the images back to the pharmaceutical companies and, if approved, put them into Pillbox. Those images could then be sent to the FDA, where they coud get included on a label.

“That would enable images of drugs based upon a single body of standards, which could then enable identification through smartphones,” said Hale. “The secret sauce isn’t the images when this is done but the background processing. We’re creating tools and services which make open data available to everyone, accessible, and in the public domain.”

More Tech Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Open Data Apps That Are Improving Our Cities
- 5 Ways Government Works Better With Social Media
- How the U.S. Engages the World with Social Media
- How Social Media Can Effect Real Social and Governmental Change
- 6 Ways Law Enforcement Uses Social Media to Fight Crime

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Anykeen

More About: david hale, federal register, github, hackathon, national institutes of health, national library of medicine, nih, NLM, open data, pillbox, Python, Ruby on Rails, slideshare, sunlight labs

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Now, on its second birthday, Google has released a stable build of Chrome version 6. Heralding itself as “The Modern Browser,” Chrome 6 does indeed boast a number of improvements, but as with previous updates, the focus remains on speed and simplicity.

Like its previous release this summer, the new version has Adobe Flash built in. The important thing here, however, is its handling of HTML5, which remains topnotch.

With the increasing prevalence of HTML5, it’s hard to imagine a world where Chrome’s browser share does not continue to grow.

More About: adobe, adobe flash, chrome, chrome 6, Firefox, Google, HTML5, internet explorer, opera, webkit

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Banksimple’s mission is to reinvent the way consumers bank, both online and off. In 2011, the startup will offer bankers an online-only banking solution designed to eliminate traditional service fees, provide stellar customer service, offer predictive money management and integrate social media into the system.

The funds will allow Banksimple to forge ahead with crucial banking partnerships that will form the financial backbone of the platform. The money will also help the company finance its initial test run of the service with friends and family before the end of the year.

“To get customer service right for banking, we need to build a technology company,” said CEO Joshua Reich in an interview with Mashable.

Banksimple had previously raised $190,000 from angel investors in a seed round. To date, the startup has raised nearly $3.1 million — money enough to last them through the end of 2011, according to Reich.

Image courtesy of Daniel Y. Go, Flickr

More About: banksimple, funding, series a

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With the new app, Android users can speak a simple “check in to [insert place name]” command after tapping the home screen button. The command will prompt Vlingo to automatically pull up the location in question, and other nearby venues, on Foursquare, providing users with a fast alternative to touch-based Foursquare checkins.

Vlingo’s voice-activated Foursquare integration not only includes support for checkins, but also lets users post voice shouts and ask Vlingo, “Where are my friends?,” or “Who’s nearby?” to pull up a list of Foursquare friends who have checked in recently.

Vlingo for Android also supports voice-activated, speech-to-text status updates for Facebook and Twitter.

Unfortunately for those of us with iPhone and BlackBerry devices, our Android-toting friends have the advantage here, but hopefully not for long. Vlingo promises voice checkins for these devices in future releases.

More About: andriod, checkins, foursquare, vlingo

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We would love for you to join us, so we’re giving away passes to BlogWorld. To enter, answer the following question — “What is the future of blogging?” — in the comments below. Readers with the best answers will win one of five “full access” tickets to BlogWorld, which includes MashBash. Winners are invited to attend this industry celebration where the online world comes together to meet, relax and make important business networking connections.

Date: Friday, October 15
Time: 8:00 p.m.-10 p.m.
Location:Haze at Aria. 3730 Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, NV.
Tickets: Must have BlogWorld Badge to enter.

How To Win Tickets

• Simply click the “Like” button on our Facebook Page (below).
• Respond to the question: “What is the future of blogging?” by noon ET on Monday, September 6, in the comments section of this post.

Please use your real identity so that we may contact you via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook to let you know that you’ve won and how to redeem your prize.

About the Blog World Expo

BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas on October 15-16: “Join us at the World’s Largest New Media event and learn about Content Creation, Distribution and Monetization strategies, step-by-step techniques and bleeding-edge tools from the most successful Bloggers, Podcasters, Social Media Pro’s, Internet TV and Radio Content Generators and New Media Marketing Pro’s! From the premier educational sessions at the Social Media Business Summit and BlogWorld Conference, to the resource-rich New Media Expo, to Amazing Networking events…it’s One economical trip, One weekend, One Big Show you can’t afford to miss!”

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With another long hot American summer coming to a close, many students are scrambling to get back into “learning mode” before school starts. One of the simplest ways to ease that transition is with podcasts. Whether your passion is American History or Algebra, there’s probably an educational podcast out there for you.

While these programs probably won’t mirror your lesson plan, they will explore topics covered in class. Below is a sampling of some of the exceptional podcasts that both teach and entertain. Best of all – they’re free. Read on for your “2010 Downloading Curriculum.”

Science

Radiolab investigates some of world’s most intriguing scientific questions in a unique conversational format. Recent episodes have examined the importance of words in human development and time. First time listeners will probably notice that the show also just sounds different.

Before becoming a radio producer, Jab Abumrad, one of Radiolab’s creators, was as an experimental musician. Abumrad’s passion for ProTools is apparent in the show’s textured soundscape, which is layered with a variety of sound effects and quick edits. Perhaps the show’s only downside is its frequency. There are only a handful of episodes every season because one Radiolab episode requires months to produce.

Outlet: WNYC, New York City’s Public Radio Station
Time: An Hour
Frequency: 5-6 every season

Additional Listening: The Naked Scientists Podcast

History

In Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, Carlin, a veteran journalist turned podcaster, dissects the textbook version of events. In shows that often run over an hour, the host passionately retells some of history’s best stories.

Hardcore History has become one of the most downloaded podcasts on iTunes, and Carlin’s widespread appeal can also be attributed to his insight. One podcast asked, “Could widespread child abuse in earlier eras explain some of history’s brutality?” Another show was based off the question, “Does the toughness of peoples play any role in history?” Don’t let the name fool you; all material is appropriate for younger listeners.

Outlet: Dan Carlin
Time: 1 – 1 1/2 hours
Frequency: 5-6 every year

Additional Listening: Stuff You Missed in History Class

Economics

Planet Money is NPR’s podcast on global economics and business. Initially created by veteran public radio reporters Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson to explain the recent financial crisis, the show quickly became one of the most popular and praised podcasts available.

Planet Money’s success lies in how it tackles complex subjects with great storytelling. A financial instrument like a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) may sound impossibly boring, but Planet Money routinely makes these types of things the heart of a thrilling narrative. The team continues to explore the financial collapse, but they’ve expanded their scope to include all aspects of the global economy.

Outlet: NPR
Time: 15-30 minutes
Frequency: Twice a week

Additional Listening: Freakanomics Radio

Disclosure: The author interned at NPR.

English

For those of us who couldn’t make it through Wuthering Heights, Cliff Notes Cramcast would have been a lifesaver. This free podcast reviews some of the stuff you need to know for the big test and does it in three to four minutes. Of course, these podcasts can’t cover every detail. To do that, you would — you know — need to read the book.

Outlet: Cliff Notes
Time: 15-30 minutes
Frequency: Twice a week

Additional Listening: Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips

Foreign Language

The Internet is full of podcasts that cater to students learning foreign languages. For those interested in the major European languages, Radio Lingua is a good bet. Another reliable hub is Open University, which in addition to the European languages also has a set of Mandarin podcasts. These outlets are mainly for beginners or students who need a quick review. Both are rated highly on iTunes by users.

Outlets: Radio Lingua and Open University
Time: 15-30 minutes
Frequency: Lesson plan

Additional Listening: Other reliable podcasts include Discover Spanish and Learn French.

Math

For those of us who struggle to calculate a 15% tip, The Math Dude’s podcast is a must-listen. Every week, affable nerd Jason Marshall explains basic concepts like how to calculate the area of an object or how to add faster. When Marshall isn’t podcasting, he researches “infrared light emitted by starburst galaxies and quasars” at Caltech, which just means his left-brain knows what’s up.

Outlet: Quick and Dirty Tips
Time: About 7 minutes
Frequency: Weekly

Additional Listening: Mathgrad.

Current Events

Every Sunday, comedians Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver recap the week’s events in The Bugle, a satirical podcast that is easily one of the funniest listens on the Internet. Think an audio version of The Daily Show, where Oliver is also a regular. The Bugle’s focus tends to be on the biggest international news, but the duo’s separate locations – Zaltzman in London and Oliver in New York City – ensure a focus on the English-speaking world’s antics. Although the pair has a leftward slant, there are no sacred cows. The Bugle even takes aim at itself in its tagline: “An audio newspaper for a visual world.”

Outlet: The Times (UK)
Time: 30 minutes
Frequency: Weekly

Additional Listening: NPR News, BBC World Service

More Educational Resources from Mashable:

- 10 iPhone Apps to Get You Back to School
- Why Online Education Needs to Get Social
- 5 Innovative Tech Camps for Kids and Teens
- 5 Organizations Helping Women Get Ahead in Tech
- 5 Fun Ways to Help Your Kids Learn Math Online

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock

More About: back to school, cliff notes cramcast, current events, dan carlin, economics, education, english, foreign language, history, itunes, math, planet money, podcast, podcasts, radio lingua, radiolab, Science, the bugle, the math dude

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In a statement, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said, “After nearly a decade-long partnership in search, we’re looking forward to expanding our global relationship to mobile search and YouTube. All aspects of our partnership will be improved by this deal.”

The extension of the deal wasn’t a given by any means; the $1 billion investment Google made in AOL back in 2005 proved to be disastrous financially. Further, Microsoft has been aggressively making deals to grow marketshare for Bing, most notably with Yahoo, which now sees Bing powering Yahoo search and its related advertising.

With the renewed AOL deal, Google locks up about 2.3% of the search market according to the most recent numbers from comScore. Google currently has 65.8% of the market, while Microsoft has 27.1% between Bing and Yahoo.

Beyond web search, today’s deal also broadens Google’s reach on mobile and gets additional premium content onto YouTube –- both of which are currently high priorities for the company, as CEO Eric Schmidt noted in his statement on the deal. “It’s particularly exciting to see our relationship expand into video and mobile. These areas are now at the heart of users’ online experiences and at the core of both of our businesses,” he said.

More About: aol, Google, Search

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Infographics at their best are more than just pictures — they can provide new understandings, succinct summaries, or just plain old fun.

In that respect, reading newspaper archives isn’t the only way to get a deeper understanding of current events. Infographics can help us get a better grasp on what’s going on.

Check out these 10 visualizations to learn more about the news with a quick look.

1. Google’s Appetite for Acquisition

Last month alone, Google acquired social-search service Angstro, visual shopping search engine like.com, and social currency company Jambool. Google has been on an acquisition binge for some time, and it’s getting tricky to keep track of its appetite.

This graphic shows a timeline of Google’s activity in three categories: “Building Revenue Streams,” “Cutting Competition,” or “A Little of Both.”

2. Gay Marriage Chronology

The campaign for gay marriage has passed a multitude of milestones over the last decade. Unfortunately for those trying to keep track of them, the victories and setbacks vary drastically by state. Decisions are reversed and in some cases overturned by higher courts, which makes progress hard to track.

This map from the LA Times shows the status of gay marriage in each state by month. Click on a state for its most recent ruling or watch the country change from being legally similar in its treatment of same-sex couples in 2000 to sharply divided in 2010.

3. IED Attacks from Wikileaks’ Afghanistan War Logs

The frequency and fatality of IEDs (homemade bombs) in Afghanistan was highlighted when WikiLeaks published more than 90,000 secret documents about the Afghan war. Anti-war activists published this illustrative video that includes all of the incidents reported in these leaked documents.

4. Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

On April 20, an explosion on a BP drilling rig started what has become the largest accidental oil spill in history. Despite numerous strategies that were deployed to plug the leak, it wasn’t capped until July 15.

This video graphic by New Orleans online newspaper NOLA wraps timeline, graphic, and cumulative damage data into one easy-to-digest piece of media.

5. CIA World Factbook Dashboard

The CIA World Factbook has always been a great resource for putting news stories into the context of their geographic location. But now it’s also easy to get the information at a glance.

The World Factbook Dashboard allows you to color code the countries of the world by population, population growth, infant mortality, agricultural GDP, industry GDP, services GDP, total GDP, GDP/inhabitant, or inflation. Clicking on a country zooms in for more information.

6. Geography of a Recession

This map from The New York Times illustrates not only which areas suffered the highest unemployment rate after the recession, but also offers the option to filter data by metropolitan areas, areas with housing bubbles, rural areas, and manufacturing centers.

7. Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional Violence Map

The Wall Street Journal updates this map constantly with violent conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to learn about the day-to-day details of the war or understand its scope, there’s no better visual resource.

8. What Does the Health Care Bill Mean to Me?

Even if you read through every health care bill article, it could be hard to exactly pick out what the law would change about your insurance coverage and taxes. The Washington Post made it easy by providing this nifty tool. Input whether you have insurance coverage, your family size, your income, and your marital status, and it will tell you how health care reform will impact your life.

For the broader picture on healthcare reform, see this subway-style map from GOOD Magazine.

9. Obama’s $787 Billion Economic Stimulus Plan

The government is still busy spending much of the $787 billion it allotted for the economic stimulus in February of last year. This infographic effectively illustrates how that huge chunk of change is being distributed.

10. American Casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Beyond

This chilling interactive graphic from USA Today simply illustrates the deaths in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Information seekers can search deaths by personal factors like name, age, gender, race, or home town as well as by military service details, date, cause, or place.

CNN has a more elaborate version here.

More Graphics Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Fab Twitter Follower Visualization Tools
- 10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics
- 5 Amazing Infographics for the Health Conscious
- 10 Essential Free E-Books for Web Designers
- 12 Beginner Tutorials for Getting Started With Photoshop

More About: afghanistan, bp, current events, gay rights, graphics, healthcare reform, infographics, iraq, News, oil-spill, stimulus, visualizations, wikileaks

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Think what you will about the ultra-widescreen, 21:9 format Philips is pushing, but you can’t deny that its cinema-proportioned Full HD LCD TV is gorgeous. Now, Philips plans to push it even further, with a 58-inch, 3D version of the device.

The device, called Philips 3D Cinema 21:9 Platinum, sports a direct lit LED screen with a 2560×1080 resolution, 400Hz picture processing, and Philips’s Ambilight technology, which illuminates the area behind the TV in order to reduce eye fatigue and produce an immersive viewing experience.

And if you think you’ll never use all that horizontal screen estate due to the lack of titles available in 21:9 format, you can watch regular TV programming on one side while browsing Philips’s Net TV on the other.

The price tag, of course, is too high for most consumers. At around €4000 ($5,100), there are plenty of high-end TV sets to be found on the market, but this TV is truly unique. For those who want to enjoy their movies as they were meant to be seen on the big screen, and in three dimensions, there are currently no better options out there.

The Philips 3D Cinema 21:9 Platinum is slated to launch in the UK later this month. No date has been set for a U.S. release.

More About: 21:9, 3D, aspect ratio, full HD, LCD, Philips, tv

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iTunes 10 and Ping Are Now Live

Apple’s latest version of iTunes and it’s new music-centric social network, Ping, went live late Wednesday evening, some eight hours after the product was announced at the company’s press conference in San Francisco. Mashable’s Christina Warren contends that Ping has a long way to go if it’s going to become a better alternative to MySpace.

Samsung Unveils Galaxy Tab

Samsung has revealed its long-awaited tablet, the Galaxy Tab, at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin.

The tablet sports a 7-inch TFT-LCD display with 1024×600-pixel resolution, Android 2.2 support, a Cortex A8 1 GHz processor, 512 of RAM and 16/32 GB of internal memory with upgrade options. It also comes with a 3-megapixel camera with autofocus and LED Flash, plus a second 1.3-megapixel camera for video chats, as well as Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. The battery, Samsung claims, can last up to seven hours of movie playback.

Samsung, it appears, has created a real competitor for Apple’s iPad, which lacks the Galaxy Tab’s cameras and support for popular multimedia formats such as Flash.

Samsung has partnered with Vodafone for the launch, which is scheduled for October in Vodaphone’s European markets, and later this year in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Twitter Releases Official iPad App

Twitter has released its official iPad app, available now in Apple’s App Store [iTunes link] for free. The app allows for seamless navigation between tweets, photos, web pages, videos and other content, enabling users to load videos while they’re browsing their timelines, for instance, as well as view them in-line with other content and expand them to full-screen size.

Further News

• Starbucks is rolling out its Starbucks Card Mobile App for BlackBerry today, enabling users to manage their payment and rewards cards, and even pay for their purchases at 16 stores in Seattle and the Silicon Valley region, as well as 1,000 Target stores nationwide.
• Google will remain AOL’s exclusive search partner through 2015, both companies announced this morning. The deal has been expanded to include mobile search and to bring AOL’s content to YouTube [via PaidContent].
• Competitors Boxee, Rdio and Roku have all issued responses to Apple’s latest TV and music offerings.
• Microsoft announced Wednesday that it has completed the development of its forthcoming Windows Phone 7. The mobile OS has reached the release to manufacturing (RTM) stage.

Disclosure: Samsung, BlackBerry and Microsoft are Mashable sponsors.

This series is brought to you by HTC EVO 4G, America’s first 4G phone. Only from Sprint. The “First to Know” series keeps you in the know on what’s happening now in the world of social media and technology.

More About: apple, first to know series, galaxy tab, ipad, ipad app, itunes 10, Ping, samsung, Tablet, twitter

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The users in most countries around the world are used to products and features not being available to them – receiving money through PayPal or buying music through iTunes doesn’t work for me, for example – but Ping is different. It’s supposed to be a social network; its competitors, Last.FM and MySpace, are available in most countries in the world. Users expect it to just work, but in my version of iTunes, Ping simply doesn’t exist.

Here’s a thread from Apple’s support forums, in which users from all around the world complain that they can’t find Ping. After Apple’s big announcement, most of them don’t even consider the possibility that this great new social network is not available in their country: they think they’re doing something wrong. But Apple hasn’t said a word about availability in other countries, so it might be a long wait for all these users.

From Apple’s point of view, it’s understandable it chose to tie Ping closely to the music store. One feature Steve Jobs had highlighted is buying a song directly from a status update; something you obviously cannot do if you don’t have access to the store. But the social networking part of Ping will suffer for it.

For an example of how being available only in a small number of countries can hurt Ping, consider one of its most important features: concert listings. This is where Last.FM shines; go to any place in the world, and you’ll be able to see which concerts are available, when, at what clubs and who’s attending. But if residents of a certain country cannot access Ping, then the concert listings for that particular country will be a sad and empty sight.

Facebook, which hasn’t really focused on music so far, is also available in most countries in the world; it’s the de facto standard for social networking, and it has half a billion active users. Yes, Ping is directly tied to music, but users aren’t used to network from iTunes. Should Facebook introduce some features similar to those Ping has, it would automatically have a huge advantage simply because it would work for all users, not just the select few. If Apple has any serious aspirations to grow Ping into a global social networking powerhouse, it should strongly consider making it available everywhere.

We’ve contacted Apple to find out when (and if) Ping might become available in countries other than the initial 23, and are still awaiting their response.

More About: apple, itunes, Ping

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Samsung has finally spilled the details about its long-awaited tablet computer, the Galaxy Tab, during a press conference at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin.

Samsung calls its tablet a “smart media device,” and Galaxy Tab definitely has the specifications to back it up: Android 2.2 support, a Cortex A8 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM and 16/32 GB of internal memory with the possibility of upgrading through microSD memory cards.

Furthermore, there’s a 7-inch TFT-LCD display with 1024×600 pixel resolution, a 3-megapixel camera with autofocus and LED Flash plus an additional front 1.3-megapixel camera for video chats (that’s got to hurt iPad owners at least a little bit) as well as Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. The dimensions of the device are 190.09 x 120.45 x 11.98mm, with 380 grams of weight, and the battery should last through seven hours of movie playback.

In other words, the iPad got a worthy competitor, not only because of the capable hardware the Tab is sporting, but also because it has the latest and greatest version of Android. Although it’s smaller than the iPad, whose screen measures 9.7 inches, Galaxy Tab does a lot of things the iPad cannot do: It has two cameras, and it supports Flash and a wide variety of multimedia formats, including DivX, XviD, MPEG4, H.263 and H.264.

Samsung has partnered with Vodafone for the launch, and the Galaxy Tab will start selling in October in the majority of Vodafone’s European markets and later this year in the U.S and other markets.

Disclosure: Samsung is a Mashable sponsor.

More About: android, samsung, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Tablet

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Because Apple is entering some new market segments (or, in the case of Ping, some new markets, period) Apple is now a direct competitor to a number of other companies already in the social music and streaming content space.

Boxee, Rdio and Roku have all issued statements in response to Apple’s latest moves and what, if anything, it means for the future of those startups.

Apple is describing Ping as a social network for music. It takes a very Facebook and Twitter approach to following friends and artists and is designed to make discovering and sharing new music super simple.

Rdio, a startup created by the founders of Skype, also lists music discovery as one of its core strengths and missions. Of course, unlike iTunes, Rdio is a subscription service that allows users to enjoy on-demand streaming music for $4.99 or $9.99 a month.

This is the statement Rdio sent us in response to Apple’s latest social music plans:

“Today’s announcement from Apple completely validates Rdio’s social approach to discovering music through people,” said Carter Adamson, COO, Rdio. “But in our view, sharing a short clip doesn’t amount to sharing music and people are still restricted by Apple’s pay-per-tune platform.”

Rdio also notes that it has apps for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.

Roku and Boxee Respond

When the first Apple TV was introduced back in January 2007, the market for connected video devices essentially started and ended with TiVo (at least on the commercial level). Almost four years later, the landscape is very different.

Steve Jobs highlighted some of the reasons Apple thought the Apple TV didn’t really take off and many of the changes to the new Apple TV are designed to address those issues. Some of the changes, including a lower price, a focus on streaming, rather than storing content, and subscription access to Netflix, are familiar to fans of the connected device space.

Roku, a company that introduced the first Netflix Watch Instantly set-top box back in 2008, shares many of the same features and is also similarly priced to the new Apple TV.

Roku provided us with this statement:

“Roku created the category for streaming players over two years ago with the original Netflix player for $99. Since then the category has continued to grow rapidly with large hardware entrants like Xbox, PS3, Wii, blu-ray players, and now AppleTV adding streaming capabilities. … During this time Roku sales have continued to accelerate as the overall streaming market grows, and customers enjoy our simple interface, low cost and large selection of services. Our customers are using the box more and more. Two years ago the average Roku customer used our product 11 hours a month, but now it’s 43 hours a month.

Beyond Netflix we have introduced over 50 additional content partners on our open platform that offer customers access to over 100,000 movies and TV shows, live sports, music, photo and video sharing, and more — all while continuing to reduce the cost of our products. Today, a customer can get a Roku player for as low as $59.99 and an HD-capable model for as low as $69.99, plus a 1080p model for $99.99. By selling direct to customers (on roku.com) we can offer more while maintaining lower prices.

Roku is completely confident that our strategy of offering more features and lower cost than competitors continues to be the right plan.”

The core difference, as we see it, between what Roku offers and what Apple TV offers is that Roku is a streaming player that connects to bigger content networks. You can browse videos from Vimeo and blip.tv, you can watch UFC Pay-per-view content and you can watch premium titles from Netflix or Amazon VOD.

However, Roku doesn’t have a connection to a user’s networked content on the Mac, PC or mobile device. Roku has more content options for users but offers less content to a user’s personal local library.

For Boxee, the situation is a bit more complex. Boxee started as software that could be run on the Mac or Apple TV. Many original Apple TV owners (myself included) only bought the Apple TV because of Boxee. Boxee added the third-party content options that the original Apple TV lacked.

Meanwhile, the Boxee Box promised to be a streaming media device to both your local network and to sources like Netflix, Crackle.com MUBI.

On the Boxee Blog, founder Avner Ronen had this to say:

“Most of us at Boxee are Apple fanboys. If it is silver and it has the Apple logo on it, we pre-order it. If there’s a line around the block, chances are we’re in it. And everything stops at Boxee HQ while we unbox the latest gadget to come out of Cupertino. We were incredibly excited when a couple of developers in the community made it possible to run Boxee on Apple TV (as hundreds of thousands of users have done) and the Boxee Remote for iPhone remains one of the most popular interfaces people use to interact with Boxee. Plenty has happened since then. …
We all watched the Apple announcement. We walked away feeling strongly confident about the space it left for Boxee to compete. We have a different view of what users want in their living rooms. We are taking different paths to get there. The Boxee Box is going to be $100 more expensive than the Apple TV, but will give you the freedom to watch what you want.”

The new Apple TV features, especially the addition of AirPlay, really go to the heart of what Boxee offers: A simple way to access local and online content directly from the TV.

While lacking a direct link to the iTunes ecosystem, Boxee does have a layer of extensibility that the new Apple TV still doesn’t really seem to embrace.

Make No Mistake, Apple IS Competition

The position that all three companies are taking is that Apple’s entry into their respective fields reaffirms their business plans. The secondary position is that the value proposition offered by each service is enough to differentiate them from Apple’s offerings.

This is true and false at the same time. While existing music networks and connected devices can surely still compete against Apple, make no mistake, this is a competition.

Apple is gunning not just for Boxee and Roku, but for Google TV, TiVo Premiere and video game consoles that tout the ability to stream content.

Mashable’s Ben Parr has already opined on the potential impact Ping will have on MySpace and other music networks like Last.fm and MOG should also be aware of the new competition.

Apple still has to sell itself to consumers in the living room, and the new Apple TV just makes that sales pitch more attractive. Where Apple doesn’t have to sell itself is with music. iTunes is the largest music store in the world and the go-to place for finding and buying music. Adding in social components to that is going to upset other sharing and discovery services.

This doesn’t mean that competing against Apple is going to be impossible, but music networks and connected device makers do need continue to keep an eye on Cupertino. Apple’s here to play.

What impact do you think Apple TV and Ping will have on its competitors? Let us know!

More About: apple, Apple TV, boxee, connected devices, itunes 10, Ping, rdio, roku

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As CEO Steve Jobs boasted at the company’s San Francisco event yesterday that Apple is activating 230,000 iOS devices per day, he also took the opportunity to accuse competitors of boosting their device activation numbers.

“We think some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers,” said Jobs, likely referring to the recent figures from Google, whose CEO, Eric Schmidt, claimed that 200,000 Android activations were made daily in August.

Google quickly responded to Jobs’s allegations. A Goole spokesperson told Fortune, “The Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market since we only include devices that have Google services.”

So there you have it: According to Google, more than 200,000 Android device activations may be occurring every day. Who do you trust: Apple or Google?

More About: android, apple, Google, iOS, steve jobs

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Name: Kembrel

Quick Pitch: A private store for students that can be accessed entirely through Facebook, from browsing to checkout.

Genius Idea: Launched by two students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school, Kembrel is a private shopping community for just for college students. The site has partnered with a few well-known lifestyle brands to offer deep discounts on goods during a limited window of time.

To give you an idea of the specifics, most of these discounts range from 40% to 75% off the retail price of the item in question, and sales generally start at 9 p.m. EST and last for just five days.

The company’s goal is to help students discover new brands and obtain highly coveted products while saving a lot of money, possibly avoiding a starving student scenario or two. Of course, such a store also gives brands optimal exposure to an important demographic and helps them build long-term relationships with their customers through a combination of social e-commerce and community management.

Kembrel isn’t the first company to start using Facebook as an e-commerce platform. In fact, we wrote recently about Delta selling tickets via Facebook. Right now, Kembrel can be accessed through the main website or via its Facebook store. It’s also not the first students-only app (we covered one of those a few days ago) or the first limited-window-of-time sales app (Groupon, anyone?). Still, it’s a clever mashup of all these ideas, and it’s offering some killer deals.

We can imagine many a college student getting excited about an exclusive, half-off American Apparel sale or a back-to-school special on iPhone accessories. And we can imagine investors getting excited about a good-looking app built on top of a far-reaching platform that also has out-of-the-box revenue potential.

What do you think of Kembrel so far?

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: ecommerce, facebook, kembrel, Store

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This is not your father’s world wide web. Thanks to soaring smartphone sales, new tablet devices like the iPad, and the burgeoning trend of connected devices, individuals are accessing and experiencing the web in a very different way than they were even five years ago.

The desktop browsing experience is also undergoing radical change, thanks to the evolution of JavaScript frameworks and the push for standards successors such as CSS3 and HTML5. It’s an exciting time to be developing or designing for the web.

Even for the seasoned developer, it can be difficult to know where to start if you want to embrace the new technologies of HTML5 and support new devices like the iPhone, Android-based smartphones or the iPad without neglecting users on older browsers. Fortunately, the collaborative nature of the web means that lots of developers and designers are working out best practices and solutions toward these problems together.

One of the most interesting new projects aimed at giving designers and developers a starting template for integrating HTML5 and other modern features into their sites is HTML5 Boilerplate.

Created by Paul Irish and Divya Manian, HTML5 Boilerplate is the product of more than two and a half years in iterative development, and it’s chock-full of best practices and techniques for creating cross-browser compatible websites that will work with legacy browsers (which means IE 6) while also being HTML5-ready.

To be clear, HTML5 Boilerplate is not a framework. It’s a template that can be modified and used for your own projects. You can use as much or as little as you want and make your own additions and subtractions. Still, it’s one of the most robust and well-commented starting points we’ve seen for setting up a solid HTML5 base for your projects.

One of the best things about HTML5 Boilerplate is that the source is openly available under a public domain license; you can use it and integrate it into your own projects in any way you want.

As a result, a ton of awesome projects have already used HTML5 Boilerplate alongside other techniques. Just check out this page on GitHub to see a sampling of some of the HTML5 Boilerplate-infused spin-offs.

Check out these additional tools, projects and resources to get the most out of HTML5 Boilerplate:

• The Source Itself – Available on GitHub for your watching/forking/commenting pleasure, this is the source for HTML5 Boilerplate. You can keep up with the latest changes, ask questions and make suggestions. You can also check out the various forks from around the community.
• Paul Irish’s Official HTML5 Boilerplate Screencast – Nettuts+ published this awesome 40-minute screencast that Paul Irish created to walk you through HTML5 Boilerplate. It shows off all the features and offers some awesome tips. Definitely check this out.
• Add 960 Grid System to Boilerplate – One of our favorite CSS frameworks is Nathan Smith’s 960.gs. It’s easy to add 960.gs to Boilerplate to create the best of both worlds.
• Use it with WordPress – Sam Sherlock created a really great WordPress theme that combines HTML5 Boilerplate with the Thematic WordPress theme framework. He has also infused many elements from the new default WordPress 3.0 theme TwentyTen.
• Some Tips To Keep in Mind – This collection of tips from Brian Blakely are good points of reference.

We’re really excited to see how HTML5 Boilerplate evolves and how other projects choose to integrate the template. It’s a terrific starting point for many designers and developers who just don’t have the time to pull all the little bits and information together when getting started with HTML5.

Are you using HTML5 in your designs? What tools are you using to ease the process? Let us know in the comments.

Rackspace is the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Cross-Platform Mobile Development Tools You Should Try
- 15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter
- 10 Tools for Distributed Developer Teams
- 11 Delicious TextMate Themes for Designers and Developers
- 7 Awesome CSS3 Techniques You Can Start Using Right Now

Images courtesy of HTML Boilerplate.

More About: 960.gs, divya manian, HTML5, html5 boilerplate, paul irish, Web Development, web development series

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It’s free and comes with a slew of touch interface bells and whistles built right in. The app is intended to allow for seamless navigation between tweets, photos, web pages, videos and other media and updates. It’s also usable even for those who don’t have Twitter accounts.

Twitter for iPad [iTunes link] has a few new UI touches that you haven’t seen elsewhere. These features are custom-designed for the larger screen and touch capabilities of the iPad. It also caters to what the iPad was made for: media consumption rather than creation. Twitter’s Leland Rechis, a mobile UX designer, writes on the Twitter blog that the iPad is “a device that really lets content shine.”

The main interface is a series of panes that can expand and retract based on the kind of content the user wants to access. “Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like,” writes Rechis.

Media viewing is optimized for the iPad, as well. Videos play in-line with other content and can be loaded while you’re browsing through your timeline. You can pinch a video to view it fullscreen, too.

Finally, Twitter has really done some interesting things with touchscreen capabilities in this app. When you pinch a tweet, you’ll see details about the author and have a list of actions you can take, including reply and retweet. A two-finger pull-down gesture will show the entire conversation around a tweet.

It’s a creative way to approach multitouch app building, and we look forward to playing with it ourselves. We’re also really looking forward to what apps may come to other tablets in the future.

The iTunes release is rolling out right now; if you can’t get the latest version of the app right now, wait a bit and try again. And of course, let us know what you think of Twitter for iPad in the comments.

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Announced just this morning, the new iTunes/Ping one-two combo pack a mighty punch. But can this dynamic duo deliver on its promise to revitalize music-based social networking? And will Ping be the MySpace killer all the tech pundits are speculating about?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have a few first impressions to share with you. We were definitely met with a few surprises and even some disappointments when firing up the app for the first time. Here’s what we think so far; be sure to share your opinions with us in the comments.

Signing Up and Getting Started

First, download the new iTunes. Once it’s installed, you’ll notice a new link under the iTunes Store tab on the left side of the iTunes interface. The Ping tab is inconspicuous as it is exciting.

The service is opt-in, so you’ll have to turn Ping on and sign in with your Apple account and agree to a new Terms of Service. After that comes a simple profile form that gives you the opportunity to upload an avatar and write the standard social media “About Me” section. Additionally you can “like” up to three genres.

Our first nose-wrinkle moment with Ping came right here: We only get to pick three kinds of music? Almost everyone likes a few more than three genres. Still, this will force those pesky “I listen to everything” types to get specific, so we can’t complain too much.

After that, you get to make some privacy choices. You can specify how music you like, rate and review is displayed on your profile; you can also decide whether or not people can follow you and if they need your approval to follow you. Even if you don’t allow others to follow you, you can still follow anyone you like. It’s a fairly common asymmetric friendship model, much like Twitter’s.

You can also choose to connect your profile on Ping to your Facebook profile, if you wish. Once your accounts are connected, you can also follow your Facebook friends on Ping, too.

Ping already has some “Artists We Recommend You Follow,” among them, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Linkin Park and U2. These don’t seem to be connected in any way to individual users’ purchasing habits or iTunes library contents. In the “People We Recommend You Follow” section, you’ll find luminaries such as Def Jam head Rick Rubin and radio DJ Jason Bentley. It’s a shame these recommendations aren’t based on available user data yet; we’re hoping that as more artists enable Ping profiles and more users sign up and begin to exhibit certain behaviors based on demographic and psychosocial factors, the recommendation quality for first-timers will improve.

Playing With Ping: UX/UI

Once you’re in and set up, you’ll see a stream of recent activity. You can think of it in a couple ways. First, it’s a music-only version of your Facebook news feed. Second, it’s a huge recommendation — one that might work pretty well if your friends, or at least the people you follow on Ping, have similar taste in music.

You can comment on and like others’ activities. When you click through to another user’s profile, you’ll also see a run-down of his or her recent activities.

Navigation is a bit awkward; don’t expect Facebook’s plethora of tabs and menus. You’ll get a search bar and simple back and forward buttons in addition to the traditional iTunes navigation bar at the top of the screen. On another look-and-feel UI note, it’s new and jarring to have to use a web app from within a desktop app, but it’s something that Ping users will apparently have to get used to.

The other part of running a social network inside a desktop app is that it’s cripplingly slow — something that might seriously inhibit the platform’s growth. If there’s anything end users hate more than sites that constantly go down, it’s sites that run slowly.

You can search for artists, people or both. Either the search function is purely busted, or iTunes hasn’t got a large enough repertoire of artists on board with Ping yet. Artists have both their iTunes Store pages and Ping profiles. Ping search takes you to the former, which isn’t quite intuitive.

The artist Ping profiles show an activity stream as well as upcoming concerts and a few other links. And of course, the entire Ping artist interface contains built-in music-selling features.

Artists can also upload photos, videos and text updates, something we haven’t yet been able to do as non-artists. As for uploading content other than reviews, regular users are limited to comments on your and others’ activity only for now.

One interesting section of Ping is its Charts, a sort of recommendation engine that delivers a brief list of songs and albums popular among people you follow. It shows purchased music only, not liked, rated or reviewed items.

Other sections of your Ping profile might not be as easy to understand; for example, don’t expect to be able to write a review when you click on “My Reviews;” you’ll have to go elsewhere in iTunes for that. Controls for the interface are small and, shall we say, specific. In other words, you’d better be pretty accurate when clicking on that five pixel-wide arrow, or you’ll end up on a wholly different part of the site and have to start all over again.

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Is It a MySpace Killer?

The big question for music fans, musicians, digital collateral creators and millions of other people is both simple and complex: Can Ping replace MySpace as the go-to marketplace to find and socialize around entertainment?

We pondered this question at length earlier today, when we were confident that this Apple-backed MySpace alternative, with its baked-in connection to the iTunes Store, would be a surefire success.

However, while testing the app this evening, we see that Ping has a long way to go if it’s going to be a better alternative. All the reasons that users have largely abandoned MySpace — the emphasis on gaudy customization, the constant stream of shallow user-to-user communication, the veritable sea of band-spam — have been avoided to a perhaps detrimental extreme. We love minimalist design as much as the next guy, but we also love self-expression, music-sharing and communication with friends. Much of that is curtailed here.

Moreover, the interface is still buggy and slower than molasses in January at the North Pole during a legitimate Ice Age. And that slowness is a big turnoff and an inherent factor of working within iTunes.

We don’t love Ping yet, but we don’t hate it, either. We suspect that much of the network’s value will be a wait-and-see proposition. Wait and see what happens when there are more artists, more curators, more well-known DJs and music bloggers, and more of your own friends on Ping. Wait to see what changes Apple makes in later iterations. But for now, it’s definitely an app worth watching.

What are your first impressions of Ping?

More About: apple, Apple Ping, itunes, itunes 10, itunes ping, Ping

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In September 2009, Starbucks introduced its Starbucks Card Mobile app for iPhone and iPod touch, enabling the owners of those devices to reload their Starbucks payment cards, monitor their rewards cards and even pay for their purchases at 16 stores in Seattle and the Silicon Valley region. In June, the coffee company extended its mobile payment system to 1,000 Target stores in addition to the roster of Starbucks venues.

Now all of this functionality has been adapted — and, in some respects, improved — for BlackBerry Bold, Curve, Storm and Tour users. For instance, BlackBerry owners can use the app’s store locator to identify all Starbucks and Target venues where Starbucks is sold, not just the ones that support mobile payments.

In an interview with Mashable, Chuck Davidson, the category manager for innovation on the Starbucks Card team, described the group’s painstaking efforts to optimize the app experience for BlackBerry users. “We didn’t just want to put an iPhone app on a BlackBerry, which would have shocked BlackBerry users,” Davidson explained. “We had to get inside a BlackBerry head and use the right workflow.”

Thus, instead of embedding rich graphics and video for navigation, the team utilized the menu key, resulting in a much more intuitive experience for BlackBerry users.

With the addition of BlackBerry support, Davidson said that roughly three-fourths of its customers now have access to the Starbucks Card Mobile app. While he didn’t confirm that an Android app was in the works, he did say it was the third-most requested app after the iPhone and BlackBerry.

To get the Starbucks Card Mobile BlackBerry app, text the word “GO” to 70845 or visit the Starbucks mobile site.

More About: Android App, App, blackberry, blackberry app, iphone app, starbucks

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The FCC’s seven-page public notice [PDF] tackles two of the key proposals from the Google-Verizon framework: “Specialized Services” and net neutrality/open Internet principles for the mobile wireless Internet. The Google-Verizon proposal has received heavy criticism for excluding wireless Internet from many net neutrality regulations.

“There are two complex issues, however, that merit further inquiry,” reads the report. “The first is the relationship between open Internet protections and services that are provided over the same last-mile facilities as broadband Internet access service. The second is the application of open Internet rules to mobile wireless Internet access services, which have unique characteristics related to technology, associated application and device markets, and consumer usage.”

The FCC has already said that it doesn’t agree with all of the points of the Google-Verizon proposal, and this public notice carries that tone. The FCC’s concern with specialized services seems to be that open Internet protections could be weakened if broadband providers use specialized services to circumvent the rules that apply to broadband Internet access.

On the wireless front, the FCC “seeks comment on ‘how, to what extent, and when’ openness principles should apply to mobile wireless platforms, with a particular emphasis on furthering innovation, private investment, competition and freedom of expression.” In other words, the FCC wants it to make the rules of wireless net neutrality very clear so companies like Google and Verizon don’t use ambiguity to their advantage.

The FCC is giving interested parties a 30-day window for filing comments and a 55-day window for reply comments. This is probably only the beginning; the important issue of net neutrality isn’t going to be resolved anytime soon.

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Still, there aren’t too many among us who have the skill, nay, the expertise to cut ties without cutting deep.

At this point, some of you may be reminiscing about the sepia-tinged past, those glory days when, if you didn’t want to chill with Lucy “I Eat Paste” Smith anymore, all you had to do was ghost out of her life, letting the last tendrils of your friendship dissolve into the ether like wisps of smoke.

Well, those days are as dead as Lucy’s creepy gray front teeth. Now, every time someone exits your life, you have to decide whether to keep them in your Facebook stream or cut the lifeline.

“Friends and acquaintances come and go as we move through life stages and find the need for keeping some friends and losing others,” says Dr. Larry Rosen, author of Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn. “If you had no way to unfriend someone, then this would lose the authenticity of having a relationship.”

You hear that? Unfriending is practically doctor-approved. Still, how do you know when and how to take the pal-eviscerating plunge? Read on for our tips on handling unfriending situations.

And so begins my Netiquette column — which I write with my Stuff Hipsters Hate co-blogger, Andrea Bartz — this week over at CNN.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, A1Stock

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Last week, Digg launched version 4.0 of the popular social news website. It’s been a rocky road pre-launch, so why would it be any different post-launch?

Since the launch of the New Digg, which introduced the ability to follow friends, a faster architecture and personalized news, users have been in revolt, mostly over the types of stories reaching the front page. Digg has since addressed some of these issues, but the debate rages on.

Last week we asked you, the Mashable readers, for your opinion on Digg. Which did you prefer: The new digg or the old one?

The old version of Digg was clearly your choice. With a full 78% of the vote (4,808 votes), the classic version bested the new version’s 12% (747 votes). Four percent of you (230 votes) said it was a tie, while 6% of you (348 votes) said you weren’t a fan of Digg.

In the comments, the debate surrounded features that were available in the old version that weren’t in the new one, including the ability to bury stories and the ability to check upcoming stories. Many of you were also quick to point out that the new Digg is designed to broaden the appeal of the social news website, rather than limit it to its current niche of tech-savvy users.

We’re going to revisit this debate in the future, when we’ve had time to reflect on the changes happening at Digg. In the meantime though, we want to hear your thoughts on this debate in the comments.

Follow Mashable on Digg

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