Chris Brogan just wrote an article the other day entitled “Social Networks are Your Local Pub,” but iCloseBy has released a little something called the iFob that does exactly the opposite: turns your local pub into a social network. A clever little utility that’s just been waiting to be made ever since 802.11 came to handheld devices, it’s a program you download to your iPhone or iPod Touch that you turn on whenever you’re going to some sort of public place (like a coffeehouse, neighborhood bar, the park). The program will alert you when someone else comes near with the program installed.

The iFob program acts as a beacon, saying “I am here!” while listening for other iFob pings saying the same. Whenever one iFob finds another, the program lights up and automatically exchanges “micro profiles” with one another. Or, if you prefer to maintain your privacy and just lurk at the local bar, you can just set iFob to listen mode, and reach out to the other iFob users you may find as you choose.

iFob is now listed as a trusted app repository under the “Network” category for folks with the jailbroken iPhones or iPod Touches, and it can also be downloaded from the company website.

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Moby is giving away some free music. He’s not pulling a Radiohead, at least not directly.  Instead of releasing an album online, he’s releasing 76 different tracks online, all of them freely available from his website in MP3 format (after passing through an email registration screen).

The purpose of the give-a-way isn’t to propagate his music throughout the iPods of the world, but to allow independent filmmakers and media producers to use the music under a Creative Commons-ish license:

    this portion of moby.com, ‘film music’, is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.
to use the site you log in(or on?) and are then given a password.

you can then listen to the available music and download whatever you want to use in your film or video or short.

the music is free as long as it’s being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short.

if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that’s generated being given to the humane society.

It’s an interesting move, and if you don’t run advertisements on your podcast, qualifies as “pod-safe” music.

There isn’t a readily available verification process that for-profit outfits can use to show donations made to the Humane Society, but those who plan to make use of the music under a commercial banner can contact Moby at the site for more details by way of email.

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Pinger launched a little while ago as a tool for creating voicemail “blast” options that can be sent out to your friends: think of it as a microblogging update that’s delivered by voice instead of text. I mentioned Pinger’s marketing potential here when the company announced that John Edwards would be using Pinger to let his followers know about campaign updates, and Mark had an in depth conversation with the company’s CEO Greg Woock not too long ago, outlining some of the concepts that Pinger is operating around, as an integrated tool for making our own lives easier (see embed below).

Today, Pinger is moving beyond its initial voicemail “blast” option to a more inclusive suite of solutions that effectively replaces your mobile’s voicemail box. Similar to YouMail, the new Pinger tools let you record personalized greetings that can be assigned to friends, family and for business purposes. You’ll also be able to get a visual voicemail with envelope information about the sender, message duration, and the time and date stamp for each message. Additionally, there are reply options that don’t require you to hang up and make a separate call.

This all means that Pinger is moving to backwards integrate with voice messaging tools, adopting several of the newer features being offered by other standalone services like Simulscribe, and even being incorporated into larger, VoIP services such as Jajah. Will Pinger be able to keep up, or will these peripheral equivalents being extended as perks by larger entities eventually overshadow Pinger?

Seeing as there are a lot of other services that are getting involved in the mobile integration of multi-formatted messaging platforms, including Ribbit and LiquidTalk, I imagine there may be an opportunity for Pinger to license or merge with another company somewhere down the line. And as many of these other services, including YouMail, are beginning to move into the marketing sector with ad-supported features, Pinger may be additionally attractive as it already is highly useful for marketing purposes.

The embed of last week’s conversation with Pinger’s Greg Woock is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

Subscribe to the podcast here.

You can check out Pinger here.

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We’ve taken note in recent months of the growth and innovative use of Web 2.0 in Kenya and how it has really taken root in light of severe adversity that still continues in the aftermath of the most recent Presidential election there. Apparently, we’re not the only ones taking note of the growth in tech usage in Kenya, as Google announced a search in Nairobi today for at least five senior executives for its African operations, according to All Africa.

The Nairobi office serves as the search company’s headquarters for all African operations, and the new senior managers to be brought into the Google-fold will join nine other senior level employees working presently in Africa. Google is also expanding into Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria and Senegal.

While the vast majority of Africa remains unconnected (estimates place it at around 95%), this means that Google is serious about cementing its position as the number one search engine choice on the continent.

A Hedge Against Microhoo?
Within Kenya, there haven’t been many headline grabbing initiatives for Google. They’ve partnered with a number of educational institutions. They’ve agreed to be the primary email provider for Safaricom, as well as an upstream data provider for the ISP, bringing a greater level of access to a large number of Kenyans.

These moves are seen by analysts as an attempt to re-align their operation in response to the looming threat of a Microhoo alliance.

“Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises more troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction,” said Google Senior Vice President David Drummond. “It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”

That might be a bit high-minded talk regarding the merger talks, but the fact remains that Google is in a far more globally diversified position than most of the other Internet giants in what is a recession-resistant market; measurable advertising. Placing an emphasis in Africa won’t provide immediate shelter from what possible economic downturns may be coming in the near-term, but it creates a long term success path to ownership of a market that only has room to grow.

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PicAnswers has just launched with the mantra: “A picture is worth a thousand answers.” OK, I get it. This is a search engine of sorts, that has arisen from a post and response “discussion board” where users can include images. In so many words, PicAnswers is a lot like Yahoo Answers. Upload a picture, give it a title, ask your question, and wait for the world to give you an answer.

PicAnswers is for all those times you’ve come across something like a weird rash on the bottom of your foot, or a scratch on the side of your car. Instead of making a doctor’s appointment or merely getting mad, you can take a snapshot, upload it to PicAnswers, and ask everyone else if they recognize what type of rash that is, or if they’re responsible for the newfound scratch on the side of your car.

Yes, I jest, but it’s difficult for me to see how PicAnswers is useful as a standalone product, without the integration of some basic options, like the ability to easily post a photo answer (as the name of the site would lead you to believe) to a photo question. Or the ability to import pictures from other places on the web, and not just your desktop. Some other features, like mobile photo submission or image recognition tools (such as those used on iLike), aren’t necessarily expected for such a new site, but would certainly aid in upping the value of PicAnswers for a larger user base.

Aside from the added features this site could use, I do think that extending licensed options to niche sites such as curbly would be useful to both PicAnswers and those that could utilize its software in an integrated manner within an existing community. Having some export options in order to submit a question on PicAnswers and then send it out to friends on other existing networks would be handy as well.

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After the ups and downs, the disappearing Scrabulous and its glorious reappearance, we’re all a little antsy about the fate of the wildly popular game that has won the hearts of Facebook users and brought on the scorn of Hasbro and Mattel, which are now in the midst of a legal battle with the popular social network that hosts the Scrabulous game application.

So while you cross your fingers every time you access the Scrabulous Facebook app, never knowing whether or not it will still be there for you to play, the folks over at TastesLikeTV have created a video in support of Scrabulous, to ease your anxiety. It’s a take on Fergie’s “Glamorous” that will make you giggle, and appreciate your MacBook.

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Crowdsourced QA service provider uTest made waves late last year when the company raised $1.7 million in funding. Nearly two months later, I got a chance to speak with uTest’s CEO, Doron Reuveni, to see what the next steps would be, now that the company has launched its beta and is beginning to gain traction.

But first, a bit of background: uTest’s SaaS Testing Platform allows companies to look to the community for QA services, leveraging a larger, social network of software testers and tech savvy individuals to find and report bugs within their websites. This is offered as a cost-effective alternative to creating your own team and testing on an internal level, and this also ensures that your site’s official launch to the public, even if it is a beta launch, will be less reliant on actual valued users for finding and reporting bugs.

One thing I found particularly interesting about uTest’s service is its pay-per-bug model that incentivizes the software testers and keeps costs low for the companies. In speaking with Reuveni, I took the opportunity to learn more about this pay-per-bug model, and the implications it held for the future of uTest itself. Could uTest’s SaaS Testing Platform in fact be used as a business model for the testers?

Reuveni explained that testers receive feedback and can gain in the rankings, just as with any other promotional network where individual users can establish themselves as authorities. To that end, the answer to my initial question was “Yes,” uTest can be used as a platform for executing one’s own business model as a software tester.

One social aspect of this particular feature, which is currently in development and stands as one of the upcoming options that uTest was kind enough to tell me about, is the ability for these respected software testers to create their own teams for the deployment of a full-fledged, all-out effort to find and report bugs on a project basis. The main reason I like this approach is the fact that the leading software testers will seek out other quality software testers, and can earn more money while providing better value for the company that needs QA testing.

Take this developing team model, and it can be applied to a great number of projects that can be rolled out on a variety of websites, allowing uTest to offer specialized niches within its larger network. One way in which this could become particularly helpful is for another one of its upcoming features: a Facebook application.

This won’t be a Facebook app like all the others, but a testing platform for app developers. It allows testers to show and their their uTest tester profiles within Facebook (self-promotion at its finest), while also enabling testers to report issues and bugs via the uTest testing platform. This is in fact quite similar to what Facebook itself is taking on with its own Translations facebook application, which is the social network’s way of better acclimating to the global growth process. Both new developments should work quite well for uTest’s platform, and I think this company has found a great way of letting companies leverage a dedicated, professional social network for quality assurance.

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Yahoo has a new facebook app. It’s called Friend Sense, and it’s a product of the research arm of Yahoo, called The Human Social Dynamics group. The point of this application is to get to know your friends, and yourself, better. Through a series of yes or no questions, you can indicate particular beliefs you hold, and guess what your Facebook friends would say on particular issues as well. Remember that book called “The Book of Questions?” It’s a lot like that.

When you first sign onto the app, most of the questions will be directed to you. “Do you side with the Palestinians more than the Israelis regarding the war in the Middle East?” “Do you approve of laws that deny U.S. driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants?” Not all the questions are this serious. Others are a bit more whimsical, or just weird, like “Would your friend eat a hamburger if he had to kill the cow himself?” Questions directed towards you and your friends are intermittent, and you can choose a friend in particular to answer a question about. If that friend has answered the question, you’ll see the answer. If not, you can invite them to answer it. Questions can be skipped, and your answers can be hidden from your friends if you’d like.

As a result of all these questions and answers, everyone gets to know about everyone else a little better, including Yahoo. I hope you don’t lose any friends over this, but it’s an interesting study of psychology, economics, statistics and sociology. Whether this collective data will ever be used for search or recommendation purposes is unclear, but the movement towards utilizing such data for these very purposes is gaining steam. At DEMO alone I saw two companies, Redux and Delver, that are aggregating data for unique search and discovery purposes, both of which rely on your standing within the larger social plane in which you exist on the web.

Insert Obligatory Microsoft-Yahoo Commentary Here:

In the larger scope of things regarding Yahoo and its stance in the market right now, it’s been made clear that the bid from Microsoft was in fact unsolicited, but I might as well take the opportunity here to note that Yahoo has been far more willing to integrate with other platforms and applications as of late, meaning the company is in fact testing out a new strategy for survival, while also managing to amass the data that it can use for the refocusing of its own platform later on down the line.

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There’s been no public handshake had between S. Ballmer and J. Yang. The offer made by the former for the latter’s dust-covered golden goose has not yet been accepted. (Officially, anyway.) But it darn well should be.

I’ll come out and say it. In the past, I’ve been bearish on any supposed Microsoft-Yahoo! deal-making. I thought that such a marriage would result in a tremendous amount of redundancies. That Microsoft and Yahoo! would have even more trouble on their (then-collective) hands in having to deal with the managerial madness that would ensue in Redmond and Sunnyvale. And, to be honest, I still kind of do feel those things to some degree. I mean, do you think two companies are in relative disarray now? Wait ‘til their respective bigwigs are sleeping together - albeit hundreds of miles apart.

But looking at the wealth of commentary circling this supposed deal-to-be today, and parsing the histories of both companies and where each stands today, I’ve effectively come to develop a new preliminary conclusion on the matter: Why the hell not?

Yes, why the hell not put Big Web Giant and Somewhat-Less-Big Web Giant together? If nothing else, it would be fascinating to observe what comes of the joint venture.

Indeed, it would be a heck of a move for both companies. Regardless of whether they’ve got their men, women, and machines all in line to steer the merger wherever it needs to be directed - sorting out what stays active and what goes on the junk pile is likely to be at or near the top of the agenda - it’d be very intriguing to see how the lot of ‘em handle the change.

It wouldn’t be easy, of course. It’d be eons past difficult. But Ballmer has never been one to shy from a challenge. Particularly one that seems insurmountable at first glance.

The basic thinking the Microsoft CEO employed in assembling his offer ($44.6 billion; 62% over market value) is that the forces of Microsoft MSN/Live and the Yahoo! portal are better brought together as one to battle the largely unchallenged king of Web search and advertising: Google. And, well, there may be some sense to the double-barreled analogy.

But this proposal might prove wholly ineffective when all is said and done. Chances are Microsoft will not expand greatly on the fortunes of its Internet business. Even with Yahoo! in the bag, the financial rewards aren’t likely to be as immense as some in Redmond might think.

But what other choice does Steve B. have at this point? He can’t eek out phenomenal growth from the Microsoft’s current set of Web services. They simply don’t have the momentum to deliver tidal shifts for the better in the years to come. A Yahoo! purchase then seems to be a “reasonable” alternative to drive for.

It may work. It may not. But Microsoft has to do something if its to gain ground in the race championed currently by Google. And what better time than now to try for a quick (though massively complex) fix? Redmond’s got the cash. Heck, give it a shot, I say.

What’s the worst that can happen? Yahoo! says no? Yahoo says yes?

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Mark Effron used to program daytime TV for the network MSNBC, but now functions as the COO for TitanTV. That’s a company that is trying to do for online network TV station presences, as they say, what King World Syndication did for the local affiliate when they burst on the scene.  TitanTV has a powerful combination of solid distribution and content management software as well as original programming to offer the local affiliate’s web presence to provide a reason beyond weather-related school closing to come to the site.

I, myself, have been involved in similar ventures for other media consulting firms in the past, so I really was interested in seeing how TitanTV approached this interesting market. Our conversation went far longer than the usual conversation went, as a result, even though he was literally on his way to take his daughter to her homecoming dance this evening.  Despite this, we covered a wide variety of topics, including opportunities within his organization for independent program directors, content producers, and from Effron’s unique vantage point what he sees the future for the Old Media’s role is in the New Media.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

Subscribe to the podcast here.

You can check out TitanTV here.

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