Dunkin’ Donuts Ru...

Foursquare and Facebook Places anchor New York-area promotion.

Microsoft Begins Rollin...

Microsoft promised just a few days back that the Windows Phone 7.5 update (otherwise known as “Mango”, because updates need funny little names now) would roll out “sometime in the next week or two” — and sure enough, said roll out has just begun. As for who it’s rolling out to… that’s still a bit of a mystery. Check out this statement: Today we’re starting the roll out of Windows Phone 7.5 to more than 98 percent of existing Windows Phone customers. This is a simultaneous, coordinated, global update that cuts across carriers, phone models, and countries. This time, almost everybody is going first. Then, just a few sentences later: So we’re deliberately starting out slow. This week, we’ll be making the update available to 10 percent of customers. So, good news: Hurray! 98% of people will get the update beginning today! Everybody goes first! But the bad news: only 10% of people actually get to install and use it. A slow roll out makes sense, of course; previous Windows Phone 7 updates have gone as sour as to brick handsets . Their message just isn’t entirely clear, and their “ Where’s my update? ” isn’t very helpful: again, they say they’re “delivering” the update today, with a special little asterisk clarifying that the update might not actually go live for a few weeks. Messy. Forgotten what’s new in Windows Phone 7.5 ? Here’s quick recap of the highlights: Facebook Places support integrated Dynamic Live Tiles for third party developers Contacts can be grouped and pinned to homescreen Twitter/LinkedIn support Windows Live Messenger and Facebook Chat Threaded messages and e-mail A suite of Bing stuff (Song ID, QR code reader, Album/CD cover identifier, etc.) New camera UI Internet Explorer 9 Ringtone management Front facing camera support Optional, depending on the carrier: Visual voicemail, internet tethering Crunchbase MICROSOFT Company: Microsoft Website: microsoft.com Launch Date: April 4, 1974 IPO: NASDAQ:MSFT Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and... Learn more

New Facebook Tab Makes ...

Social giant also testing feature that transparently tallies Facebook Places interactions.

Facebook Imitation Not ...

Because this reminds me of that time when Facebook unveiled that the Facebook Places logo was, no joke, a “4″ in a square , I’m just going to copy the intro sentence to that post: On the right is the status and photo update interface for Facebook’s iOS app, updated to a 3.5 version yesterday. On the left is the iOS interface for the current leader in the status update space Twitter . Notice anything interesting? Sure you say, a standard mobile status update box isn’t exactly a UI opus. But it’s the little things, like how the people tagging icons are in exactly the same place on both apps, that matter. Also, this is what the Facebook iPhone status update interface looked like before the 3.5 version. Heh. Apparently I’m not the only one who sees the resemblance between the two, as Twitter mobile designer Bryan Haggerty has tweeted out comparative screencaps of both, with the comments, “Seriously Facebook?” and “Okay Facebook, enough with the flattery.” Interestingly enough, Haggerty used to work on the mobile team at LinkedIn, which, coincidently, was at some point itself on the receiving end of claims

Facebook Photos Get Ano...

The web’s most popular photo sharing site is getting another update. In a blog post this evening, Facebook — which is by far the biggest photo site on the web — has announced that it’s launching a new photo viewer that presents images that are 960 pixels wide, as opposed to the 720 pixels they’ve been since March 2010 (they were 620 pixels before that). The viewer itself is also getting an update that replaces the current black lightbox with an opaque white, which it says puts more of the focus on the photo itself. Facebook also says that photos now load twice as fast, though it doesn’t get into how it’s serving the content so much faster. Facebook’s last major Photos update came out in September 2010, when it introduced the black lightbox-based photo viewer and added support for photos as large as 2048 pixels in width (it doesn’t actually display these in the viewer, but you can download them at this size). That update finally made Facebook a viable way to share high-quality photos (before then, you could only download the low-res versions). This has been a big week for Facebook. On Tuesday it announced a slew of tweaks largely related to its privacy controls and photo tagging  —you’ll soon be able to approve photos before they show up on your profile, which users have been requesting for years now. It also drastically changed the way Facebook Places work, placing less emphasis on check-ins. And earlier today confirmed that it’s killing off its Groupon-like daily deals just four months after launching them, though location-based deals are still around. Crunchbase FACEBOOK Company: FACEBOOK Website: http://facebook.com Launch Date: 1/2/2004 Funding: $2.34B Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It... Learn more