CRM Update – Mar 20 : 8:33 pm

You’ve heard of setting your phone on vibrate, but how about your arm? A new patent filed by Nokia describes a piece of fabric that can be attached to your skin, that will also alert you in you have a call.
Originally uncovered by Unwired View, the patent shows a small, square piece of fabric that could be attached to your fingernail, abdominal arm, or forearm. The device would pair with your mobile phone, and when a call comes in would vibrate where it’s attached, much like your phone does now…

Down in Florida, they love their oranges. Not just the citrus fruit, but at one law firm, 14 employees loved the color enough to all wear it to work one day. Too bad management had a bee in its bonnet over the color-coordinating and fired them all for donning orange en masse.

ABC News says the group of employees claim they had established a tradition of celebrating payday Friday with a happy hour outing, and wore the orange shirts to indicate they were a group while out celebrating…

Channeling Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, President Obama has said that an “Electronic Curtain” is descending over Iran. The country’s government continues to block Internet access for thousands of citizens.
But that’s not stopping the U.S. State Department from using the Internet to engage with average Iranians.
The administration believes that the Iranian people have a “universal right to access information” and to “freely assemble online,” but Iran’s leadership “denies these rights, and uses technology to suppress its people,” according to a White House blog post…

Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS dominate the smartphone market with hoards of fans willing to fight tooth and nail for their platform of choice. What is it really like moving from one to the other? I found out.
I made the move from Android to an iPhone 4S over the weekend and reactions have, as expected, been mixed ranging from the disparaging “a downgrade” to “welcome to the club, you won’t regret it”.
Having been an Android power user for almost two years I feel able to comment in a rational, balanced way without any fanboy style reactions…

The Navy will soon have fire-fighting humanoid robots aboard its military vessels.
Navy ship fires are all too common, with or without military battles. The SAFFiR, or Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot, will help fight fires — which will in turn increase safety and reduce excessive ship repair costs due to fire damage.
The robot looks similar to a human, and will be able to keep balance on a rocky sea, control fire suppression gear, climb ladders and interact with humans. The bot will be able find fires and throw propelled extinguishing agent technology (PEAT) grenades to extinguish them while walking through the ship…

Dave Kerpen is the CEO of Likeable, a social media agency that has worked with more than 200 leading brands including 1-800Flowers.com, Verizon and Neutrogena. He is author of the New York Times best seller Likeable Social Media.
When Facebook introduced Timeline for Pages, it gave brands a greater opportunity to connect with their audiences. One of Facebook’s most helpful new features, the Admin Panel, is a one-stop shop for the tools and tips brands need to manage this connection.

1. Notifications

The notifications panel gathers all of your brand’s notifications into one place, so you don’t have to leave the page to see new Likes, comments and tags…

Walmart is the largest retailer in the country, which means that there are inevitably a number of the store’s customers who don’t use credit or debit cards. In the checkout aisle, that’s not a problem because cash is always an option, but the lack of plastic keeps these shoppers from buying anything online. Walmart thinks it may have found a compromise that could resolve that issue.

Called “Pay With Cash,” the program would allow the approximately 20% of Walmart customers who lack bank accounts or credit cards to reserve products for pick-up online and then pick them up at a nearby Walmart, where they would, as the name suggests, pay with cash…

It used to be that streaming a show online meant you had to deal with a minimum number of ads. But those online ad breaks are now growing longer and longer, and you usually don’t have a method for fast-forwarding past them. That’s why Microsoft has patented a system that would allow you to skip ads — for a price.

Late last year, the Windows wizards received a patent for “Control-based content pricing.”

From the patent application:
In an implementation of control-based content pricing, a content server distributes media content to a client device in response to a request from the client device to receive the media content…

We’ve already written about Bank of America customers trying in vain to prove that they are not dead. But this story is a bit different. A man says he tried to get a modification on his BofA mortgage, but the bank won’t do anything until he can prove he’s dead and that he’s paying child support to children he doesn’t have.

De Veau Dunn, a filmmaker, decided to document his ordeal on video (see below for Part 1).

After the economy collapsed, his the value of his home took a nose dive and he was bringing in less money…

Over at Consumer Reports, they’ve been busy testing the new iPad, which they’ve discovered isn’t just a hot item in the figurative sense, but in the very physical way in that it can run sat significantly higher temperatures than its predecessor, the iPad2.

Consumer Reports’ engineers used a thermal imaging camera to record temperatures while running a game on the new iPad and then compared them to the iPad2 using the same tests. There have been complaints that the new iPad gets pretty hot while doing tasks that involve a lot of work by the processor…

Market research firm IDC and mobile platform services company Appcelerator have released the results of a developer survey that examined the attitudes, ideas, and plans of mobile application developers in the first quarter of 2012.
Principal among the survey items was developer interest in platforms. Unsurprisingly, iOS remained the top platform for developers, followed by Android (phone). Third place, beating out Android tablets, and indeed all the remaining mobile platforms, was HTML5 Mobile Web…

Filmmaker and producer Adam McKay (Talladega Nights, Anchorman) is partnering with director Jason Pollock to develop what they are calling a “social media documentary” that sheds light on the high school dropout rates in the U.S.
The goal of the documentary: use social media to tell the stories of students and communities that grapple with high dropout rates. Pollock and McKay believe education is an important issue in the 2012 election and want to use the film as a way to educate voters and politicians…

The Department of Justice and the FBI opened an investigation into the murder of Florida teen Trayvon Martin on Monday, after a month of fierce online petitioning on Twitter, Facebook and Change.org.
The case was sent to a grand jury by the Florida state attorney general Tuesday.
Trayvon, 17, was shot dead by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman when Trayvon was walking through his gated Sanford, Fl. community on Feb. 26, carrying a cellphone, a bag of Skittles and an iced tea. Trayvon was unarmed…

How “hyper-local” targeting of prospective customers can help your business. Tips from Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, and Joe Meyer, CEO of Hopstop.

When you take your seat on that bus to visit grandma in Atlantic City, you’re putting your life in the hands of a driver you don’t know and a bus company whose safety record you may not be familiar with. But a new app from the Dept. of Transportation aims to put some of that info in the palm of your hand… if you own an iPhone, that is.

The new, free SaferBus App for iOS devices is intended to deliver the most up-to-date bus safety information so that consumers can know what they’re getting into before they book a ticket…

When it comes to keeping your hard drive defragged, Windows built-in tools do an okay job, but if you’re looking to push the performance envelope further you want a trusted, reliable third-party solution like Auslogics Disk Defrag Pro 4.
Also available as a cut-down free version, Auslogics Disk Defrag optimizes your hard drive in a myriad of different ways, and the great news is you can order a copy of the full Pro version for just $9.95, a saving of 67 percent on its retail price.
For those who are happy to stick with the free, cut-down version, Auslogics Disk Defrag 3…

If you’re ditching cable, there are many alternative content destinations online. If you’re a gamer, one of those is probably TwitchTV.
TwitchTV was started in June 2011 by Justin.tv founders Justin Kan and Emmett Shear. Since launch, TwitchTV has built an audience of 16 million visitors per month, with a growth rate of about 11% per month, according to Kan. Not only that, but those on the site stay and watch for an average of 47 minutes.
What are they watching? Usually, live broadcasts of gamers playing Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, or even classics like StarCraft, Halo and Street Fighter X Tekken…

The new iPad is a hot seller, according to Apple. It also may be a bit too hot to handle based on several tests of the device. At least two separate ones find that new iPad runs at least 10 degrees hotter than iPad 2. Not surprisingly, users are complaining on Apple support forums.
The first tests performed by Dutch tech site Tweakers.net earlier this week put new iPad’s temperature at 92.5 degrees Fahrenheit, or 9.5 degrees hotter than the 83-degree Fahrenheit temperature measured on the iPad 2…

A client has asked me to set up some goal tracking on her client’s site. The URL destination goals are straight forward. However, she also wants to track

The New York Times

Looking at the updated New York Times app (free for 10 articles/month) on a new iPad beside the old app on an old iPad, and you can really see the difference. Text — headlines, body text and captions — is visibly sharper, and photos really pop. The Times app, which has a top-notch photo viewer and plenty of multimedia content, serves as the textbook example of what retina can do for a news reader.

Alternative: The Daily (free, $39.99 annual subscription)Click here to view this gallery…

The LinkedIn co-founder is lending $1 million to struggling entrepreneurs around the world and you can help decide who gets it.Want to lend money to a struggling entrepreneur in a developing nation without using any of your money? I did, and for a little while longer, you can too.Here’s how. Recently LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman put up $1 million to fund 40,000 individual $25 dollar loans through the microlending platform Kiva.“The most successful ventures depend on that initial spark from angel investors,” Hoffman says…

What happens when you combine Mitt Romney and an Eminem classic? YouTube viral gold, apparently. This video takes carefully cut edits of Romney and others and combines them into a cover of Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.”
The video, created by Australian Hugh Atkin, was uploaded to YouTube on Monday. It’s been seen more than 12,000 times and it’s collected more than 2,000 “likes” as of Tuesday afternoon.
Atkin has been receiving praise for the video all night on Twitter…

2011 was a stellar year for inbound marketing with exceptional adoption of inbound marketing tactics and HubSpot software throughout the world.
In 2011, HubSpot saw an 81% revenue increase, earned a total of 2,000 new customers, and aquired two phenomnal organizations: Performable founded by David Cancel (former CEO of Compete.com) and oneforty founded by Laura “Pistachio” Fitton (Co-Author of Twitter for Dummies). David now serves as HubSpot’s Chief Product Officer and Laura joins HubSpot as the leader of PR and Media Relations…

Twitter on Tuesday announced it was bringing Promoted Tweets to mobile devices.
The move, which Twitter had announced was coming last month, means Promoted Tweets will join Promoted Accounts on users’ mobile devices. Advertisers can also specify whether their Promoted Tweets will run on iOS, Android or other mobile platforms.
In a blog post, Twitter noted that the targeting is “great for brands who want to increase the prominence and reach of their message to a particular type of mobile user…

A sticker price is one thing. Be sure you factor in all costs of your expenses. Here’s what I mean.My mom used to say: ‘The things you own end up owning you.’ While there’s probably a psychological argument buried in there somewhere, there are some tactical implications of this phrase. When you buy something, you’re also stuck protecting, maintaining, and supporting that product or service. You become its caretaker. And taking care of things, of course, costs more money.If you buy a new car, you’ll need to get it insured…and washed…

A new app called Karma lets you instantly send gifts to friends, even if you don’t know their physical address.
A service for “in-the-moment gifting,” Karma lets you send everything from a bottle of wine to a fuzzy teddy bear to friends via SMS, email, and Facebook. Once the recipient gets the message, she can specify which address she wants it shipped to.
The Karma app works as a virtual storefront of sorts. Karma has partnered with Hulu, Gund, MoMa and Spotify and offers gifts appropriate for people of all age groups…

Even though the topic of social media ROI may sometimes seem like an endless game of Whack-a-Mole [see previous post], there’s plenty of evidence to suggest we’re inching ever closer to accountability. Today’s announcement from the Google Social Analytics team aims to address some of the most pressing questions that marketers face when trying to understand the revenue [...]

Earthquakes hit both sides of the Pacific midday Tuesday, as Mexico and Indonesia were rocked by major earthquakes — and locals turned to social media to share reactions and pictures.
A 7.6 tremblor hit Acapulco on the Pacific coast of Mexico, with a large aftershock felt in the capital, Mexico City. Phone lines were taken down by the quake, but no other major damage was reported — although some residents said on Twitter that it was the strongest earthquake they’d felt on the fault line in more than a decade…

While you shouldn’t even bring bagels up with a New Yorker if you’re not prepared for a fight, the brave, expert testers over at our smarter siblings Consumer Reports took on a bready battle of epic proportions, as they sought the best bagel you can find in stores nationwide.

The trained testers at Consumer Reports picked eight plain bagels and four with “everything”: onion, garlic, sesame seed, poppy seed, and other toppings. In addition, they tested out Thomas’ Bagel Thins, which have lower calories and make having a bagel sandwich an easier experience on your jaw…