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When Facebook entered the location arena with Facebook Places this summer, many were quick to assert that this would spell the end for smaller players in the space. But Google-backed SCVNGR is fighting the odds and proving that mobile game layer can still thrive in post Facebook Places.

Case in point, CEO and Founder Seth Priebatsch informs us that SCVNGR application downloads this morning surpassed 100,000 downloads across iOS and Android devices in just 48 hours.

The download figure is significant considering SCVNGR’s late entry in the consumer sector, but the startup’s sophisticated rewards system and numerous partnerships are helping ensure that it remains competitive in the space. Priebatsch actually attributes most of the growth to its integration of Facebook Places. He notes that piggy-backing off of Facebook has helped SCVNGR rise on the iTunes App Store charts.

“We did the Facebook integration, which gave us a serious bump, then launched our city-by-city rollout of rewards in Boston, which gave us another bump. Then we broke into the top 50 [in iTunes] and then we spiraled upwards from there,” explained Priebatsch.

During SCVNGR’s climb of the iTunes App Store, it reached a height of number two app in the social networking category (it’s now dropped to number five) and cracked the top 25 free iPhone apps list (currently number 48).

So, where exactly does this put SCVNGR? Unfortunately, Piesbatsch says that while SCVNGR’s already phenomenal user growth continues to accelerate, the company isn’t yet ready to release solid user numbers.

Still, 100,000 downloads in 48 hours is an impressive figure, especially when stacked against Foursquare, which is adding approximately 18,000 new users per day.

Image courtesy of TEDxBoston 2010, Flickr

Reviews: Android, App Store, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare

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pimg alt="logo_aws_sept10.gif" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/logo_aws_sept10.gif" width="150" height="54" class="mt-image-none" style="" /Perhaps it's the nature of the business - as a technology journalist, when I talk to people about the path to widespread adoption and acceptance of cloud computing, the emphasis is usually on the things that need to be in place in order to convince enterprise organizations that the cloud is secure and reliable, that the cloud can meet their demands for high scalability and performance./p pBut despite all the hoopla (I almost typed "hadoop") about a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/09/hadoop-and-a-critique-on-geek.php"big data/a and infinite scalability, there remains a number of use cases, not to mention a whole chunk of the small business world, that really don't require massive instances or computing power. And perhaps meeting the needs of that market, as much as the needs of large companies, will be the road to cloud computing's normalization./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21743amp;cb=21743' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21743amp;n=21743' border='0' alt='' //a/p pIf that's the case, then Amazon Web Service's announcement today of Micro Instances is great news for small businesses and great news for small computing projects (but maybe not so great news for Amazon's competitors)./p pAWS announced today new a href="http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/09/new-amazon-ec2-micro-instances.html"EC2 Micro Instances/a. Micro Instances are geared towards low traffic sites and low throughput applications. They're available in 32 and 64 bit versions with 613 MB of RAM. And here's the clincher, the price: $.02 per hour for a Linux/Unix instance and $.03 per hour for Windows./p pThe Micro Instances can be monitored with a href="http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/"CloudWatch/a to judge the CPU utilization - important because these instances are really not designed for any substantial volume of requests (only about ten requests per minute). But as AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr notes, "at this low a price you could run CloudWatch configured for Auto Scaling with two Micro Instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer for just under the price of one CloudWatch-monitored Standard Small instance." /p pThe latter runs a little under $90 per month for Windows and $60 for Linux. For many small businesses with minimal usage, that's probably more than they're willing to budget, and Amazon's Micro Instances may come at a price that makes the move to the cloud more affordable./p pAmazon a href="http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/09/amazon-ec2-price-reduction.html"lowered its prices/a earlier this month on a couple of its high-memory, extra-large instances, and today's announcement offers a very competitive price at the other end of the computing scale. How its competitors will respond will be interesting to watch, as will the adoption and utilization of today's new Micro Instances./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/09/amazon-ec2-goes-micro.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/SmAQ--pw8yPnQ2bXPkX2IOy_Ec8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/SmAQ--pw8yPnQ2bXPkX2IOy_Ec8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/SmAQ--pw8yPnQ2bXPkX2IOy_Ec8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/SmAQ--pw8yPnQ2bXPkX2IOy_Ec8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gyDmlt4RpSY:gzc_JFcfACI:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/gyDmlt4RpSY" height="1" width="1"/

An anonymous reader found a story that starts "'We have developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine whether it should deceive a human or other intelligent machine and we have designed techniques that help the robot select the best deceptive strategy to reduce its chance of being discovered,' said Ronald Arkin, a Regents professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhardware.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F1626244%2FRobots-Taught-to-Deceive" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Robots+Taught+to+Deceive%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Fdvofvx" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/1626244/Robots-Taught-to-Deceive?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1782222amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d985bf4/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1qJX7duceoguG9GUsq1NHeHhBU4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1qJX7duceoguG9GUsq1NHeHhBU4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1qJX7duceoguG9GUsq1NHeHhBU4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1qJX7duceoguG9GUsq1NHeHhBU4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/Lh7h7yln8xk" height="1" width="1"/

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this year Apple caused major upset among developers by updating the iPhone developer program license with clause 3.3.1. It basically stopped the use of cross-platform compilers, meaning Adobe Flash could not be used to develop an app for the App Store. The move also put into doubt which other development platforms could be used and generally caused a lot of confusion. Apple has just significantly relaxed that policy and allowed for the use of development tools, as long as 'the resulting apps do not download any code.'"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fapple.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F141254%2FApple-Relaxes-iOS-Development-Tool-Restrictions" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Apple+Relaxes+iOS+Development+Tool+Restrictions%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F9XUXb5" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/141254/Apple-Relaxes-iOS-Development-Tool-Restrictions?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1782040amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d972652/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mo3WnJiUVJtrEqaJbII8hwwpI4A/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mo3WnJiUVJtrEqaJbII8hwwpI4A/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mo3WnJiUVJtrEqaJbII8hwwpI4A/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mo3WnJiUVJtrEqaJbII8hwwpI4A/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/bB8zQYtiv98" height="1" width="1"/

a href=http://twitter.com/johnmerritt@johnmerritt/a a href=http://twitter.com/peterscampbell@peterscampbell/a a href=http://twitter.com/steveheye@steveheye/a haha I miss you dudes! a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a howapos;s yapos;alls band?

pimg alt="Twitter" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/imgTwitter.jpg" width="150" height="49" class="mt-image-none" style="" /Republican congress members may have a big advantage in the run-up to the midterm elections. A full 72% of Congressional Republicans have at least one Twitter account, compared to 55% of Congressional Democrats, according to a href="http://www.slideshare.net/BMGlobalNews/burson-marsteller-proof-congressional-use-of-twitter-final"study/a released today by communications firm Burson-Marsteller./p pRepublicans also had 38% more followers on their congressional accounts, where they tweeted about legislation. Even worse news for Democrats: Republicans had almost double the followers for campaign-specific accounts like a href="http://twitter.com/foxxforcongress"@foxxforcongress/a and a href="http://twitter.com/VotePerriello"@VotePerriello/a./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21744amp;cb=21744' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21744amp;n=21744' border='0' alt='' //a/p pIt's not surprising to see that Republicans are making good use of Twitter, considering the conservative affinity for talk radio. Some a href="http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=834"41%/a of talk radio listeners identify as Republican compared to 27% as Democrats (the reverse is true for NPR). Talk radio is a lot like Twitter - host talks, listeners call in; account tweets, followers retweet and reply./p pThe most-followed member of Congress is a href="http://twitter.com/senjohnmccain"Senator John McCain/a, who has more than 1.7 million followers and is on 9,658 lists, although his campaign-specific account a href="http://twitter.com/teammccain"@teammccain/a is much smaller. A look at his Twitter page turns up retweets, @ replies, hash tags, photos and updates from Twitter for iPhone, text and HootSuite./p pimg alt="mccain-twitter-vote.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/mccain-twitter-vote.jpg" width="605" height="302" class="mt-image-none" style="" /emA recent tweet by Republican John McCain, the most-followed member of Congress./em/p pimg alt="claire-mccaskill-twitter.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/claire-mccaskill-twitter.jpg" width="605" height="340" class="mt-image-none" style="" /emA tweet by Claire McCaskill (D-MO), the third most-followed member of the Senate with 40,000-odd followers./em/p pIf social media plays as big a role in the U.S. as it has in other countries, the Republicans' Twitter edge could grab them some Congressional seats. "Data from the 2008 Presidential election suggests that grassroots campaigning via the Internet, including social media, contributed to President Obama's win," Burson-Marsteller concludes. "Future analyses will demonstrate how social media plays a role for congressional seats in the November 2010 election." The study was based on data on data from June./p pDo you think Twitter will make a difference in the mid-term elections? Why or why not?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/republicans_in_congress_are_more_active_and_more_p.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bHvwFtdjDNmYkETsiZunX6LnWUo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bHvwFtdjDNmYkETsiZunX6LnWUo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bHvwFtdjDNmYkETsiZunX6LnWUo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bHvwFtdjDNmYkETsiZunX6LnWUo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=nr5F0Nd7lpo:zJ5xkN7IQ9s:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/nr5F0Nd7lpo" height="1" width="1"/

Seesmic Desktop 2 has just arrived, and it’s bringing an entire marketplace of apps along with it.

The new platform will give its users all-in-one access to some of the most popular (and some of the more long-tail) social media services around. It includes the usual suspects, such as Twitter and Facebook, but its plugin marketplace also includes services such as Zappos, Formspring, YouTube, Last.fm, Techmeme, Ping.fm and many more — around 40 apps and services, all told, with dozens more coming soon.

Users will be able to add, remove and customize what services they use via SD2, leaving only the apps that truly matter to them. With broad customization options and tons of flexibility, Seesmic Desktop 2 seems poised to be all things to all users, a sort of social media meta-app. It’s a beautifully built UI with subtle, elegant details.

SD2’s initial lineup of integrated apps includes Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Ping.fm. You can expand SD2’s functionality throught the Plugin Marketplace. There are too many apps available in the marketplace to list here; you’ll find all the services we mentioned above, plus some longer-tail services that will appeal to various subsets of Seesmic’s user base, including Bing Maps, Klout, Salesforce, OneRiot, Ning and Socialcast.

Of course, the app will retain the familiar interface of customizable columns for sorting and seeing all your Facebook or Twitter updates, mentions and messages; but it now has the capability to do a lot more as well. Here are some screenshots showing just a few of the nifty things SD2 can do:

And if there’s a service you love and use but don’t see — or if you’re a developer and want to get in on the SD2 platform — there’s an SDK for that. You can choose to build a plugin yourself, or you can contact the Seesmic team directly to help them with developing a plugin for your app of choice.

SD2 is a Silverlight application and is Windows- and Mac-compatible. Linux users, we hope you like using emulators; until Silverlight and Liinux distros can play nicely together, SD2 won’t work so well with your OSes.

Back at Twitter’s developer conference, Chirp, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur shouted out over a crowd of shaken third-party Twitter developers, “There is plenty of opportunity for us.” In a time of uncertainty for many third-party services, Seesmic has certainly made the most of the many available opportunities by adding a maximum amount of value and integrating an unprecedented number of social services.

Looking back at our interview with Le Meur during Chirp, we see how his words foreshadowed today’s announcements. At the time, he told us that innovative applications that add value and diversity will always find a place in the market; adding value and diversity is precisely what Seesmic has done with SD2.

Give SD2 a whirl for yourself, and let us know what you think in the comments. Is the app convertible enough to meet all your needs? What services do you think SD2 should work on adding next?

Reviews: Chirp Blu, Facebook, FormSpring, Foursquare, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Linux, Ping, Seesmic, Seesmic Desktop, Twitter, Windows, YouTube

More About: seesmic, seesmic desktop, seesmic desktop 2

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Web-based presentation software Prezi is bringing its own twist to presentation collaboration with the launch of Prezi Meeting.

Prezi, launched in May 2008, ditches the traditional slide format for presentations in favor of a storyboard format where the presenter zooms in and out of the “big picture” to deliver key presentation points through swift animations.

Prezi Meeting, which launches today, brings real-time collaboration to the Prezi platform. Once collaborators have been invited to work on a presentation, the team can update different parts of the storyboard — pictures, text, images, videos, etc. — while watching collaborators add their own content to the presentation.

Presentation collaboration tools aren’t anything new — Adobe’s Acrobat.com has it and Microsoft Office 2010 comes with a strong set of co-working features. The interface is what makes Prezi Meeting unique, though; participants appear as cute avatars in the focus area they are editing. Up to ten presenters can break down, rearrange and build presentation storyboards. The real-time aspect makes it so that remote team members can see changes as they happen.

Prezi Meeting is available for free to all Prezi users, but for private presentations and access to Prezi Desktop, users have to pay a monthly fee. The company has raised funding from Sunstone Capital and The Sapling Foundation, the owners of the TED conference.

Reviews: Prezi

More About: collaboration, Prezi, Prezi Meeting, startup

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RT a href=http://twitter.com/rootwork@rootwork/a: More Facebook activism: Support Mott workers a href=http://bit.ly/chHbcXhttp://bit.ly/chHbcX/a amp; AIDS org taking anti-gay $ a href=http://bit.ly/ahGTELhttp://bit.ly/ahGTEL/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%234change onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#4change');#4change/a

More Facebook activism: Support Mott workers a href=http://bit.ly/chHbcXhttp://bit.ly/chHbcX/a amp; AIDS org taking anti-gay $ a href=http://bit.ly/ahGTELhttp://bit.ly/ahGTEL/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%234change onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#4change');#4change/a

a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23idealist onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#idealist');#idealist/a TechStart After School Teacher a href=http://ow.ly/18WrA7http://ow.ly/18WrA7/a

I recently presented a class as part of the Skills 2 course for the Fundraising Institute of Australia (FIA). The class was on e-fundraising techniques and tools and there were some really insightful questions asked by the fundraisers present. In particular, I was asked by an attendee whether it#39;s better to dedicate a resource to cover the sphere of digital marketing, or whether it would be better to bring in an outside consultant. I found this a tricky question to answer, as I am obviously a...(a href="http://forums.blackbaud.com/blogs/emarketing/archive/2010/09/10/when-do-you-need-a-digital-marketing-consultant.aspx"read more/a)img src="http://forums.blackbaud.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=159539" width="1" height="1"

The New York Times is developing a personalized, social news service, News.me.

The venerable newspaper is partnering with pseudo-incubator Betaworks to bring the product to market. The site is currently nothing more than an inscrutable honeycomb logo, but Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told the newspaper that News.me has already been in development for six months and is expected to launch publicly by the end of 2010.

News customization is hardly a new concept, as various startups and major players have tackled the subject over the years. Google, for instance, launched its own personalized news feature and The Los Angeles Times debuted Newsmatch, a feature which learns readers’ tastes and interests to create a personalized page of content.

Nevertheless, being late to the game isn’t necessarily a bad thing; The New York Times has the reputation and content to make a compelling offering for readers.

And a Betaworks partnership is no small potatoes, either; its portfolio includes companies such as TweetDeck and Bit.ly. Then again, as one of the incubator’s financiers, The Times Company would have seen Betaworks as a natural fit for this project.

Michael Zimbalist is the media company’s vice president of research and development. Zimbalist said to NYTimes.com, that the app will “abstract… a vision of how social sharing and the real-time web are going to influence the news consumption experience. We decided to develop a prototype that we thought was illustrative of where the world was heading.”

So many news-related startups have made great products around the related concepts of customization and social media; we’re anxious to see what the recently forward-looking Gray Lady will bring to the table.

What sites or apps do you use these days to get and share the news that’s most relevant to you? What features do you hope to see in News.me? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, mfobrien

Reviews: Flickr, Google, TweetDeck, news

More About: betaworks, media, new york times, News, news.me, NYTimes

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RT a href=http://twitter.com/rootwork@rootwork/a Another good writeup of the Facebook page activism on a href=http://twitter.com/greenpeace@greenpeace/a amp; Nestle: a href=http://bit.ly/bC9uwVhttp://bit.ly/bC9uwV/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%234change onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#4change');#4change/a

pimg alt="madison1.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/madison1.jpg" width="150" height="199" class="mt-image-none" style="" /Madison, Wisconsin has always been known as a progressive town - in part because it's home to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But over the last few years, the city has gained a reputation as an emerging technology startup hub in the Midwest./p pEarlier this year, Forbes Magazine named Madison the a href="http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/24/patents-funding-jobs-technology-innovative-cities_slide_8.html"7th most innovative city/a in the U.S., ranking it ahead of the noted startup hotspot of a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/01/nevermind-the-valley-heres-bos.php"Boston/a. /p pLike many cities that foster thriving startup communities, Madison benefits from strong university and government support (the latter in the form of a 25% tax credit for angel investors and a 2% forgivable loan for startups), as well as a number of entrepreneur-friendly events organizations. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21741amp;cb=21741' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21741amp;n=21741' border='0' alt='' //a/p p h2Local Programs to Develop Entrepreneurship/h2 /p div class="super-pullquote"RWW's Never Mind the Valley series: ?php include("../../never_mind_valley.php"); ? /div pSince early 2009, a href="http://www.capitalentrepreneurs.com/"Capital Entrepreneurs/a has held a monthly meet-up for entrepreneurs. With over 60 member companies, the group has helped bring the Madison entrepreneur community together. The group also has its own Capital Entrepreneurs Angel List, based off of a similar program out of a href="http://www.venturehacks.com"Venture Hacks/a./p pBased off a successful program at MIT, a href="http://www.merlinmentors.org/"Merlin Mentors/a pairs new startups with successful business people in the community, who act as mentors and as an informal board of advisors. Merlin (short for Madison Entrepreneur Resource, Learning and Innovation Network) Mentors was developed with the support of various programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison./p pimg alt="madison2.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/madison2.jpg" width="600" height="400" class="mt-image-none" style="" //p pIn the Fall of 2009, the university received a a href="http://www.news.wisc.edu/17142"Kaufman grant/a to foster entrepreneurship on campus. And between the a href="http://www.bus.wisc.edu/burrill/"Burrill Business Plan competition/a, the a href="http://www.housing.wisc.edu/erlc/index.php"Entrepreneurial Residential Learning Community/a - a dormitory that is geared towards those interested in entrepreneurship, and a a href="http://sife.rso.wisc.edu/sbi/"Student Business Incubator/a, there are a number of programs on campus that help develop the startup community./p pThis summer was the first year for the a href="http://ftf2010.com/"Forward Tech Festival/Conference/a which hopes to become a mini SXSW for the Midwest region. /p pNotable startups from Madison include the social media and gaming company a href="http://www.perblue.com/PerBlue/a, social media monitoring platform a href="http://networkedinsights.com/"Networked Insights/a, student peer-to-peer support site a href="http://www.studentspill.com/"Student Spill/a, and a href="https://www.entrustet.com/"Entrustet/a, which allows people to delegate what will happen to their digital assets when they pass away (and whose co-founder Nate Lustig I'd like to thank for spurring me to write about Madison and for providing much of the research for this article)./p piPhoto credits: Flickr users a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hollyberrie05/1546838319/"Holly Ramsey/a and a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/j_benson/4428525045/"John Benson/a /i /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/09/never-mind-the-valley-heres-madison.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LGaqMhjAcy0DJk7lTVqTjKeTTpc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LGaqMhjAcy0DJk7lTVqTjKeTTpc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LGaqMhjAcy0DJk7lTVqTjKeTTpc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LGaqMhjAcy0DJk7lTVqTjKeTTpc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c8PddPEhO8g:W1MQ9ZisHHs:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/c8PddPEhO8g" height="1" width="1"/

div style="float: left; padding-right: 10px;" !-- div style="background-color: #B3B3B3; width: 160px; padding: 1px;"a title="Click here to read Use Google Voice Actions with Any Web Service that Supports SMS or Email" href="http://lifehacker.com/tag/androidtip/" style="background-color:#888888; color:#FFFFFF; font-size:12px;text-align:right; display:block; height:14px; padding:1px 2px; text-decoration:none; text-transform:uppercase; width:156px;"span style="color: white;" class="hash"#/spanspan style="color: white;"androidtip/span/a/div -- diva title="Click here to read Use Google Voice Actions with Any Web Service that Supports SMS or Email" href="http://lifehacker.com/5634360/use-google-voice-actions-for-any-web-service-that-supports-sms-or-email" class="pp_image" img style="border-color: #B3B3B3; border-width: 0 1px 1px; border-style: none solid solid;" height="120" width="160" title="Click here to read Use Google Voice Actions with Any Web Service that Supports SMS or Email" alt="Click here to read Use Google Voice Actions with Any Web Service that Supports SMS or Email" src="http://cache-02.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/17/2010/09/160x120_voiceactions.jpg"/ /a/div /div The newest update to Google Voice Search on Android is pretty sweet, but reader Bob shows us that it can control a whole lot more than just Android's built-in appsmdash;with SMS and email, you can do just about anything. a href="http://lifehacker.com/5634360/use-google-voice-actions-for-any-web-service-that-supports-sms-or-email" title="Click here to read more about Use Google Voice Actions with Any Web Service that Supports SMS or Email [Android Tip]"Morenbsp;raquo;/a br style="clear: both;" /div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=ss6qoXxnGNI:52L-KxtpUZM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=ss6qoXxnGNI:52L-KxtpUZM:D7DqB2pKExk"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?i=ss6qoXxnGNI:52L-KxtpUZM:D7DqB2pKExk" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=ss6qoXxnGNI:52L-KxtpUZM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?i=ss6qoXxnGNI:52L-KxtpUZM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?a=ss6qoXxnGNI:52L-KxtpUZM:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/lifehacker/excerpts?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /div

Another good writeup of the Facebook page activism on a href=http://twitter.com/greenpeace@greenpeace/a amp; Nestle: a href=http://bit.ly/bC9uwVhttp://bit.ly/bC9uwV/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%234change onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#4change');#4change/a

akaru writes "Using common DSLR cameras, some creative individuals have created an example of true HDR video. Instead of pseudo-HDR, they actually used multiple cameras and a beam splitter to record simultaneous video streams, and composited them together in post. Looks very intriguing."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhardware.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F2342218%2FHDR-Video-a-Reality" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=HDR+Video+a+Reality%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Fb1PRJL" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/2342218/HDR-Video-a-Reality?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1782630amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d9a3ccb/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/gXab0BGigAi9LmHhVgIvlkQFTfE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/gXab0BGigAi9LmHhVgIvlkQFTfE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/gXab0BGigAi9LmHhVgIvlkQFTfE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/gXab0BGigAi9LmHhVgIvlkQFTfE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/1JCKs1eeBsA" height="1" width="1"/

Excellent example of Facebook page activism from a href=http://twitter.com/sue_anne@sue_anne/a - a href=http://twitter.com/greenpeace@greenpeace/a and Nestle: a href=http://bit.ly/bOZSh5http://bit.ly/bOZSh5/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nptech onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#nptech');#bnptech/b/a a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%234change onclick=pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, 'result_type', 'recent', 3);pageTracker._trackPageview('/intra/hashtag/#4change');#4change/a