Raise Your Marketing IQRaise Your Marketing IQ

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, Developer, iPhone

Mashable’s Ben Parr sat down at CES with Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, which is not only a TUAW favorite, but acts as your “external brain,” saving little clips and bits of information both collectible from and accessible by any device you happen to have with you. We love the app, and while it isn’t a Mac exclusive, there are both Mac and iPhone versions, and apparently they’re doing very well. Libin tells us in the video that not only are they picking up five thousand users a day (!), but over half of their two million users are using the iPhone app [iTunes link]. As Libin says, the app is “very good” — it’s easy to use (and free), the iPhone’s camera makes picking up even real-life scraps of information super easy, and Evernote is designed to share information back to your Mac. Libin says that “most” of the iPhone users do access their information back on other PCs.

Libin also talks about power users of the service — there’s one in the system that has over 80,000 notes, though due to privacy, Libin doesn’t share what they’re keeping in there. And apparently one issue they’re dealing with is long-term retention. I can identify with that — while Evernote is a great service, it’s tough to remember that you can use it to remember things, and for that reason I think that even with two million users, it’s still very underrated. Libin sounds like he’s on top of things, though — he promises that they’re always working on not only helping users figure out how to use the service, but also in polishing it and making it even easier and simpler.

TUAWEvernote’s CEO: 5k new users a day, but long-term retention is a problem originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you were looking for a large and impractical “cellphone,” we just might have some news for you. Hot on the heels of a certain Dell netbook mod, we submit for your approval a 5-inch convertible device that features a QWERTY chocolate keyboard, trackball, and quite possibly Windows XP. We’ve got no relevant data for you, such as manufacturer, price, and release date are all mysteries at this point, but you can see it in action if you like — just check out the videos after the break. As for us, we think we’ll just wait for the xpPhone.

Continue reading BPhone looks like a netbook, acts like a netbook, has ‘phone’ in its name (video)

BPhone looks like a netbook, acts like a netbook, has ‘phone’ in its name (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The PR campaign for Dante’s Inferno—which included such things as “acts of lust” perpetuated on booth babes and money being given to the press—has been incredibly obnoxious. The goal was to get us talking about the game, however, and that worked. An even better way, though, is to send us some content from the game itself. EA just delivered a disc with the demo of the game for the 360, and after playing through it a few times, it’s clear the only sin here is… well, didn’t we just talk about clones of existing, popular games?

Jessica Faye Carter is an award-winning author and columnist. Her company, Nette Media develops social media technologies for women and multicultural communities, and she blogs at Technicultr.

The expression of community has changed considerably since the emergence of social media technologies, but its basic foundation — the notion of individuals exchanging information, ideas, and opinions — remains firmly intact. Today, one of the most widely-used tools in developing these types of exchanges online is WordPress, the popular blogging and publishing platform. Part of its appeal is the ease with which users can build advanced functionality into their sites with plugins. If you’re interested in building a community around your site, there are plenty of third-party add-ons that can help create one.

These 10 WordPress plugins add features that will help you to engage your user base.

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Highlight Your Best Content

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1. Featured Content Gallery – If you’re not an expert in programming or design, Featured Content Gallery makes it easy to highlight images, posts, or pages anywhere on your site. It comes with a sleek and contemporary design that is fully customizable through the WordPress dashboard, so that you can integrate your highlighted content seamlessly with the rest of your site.

2. Popularity Contest – Your users will want to know what’s popular and interesting to their peers in the community and the Popularity Contest Plugin can help. It keeps track of the most popular posts and pages on your site and acts as a leaderboard that directs users to the most active content in your community. You can customize the point values assigned to user actions on the site, such as comments or views, and display the results easily in a widgetized-sidebar.

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Facilitate User Engagement

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3. Viper’s Video Quicktags – Including video in your community is easy using Viper’s Video Quicktags. Just enter the URL of the video in the prompt box and see a preview of the video right on your screen. Then specify the dimensions and other customizations you’d like to add and see your final product before saving it into your post. Supported video sites include YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and others.

4. WPtouch – Part of keeping the community vibrant means letting your users take it with them. You can go mobile with your community using WPtouch and avoid building a mobile website or the costs of developing an iPhone application. You can control the mobile user interface by allowing the browser to automatically route users to the interface of your choosing — your site or the WPtouch interface, which looks similar to an iPhone app. You can also show or hide post excerpts and customize the icons and general appearance of your mobile site.

5. Disqus Comment System – Nothing stops a potential commenter in their tracks faster than having to set up a user ID and password in order to leave a message on your site. At the same time, most of us would like some sort of authentication process we can use to identify and correspond with other users as we develop our communities. The Disqus Comment System allows users to engage with your site using their Twitter, Disqus, Facebook, OpenID or selected other accounts. This prevents users from having to set up new accounts while allowing for authentication. Bonus: the Reactions feature allows you to include the social component of user feedback into your comments.

6. Customize Your Community – Customize Your Community (CYC) provides some useful options for those building communities in WordPress. It allows you to re-brand the WordPress pages for registration, logging in/out, and lost passwords, as well as the user profile pages. In addition to giving your community a standardized look and feel, CYC helps with a long-standing navigational issue in WordPress: it automatically directs “subscribers” to their profiles and bypasses the WP backend entirely.

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Measure on the Fly

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7. Clicky – While Google Analytics provides you with a long-term perspective on your site metrics, Clicky gives you instantaneous feedback. The dashboard includes traditional site metrics, but also offers cool features, like “Spy”, which pinpoints the location of current visitors on a map. It’s an easy way to get a snapshot of your site’s current activity and, in conjunction with Google Analytics, gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s activity.

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Improve User Navigation

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8. Breadcrumb NavXT – Your users aren’t exactly Hansel and Gretel, but they still may occasionally need help navigating your site, particularly if it’s content-heavy. Breadcrumbs are usually located just below a site’s primary navigation system and look something like this:

Home » Dance Music » Saint Etienne » Method of Modern Love

Breadcrumb NavXT, the successor to Breadcrumb Navigation XT, improves your site’s navigation by building this kind of virtual breadcrumb trail for your users to follow. This way, users will know where they’re located on your site. This plugin may require customization, depending on your theme; check out the Advanced Options section of the plugin’s homepage for additional instructions.

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Monetize It!

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9. Advertising Manager – If you were previously using the Adsense Manager plugin, you’ve probably noticed that it hasn’t been updated in a while. That’s because it has been succeeded by Advertising Manager, which is recommended unless you are using WordPress version 2.5 or earlier. The renamed version supports a broader group of ad networks in addition to Google AdSense, such as Adify, AdBrite, and several others. It also imports your AdSense Manager settings, for users of the previous plugin.

10. WP125 – Do you prefer a more hands-on management style for your advertising? WP125 allows you to do everything from arranging the ad display so that it fits your site design to setting timelines for ads (they can be removed automatically or manually at expiration). It also provides a placeholder for empty ad space, which you can switch to your own customized version.

Do you have another plugin that’s been helpful to you in building your community? Share your favorites in the comments below.

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More WordPress resources from Mashable:

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WordPress Themes: “Top 12 Stunning WordPress Themes“, “30+ WordPress 3 Column Themes,” “20 WordPress 4-Column Themes,” “30+ WordPress 1-Column Themes,” “10 Unusual & Original WordPress Themes”

Plugins: “50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Comments,” “30+ WordPress Plugins to Get More Blog Readers,” “Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles”

Miscellaneous: “WordPress God: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog,” “The 7 Weirdest and Wackiest Uses for WordPress“

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Reviews: Clicky, Disqus, Facebook, Google Analytics, Google Video, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, YouTube

Tags: community, Lists, plugins, Wordpress

Filed under: Apple, iPhone

Reader Maik Lutze sent us some pictures from in front of “THE PLACE” shopping center in the CBD area of Beijing. As you can see, Apple is planning for a rather large event tomorrow! He notes the activation stations, with copiers for IDs and, sadly, Windows machines for activation. There’s also a stage, presumably for live acts, and some very nice seats. If you’re there tomorrow, tag photos on Flickr as “tuaw” (no quotes) or submit them to our Tumblr page.

Thanks for sending these in, Maik! His blog, in German, can be found here.

TUAWPictures from the Beijing iPhone launch originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Earlier this month, Last.fm launched its own HD radio stations in four different cities. Now, the CBS-owned company’s plan to expand beyond online music programming includes video too.

According to Music Week, the company will launch Last.TV to online and offline airwaves starting in January and will initially include content from music festivals in Europe, “either through building bespoke events or partnering with existing festivals.”

Of course, it seems like music-oriented programming is a logical next step given the network affiliation, and we certainly think that there’s more room for music-oriented television — especially with MTV focusing on reality-show content. Last.fm is certainly poised to pull in big acts and appeal to younger audiences already using the online service, but it will be interesting to see how this actually comes together.

Would you watch Last.TV online or on your television set? Let us know what you think about the news and what it would take for you to tune into Last.fm branded content from CBS.

Image from dailyinvention on Flickr

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Reviews: Flickr

Tags: cbs, Last.FM, last.tv, television

Money clips are great because they’re lighter weight than wallets, (nice when you want to avoid wallet butt bulge), but they don’t have the storage options of wallets. The Storus Smart Money Clip is half wallet, half money clip, and still lightweight.

Half money clip, half credit-card clip, the Storus clip gives you a nice place to store and separate both your money and your cards. From clever gadgets weblog Cool Tools:

I’ve been using Storus’ simple wallet/money clip for four years now, and highly recommend it. It’s just enough wallet to qualify as one, but no more: light, simple, minimalist. The money clip is great, and the other side can hold five credit cards.

The money clip/wallet comes in stainless steel, matte black, and various other finishes; the stainless steel clip is cheapest, costing $20 at Amazon.

Filed under: Accessories, Odds and ends, Macbook Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air, iPod nano

quirky is a design firm with a difference. Rather than pay a brain trust to sit around and think up product ideas, they let average Anns and Andys submit designs that are then refined and named by a community of site visitors. When designs are ready for production, quirky sets a threshold number of units to be sold to be profitable, and once that number of orders comes in, they send the design off for manufacturing.

Plato said “…the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.” In this case quirky community member Jeff Scholen was driven not only by the need to neatly wrap up the thin power cable and thick AC line going into his Apple MagSafe Power Adapter, but also keep the transformer “box” off of the floor or desk and give it a way to stay cool.

In less than 24 hours, the design was finalized through input from Apple fans worldwide and the PowerCurl (US$9.99) was ready to roll. It comes in “quirky orange” only, but has two sizes to match the 60W and 85W MagSafe Power Adapters.

The quirky community has also come up with a case design for the new iPod nano that not only protects that shiny finish, but acts as a stand and video handgrip as well. The Kickster (US$14.35) is awaiting your commitment to purchase before it moves into production.

TUAWPowerCurl: A quirky way to wrap up your MagSafe Power Adapter originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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