Mashable: Latest 12 News Updates - including “Mashable Weekend Recap: 32 Stories You May Have Missed” |
- Mashable Weekend Recap: 32 Stories You May Have Missed
- No Hope For the Russian Space Probe
- YouTube Cover Song Face-Off: ‘It Will Rain’ from Bruno Mars
- 1.8 Billion Questions Later, ChaCha has Evolved Past Text Message Roots
- Gingerbread Dominates 50.51% of Android Phones, Five Others Coexist
- Sneak Peek at Santa’s Warehouses: Where Online Gifts Really Come From [PICS]
- Viral Video: Band Brings iPhone Games Into the Real World
- Tech the Halls: 12 Christmas Decorations for Geeks [PICS]
- 13 Helpful Apps for Taking Care of Your Pets [INFOGRAPHIC]
- Apple Licensed iOS Scrolling Patent to Nokia, Offered It to Samsung Too?
- Top 10 Tweets: Herman Cain’s #CainWreck Speech
- 10 Historical Events Affected by Social Media
- 8 Holiday Apps That Are Just Plain Silly
| Mashable Weekend Recap: 32 Stories You May Have Missed Posted: 05 Dec 2011 03:56 AM PST      We found a plethora of news, views and weekend hullabaloo here at Mashable over the past couple of days — but if you missed it, the Weekend Recap is your humble servant. We published helpful hints, online shopping tips, a unique look at a boatload of colorful and techie Christmas ornaments and even a behind-the-scenes peek at Santa’s warehouses hidden across the U.S. — and that’s not even the half of it. Here’s every one of those stories from the entire weekend, waiting for you in an convenient format. So read what interests you, and then go out there and seize the week! News & Opinion Essentials
Helpful Resources
Weekend Leisure
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| No Hope For the Russian Space Probe Posted: 05 Dec 2011 01:46 AM PST   The European Space Agency has given up on efforts to revive Fobos-Grunt, the Russian space probe which was slated to visit the Martian moon Phobos, but got stuck in Earth’s orbit shortly after launch. The unmanned probe was launched on Nov 9, 2011, with a mission to take soil samples from the Martian moon and fly them to Earth. All efforts from the ESA to send the probe commands which could send it to the next stage of its mission have been unsuccessful, however, and now the ESA has announced it will not be making further attempts to contact the probe. "In consultation and agreement with Phobos-Grunt mission managers, ESA engineers will end tracking support. Efforts to send commands to and receive data from the Russian Mars mission via ESA ground stations have not succeeded; no response has been seen from the satellite. ESA teams remain available to assist the Phobos-Grunt mission if indicated by any change in the situation," said ESA in an official statement. This likely won’t be the last we hear of the 13.2-ton spacecraft, as scientists expect it to fall back to Earth sometime in January. Most of its weight consists of highly toxic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide fuel which, according to NASA veteran James Oberg, makes the probe the “most toxic falling satellite ever.” If the fuel has frozen in space, some of it could survive the fall to Earth, but if it’s liquid, it will probably burn away – along with the rest of the probe – when re-entering the atmosphere, experts say. More About: fobos-grunt, Mars, Phobos, Russian space probe, space, space probe
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| YouTube Cover Song Face-Off: ‘It Will Rain’ from Bruno Mars Posted: 04 Dec 2011 08:02 PM PST Each week, Mashable picks a popular song, finds 10 covers of it and asks you to vote for your favorite.   Bruno Mars is ending 2011 on a high note, snagging six Grammy nominations and having the lead track, “It Will Rain,” on the latest Twilight movie soundtrack. Along with that success, Mars has roped in fans from all over the world. Some of them are showing their admiration on YouTube by creating covers of “It Will Rain.” Listen to their renditions below and then vote for your favorite in our poll. Roomie
Click here to view this gallery. To listen to more covers used in past YouTube Cover Song Face-Offs, click here. Nov. 20 Face-Off Winner: LEELOOIn Mashable‘s last face-off, Brazilian singer LEELOO pulled in the most votes with her emotional video and haunting vocals for Katy Perry’s “The One That Got Away.” Here’s a collection of covers from LEELOO. "The One That Got Away" Cover by LEELOO
Click here to view this gallery. More About: Entertainment, Music, music videos, viral videos, YouTube, YouTube Cover Song Face-Off For more Entertainment coverage:
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| 1.8 Billion Questions Later, ChaCha has Evolved Past Text Message Roots Posted: 04 Dec 2011 02:23 PM PST   When ChaCha launched in 2008, most of us were introduced to it through a friend. We added its number to our flip phones and sent our questions off via text message, gleefully showing our friends how quickly we received responses. It was like Google, only mobile. Now Google is mobile, and an estimated 35% of Americans have smartphones. But instead of becoming obsolete, ChaCha has shifted its focus toward mobile apps, Q&A as a form of content and a social redesign that could challenge crowdsourced Q&A sites such as Quora and Yahoo Answers. As the company continues to answer one million to two million questions every day by text message, it answers about as many through its web and mobile presences. In the last year, it has answered about 800 million questions — bringing its all-time total to 1.8 billion. It recently started answering questions for large municipalities’ 311 initiatives. Here’s how ChaCha has stayed relevant as smartphones have proliferated and a barrage of Q&A apps — highbrow, social, local and otherwise — have launched their own takes on Q&A. Remaining Different What separates ChaCha from other Q&A services is that its answers are not crowdsourced, but researched by a swarm of about 180,000 freelancers who are paid up to 20 cents per question. Some of them pull answers to repeat questions from ChaCha’s ever-growing database. Others specialize in a particular topics. All need to take a training course and pass a test before they can participate. The result is nearly instant, usually correct answers, something that other Q&A platforms that rely on goodwill don’t often provide. And creating them is almost exactly the same process no matter what platform they are delivered to. Going to the Web and Mobile Again ChaCha’s Android app launched last week. Mobile apps for iPad, BlackBerry and Windows are also in the works. While much of ChaCha’s perserverence can be attributed to an answering system that has stayed the same, to stay relevant, it made big changes. One year after it launched its text message service, it launched a website. A year after that, it launched its first app. With each new platform it has inched further into becoming a service that is just as much about reading other people’s questions as it is about asking them. The website, which had 18 million unique visitors in October and 25 milliion in November, allows users to browse questions by categories. The iPhone app added the ability to browse recent and nearby categories. ChaCha CMO Shawn Schwegman says, “70% of the people who use the apps don't ask a question. They're looking at the categories that they're interested in.” That, and probably at questions such as “If a vampire and a zombie get in a fight, who wins?” that are mixed in with those from students obviously cheating on tests (“What challenges did President Truman face after World War II?”) and from those who haven’t gotten over the magic (“ARE YOU a REAL PERSON?”). Trending topics on ChaCha often mirror news events. After it was announced that Steve Jobs had died, for instance, ChaCha got 18,000 questions about his life and death. “People hear things on TV and then they ask the question of ChaCha,” Schwegman says. That this sounds a bit like Twitter hasn’t been lost on the company. Its wheels have been spinning on the social question for some time. Planning For a Social TwistTo cater to users’ demonstrated interest in what their friends are asking questions about, ChaCha has put a number of interactive features in the pipeline. For starters, it plans to add a scalable map that shows where the millions of questions per day are coming from. “The big difference here is that when questions are popping, they're answered,” says ChaCha Head of Mobile Product Mick Oppy. “It's not like, oh, here's a question.’ We've actually completed an answer.” Schwegman says that the company has also been thinking of ways in which it will allow users to communicate with each other for the first time at some point next year. “There's a huge barrier to entry for the kind of answering that we do,” he says. “For other Q&A platforms to move into the real time Q&A space would be very difficult. However, it's not that difficult for us to move into the crowdsourcing space.” More About: ChaCha, q&a, Startups For more Business coverage:
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| Gingerbread Dominates 50.51% of Android Phones, Five Others Coexist Posted: 04 Dec 2011 02:00 PM PST   The Android platform moves quickly. While Google does its best to keep the OS fresh and secure, OEMs and carriers don’t always act quickly in pushing out the latest code to already existing devices. Complicating matters are new devices, often pushed to market with code that’s not always the latest. The result? Now, six versions of Android coexist on devices (Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich) with Gingerbread being the dominant one. Android 2.3.x represents 50.51% of all Android installs while the rest of the versions still account for a total of 47% (the difference is Honeycomb on tablets). In layman’s terms, for every Gingerbread phone in use, there’s a phone running older code.  While Ice Cream Sandwich is too fresh to be part of the pie chart, Froyo still has a 35.3% share with Eclair running on 9.6% of Android handsets. There are also 1.3% of devices running Donut and believe it or not, there are 0.8% phones powered by Cupcake. While it is fair to write off Cupcake and Donut phones, the future should see a shift from Froyo to Gingerbread and from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich (in some exceptional cases, directly from Froyo to Ice Cream Sandwich). We have to also accept the fact that some devices out there are doomed to run the current version of Android until they’re trashed. The only question is how quickly will OEMs and carriers act on this. [via Android Developers, DroidDog] More About: android, gingerbread, ice cream sandwich
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| Sneak Peek at Santa’s Warehouses: Where Online Gifts Really Come From [PICS] Posted: 04 Dec 2011 01:21 PM PST You’ve placed dozens of book orders on Amazon by now. You’ve typed in a credit card number and address for at least a decade’s worth of bagels to your New York City-deprived relatives in Seattle. But when was the last time you stopped to wonder where those packages came from — or at least, where their layovers were? We’ve asked five major online retailers to show us their backstage operations. Considering you’ve probably only seen their online storefronts, these warehouse will blow your mind (read: Zappos has a continent of shoes at least 100 boxes high and many thousands wide). What behind-the-scenes retail operations are you most curious to see? Zappos   Zappos Fulfullment Center, Shepherdsville, KY. Click here to view this gallery. More About: amazon, features, gilt, newegg, online retail, Zappos For more Business coverage:
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| Viral Video: Band Brings iPhone Games Into the Real World Posted: 04 Dec 2011 12:42 PM PST
When members of the Australian indie pop group Hey Geronimo put together a music video of the title cut from their upcoming Why Don’t We Do Something? album, they started with some of their favorite iPhone games and ended up bringing them into the physical world. iPhone gamers will recognize Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Flight Control, Cut The Rope and Plants vs. Zombies in the video. Looks like band members Tony Garrett, Greg Chiapello, Pete Kilroy, Andrew Stone and Rosco Pearson had a blast making the video, although we’re glad we weren’t the ones assigned to wear those Angry Birds heads. The video’s quickly making its way toward viral status, receiving more than 181,000 views in the past couple of days. More About: angry birds, Hey Geronimo, viral video, youtube video of the day For more Entertainment coverage:
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| Tech the Halls: 12 Christmas Decorations for Geeks [PICS] Posted: 04 Dec 2011 11:37 AM PST 1. Pantone Christmas Baubles Color-code your Christmas with these stunning Pantone baubles. Cost: $14 each or $62 for a set of five Click here to view this gallery. Here at Mashable we love the holiday season. Decorating your home, cubicle and heck — even your car — is all part of the fun. However, traditional decs just aren’t geeky enough for our tech-loving tastes. To this end we’ve scoured the web for festive ornaments with a geeky or social media twist. From Angry Birds to LEGO via Santa-Bots, we think you’ll like our 10 cool Yule creations. Let us know in the comments which ones you’d stick on your tree. More About: Christmas, features, Gadgets, gallery, geek, Holidays 2011, Tech For more Dev & Design coverage:
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| 13 Helpful Apps for Taking Care of Your Pets [INFOGRAPHIC] Posted: 04 Dec 2011 11:04 AM PST When it comes to taking care of your pets, your smartphone can be surprisingly handy. Here are some of the best apps that help you make sure your dogs and cats are happy and safe. These 13 helpful apps can do things such as track your pet‘s health, show you tips for grooming and care, help you select the right foods, locate dog parks, find pet-friendly hotels and lots more, and they’re now available for your iOS and Android smartphones. Which apps are the best? The resourceful people at eBay Classifieds have found some of the most useful, including them in this infographic:
Infographic courtesy eBay Classifieds More About: android, apps, iOS, pets
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| Apple Licensed iOS Scrolling Patent to Nokia, Offered It to Samsung Too? Posted: 04 Dec 2011 10:29 AM PST   Apple licensed an iOS software patent to Nokia and IBM– reportedly related to scrolling, especially the part where over-scrolling reveals a textured background. When Apple and Samsung reached a settlement over a patent battle last summer and withdrew complaints from the U.S. International Trade Commission, Apple not only paid up a one-time check but also forked over ongoing royalties to Nokia. One of the items Apple licensed to Nokia and IBM– is reportedly the iOS scrolling patent. This by itself demonstrates that Apple lost a major fight as the Cupertino company was never so willing to give away code, especially if that bit was referring to iOS. What’'s even more interesting is that Apple reportedly offered the license to the same patent to Samsung during failed settlement negotiations in November 2010. This, of course, in a context in which the late Steve Jobs wanted to "destroy Android" because he regarded it as being a stolen product. There's no information on why those specific negotiations failed (or whether others are ongoing with lawsuits between the two companies now existing on almost every continent). In that Nokia-Apple war settled last summer, which took place in a courtroom instead of the market, Nokia had initially sued Apple at the end of 2009 over ten GSM, UMTS, and Wi-Fi related patents allegedly infringed by Cupertino in its iPhones; Apple got back in the game with a lawsuit against Espoo for alleged infringement of thirteen Apple patents. [via The Verge, MyNokiaBlog] More About: apple, patents, Sausung For more Mobile coverage:
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| Top 10 Tweets: Herman Cain’s #CainWreck Speech Posted: 04 Dec 2011 09:36 AM PST Chinese Nukes? Huh?
Click here to view this gallery. When Herman Cain’s hapless presidential campaign went down in flames on Saturday, Twitter lit up with a firestorm of hilarious quips. As Cain delivered his defiant last hurrah when “suspending” his presidential bid, he gave one of his final and most generous gifts to comedians and jokesters all over the world, with a rambling and almost incoherent speech that contained a tremendous amount of fodder to hoist the (allegedly) philandering and (rumored) sexually harassing politician on his own petard. Let’s face it, when you wear sunglasses to an event where you’d like to exude credibility, and then start quoting from Pokémon, you’re pretty much asking for it. And Herman Cain got it from Twitter, including the 10 best tweets we present to you here. What do you think? Did Herman Cain deserve this widespread ridicule as his Cain Train pulled into the station? Is this the last we’ll hear from the former pizza man? Bonus: Here’s Cain’s bizarre speech: Pic courtesy A1 Social More About: CainWreck, Herman Cain, Twitter
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| 10 Historical Events Affected by Social Media Posted: 04 Dec 2011 08:23 AM PST   Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, Princess Diana’s death — these three events might have played out differently had social media been as strong as it is now. That’s not to say they wouldn’t have happened. But if nonprofits then had been able to access the same technology resources we have today, perhaps the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina wouldn’t have been so painstakingly slow and devastating. Families wouldn’t have waited nearly as long to be reunited after 9/11; not to mention, those who couldn’t turn to real-life support could have relied on digital communities. And today’s technology would have made it a lot easier to personally contact British friends as they mourned the loss of Princess Diana. Alas, we worked around the technological limitations of the time. Today we turn to social media when an influential event occurs as a way to share our personal experiences and relate to the people most affected. It provides us with the reassurance that we’re not alone, but also gives us the opportunity to help. Here are 10 moments in history affected by social media. How would social media have changed the outcome of other historical events? Let us know what you think in the comments. 1. Presidential Election 2008 Twitter had never existed in any campaign before the 2008 presidential election, where it was successfully integrated into President Obama's campaign. Although voting has traditionally been regarded as a private decision, millions took to social media to openly express their political approval or contempt. Click here to view this gallery. More About: features, history, japan earthquake, september 11, Social Media
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| 8 Holiday Apps That Are Just Plain Silly Posted: 04 Dec 2011 07:21 AM PST The holiday season is in full swing, and smartphone and tablet app stores are flooded with products designed to capitalize on the winter cheer. Old standbys such as Angry Birds Seasons debut timely updates to revamp gamer interest, while apps such as Cut The Rope develop entirely new products to attract a new wave of gamers eager to celebrate their holiday feelings with Om Nom. Along with this wave of new material comes apps specifically designed to provide holiday entertainment. In the sea of talking Santas and augmented reality apps, new entertainment products spring up faster than jokey novelty stocking stuffers at the sales counter of your local toy store. Here are 8 apps that corner the market on holiday minutia. Need a way to spread holiday cheer? Turns out, there really is an app for that. Is there a holiday unitasker you love (or loathe) to unleash on your peers? Let us know in the comments below. 1. Mr. Breen Christmas Counter   This puzzling anomaly of an Android widget features a rather intense-looking fellow in a Santa hat staring out coldly into the void and thinking about how many days left until Christmas. If that's not enough to get you into the holiday mood, if you tap the face, Jingle Bells will begin playing. Click here to view this gallery. More About: android, apps, Christmas, Hannukah, Holidays 2011, iphone
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