While the question remains whether or not you should be eating Domino’s pizza at all, a clever service now allows you to pay for your pie with Bitcoins. The service is far from an official Domino’s app and is instead a gateway or broker between the world of pizza and the world of popular virtual currencies.

The site, PizzaForCoins, asks for your address and then brings up pizza places near you. You place your order and send over your coins – the exchange rate is “APPROXIMATELY $0.50 Cents less then the current Mt.Gox Rate,” their emphasis – and wait for your pizza. Then you eat it.

The team behind the site, Matt Burkinshaw and Riley Alexander, built the service as a conduit between bitcoin and the real world, a key tool that will improve the visibility and viability of the platform.

The pair are working on adding other pizza places to the service including Papa John’s.

Bitcoins are currently trading at about $25 so two pizzas and bread bites will cost you $17.75. You can also add things to your order like wings, different crusts, and the like. It’s a fascinating tool and far more valuable to the average user than sites like Silk Road where bitcoins are used for more illicit purposes. I’m sure an entire subset of users would love a way to use an untraceable currency to pay for everyday things and pizza is a great start.

via DigitalTrends

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Millions of people are downloading iOS 6 right now, and many will use the Facebook contact sync feature to pull in photos and current phone numbers of friends. But rather than your real email address they’re going to pull in hundreds of @facebook.com addresses. These addresses don’t actually deliver to your email, but instead to your Facebook Messages Inbox.

Why? Because with little notice, Facebook changed everyone’s email address visibility settings in June to hide the Gmail or other addresses we purposefully shared with friends, leaving just our @facebook.com addresses. If you don’t want to miss out on email from friends, here’s how you undo Facebook’s change.

To make sure friends can see and contact sync the email addresses you want:

1. Visit your profile and click the “About ” link on the left side below your cover.

2. In the bottom right click “Edit” in the Contact Info section

3. In the top right, toggle “Hidden from Timeline” to “Shown on Timeline” for any personal email addresses you want people to see

4. Select exactly who you want to see that email address with the privacy control just to the left of the visibility toggle

5. Consider hiding your @facebook.com address if you don’t want emails coming to your Facebook Messages inbox

With this completed, you’ll be sharing your real email addresses with the people you want to give access, and anyone who syncs their iOS 6 contacts will get the right email address. If you don’t, people might think they’re sending you email, but you might miss them since they’re delivered to your Facebook Messages inbox instead.

I talked to Facebook yesterday and it admitted “we could have done more than we did” to notify and educate people about the change. The little box alerting people to the change was buried inside the About page where few people saw it. “That was something we could have done a little bit better.”

But an apology like that is not sufficient. Adding new visibility controls that override user privacy controls without proper notice is totally unacceptable.

Hopefully enough people are outraged like me and will tell their friends to undo the damage done by Facebook’s meddling. If we can negate any benefit Facebook would get from altering what we share with friends without our permission, it will be less likely to make these invasive changes in the future.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Click ‘Messages’ on Facebook and then “Other” in the right sidebar and you might find emails missing from your Gmail or other personal and work accounts. Without giving you any warning or notification, Facebook last week changed your profile to hide any email addresses you’ve previously listed and instead show only your little-known “@facebook.com” address. Any messages sent to you or your @facebook.com address that wasn’t sent from friends, friends of friends, or email addresses registered to their Facebook accounts ends up there, easily missed.

Now Facebook’s unauthorized change to your preferred contact info is auto-syncing with address books for some mobile devices, so people don’t even realize they’re not pinging your Gmail, they’re sending messages to your Other black hole. But rather than apologize, Facebook has implied to ReadWriteWeb that users are merely confused. Yes, users are confused…because Facebook changed their contact info without consent!

Most people aren’t aware of or forget about their Other inbox, which is why it’s caused issues since it debuted two years ago. That’s why at first many people and publications thought the Facebook email change fiasco was causing their email to be deleted because it wasn’t showing up in their primary Facebook Messages inbox. They hadn’t checked their Other inbox. So yes they were confused, but that stemmed from Facebook’s unannounced change.

I didn’t think the Other inbox would swallow too many emails because few people would voluntarily email something to your unfamiliar @facebook.com address. The problem is that your friends didn’t even realize they were sending messages there. Their phones may have automatically synced your contact file with your Facebook profile, substituting the @facebook address for your actual email address, so when they selected to email you by name, they never saw the new Facebook address they were pinging.

Facebook, the jig is up. By making unauthorized changes to our contact info you eroded our trust. And while auto-syncing by devices may be out of your control, that change is now having real consequences for people who are missing meetings, losing clients, or getting disconnected from friends because they weren’t getting their email where they expected to.

Last week I called this poppycock and called for at least one of two solutions, and I’m still waiting:

1. Revert the change and resurface everyone’s email address, except if someone manually altered the visibility of their addresses since the change so you don’t accidentally make visible any address someone has deliberately hidden.
2. Notify the entire user base about the change IMMEDIATELY! Making this change without alerting users is wildly irresponsible.

Meanwhile you should use this tutorial to undo Facebook’s changes and show exactly which email addresses on your profile you want

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Like Milo before it, Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores — from big chains to mom and pop shops. The startup has since focused its efforts on developing social commerce solutions for retailers, launching tools like Social Store, which allows any business to quickly create and deploy a storefront for their businesses on Facebook.

While Wishpond, like so many others, is looking to capitalize on the growing interest in social commerce, its solutions have really been developed as means by which to expand on its core competency: Consumer-facing product aggregation and search for retailers. And today, Wishpond is leveraging its technology for the sake of a segment underserved by eCommerce solutions: Shopping malls, launching Mall360, a service that enables malls and shopping centers to offer their shoppers a browsable, searchable product discovery app that works across their Web, social, and mobile properties

As eCommerce solutions mature, more and more consumers are doing their shopping online, from start to finish. However, while 90 percent of shopping begins online today, the majority of people still prefer to buy products live, in local stores, rather than online. For the most part, shopping malls are still in a past decade when it comes to their approach to eCommerce, even though customers continue to visit their stores when they’re ready to buy.

Mall360 gives shopping malls a way to increase their visibility online in a way that lets them better understand and influence potential customers while they’re in the process of making their purchasing decisions, while they’re searching, talking about products with friends, and planning their next excursion to the mall.

For outlets that may house dozens of brick and mortar retail stores, Mall360 lets visitors search and browse through all the products found at the shopping center through visiting the mall’s Facebook page and clicking on a “Shop Our Stores” button, for example.

To enable this cross-platform service, Wishpond is leveraging RetailConnect, its scalable platform that imports, aggregates and processes large volumes of product data from websites, point of sales systems, and eCommerce platforms. It then uses this data, along with its search and publishing capabilities to enable malls to instantly deploy its product discovery app on their mobile and desktop websites, mobile apps, and Facebook pages.

The goal is to be able to give consumers an easier way to search for and discover products at their favorite local retailers, while in turn, giving retailers the ability to boost social interaction, traffic and both website and social engagement. According to the Wishpond team, malls can choose to deploy some or all of the components of its solution, and over the next few weeks, participating outlets will begin to deploy the solution across their digital properties.

For more, check out Wishpond at home here, Mall360 here, or see the video below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TechCrunch has received a response from Facebook to the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s letter urging the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate Timeline for privacy violations. Facebook says it has not violated user privacy or its November settlement with the FTC. That’s because Timeline simply makes historic content more accessible, not visible to anyone who couldn’t already see it. Also, Timeline provides Activity Log for managing the visibility of this content. I agree. Facebook may be bending the rules of privacy, but it hasn’t broken them.

In response to EPIC’s call for an FTC investigation, as reported by Identity Matters, Facebook’s Director of Public Policy Andrew Noyes tells TechCrunch:

“As we explained when we announced timeline in September, and we reiterated last month when it became available worldwide, timeline doesn’t change the privacy of any content. Everything is accessible to the same people who could or likely had seen it already in their News Feed sometime in the past. In addition, timeline offers a number of new, simpler, and more effective ways for people to control their information, including activity log, the most comprehensive control tool we’ve ever developed. We think these innovations are things privacy advocates should be applauding.”

Maybe ‘applauding’ goes a bit far, but privacy critics should be satisfied that Facebook has paired easier access to content with better ways to manage it. Before Timeline launched, to reach years old content one had to click the “older posts” button over and over. Profile owners were unlikely to go to this trouble, but someone intent on running a background check or defaming them might do so. In this way, the “privacy by obscurity” that EPIC says Facebook has violated may have been more dangerous than helpful to users.

The critical clause of Facebook’s FTC settlement is that it agreed to “obtaining consumers’ express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established.” The fact is that migrating to Timeline does not change one’s privacy settings. Anything set to friends, friends of friends, public, or a custom setting stays that way. Therefore, EPIC’s claim that “Facebook is changing the privacy settings of its users in a way that gives the company far greater ability to disclose their personal information than in the past” is simply false.

I’m a big advocate for users combing their Timeline for embarrassing content they might wish to remove. If the FTC wants to make a recommendation about Timeline, it should ask Facebook to more actively encourage use of Activity Log. But ultimately, it should see past EPIC’s sensational claims and conclude that Timeline does not violate user privacy.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“If at first you don’t succeed, try try again.” It looks like LG and Intel have taken that old adage to heart, if a new report is to be believed. The Korea Times reports that LG will debut an Intel-powered smartphone at CES 2012, but the bigger question is whether or not the device will ever make it to market.

LG and Intel’s first mobile partnership yielded an Android smartphone running on Intel’s Moorestown chipset for CES 2011, but the device was ultimately scrapped. The reason for its premature demise? As the story goes, the device died because of it’s “lack of marketability.”

LG’s brass certainly thinks their Intel smartphone is viable — according to one of the Times’ executive sources, the device could be released as soon this March. Still, the original LG-Intel phone was pegged with a 2011 release date, so take those claims with a grain of salt for bow.

Hopefully LG’s second swing at an Intel-powered phone fares a little better — it’s said to run on Intel’s next-generation Medfield system-on-a-chip, and early tests have yielded some pretty impressive benchmarks when compared to NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon MSM8260 SoCs.

Of course, the real competition is yet to come, as nearly every player in the mobile chipset market is hard at work on their next-generation platforms. Intel has a lot of brand recognition when it comes to PCs, but their lack of presence in the mobile market to date could mean that Medfield could drown in a sea of established ARM-based chipsets.

That’s why the partnership with LG is so critical — despite their handset division spending a few quarters in the red, LG is still the number two handset OEM in the U.S. Having a major hardware vendor taking a chance on their new platform could establish Intel as a real player in the mobile space, and right now Intel’s mobile efforts could use all the visibility they can get.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is conducting a short term test showing application requests in the notifications channel. It will analyze the effects of the change before concluding whether to further roll out application request notifications.

By showing these requests in a persistently visible, frequently checked channel alongside notifications about system actions such as a user being mentioned in a post or tagged in a photo, Facebook may be able to assist developers with app discovery and user retention.

Applications could previously send messages directly to users as notifications, but lost access to the notifications channel in February. Facebook made major changes to the Platform in September, removing stories about in-game content from the feeds of non-gamers, leaving only app discovery stories about friends starting to use an app. Facebook also moved app invites and requests from the Requests panel to the Application and Game Dashboards. Many developers complained that these changes significantly hurt discovery and retention, leading Facebook to bring app invites and requests back to the Requests panel.

Facebook has sought to improve relations with developers of all sizes through improved outreach, documentation, and reliability as part of “Operation Developer Love.” But its access to communication and viral channels which are the biggest concern for most developers. Removing these channels makes it especially difficult for smaller developers to compete with larger ones which can pay for massive advertising campaigns and cross-promote to kickstart new apps.

The introduction of application requests and invites to the notifications channel could be some of the change developers have been waiting for. Facebook improved the visibility of this channel earlier this year by showing alerts of notifications on browser tabs opened to Facebook. The red counters on the notifications icon are difficult to ignore, so these notifications could lead users to more frequently visit the dashboards where they can respond to requests and invites.

Facebook must try to assist developers without detracting from the user experience. Some might be frustrated about notifications which distract them from their browsing but don’t link to more intimate social activity such as a friend Liking their status update or writing on their wall. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “one of the biggest drivers of negative experiences has been games”, and these notifications could remind users of the days when their home page and news feed were flooded by app spam. However, these notifications can only be generated by explicit actions of a user’s friends, which could set the right balance between annoyance and obscurity for applications.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

People love taking pictures of food. It’s just a fact of life. Don’t even bother arguing about it. It’s just the way it is. Case in point: Foodspotting, the service which asks you to take pictures of your food to share with others. People love this service. Since its initial launch in January 2010 (we first covered it in March), people around the world have “spotted” just about 100,000 different pieces of food.

And now a group of investors have decided to put their money where their mouths are — literally. Foodspotting has just secured a new $750,000 seed round of funding. The round was led by Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures and anchored by Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Shana Fisher’s High Line Venture Partners, Zelkova Ventures, and 2020 Ventures.

Other individual angels include Dave Morin (of Path), Steve Lee (product manager of Google Latitude), Derek Dukes (of Dipity), and Dan Martell (of Flowtown — which also got some funding this morning).

This new money follows a big couple of weeks for Foodspotting. Last week, the new Foodspotting 2.0 website and iPhone app became available. The service was also able to secure deals with both Zagat and The Travel Channel for partnerships that will expand their visibility and functionality (see the commercial below).

While Foodspottings website and iPhone app are almost equal in terms of usage, it’s the app that’s really the key to the service. It is what allows people to be out and about taking pictures of their food and geotagging it. So far, the app has seen over 120,000 downloads.

And the 2.0 version of the app is much more robust than the previous version. In fact, it’s the version Foodspotting always had in mind, co-founder Alexa Andrzejewski says. With it, it’s not only easier to “spot” your own food, but it’s easier to find food around you that you might enjoy.

“This is not just for ‘foodies’ — it’s an app meant to solve a practical problem surrounding location: discovery,” Andrzejewski tells us. ”It’s practical augmented reality.” Andrzejewski tells us.

With that in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that Foodspotting is already thinking about expanding their idea beyond food. The service has already purchased the domains sightspotting.com and goodspotting.com for other services they are planning. Andrzejewski wouldn’t elaborate too much except to say that you can expect them to be based around travel in a more general sense.

Below, find the killer spot The Travel Channel is currently running for Anthony Bourdain’s popular No Reservations show.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s probably not a coincidence that Google is making a significant upgrade to Docs the same week that Microsoft rolls out Office 2010 to the public. Not to be left out, the search giant has modified sharing, visibility and the interface for Google Docs, which is also part of its Office 2010-competitor, Google Apps.

Google is now giving users more clear cut options for sharing documents: private; anyone with a link; or public on the web. All documents start out as private, with the creator as the sole administrator. You can then share your document by setting it as “Anyone with the link,” which allows anyone who knows the web address or URL of that doc to view it. You can set your document as ‘public on the web,’ which allows anyone to find the document on the web. Google says that Public docs are automatically indexed by search engines so they may appear in search results.

Google is also enhancing the visibility options for docs, making it fairly clear to the administrator which document is set to private, semi-private or public. The options now appear next to every doc title and in the docs list. You can also see the full list of editors and viewers by clicking on the ‘visibility option’ next to the doc’s title or on the Share button. And Google has improved the sharing interface and allows you to reset any link you’ve shared, so that you can move a document back to private even if you’ve shared the document.

It’s probably wise that Google has improved its sharing options, considering that Microsoft is now attacking Google in the cloud with the web-version of Office 2010. It should be interesting to see if the use of Word will gain traction in the cloud as Office 2010 is rolled out more widely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Online video production startup TurnHere is now the exclusive provider of video creation services for Yelp, the popular local search and business review site.

TurnHere, through its network of over 8,000 professional filmmakers, will be providing local video production for businesses that advertise on Yelp, as well as a slate of video-related services, including expanded distribution of their video(s) across the Web.

John McWeeny, COO of TurnHere, claims online businesses that have videos included in their listings experience higher numbers of clicks, calls and leads. TurnHere henceforth enables Yelp to provide their advertisers with two video options:

- Standard Video: Advertisers receive a 30-second video slideshow made from a series of photos provided by the business with music and custom voice-over narration.
- Premium Video: Advertisers receive a 30-60 second custom video shot at their place of business by a professional filmmaker from the TurnHere network.

Additionally, advertisers can choose to increase the visibility of their video through TurnHere’s video promotion package, which includes distribution to YouTube, Google Places, Facebook, Yahoo! Video and more.

You can see some samples on Yelp here and here.

All in all, it’s a big score for TurnHere, a San Francisco startup founded in 2005 that has raised $8.6 million in venture capital since its inception. The company competes with StudioNow, which was picked up by AOL earlier this year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch