Blackberry Fans . . . The new BlackBerry PlayBook is HERE!!!!!!

BlackBerry PlayBook, RIM’s foray into tablet territory, is now available for pre-order in three different versions, starting from $499.99.

PlayBook has a 7″ 1024×600 WSVGA capacitive LCD touch screen, a 1 GHz dual-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM memory, a 1080p HDMI output, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 5-megapixel camera on the back, as well as a 3-megapixel one on the front for video chats. The aforementioned $499.99 will get you the 16 GB variant, and you’ll have to dish out $599.99 or $699.99 for the 32 GB and the 64 GB model, respectively.

Social Media for your brand

By Amanda Patterson

Facebook reflects your brand. Twitter reflects your personality. LinkedIn shows us what you've accomplished. 23 million South Africans have access to the Internet via cell phones alone. It would be naive to ignore these platforms.
70 out of every 100 people who join Facebook never leave. 30 out of every 100 people who join Twitter continue tweeting. Anyone who is serious about business has a LinkedIn profile. Facebook requires patience, charm and innovative thinking. Twitter requires wit, and an authentic voice. LinkedIn requires an honest up-to-date record of your work history. It also needs regular updating and referrals from satisfied customers.

Secret to social media marketing

Everyone wants to know the secret to social media marketing.

It's simple. It's also hard work. You have to create a personality for your brand. You have to give it a face, and a voice. Literally. You have to choose a real person. This person can be someone in your company, or someone you believe personifies your brand.

However, it would be wise to avoid using the usual suspects.

Musicians, screen and radio personalities do not always translate successfully into social media networks. These artists may have only been famous for the way they look or the way they sing or talk. Social media networking requires more than this.

The usual suspects also rely on their employers, their existing platforms and publicists to bring their audience to them. They are not necessarily innovative and creative. Most radio presenters, actors and musicians work through agents or managers. Mostly they are unaware of how these new media work. In all honesty it would damage their careers if they were let loose without supervision on the Internet. It would also be commercial suicide for their sponsors.

It is interesting to note that Talk Radio 702 has only 3094 members in its Facebook group. Redi Tlhabi has 2 386 members in her group. Other presenters have 100-300 members. The Parlotones have a few hundred members, as do Freshly Ground.

Why these low figures?

Firstly, the dedicated television viewers and radio listeners are growing old. They are not young enough to understand social media. Secondly, these presenters, and performers, have producers who script shows for them. They need direction and are largely reactive. Thirdly, the Internet needs constant 'gardeners' who create and grow their online personalities. These 'celebrities' do not, and in some cases, cannot, do this. An Internet audience can feel the lie when publicists do it on their behalf.

This is worrying for advertisers. Most consumers with a higher LSM (life style means) spend significant amounts of time on the Internet.

Some celebrities like Trevor Noah with 494,300 fans and Gareth Cliff with 276,105 fans have crossed the divide. Why? They are multi-talented. Not just famous for a voice or a look. They often write their own material, think on their feet, and entertain us. They are perfect for social media. They are the constant gardeners.

Choose the correct personality

Social media is networking. It has levelled playing fields. You do not need a huge budget. If you choose the correct personality to represent your product you will succeed. If that personality is able to attract 'fans', post interesting content and inspire them to want more, your customers will follow.

Allow consumers into your world and headspace. Remember that consumers don't just want to buy a product. They want to be courted and tempted into making the decision.

The most successful companies place social media marketing at the heart of their business. They find online social media personalities with an established following to promote their product and woo an audience.

Where will you find your 'constant gardener'?

South African startup: Mobile social network Motribe growing by 10,000 users a day

There’s Silicon Valley on the West Coast, Silicon Alley in New York, Silicon Roundabout in London and now, Silicon Cape in South Africa- Yes the comercial technology industry is growing in South Africa too, but startups are largely focusing on mobile because just like in many developing countries mobile is how people connect not just to each other, but to the Internet as well. And for the majority of the population we are not talking about smart phones we are talking about first and second generation Nokias and the West’s hand-downs from the 90s.

I sat down with the co-founders of Motribe -a startup that is providing a platform for people to build their own social networks for mobile. We talked about how the company was set-up and how South Africans are using mobile technology to help go about their daily lives.

Why Social Media Innovation Has Hit a Plateau

Whenever you bring up the idea that the cycle of innovation must, at some point, come to an end, you inevitably evoke the memory of Charles Duell. For the uninitiated, Duell was the commissioner of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in 1899 supposedly said, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

We can all have a good laugh at Duell’s expense now (even though he may never have actually said that), but perhaps we shouldn’t. After all, isn’t Duell’s sentiment generally true in a lot of cases? For instance, have cars really changed that much since the ’50s? Sure, they’re more fuel efficient and they now have OnStar systems and USB ports, but they’re still basically the same — four tires that you operate with a steering wheel. They still (mostly) run on gas. They’ve been perfected, but are they fundamentally different?

Or take toasters. Is the toaster you could buy in 1971 really all that different from today’s? For all I know, toaster technology may have advanced dramatically since then, but as a consumer, there’s really not much difference. It took a minute or so to make toast 40 years ago, and it still does today.

So why do we expect social media to be any different? Simple. It’s because we have just come off a big spurt of growth and the natural inclination is to assume that’s going to continue forever. That’s just human nature. And that’s why this year’s South by Southwest conference is a bit of a comedown. Back in 2007, SXSW was the launching pad for Twitter. In 2009, it was Foursquare. This year? Nada.

But we’re not just having an off year. We’re at a new, more boring stage in the development cycle.

Such thinking runs counter to the ethos of social media, I realize, but consider that social media has really only been around in its current form since 2005 or so. The real innovation that spurred the social media movement is microblogging. Before Facebook added status updates, fewer people were blogging and responding to blogs. Every innovation since then has basically been a refinement, including:

Twitter: a network devoted exclusively to microblogging
Foursquare: mobile microblogging with information about your location
GetGlue: microblogging about TV programs
Instagram: visual microblogging
If the latter is the big innovation of SXSW this year, I can hypothosize that micro video blogging will rule in 2012, but this is more tweaking than anything brand new. (While 12seconds.tv ultimately failed in its micro video blogging endeavors, perhaps it was ahead of its time.)

Perhaps you object to this on the grounds that tech is somehow immune to the toaster innovation phenomenon. But what about personal computing? The industry took a quantum leap in 1984 when Apple introduced the Macintosh, but, seriously, how different is your Mac or PC today? Yes, the graphics are a lot better and it’s a hell of a lot faster, but there hasn’t been another innovation quite at the same scale as the graphical user interface. The iPhone was also a big jump for mobile in 2007, but all the smartphones since then have basically run with the idea of a touchscreen and mobile apps. The iPad? It’s nothing new: Tablet PCs have been around for 20 years. Apple just basically introduced a larger version of the iPhone. The iPad is very well designed of course, but, in the end, the device’s success is a feat of marketing.

So where does this leave us? Maybe with a more realistic sense of where social media is going. Yes, it’s going to be even more prevalent in 10 years. Yes, there will no doubt be lots of cool new technologies that bring microblogging to new arenas, but you’re not going to see another Twitter or Facebook. Maybe everything that could be invented hasn’t, but, in social media, all the important things have

Social Media Revolution

We are the leaders

Social Media Champions League: Man United, Justin Bieber, Glee, MTV

If there were one giant global sports tournament, to be decided by how many fans a team has on Facebook, Manchester United (9.9 million fans) would lose a close, tense final match to FC Barcelona (10.3 million fans).

But what if you decided the winner on how many of those Facebook fans are active – that is, the ones liking posts and making comments? Then Man United’s 256,000 active fans would run away with the trophy. Barcelona wouldn’t even get a runners-up medal. Its 142,000 active fans are fewer than Real Madrid’s 155,000. (All numbers are rounded to the nearest 1,000.)

Such are the results of a fascinating new monthly ranking of Facebook fandom, cooked up by New York startup FanGager. In a bid to promote its CRM-style dashboard of social media engagement, the startup has started curating a list of the top 100 most active fan pages. “Brand managers are collecting fans,” says CEO Eran Gefen, who started the company in Tel Aviv two years ago, “but we think the conversation should move to engaged fans — just as on the web, counting hits and page views gave way to counting unique users.”

Moving the conversation would be good for Justin Bieber, too. The Canadian pop star’s 20 million fans are outnumbered by Lady Gaga‘s 29 million — but Bieber’s number of engaged fans, 360,000, is the highest on Facebook. Lady Gaga’s 148,000 engaged fans can’t even top those of Kesha or the Black Eyed Peas.

Facebook game company Zynga has the second highest number of active fans, for its Texas Hold ‘Em poker game, while Facebook’s own fan page doesn’t even make the top 10. Glee is by far the most engaging TV show, apparently, followed by Jersey Shore and trailed way behind by How I Met Your Mother and House.

Given that Jersey Shore activity, the top-ranked corporate brand in the listing, MTV, may come as little surprise. The second highest corporate brand, Victoria’s Secret, also requires little explanation. The top packaged goods? Skittles, followed by Oreo cookies. Check out the top 20:


Man United can’t claim quite as many engaged fans as Bieber or Zynga, but it does walk away with the title for highest percentage of active fans in the top 100, at 2.6%. But Gefen says that figure pales into comparison with the U.S. Army, which has relatively few fans but a 10% activity level.

As for Mashable? We’re closing in on half a million Facebook fans — and a very respectable 4.5% activity level. Thanks, everyone

Facebook “Likes” More Profitable Than Tweets [STUDY]

f event registration site Eventbrite’s experience is any indication, social media marketers looking for monetary returns on their efforts might get more value from Facebook than Twitter.

The company announced Wednesday that an average tweet about an event drove 80 cents in ticket sales during the past six months, whereas an average Facebook Like drove $1.34.

The study, which used in-house social analytics tools to track ticket sales on the site, was a continuation of a similar analysis the company released in October after analyzing data from a 12-week period. That study also indicated Facebook drove more sales for Eventbrite than Twitter, although the difference between the two networks’ sales per post was greater at that point than throughout the entire six-month period (the “value” of tweets increased).

In addition to each individual Facebook Like driving more sales than an individual tweet, the study also revealed cumulative activity on Facebook was greater than activity on Twitter for Eventbrite. People shared Eventbrite events on Facebook almost four times as often as they did on Twitter. The company attributes this disparity to Facebook’s wider reach and greater emphasis on real-world ties.

It’s important to note that only a very small percentage of site visitors shared event pages on either network. Just 1% of people who landed on an event page shared it with their friends; 10% of people who had purchased a ticket did the same.

Obviously people are more likely to share events if they are attending. Their friends, according to Eventbrite’s data, are also more likely to buy tickets to an event shared on Facebook by a ticket holder than one shared by an uncommitted friend. But whether these trends, or any of Eventbrite’s findings, are relevant to other types of purchases is still a matter of speculation. But Eventbrite is betting they are.

“We carefully track sharing behavior in an effort to help event organizers tap into a new world of distribution for their event promotion,” wrote Tamara Mendelsohn, Eventbrite’s director of marketing and former senior analyst at Forrester Research, in a blog post about the study. “But the findings apply broadly to all e-commerce businesses, because the foundations of e-commerce are shifting as the social graph becomes a meaningful influence in driving transactions.”

Is Twitter Dividing the Happy From the Unhappy?

Anyone who thought that social media was going to usher in a utopian era of communication without borders is going to have their faith badly shaken by a new study from Cornell University. On Twitter, it seems, there are already at least two walled-off nations: happy people and unhappy people.

And never the twain shall tweet.

The Cornell study, spotted by New Scientist magazine, tracked 102,000 Twitter users and analyzed the 129 million tweets they sent and received over a six-month period. It examined the words they used using what the authors call “standard techniques from psychology” to rate their sense of self-fulfillment — an important measure, in the burgeoning field of happiness studies, known as Subjective Well-Being or SWB. People with a high SWB were significantly less likely to send or receive tweets from someone with a low SWB, and the same was true in reverse.

In other words, the happy people have formed little Happy Twitter clubs. Meanwhile misery loves company in social media — as much as, if not more than, in real life.

“Beyond demographic features such as age, sex and race, even psychological states such as “loneliness” can be assortative in a social network,” writes the study’s lead author, Johan Bollen. But he admits that even he doesn’t know why that should be the case.

So why is it so? Is it simply human nature, or a function peculiar to short-form virtual communication?

The answer depends on who you ask. Users on the “happy” side of the SWB equation will probably tell you they meant to respond to that depressive tweet from their Debbie Downer friend, but it was such a bummer they couldn’t be bothered. Unhappy tweeters will grumble about the insufferably peppy quality of tweets from those shiny cheerleaders over in the happy corner.

If there are any Twitter API developers looking for a Nobel Prize-worthy challenge, now would be the time to devise an app that could bring the two factions together in a state of semi-contentedness.

Twitter: 460,000 New Accounts Created Daily

Twitter will soon be celebrating the fifth anniversary of the first tweet, and the company Monday released a set of stats showing how huge the service has become.

This week in 2006, designers began creating a prototype of what would become Twitter. Jack Dorsey sent the world’s first tweet on March 21, 2006. On its blog, Twitter took the opportunity to point out some key stats, including:

-It took three years, two months and one day to get to the billionth tweet. Now there are a billion tweets a week.

-A year ago, people sent 50 million tweets a day. On March 11, 2011, the tally was 177 million.

-There were 456 tweets per second after Michael Jackson died in 2009. That record was broken on New Year’s Day this year with 6,939 tweets after midnight in Japan on New Year’s morning there.

-There were 572,000 new accounts created on March 12, 2011; there were 460,000 new accounts created daily, on average, in the past month.

-Mobile users increased 182% in the past year.

Twitter has 400 employees today, compared to eight in January 2008.

80% of Children Under Age 5 Use the Internet [STATS]

Nearly 80% of children between the ages of 0 and 5 use the Internet on at least a weekly basis in the United States, according to a report released Monday from education non-profit organizations Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop.

The report, which was assembled using data from seven recent studies, indicates that young children are increasingly consuming all types of digital media, in many cases consuming more than one type at once.

Television use dwarfs internet use in both the number of children who surf the web and the amount of time they spend on it. The analysis found that during the week, most children spend at least three hours a day watching television, and that television use among preschoolers is the highest it has been in the past eight years. Of the time that children spend on all types of media, television accounts for a whopping 47%.

Heavy television viewing may even be partially responsible for the rising number of children who use the Internet. Parents in one study indicated that more than 60% of children under age three watch video online. That percentage decreases as children get older (the report suggests this is because school-age children have less time at home), but even 8- to 18-year-old children reported in another study that they consume about 20% of their video content online, on cellphones, or on other portable devices like iPods.

Internet and television use among children has become entwined in other ways as well. A 2010 Nielsen study suggests that 36% of children between the ages of 2 and 11 use both mediums simultaneously. Altogether, children between the ages of 8 and 10 spend about 5.5 hours each day using media — eight hours if you count the additional media consumed while multitasking.

The report doesn’t attempt to solve the more-than-decade-old debate of whether all of this screen time is good for children. Instead, it preaches balance: “My mother used to say that too much of anything isn’t good for you, whether it be eating only protein, shooting hoops all day or ‘always being connected’ to the digital world,” said Dr. Lewis Bernstein, executive president at Sesame Workshop, in a press release.

It does, however, point out that time spent in front of books remains constant even as screen time increases.

About 90% of 5- to 9-year-olds who participated in a 2008 Sesame Workshop study reported spending at least an hour every day reading old-fashioned, physical texts.

Facebook Adds Ability to Easily Tag Others In Comments

Facebook has expanded its @ Mentions feature, now letting you tag friends, pages, events or groups within comments, turning their names into clickable links by using a simple drop-down menu.

Try it. Start a comment in Facebook, type the “@” symbol, and when you type the first letter of a friend or group’s name, a drop-down menu appears and creates an easily navigated link to that friend or group’s page. When you mention and link to somebody like this, it notifies that person that you’ve done so.

There’s more coolness: According to Inside Facebook, “Admins can ‘use Facebook as a Page’ and publish comments that mention themselves on the posts of other Pages in order to attract people to their Page.”

In other words, this is a way to get around Facebook’s spam filter that often won’t let you include URLs in comments (hey, that’s just like Mashable), letting you slip in a link to your page that might actually stick.

How about it, commenters? Will this enhance engagement, or will it encourage spamming within comment reels?

Facebook Adds Ability to Easily Tag Others In Comments

Facebook has expanded its @ Mentions feature, now letting you tag friends, pages, events or groups within comments, turning their names into clickable links by using a simple drop-down menu.

Try it. Start a comment in Facebook, type the “@” symbol, and when you type the first letter of a friend or group’s name, a drop-down menu appears and creates an easily navigated link to that friend or group’s page. When you mention and link to somebody like this, it notifies that person that you’ve done so.

There’s more coolness: According to Inside Facebook, “Admins can ‘use Facebook as a Page’ and publish comments that mention themselves on the posts of other Pages in order to attract people to their Page.”

In other words, this is a way to get around Facebook’s spam filter that often won’t let you include URLs in comments (hey, that’s just like Mashable), letting you slip in a link to your page that might actually stick.

How about it, commenters? Will this enhance engagement, or will it encourage spamming within comment reels?

Lost city of Atlantis, swamped by tsunami, may be found

NORTHAMPTON, Mass (Reuters) – A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.

"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.
"It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.

The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.
Freund's discovery in central Spain of a strange series of "memorial cities," built in Atlantis' image by its refugees after the city's likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.
Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there, he added.

The team's findings will be unveiled on Sunday in "Finding Atlantis," a new National Geographic Channel special.

While it is hard to know with certainty that the site in Spain in Atlantis, Freund said the "twist" of finding the memorial cities makes him confident Atlantis was buried in the mud flats on Spain's southern coast.

"We found something that no one else has ever seen before, which gives it a layer of credibility, especially for archeology, that makes a lot more sense," Freund said.
Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Atlantis some 2,600 years ago, describing it as "an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules," as the Straits of Gibraltar were known in antiquity. Using Plato's detailed account of Atlantis as a map, searches have focused on the Mediterranean and Atlantic as the best possible sites for the city.

Tsunamis in the region have been documented for centuries, Freund says. One of the largest was a reported 10-story tidal wave that slammed Lisbon in November, 1755.
Debate about whether Atlantis truly existed has lasted for thousands of years. Plato's "dialogues" from around 360 B.C. are the only known historical sources of information about the iconic city. Plato said the island he called Atlantis "in a single day and night... disappeared into the depths of the sea."

Experts plan further excavations are planned at the site where they believe Atlantis is located and at the mysterious "cities" in central Spain 150 miles away to more closely study geological formations and to date artifacts.
(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Greg McCune)

Help Japan: Facebook Click Helps Dogs Rescue Trapped Quake Victims

As you read this, victims of the tragic earthquake in Japan are waiting to be rescued under piles of rubble. Here’s a way for you to help them, and you barely have to lift a finger.

Explore.org founder Charlie Annenberg Weingarten, who’s also Director of the Annenberg Foundation, challenged the interactive community from the floor of the SXSW convention center, saying Explore.org will donate up to $100,000 to the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation. Its dog rescue team is on its way to Japan to help with earthquake search and rescue operations.

“Search and rescue dogs are a critical resource for emergency situations” says Weingarten. “There are many bootstrapped start-ups down here in Austin and plenty of people across America who want to help Japan in some way but don’t have the resources; we’re giving those people a chance to support with a simple social action”

Here’s where you come in: For every “Like” of the “Dog Bless You” Facebook page (#dogblessyou, #dogs4japan), Explore will donate a dollar up to $100,000. Get this: If the page gets 100,000 Likes by Sunday, March 13 at 2 a.m. EST, that dollar figure doubles, and Explore will donate $200,000. C’mon people, let’s help those quake victims!

Measuring Social Media: Who Has Access to the Firehose?

At SXSW 2011, I moderated a panel titled “Measuring Social Media – Let’s Get Serious,” with the goal of having a frank discussion about the realities, pratfalls and opportunities for individuals and marketers tasked with managing social media and measuring social media ROI.

During the Q&A session of the panel, a audience member from Porter Novelli asked Kevin Weil, product lead for revenue at Twitter, a pointed and direct question that cuts to the core of the conversation surrounding social media measurements: Who has access to the data?

In the case of Twitter, the company offers free access to its API for developers. The API can provide access and insight into information about tweets, replies and keyword searches, but as developers who work with Twitter — or any large scale social network — know, that data isn’t always 100% reliable. Unreliable data is a problem when talking about measurements and analytics, where the data is helping to influence decisions related to social media marketing strategies and allocations of resources.

The question that the audience member asked — and one that we tried to touch on a bit in the panel itself — was who has access to this raw data. Twitter doesn’t comment on who has full access to its firehose, but to Weil’s credit he was at least forthcoming with some of the names, including stalwarts like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo — plus a number of smaller companies.

The Problem With Limited Access

One of the companies that has access to Twitter’s data firehose is Gnip. As we discussed in November, Twitter has entered into a partnership with Gnip that allows the social data provider to resell access to the Twitter firehose.

This is great on one level, because it means that businesses and services can access the data. The problem, as noted by panelist Raj Kadam, the CEO of Viralheat, is that Gnip’s access can be prohibitively expensive.

For measuring services that can’t afford (or aren’t willing to pay) to pay for full access, the alternative remains using the API, which can yield inconsistent results. To be clear, I’m not criticizing Gnip or its pricing model. Rather, I want to highlight the realities about data access.

It’s Not Just Twitter

The problems with reliable access to analytics and measurement information is by no means limited to Twitter. Facebook data is also tightly controlled. With Facebook, privacy controls built into the API are designed to prevent mass data scraping. This is absolutely the right decision. However, a reality of social media measurement is that Facebook Insights isn’t always reachable and the data collected from the tool is sometimes inaccurate.

It’s no surprise there’s a disconnect between the data that marketers and community managers want and the data that can be reliably accessed. Twitter and Facebook were both designed as tools for consumers. It’s only been in the last two years that the platform ecosystem aimed at serving large brands and companies — platforms and tools like Salesforce.com, Buddy Media, Viralheat, Radian6, Vitrue and Involver — have started to build out and address the needs of these business users.

We Need More Transparency for How to Access and Connect with Data

The data that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare collect are some of their most valuable assets. It isn’t fair to expect a free ride or first-class access to the data by anyone who wants it.

Having said that, more transparency about what data is available to services and brands is needed and necessary.

We’re just scraping the service of what social media monitoring, measurement and management tools can do. To get to the next level, it’s important that we all question who has access to the firehose.

Bands Can Tap Into the Power of Their Online Fanclub With New App Creator

Quick Pitch: FanTrail is an app that allows fans to connect with their favorite artists, reaping rewards for their devotion and interaction. Artists, in turn, can easily reach fans and create stronger ties with their following.

Genius Idea: So you’ve got fans? Rad. You’re already one step above that dude in his basement, uploading sad, sad GarageBand-fashioned songs to BandCamp, where they will never be heard by anyone but his mother. Now, the question becomes: How do you leverage said fans? How do you reach out to them in a way that’s not spammy, annoying or irrelevant? Startup FanTrail thinks that it has the answer.

FanTrail, which launched this month in preparation for SXSW, was founded by Joshua McClure, who used to work for an iOS development firm and built apps for bands, and Joel Rasmussen, who produced and co-wrote the documentary Before the Music Dies (a film about the ills of the music industry). The two decided to merge their expertises and create an app that would be helpful to musicians and fans alike.

Enter FanTrail. The service is basically a method by which artists can easily create an iPhone app (Android is on the way) for their fans — for free. Every app has the same elements, which let fans garner rewards for their devotion.

Artists simply sign up for the service via the website (provided they have an Apple ID), after which it creates an app that is placed in the App Store. In the app, artists are outfitted with a dashboard that they can use to post news and events, update Twitter, Facebook, etc. all at once, push announcements, see where fans are located on a map using geolocation and send personally recorded messages to followers. Right now, one must do all of this within the app, as there will be no web version until the next iteration of the service.

Artists can also earn revenue through the app. When fans buy music using FanTrail, artists receive their usual royalties, and even additional cash from the service itself via what’s called Artist Incentives. All artists receive a FanTrail Score, which is tabulated based on how many fans have downloaded the app and those fans’ average LoveScore (which is basically a loyalty score). That score determines how much money FanTrail will pay the artist out of its total profits.

FanTrail makes money via co-marketing agreements, sponsorship and mobile payment fees.

Fans, in turn, can reap benefits from their LoveScore, which grows every time they check in at a show, buy music through iTunes and Amazon, and send artists cash through a feature called “LovePay” (said cash can be used for any charity the artist chooses). Every action that offers an artist support garners the fan “Love” on a “LoveMeter” featured within the app. That way, artists can see which fans are most loyal and reward them via recorded messages or any other offer they may choose.

The FanTrail team especially highlights the app’s “Love Mail” feature, which allows artists to record messages and send them to all of their fans, fans chosen by location, or one, special fan.

To leverage its platform, Fan Trail is launching a contest called the Sweetwater Indie Cup at SXSW for all showcase artists. Each band is encouraged to build a FanTrail app, and the artist that gets the most fans will score $40,000 worth of recording equipment and recording time at Sweetwater Studios in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Artists like Erykah Badu and The Roots already have apps via FanTrail, and the team says they’ve seen more than 500 signups this month.

Granted, this isn’t the only platform for artist app creation out there — Mobile Roadie has been around for a while, and there are a ton of startups like Flowd and Mobile Backstage cropping up overseas to offer artists an easy way to connect with fans.

Moreover, the you-scratch-my-back, etc., etc., trend among artists and fans is seriously on the rise, what with crowdfunded record labels, crowdsourced A&R sites and services that let fans make album decisions launching every day.

The concept of letting fans — Super Fans, really — take the reins seems to be extremely popular of late. It just remains to be seen if those fans will actually take the initiative to pick up where the music industry left/is leaving off.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Bliz

Google Chrome Gets Updates: New Interfaces, Faster Browsing

Tuesday, Google announced a few changes to Chrome, its engineered-for-speed web browser.

The super-fast beta version that was announced a few weeks ago has already been updated to a stable version. For the Googlers working on Chrome, speed entails not only faster code (the latest version of Chrome boasts a 66% improvement in JavaScript performance) but also easier-to-navigate interfaces.

With that in mind, the company is rolling out a new Settings interface for all Chrome users. One major change is that Settings are now presented in a Chrome tab rather than a dialog box — a change that will seem familiar to those using Google’s Cr-48 notebooks, which run Chrome OS and present absolutely everything in a browser tab.

Settings are also searchable, which many users will likely find extremely helpful.