Sophie helps a guest check her bags.

I spent the summer of 2008 living in a youth hostel in the middle of Times Square, where an old classmate I had reconnected with on MySpace had filled his two-bedroom apartment with bunk beds. I shared a basement with a rotating cast of 14 tourists and two kittens while he slept in a loft space above the living room and his roommate took the other bedroom. The idea was ahead of its time — Airbnb, a site for listing short-term rentals of rooms or entire homes, emerged just a couple months later.

In exchange for free room and board for the summer, I would help my host check the guests in, hand them their keys, and answer the questions they had about the city, although I had just arrived myself and didn’t know

Swirl today launched an eponymous app that retailers can use to deliver targeted content and offers to consumers while they shop in their stores.

Timberland, Kenneth Cole, Exhale Spa and several others began using the platform in New York and Boston stores.

“We think Swirl creates a really exciting way to enhance the shopping experiences of our customers, on their terms. It also gives us valuable, real-time insights so we can hone in on – and better serve – our customers’ needs,” said Jim Davey, Vice President of Global Brand Marketing at Timberland.

Geolocation has been a much coveted tool for marketers since it first became widely used in smartphones. But marketers have struggled to make full use of its commercial potential, due in part to the need for either free-standing apps or for the tools on a major platform to serve

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Microsoft’s New Xbox One Teams with Spielberg and NFL to Create Interactive Social TV (LostRemote)
Xbox revealed its next-generation console Tuesday, Xbox One, featuring live TV integration and two big announcements to blur the lines between television and social gaming. The big announcements were focused on redefining the act of watching TV from a passive to an active experience — mostly on the first screen. The New York Times To that end, Microsoft announced a plan to develop its own original live-action television series that will be accessible through the Xbox, in partnership with the director Steven Spielberg, based on its Halo video-game franchise. The company is also working with the National Football League to develop an app for Xbox that lets players interact

Facing an online revolt, Ferrero, the company that makes Nutella, rescinded a cease-and-desist letter it had sent to the organizer of World Nutella Day, an online event to celebrate the delicious chocolate-hazelnut spread.

“I’m relieved to say there’s been a positive resolution to the situation. Ferrero employees reached out to me directly after I had posted my fan letter online and sent my formal reply to their C&D [cease-and-desist letter]. They were very gracious and supportive and we were able to have a productive discussion about World Nutella Day living on for the fans, which is the whole point,” said the event’s organizer Sara Rosso.

But even in its Facebook post apologizing for the fiasco, Ferrero still showed a lack of social grace.

“The case arose from a routine brand defense procedure that was activated as a result of some misuse of the

This week, Yahoo got a much-needed dose of cool when the company announced its plans to acquire the blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion. In 2008, long before Tumblr CEO David Karp said “fuck yeah” to Yahoo, he told Mediabistro  in an interview about his plans for the startup, “I don’t think we aim to sell anything.”

Read an excerpt from our 2008 “So What Do You Do?” interview with Karp below:

Describe the ideal situation for Tumblr, five years out: What will be its key features and how many users will you have registered? How many will be on staff?

In five years, I have absolutely no clue. Hopefully we’ll have moved into the position of refining a core product. We’ll be refining whatever that product is and have shifted our focus on entirely new functionally and uses that we’ll be investing

Twitter has earned a patent for the interactive feature by which users pull down to refresh content, which is widely used in mobile apps. The company said it would manage the patent using an Innovator’s Patent Agreement, essentially only exercising the patent if it is first sued by a company that allegedly infringes on it.

To use the patent as the basis for suing another company first, Twitter would have to get permission from the former employee who created the patented technology, Loren Brichter, who’s latest project is the popular game WordPress.

If the model works as Twitter says it will, it may influence the tech industry as a whole.

The new type of patent, released in draft form last spring, seeks to reduce the use of patent claims to stifle challenges from competitors. Groups called patent assertion entities also

Brooklynites love Brooklyn Bowl for its 16 bowling lanes, live concerts, cushy leather seats, fried chicken from Blue Ribbon, and selection of Brooklyn Brewery beers, but how does the rest of the world discover a remote corner of Williamsburg that’s big enough for a whole bowling alley? And how does the venue keep New Yorkers coming back for more?

Social media.

Founded in 2008, Brooklyn Bowl now has the most-followed Instagram profile of any venue in New York City (8,940 followers). In 2011, “Brooklyn Bowl” was the tenth most-searched Google keyword in the New York metropolitan area.

Justin Bolognino, founder and creative director of Learned Evolution, leads the social strategy for his clients at Brooklyn Bowl, who strive to provide the same experience online that they do in person. “We’re constantly reaching out to people to build a tight-knit community online,” Bolognino said.

Brooklyn

YouTube has announced the winners of its Next Vlogger competition: an elite group of video bloggers who inspire others while they sit in front of the camera and talk about everything from their latest hauls from the beauty supply store to the best uses for pineapples.

The YouTube judges were looking to crown the next Philip DeFranco or iJustine, who are just two of the many talented vloggers who have made the format so popular on the video-sharing site.

The judges found talent in the U.S., England, Ireland, and Australia who cover a broad spectrum of geekery, beauty, comedy, and other topics.

And the winners are:

• 3sixty5days
• Akayd
• appchat
• beckie0
• csandreas
• emilieofnewgloom
• EQVAY04
• glowpinkstah
• ItsRaphaBlueBerry
• Kayleighkill
• lukeslovinglife
• millymollymandy16
• PlusModelinTheMaking
• thatzak
• TheOliWhiteTV

Each of these winners will attend a Google+ workshop

No wonder Grumpy Cat is so grumpy: parents are now sharing more videos of their kids than of their cats, according to a survey of parents by Magisto.com and PlayScience global research firm. In fact, parents are three times more likely to shoot and share videos of their kids (27 percent) than they are of their pets (9 percent).

Shooting a video does not always guarantee that it will be shared, the research showed. Overall, 60 percent of parents said they shoot at least three videos per month, while less than half (44 percent) say they share at least three videos per month. But 53 percent of parents said they shoot videos of their kids just so they can share them with others and 88 percent of parents will share them either way.

See which devices and platforms parents prefer, and the subtle differences between moms and dads, in the infographic below.

I have a simple question for you: How much does social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk stand to make from Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr? On Gary Vaynerchuk’s website, he discloses that he has an investment in Tumblr.

As far back as 2008, according to The Wall Street Journal, Gary has been seen “backslapping” with Tumblr CEO David Karp. Gary’s website is hosted on Tumblr, something that, in arguably an extraordinary step, was announced on the Tumblr staff blog in February of 2009. In his first book, Crush It, Gary compares and contrasts WordPress with Tumblr, but I feel he clearly was arguing in favor of readers using Tumblr over WordPress, going as far as to have an aside on Page 63 that says, “E-mail me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for details about the