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Privacy concerns dog location-based services

It sounds like a sweet deal: report your location to a social network and get a coupon for discounts and prizes. The price? The possibility that advertisers and other third parties will know where you are and where you've been.

A recent survey by the Pew Center's Internet & American Life Project found that only 4 percent of Internet users have adopted location-based services, as Cecilia Kang reports on The Washington Post's Post Tech blog. That survey was conducted in August and September, before Facebook and Yelp joined Foursquare and Gowalla in offering coupons to users who … Read more

CNET's favorite LED-based monitors

Earlier this year I posted a roundup of what I thought were the best LED-based monitors on the market. In that comparison, I commented that every LED-based monitor on the list was thin and relatively inexpensive at less than $350.

Well, what a difference a few months makes. While most of the monitors on this new list are indeed thin and relatively inexpensive, that price average is skewed, big time, by the $1,000 Apple LED Cinema Display 27-inch and the $3,500 HP DreamColor LP2480zx. Still, there's no denying that both have LED backlights, aren't thin, and … Read more

Astronaut logs one giant check-in for Foursquare

The first live Twitter messages from space were less than a year ago, but already astronauts have moved on to geolocation: Douglas C. Wheelock, commander of the Expedition 25 mission, earned the "NASA Explorer" badge on Foursquare for checking into the International Space Station on Friday morning.

Foursquare business development rep Eric Friedman said on the company blog that Wheelock was "the first human to ever use a location-based service from space," leaving open the possibility that aliens somewhere else in the universe may have developed their own social-networking services and consequently, as far as we … Read more

Initial issues surrounding Apple's Aperture 3.1 update

Apple has released an update to its professional image-editing software Aperture, now version 3.1, as well as a handful of helpful troubleshooting knowledge base articles and information documents.

As with any update, it is recommended to create a stable backup of all your important data should anything unexpected go wrong with the installation of the new software.… Read more

Verizon Wireless steps toward tiered data pricing

After months of hints, Verizon Wireless is jumping on the tiered data pricing bandwagon, a source close to the company confirmed on Tuesday.

Starting October 28, the company will launch a new promotion that will allow customers to subscribe to a $15 a month data plan, which gives individual smartphone subscribers 150 megabytes of data for the month. The new pricing is only a promotion for the holiday season and is meant to entice traditional feature-phone customers to upgrade to smartphones, the source said. The source was unable to say whether Verizon would continue to offer the pricing after the … Read more

Friendster explains monetization plans

As part of its efforts to better monetize its services, Friendster is looking to expand its brand beyond just a social-networking site to one that encompasses games and location-based services.

In an interview with ZDNet Asia, MOL Global CEO Ganesh Kumar Bangah highlighted social networks, social games and location-based services as three key areas of growth, noting that the company now wants to bring these elements together and expand Friendster beyond just a social network. A Malaysia-based payments company, MOL acquired Friendster last December.

Pointing to Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon as currently the biggest players in the three respective segments, … Read more

Civilization V: Striking a blow for complexity

Hearing tales of everyday regular folk skipping work to play a new game happens a couple of times a year, usually around the release dates of a new Madden or Halo installment. Much more rare is seeing same "taking the day off" messages via Twitter or Facebook in reference to a PC game. That's part of what makes the Civilization series so unique; it's a serious turn-based PC strategy game that manages to have similar mainstream crossover appeal as some of the big-console action hits.

What makes Civilization V even more of an anomaly is that … Read more

Nokia, Intuit to launch marketing service for SMBs

Nokia and Intuit are teaming up to offer small businesses a new service designed to grab more customers through mobile marketing.

Unveiled at Nokia World 2010 on Wednesday, the new service will target mobile subscribers with a series of ads and personalized offers for products and services that they can buy in their own neighborhoods. The goal is to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) better reach and communicate with their local customers.

To push out its ads precisely, the service will tap into such mobile technologies as location-based awareness and mapping, according to the companies.

In order to build … Read more

Hot Potato officially lands in Facebook's lap

Hot Potato, an online "check-in" service that lets users report their whereabouts and activities to friends, announced on Friday that it had been acquired by social-networking behemoth Facebook.

The deal, which has been talked about for several weeks, is the most recent development in Facebook's efforts to juice up the location-based aspect of its hugely popular service, which lets people connect with friends and family via the Web and share thoughts, links, photos, and more.

On Wednesday, Facebook unveiled Places, a feature that enables Facebook account holders to advertise their current location to friends, and lets users … Read more

Facebook goes Places

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded: Update your Facebook Places Verizon on the iPad Google Chrome Web Store leaks Intel to buy McAffe Personal spy game with the iPhone