media

In recent years, we've seen people dabble in bringing a narrative film experience to mobile phones. It makes sense -- there's an interactive personal screen in your pocket that allows you to pick up content wherever you go. But neither the interactive film "Tender Loving Care" (starring John Hurt) nor the Dutch film "App," which interacted with your iOS or Android device during cinematic screenings, picked up much traction.

"Haunting Melissa," by film producer Neal Edelstein, might have what it takes. Available globally as a free app on iOS, the film is accessible, and it's using the flexibility of mobile devices to experiment with the genre. … Read more

Twitter and NBA Digital have partnered to stream in-tweet video highlights of some of the NBA playoffs' most exciting plays.

The deal, which was first reported by Bloomberg, comes just days after a similar arrangement between Twitter and ESPN. In that arrangement, Twitter users will have access to replays from soccer, the X Games, and college football.

Twitter said that the NBA highlights will be sponsored by Sony Pictures Entertainment, Taco Bell, and Sprint Nextel.

QR codes haven't exactly set the world on fire, yet most people know what they are, and most phones can scan them, either out of the box or with a third-party app.

The Findables Case takes that idea to heart by emblazoning a unique QR code on each hard-plastic shell, the idea being to use that code to share information about yourself or help recover your lost phone.

In other words, your case can now take the place of your business card, while at the same time offering good Samaritans a means of contacting you (that doesn't involve poring through your address book).

When someone scans the code, they'll see one of three profiles (chosen by you via a companion app or the Findables Web site): Business, Social, or Lost.… Read more

Pheed, a social-networking service designed to meet all the multimedia needs of today's mobile user, has launched its application for Android.

The Android release trails Pheed's official debut back in November on Apple's iOS platform.

Since then, the Los Angeles-based bootstrapped startup has racked up "a few million users," around 20 percent of whom are teens ages 15 to 17. And more than 42 percent of app users are between the ages of 17 and 22, which means Pheed is already immensely popular with high schoolers and college kids and may be one of the … Read more

"Thank you for sharing" takes on an entirely new meaning when using social media. Most of the people who use Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks intend their posts to enlighten, amuse, or inspire their friends and followers. It doesn't always work out that way.

For businesses, Twitter is primarily about customer relations, but this can backfire, too, as Customer Think's Trish Miller points out in the Top 10 Twitter Mistakes of 2012.

The first time you sat behind the wheel of a car you didn't just turn the key and head for the freeway … Read more

If you like sports highlights but spend more time on social networks than watching TV, Twitter and ESPN are going to do their best to meet your needs.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter and ESPN plan to announce tomorrow a deepening of their existing relationship, agreeing on a pact under which the leading sports channel will unveil a wide variety of highlight clips in its tweets. The videos would be available on Twitter "shortly after" they take place live.

Naturally, the new arrangement -- which expands on a pact signed in December under which ESPN began … Read more

Twitter's shopping spree shows no signs of letting up. Today, the social-networking giant said that it has acquired big data startup Lucky Sort.

Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper said in a blog post that his company's "goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize, and visualize by building elegant and user-friendly tools for text analysis."

Neither Twitter nor Lucky Sort said precisely how the startup will be integrated into Twitter's larger plans, but Pepper said in his post that several members of his team would be moving to San Francisco to become … Read more

Meet Saga, the "Automatic Lifelogging" app. This is the app you've never known you needed. Remember what you were doing last Thursday? Saga remembers. OK, I guess that sounds a bit creepy. But really, here's what the app does...

Instead of forcing you to write a journal each day to talk about everything you did, in perhaps an overlong narrative, Saga keeps everything in a neat list for you. Checked in at the grocery store on Foursquare last Monday? Saga recorded it. Tweeted about an upcoming movie you want to see? Yep, Saga got that, too. … Read more

Imgur is one of those sites that becomes a huge time sink if you let it. For some reason, browsing the random photos that people upload is really addictive, and so is reading the comments on said photos.

If you like to share your own images, you probably already know there are four ways to do so: uploading from your computer, putting in a URL, dragging and dropping, or with the paste command. But if you notice that you're often sharing pictures you find online, whether they're in your Facebook Timeline or just random spots on the Web, … Read more