Back during the heyday of CrunchGear (now known as TechCrunch/Gadgets), we couldn’t get enough of Borderlands . The game masterfully combined the game play of a FPS with the best elements of an RPG.

For various reasons (groan) I’m not heading to SXSW this year, but then neither are millions of other people. But that won’t stop the 20,000 attendees from clogging up our Twitter feeds trying to find each other in the nearest bar, tweeting incessantly about some “awesome” panel session you are not at or generally conversing about in-jokes you weren’t there to witness. That’s why you need a handy way of temporarily blocking those tweets or those people – or maybe even both

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have long counted on the rise in smartphone usage to help fuel their growth: that trend, however, seems to also be taking a toll on mobile carriers — specifically in the form of revenues. The analyst firm of Ovum , part of the Informa Group, has estimated that operators lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenue in 2011, as a result of their customers using services like Twitter and Facebook to message each other instead of the carriers’ own text messaging services.

Mobilisafe , the stealthy Seattle-based mobile security startup with $1.2 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group and Trilogy Equity Partnership , is opening up access to its private beta program today (invite link below) for a handful of TechCrunch readers. In addition, the company is revealing new insights it gained during its private beta period related to the penetration of mobile devices in the SMB market – the area which happens to be the startup’s current area of focus. Much of the current analysis on the consumerization of I.T

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