Local News

How would you like to put an NBA star to work as your own personal phone operator? That’s more or less the idea behind a Twitter-driven contest by Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry. Curry has called for fans to tweet him video clips their best moves from the game H-O-R-S-E, where players try to best one another with trick shots. Fans have until midnight on Sunday to send their videos to his @StephenCurry30 account with the hashtag #SC30. His top 5 picks will then be entered into a poll on his Facebook page, where fans will vote the ul...

Been away from Mashable for a few days? Here’s something that’ll get you caught up in a flash: it’s our weekly roundup of Mashable features. Look at all the coolness you missed: We have tips for the transition into Facebook Timeline, tricks for improving your productivity via Google Calendar and Safari and links to the most popular memes. We’ve covered social networking in the workplace, using networks for social good and even using plugins to help you get the old Facebook back. So if you wanted to catch up on the best of our digital me...

In case you missed it, Google really is organizing all the word's data.  This is no longer a clever marketing ploy but the stark reality of the digital world in which we live.  In an era where more than 61% of all adults search for health information online, we need to sit up and take notice when Google makes significant changes to its search results and privacy policy.  Given the outcry this week regarding Google's privacy policy and this month's integration of Google+, let's step back and review a few facts.1) Facebook may have nearly a billion users but Google still dominates search...

We've written before about Brainshark's iPad slide show app and today they have announced the availability of SlideShark Team Edition. It adds admin controls, team-wide content sharing, and usage analytics to the individual features found previously. With Team Edition, sales teams for example can share their slide decks as they tote about their iPads around the countryside. Individuals can still upload PowerPoint slides for their own use too.

Today is International Data Privacy Day, an event backed by companies like Intel, Ebay, Facebook and Microsoft, and dedicated to educating data owners about best practices in protecting the privacy of consumer data. The need to keep people from being exploited on account of violations of their privacy is clear, well-known, intuitive and amply articulated by highly capable people. The up-side of making use of peoples' data is far less so. The two concerns are closely tied together. That's something Bill Gates is likely very aware of, if his comments 10 years ago are any indication.

As social media is becoming ingrained in our society, the Philadelphia Police Department is on the frontier of its use in law enforcement. The PPD Media Relations Unit has incorporated several social media platforms to assist the Department in the release of important information and the dissemination of crime surveillance videos to our communities and the media. The nucleus for the Police Department’s presence rests in the “big three” of social media, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.   The Department started using Twitter to micro-blog or “tweet” in September of 2009. The use of Tw...

This has been quite the week for social media blunders, particularly on Twitter. McDonald’s most recent PR stunt is more-commonly being referred to as “#McFail.” The campaign was intended to shift consumer opinions using the hashtag #McDStories, by tweeting facts about their organic potato farmers in an effort to more closely associate themselves with the positive attributes of organic food. But the current consumer mindset association between ‘organic’ and fast food could not be at further polar opposites. This tweeting strategy quickly backfired as the campaign became a l...

About the panel Jonathan Salem Baskin is an author who writes a regular column on Advertising Age posts on his award-winning blog. More » John Bell heads up the 360° Digital Influence team teaches graduate studies in Digital Influence at Johns Hopkins University. More » Don Bulmer is Vice President of Communication Strategy at Royal Dutch Shell More » John Byrne is chairman editor-in-chief of C-Change Media Inc. the author or co-author of eight books. More » Gini Dietrich Gini Dietrich is the founder and chief executive officer of Arment Dietric...

Along with all of the other weird quirks of the web, animated GIFs are extremely popular — especially on content-curating sites like Tumblr and Reddit. In terms of GIFs, we’ve seen everything from mainstream celebrities photobombing major award shows to familiar web trends like cats and Star Wars characters. But when it comes to animated GIFs, one thing is for certain: Humor always wins. SEE ALSO: 10 Funniest GIF Trends of 2011 Here are 10 hilarious GIFs circling the web these days. Do you have a favorite? Let us know in the comments. ...

So it is that a software designer ends up becoming one of the public faces of the ideal of API architecture as a business tool. Daniel Jacobson is the lead API engineer for Netflix - arguably the largest single consumer of bandwidth on the entire Internet. His O'Reilly book, APIs: A Strategy Guide, co-authored with Apigee CTO Greg Brail and research editor Dan Wood, deals with the implementation of APIs not so much for software's own exclusive purposes, but moreover as a means of realigning and renovating business' resources overall. "APIs should not be geeky 'science projects,'" ...