This fall, the CW will give a lot of airtime to a new up-and-comer: Microsoft’s Bing.

The search engine will appear on the lower third of TV programming during certain shows, highlighting “TV to Bing About,” a twist on the network’s “TV to Talk About” slogan. The effort will also include more than 50 vignettes featuring the cast of various CW shows specially made for Bing and will appear on a dedicated microsite.

Read the rest of this article at Mashable

Today marks Twitter’s 5th birthday and they’ve launched a new discovery page to help new and existing users figure out who they should follow. The page includes a video with a star-studded cast. Everyone from Hilary Clinton and Gary Vaynerchuck to Dana White and Martha Stewart share how they use the popular micro-blogging service.

Serena shares how she follows her favorite band Green Day on Twitter so she can keep up with what they’re doing. Snoop Dogg admits following his “home girl” Martha Stewart “because she keeps it stuttered and buttered, baked and flaked, and she love to wake and bake with the big Snoop Dogg.”

There are some very interesting and intelligent people in the video and also listed on the site so that you can explore their profiles and follow them. If none of these popular people tickle your fancy, you can browse the general categories to “discover your world. ”

Even though Twitter has gone mainstream, most people still haven’t a clue what to do with it. This is a good move for Twitter in leveraging these celebrity personalities to give people ideas. Check out the video below.

via TechCrunch

Research and discovery is very important to many people as the art of consuming news continues to evolve. There are many tools that are created that have a minimal shelf life until the public moves on to the next best thing. Icerocket is a tool that was created in 2004 and is still around today, it provides great value for those who have a thirst to stay on top of what is buzzing on the internet.

IceRocket is a real-time search engine that searches blogs, tweets, news etc in real-time. They have a couple different blog tools including Link Tracker, Topics and Trends. The initial home page gives you the option to search in real time through blogs, the web, Twitter, News, Images and a category called “Big Buzz”. Pick a topic, click search and watch the results come through in real time.  Big Buzz provides the user with a way to see all of the sections aggregated on one page in real time. In order for you to manage the flow of information effectively, real time updates can be adjusted to one, three or five minute increments. One interesting feature is that people’s Facebook status updates or links that they share show up in real time as well.

Moving back to the home page, there are additional sections that monitor video buzz (tracked on video links sent to YouTube and Google), Movie news, sports news and celebrity news. The Trends tool allows you to enter up to three terms and watch them trend over time. A great feature in this tool is that it shows you buzz stats. The Topics tool, also very cool, shows you popular tags people are using. My favorite feature is called Icespy. IceSpy is another great search feature. IceSpy shows you what IceRocket users are searching for in real-time. IceRocket doesn’t censor the displayed searches which leads to some pretty random results (I am still trying to figure out why Epson is so popular). The IceSpy searches are divided between the web, blogs, news and images.

Any search on Icerocket gives you an RSS feed for future monitoring. You can also use the RSS Builder tool that Icerocket has available as well.  I highly recommend adding Icerocket to your toolbelt if information monitoring and news consumption is important to you. The next time something big breaks, you might just be one of the first people to know about it.

Sony has recently added music to its cloud-based entertainment service called Qriocity. In an interesting strategic development, Sony will offer Qriocity on a variety of connected Sony devices from Bravia TVs to Android-based handsets. Originally, Qriocity had video and movie-based content upon launch in the United States in April of 2010. Strangely enough, the music portion of Qriocity will launch last in the United States with countries such as Ireland and the UK getting access first. I would tend to think this service’s US release will lag on similar to how Spotify’s US release has lagged.

What devices will be able to access this service?  Sony’s 2010 models of network-enabled Bravia TV, Blu-ray Disc player, Blu-ray Disc Home Theater system, PlayStation 3 as well as VAIO and other personal computers. Sony says that it will also eventually be usable on Sony’s portable devices, as well as Android-based mobile devices (possibly even those not made by Sony Ericsson). The availability on PlayStation 3 and Android-based mobile devices are the most exciting. The PS3 is turning into a one-stop shop for everything, and one of the current weaknesses is music. Qriocity would turn this weakness into a strength immediately. Also, the ability to access over six million tracks on the go via my Android phone is also encouraging. The main issue is that nothing in life is free.

There are two different cost structures for Qriocity. The first is around $5.49 monthly and gives users unlimited, ad-free forward skipping of the songs; access to a library of six million tracks, and “dozens of personalized channels” categorized by genre, era and even mood, using something Sony calls “SensMe,” a “proprietary 12-tone analysis technology used to evaluate music tracks”. The service not only scans what you are playing but what music is already on your devices, to help build up a profile of your tastes. “SenseMe” is a development with huge potential to expose users to new, underground artists that are below the radar. The second pricing level is Premium level (approx $11.49 monthly) and lets users also create playlists and access premium top-100 channels. Premium can also be trialled for free for 30 days. Initial reviews of the service have been positive with mentions of minor improvements.

Qriocity is focused on bringing your cloud based music to any location in your home or mobile device. With the list of competitors increasing, does it stand a chance of surviving? Leave us your throughts in the comments section.

Google and NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command) have teamed up to bring you realtime coverage of Santa’s sleigh-ride around the world. You can follow Santa as he travels the world sliding down chimneys, dropping off presents, and eating entirely too many chocolate chip cookies.

NORAD has confirmed that Santa and his fully-loaded, reindeer-powered sleigh took off from the North Pole and soared into the arctic sky at 6:00 a.m. EST (5:00 a.m. CST, 4:00 a.m. MST, 3:00 a.m. PST). NORAD radar is tracking Rudolph’s bright red nose, and satellite imagery is providing minute-by-minute coverage of Santa’s location.

While watching Santa’s progress across a world map is pretty cool, that’s just the tip of the iceberg this year. Instead of just watching a 2D Santa hop across a flat map, you can see Santa in 3D using the Google Earth plugin. Tips on setting that up are here. After you’ve got the plugin installed, just visit the 3D tracker to see what’s really going on with jolly old St. Nick.

With mobile being the new center of attention in the tech world, Google and NORAD have also made it possible to check on Santa from your smartphone using Google Maps for mobile. Just open it up and do a search for “Santa” to see his latest location.

If you’re interested in seeing videos of where Santa has been or can’t get the Google Earth plugin working, you can watch video of where he’s been.

Santa Cams are ultra-cool, high-tech, high-speed digital cameras pre-positioned at many locations around the world only on December 24th. The cameras capture images and videos of Santa and his reindeer as they make their journey around the world.

For the kids, or adults who still believe in Santa, you can visit the Kids’ Countdown section to browse shops in the North Pole, play games, and see what’s going on with Santa’s helpers.

Making sure to keep up with the latest in social networking, you can also track Santa via Facebook and on Twitter at @noradsanta.

Recently, Black Web 2.0 highlighted a popular service called Kickstarter, which helps individuals and groups in multiple categories raise money for their entrepreneurship ventures. Kickstarter tends to trend towards more creative ideas in media, arts, music and other categories. Today we will discuss Fundry which trends towards the software development space. Fundry is operated by Stateless Systems, a small web startup based in Australia.

Fundry defines itself as a crowdfunding platform that helps developers get paid for creating new features, and enables a community of funders to contribute to get the features they want. It’s a win-win for developers and the community they serve. The main focus of Fundry is on any major open-source projects, WordPress themes or plugins and iPhone apps (no Android love yet?). Let’s take a look at how the service works for the developers and the funders.

Once a developer adds a project, they can list projects or features that they plan to develop, as well as accept (or reject) feature requests from the community. When the developer completes and releases a project or feature, everyone who has pledged to the funding of that feature has seen days to accept or reject the feature. The developer receives the total pledged amount (unless there are any fee(s)) if the majority of funders accept the feature. If a minority accepts the feature, the developer receives funding from those that have accepted the feature. This is a small difference from other similar services (for example Kickstarter), which is more of an all-or-nothing funding model. Fundry charges a 5% fee on any successful funding. Paypal is the only method of payment currently be used, so be sure to have you account set up.

Funders have a more simple road to investing. Once they have funds in their Fundry account, a funder can pledge to particular project or feature, and add feature requests. A pledge can be cancelled at any time before a project is completed. A funder may also withdraw at any time funds they have deposited with Fundry (provided that those funds have not been pledged to a project that is complete). There is also the option to simply make a donation to a specific project and not request a feature. No fees are charged to the developer for a donation.

The next key component is voting on the features once they are complete. Upon first glance, the rules are a bit confusing. A majority vote will net the developer all of the money that has been pledged for a specific feature. This means that some funders could “reject” the feature but still have to pay the money pledged.More detailed information is located here in the Fundry FAQ.

In addition to revenue generation, Fundry will provide a nice platform to view customer feedback and interest in new features based on what is requested and how the pledged money is distributed.

Anyone have any experience using Fundry? Leave your story or thoughts in the comments section.

Salesforce.com has announced plans to officially release Chatter.com early 2011. Chatter.com is known in the industry as a “Facebook for Work”. Salesforce.com has a segment of their service called the “Collaboration Cloud”. Within this cloud is where chatter.com will sit. From salesforce.com’s website, they like to describe chatter.com as , “a new world of real-time enterprise collaboration software-as-a-service. It’s a world where collaborating at work is as easy as using Facebook. It’s where you stay on top of what’s happening in your company with real-time updates on people and groups, important documents, and your top deals and accounts. You can also discover new experts and insights that will make your job easier. All of it fueling smarter and faster business decisions.”

The goal with Chatter.com is to keep up with everything that’s happening in your company with real-time feeds very similar to how Facebook works in your personal life. Let’s take a deeper look at the features of Chatter.com:

• Profiles – Get to know your colleagues and share important information in the Collaboration Cloud. Discover peers and experts to expand your network and work more productively. Establish yourself as an expert in the areas where you have knowledge to share.
• Status updates – Keep your colleagues up to date on what you’re doing. Share insights, prevent duplication of effort, and reduce unproductive email traffic.
• Groups – Work more productively in teams to get things done quickly. Share information, work together on documents, and collaborate on business-critical projects—all in the Collaboration Cloud.
• Document sharing – Work collaboratively on documents and easily find them again months or years later, all from a secure browser, right in the Collaboration Cloud.
• App updates – Make all your salesforce.com applications smarter and more proactive. Your salesforce.com application records come to life when they can automatically alert you to updates and changes, right in your real-time feed.
• Feeds – Monitor the people, groups, documents, and application data that are most important to you—it’s all pushed to you in real time in the Collaboration Cloud.
• Security and sharing – Keep the right people in the know and keep sensitive information private. Security is not a concern in the Collaboration Cloud.
• Social – Bring insights from Facebook and Twitter into your Collaboration Cloud, so you can monitor all of your communities from your unified, real-time feed.
• AppExchange – Add Collaboration Cloud features to your Force.com applications or build brand-new apps that include Chatter. Then add them to the AppExchange, salesforce.com’s popular marketplace of cloud computing. Now featuring ChatterExchange, where you can find collaboration software-as-a-service apps for your business.

The debate is whether or not Salesforce.com can beat out Yammer which has a similar feature set and has recently gained momentum with additional funding and new clients. Dell is one of the first company’s to use Chatter and  they currently have over 100,000 users within the system.

Chatter.com is free for everyone to try. From there, Chatter.com users can upgrade to Chatter pro, the traditional service that costs $15 per user per month. They can also upgrade to Salesforce’s other customer relationship management (CRM) software products. There are also Chatter apps on the iPhone, iPad and Blackberry. The Android version is coming in first quarter 2011 and the site should come out of beta in February of 2011.

Are you motivated to use chatter within your company as the communication platform? Leave us your thoughts in the comments section.

Popular social networking-focused web browser Flock, has released version 3.5 which now supports Apple Macintosh OS. Flock makes it extremely easy to integrate five different social networks during every move you make in your browsing experience. The newest addition is Linkedin which joins Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr as the foundation of what makes Flock tick.

Flock allows users to see all of their social content in one place by simply glancing at the sleek Flock sidebar, including tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn status updates, RSS feeds, and YouTube and Flickr content. Flock takes it a step further by utilizing social search, so users can “See what your friends are saying.” When you enter a question or search query in the address bar, Flock shows you recent pages, favorite sites and feeds, and Google search results, as well as any matches from your friends’ status updates, tweets, and photo/video uploads across all of your social networks.

Flock has been busy in the past six months. In June, they introduced the first social web browser built on the superfast Chromium platform which received many accolades. People are taking notice as Flock has reached 57 million new activities conducted within new the latest version of Flock per day — over 4 billion activities in the last four months. Since June 2010, Flock has been seeing an average 15-percent increase in active users week over week. It is one of the only products on Facebook with two products listed in the top 10 for most popular desktop applications. The original version of Flock is the number one non-mobile desktop app on Facebook and new Flock (Social Browser) is now the sixth most popular non-mobile desktop app on Facebook.

Here is a list of the most recent technical additions within Flock:

• Combined Address & Search Bar: Apart from search, as you type, you see any matches from What Your Friends Are Saying as well as from your history or favorites.
• Sidebar: Shows you the aggregated activity of your friends’ updates, tweets and favorite content (feeds) from across the web
• Groups: Allows you to create groups across social network. (A very bold feature which can be perfected in upcoming updates.)

Are there any Flock users on BW 2.0? Is it worth taking a further look? Leave us your thoughts in the comments section.

Koofers also has an online collaboration model that really promotes student collaboration on an intercollegiate level. The platform enables students to help each other learn, by sharing knowledge and study materials and serving as a mutual resource for questions and answers, study groups, collaboration, etc. The social learning platform enables students to collaborate nationwide with their peers at other universities who are taking equivalent courses and studying similar subjects. Where was this when I was struggling with Calculus II in summer school? Another cool feature that compliments the social collaboration is how Koofers is aggregating and organizing some of the best content available on the web (videos, lectures, instructional materials, etc.) and making it easy and free to access so that students may further enhance their learning experience.

Continuing with the goal of saving college students as much money as possible, Koofers recently introduced a textbook comparison tool which shows students the place to purchase their textbooks for the greatest value. The Textbook Center helps students find the lowest prices on their class books from the industry’s leading textbook vendors. Koofers has partnered with the top online book providers to give students the most options. Partners include: Amazon, Amazon Marketplace, Barnes and Noble, BookRenter, Chegg, eCampus, Textbooks.com, and Half.com.

Do you have experience using Koofers? Let us know your experience in the comments section. A little advice for any professors reading BW 2.0 – check out what students are saying about your class online. Feedback is a gift.

Two years ago, the phrase “check-in” was reserved for people traveling on airplanes and staying in hotels. Now check-in can include a wide variety of activities. Your current location (Foursquare) , the television show you are watching from home (miso/Getglue) or the next stop on your SCVNGR hunt. Now Meebo has brought us our next check-in frenzy, checking in to anywhere on the web. In simple terms, once you download the Meebo mini-bar that will be placed at the bottom of your browser, you can then check-in from any website across the Internet. You do have to sign-up for Meebo, but it is a simple and non-intrusive process. Next, download the browser extension and then you are off and running.

Users can follow other people who are on Meebo and begin to share websites you visit. Similar to the “mayor” goals that Foursquare has, you can become a VIP of websites that you visit. More than one person can become a VIP of any specific site. Eventually, the team at Meebo says the goal is for individual sites to reward their most loyal visitors who achieve VIP status, but that is strictly based on the website’s personal decision. If there is a specific article on a specific site you would like to share, you have the choice of sharing the website, the article or both. All of the information will show up on your feed and in the feed of anyone who follows you. Whenever you visit different sites, your activity will only be shared if you choose to click the check-in button.

The true value of this new creation by Meebo is the ability to see which sites your friends and people you follow check-in to on a regular basis. Compared to following people on Google Reader, Facebook and Twitter, this gives you a more in-depth look at sites regularly visited. Discovery is the name of the game and Meebo has taken an interesting step in this space – social discovery based on interest.

Meebo is not interested in “game mechanics”, but rather exposing users to new websites among people who have common interests in similar websites . Imagine if you just began to develop an interest in cooking. Visit a major site and check-in via meebo. Next, look at who is a “VIP” on the cooking site and then check to see what other sites they visit or are VIPs. From there the discovery portal is open and within minutes you can discover three or four relevant websites related to your new interest. Pretty cool. Check out this video of the CEO of Meebo, Seth Sternberg, explaining the new service.

Publisher tools will be out in mid to late December which will include to the API for this mini-bar. Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer are the lucky browsers with first access to the service. More will be added in the upcoming weeks. Mobile access and implementation should come to fruition later on down the line. I am a big fan of Meebo (almost five years of use for myself) and suggest you try it out. What initially may seem like another company playing the check-in game actually is very different and more in tune with expanding your knowledge base. Try it out, follow me on Meebo and let us know your thoughts in the comments section.