News.me Is Building A News Social Network Within Its New iPhone App

news meNews.me, the news service developed in The New York Times’ R&D labs and incubated at betaworks, is launching its iPhone app today.

A bit unusually, the part of the app that you’ll use first may actually be the least interesting. In some ways, the new app is just a redesign of what News.me was already offering through its iPad and email products — a list of news stories, pulled from your Facebook and Twitter streams, then curated based on signals from Twitter and bit.ly, and presented with the context of the initial tweet or Facebook comment.

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Hot Background Location App Highlight Gets Funding As It Plans SXSW Update

highlight22122A new generation of location apps is here, just in time for the world’s best event for using them: the South By Southwest music, film and tech extravaganza starting next week in Austin, Texas. Ahead of it, my favorite of the bunch, Highlight, is announcing that it’s pushing out a new version for the event, and bringing in funding.

But before I get into the news, what’s special about Highlight, and competitors like Glancee? Instead of asking you to check in, they simply run in the background, sending notifications to you when interesting people are physically near. For SXSW, these apps can help you sort out the most relevant folks from the crowd.

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Flipboard’s Latest Brings Cover Stories To The iPad, Plus A New French Edition

flipboard-ipad-coverFlipboard is rolling out the first major update to its social magazine tonight since its December launch on the iPhone. The new release brings the iPhone app’s most popular feature, “Cover Stories,” to the iPad’s bigger screen. Now, iPad users will see a large, double-tiled pane on the first page of their Flipboard app. There, you’ll find a mix of stories popular among your friends, those that are popular across Flipboard’s network, as well as those that are uniquely relevant to you.

Also new in tonight’s release are a number of design tweaks, meant to give Flipboard a print magazine-like appeal, as well as a much-requested third page in Flipboard’s Table of Contents. And for international users, there’s even more big news: Flipboard just launched its first standalone European edition with the arrival of Flipboard in France, and is promising more localized editions to come.

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Foursquare Is Doing Big Things, So Existing Investor Spark Capital Buys $50M Of Employee Stock

photoFoursquare founder Dennis Crowley spent this afternoon in Barcelona, explaining his location company’s potential to Mobile World Conference attendees. Someone else didn’t need to hear the presentation, though. Existing investor Spark Capital is buying $50 million worth of its stock, according to sources, in a deal to provide at least some employees with liquidity.

The result is a valuation north of of the already-impressive $600 million from its last round, I’ve heard. This is even though the company continues to focus on product development instead of trying to maximize revenue.

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Tasted Menu Takes On Foodspotting With New iPhone App

tasted menuThe team behind startup Tasted Menu thinks it has the technology to help you find the exact dish you’re looking for. The company is launching its iPhone app today (its website was already live), and it’s also expanding from its hometown of Boston into Austin — just in time for South by Southwest.

Of course, there’s already a popular iPhone app for food recommendations — Foodspotting, which said in January that it has nearly 2 million app downloads. However, Tasted Menu CEO Alex Rosenfeld argues that Foodspotting and similar apps “effectively amount to check-in apps for food,” whereas Tasted Menu helps the vast majority of people who aren’t interested in that, but “would love a product that helps them make better ordering decisions and discover new dishes and restaurants.”

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The Pinterest Effect: Conde Nast Casts ‘Easy Living’ In The Mold Of Hot New Social Network

Screen shot 2012-02-22 at 11.45.32They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result.

That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page.

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Alert: Social Media Is Eating Into Carrier Revenues, And It’s Only Getting Worse

whatmeworryTwitter, 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 — a big rise on the $8.7 billion Ovum estimates was lost in 2010. A separate report from mobile analytics firm Bytemobile has also charted huge growth in the use of social media on mobile — with operators getting virtually no benefit as a result.

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Storify Brings Drag-And-Drop Social Curation To The iPad

Storify-iPad-2Storify has become one of the main ways that people can create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social objects. And now you can do that curation from your iPad.

The company was already mobile, in the sense that stories (which are essentially curated timelines of content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and more) created with its tools could be viewed on smartphones and tablets. But with the new Storify iPad app, you can create those stories on a mobile device, too. In fact, co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman argues that this may be the first great app for content creation (rather than consumption) on the iPad.

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OMGPOP Hits 1M Downloads For Draw Something App, “Locked Down” On Mobile Strategy

Draw.SOmething.DivorceOMGPOP, the social game-maker formerly known as iminlikewithyou, says it has another mobile hit — its app Draw Something has been downloaded more than 1 million times in 10 days.

Draw Something is based on OMGPOP’s online game Draw My Thing. Described by CEO Dan Porter as a turn-based version of Pictionary, players are assigned things to draw, which can be simple (like a smile) or complicated (like a zombie), then their friends are supposed to guess what it is.

Players have already created more than 20 million drawings, Porter says. The game’s average load is now 50 drawings per second, and where the company took nine days to reach its first 10 million drawings, it’s now seeing 10 million new drawings every 24 hours.

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Forkly 2.0 Puts Your Taste Graph To Use With New, Personalized Recommendations

forkly-1Forkly, the food rating app from Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May, just launched a major update dubbed “Forkly 2.0.” Along with a user interface overhaul which features a faster feed, bigger photos and an upgraded user profile design, the app update also includes improved menus and a “Discover” function to offer better, personalized recommendations. Hey, your Forkly “taste graph” just got useful!

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