Talk about Deal

Services like Tweetmeme, Bitly and Facebook provide useful tools to share links on-line. The Tweetmeme button and Facebook Like button are a perfect example of these tools you can easily add to your WordPress Theme using just a bunch of lines of code.

The most interesting feature of these bottons allows you to show how many people are sharing a specific link on Twitter and Facebook, measuring in this way how a certain post is popular over these social networks. Bitly is instead extremely useful to shorten long URLs into shorter URLs and it’s perfect to share short links on Twitter.

Another practical way to retrieve these data is to use the APIs. Here is a collection of three simple PHP code snippets for WordPress to retrieve how many people are sharing your posts on Twitter and Facebook and shorten URLs using the Tweetmeme, Facebook and Bitly APIs.

Twitter and Tweetmeme total retweets

The following function uses the Tweetmeme API to return how many people retweeted a specific link on Twitter. In your WordPress theme add this function into function.php:

Then open single.php and add this code into the loop to display the number of total retweets for the current post:

URL shortener with Bitly

The following function uses the Bitly API to return a Bitly short URL. To integrate Bitly with your WordPress theme you need a Bitly account and an API key. The only thing you have to do is to add this function into function.php:

Then substitue YOURLOGIN with your user name and YOURAPIKEY with your API key you can find here if you are already logged into Bitly.

In single.php add this code into the loop to return the shortened URL of the permalink of the current post:

A useful way to use this code snippet is to integrate it with the Twitter status update link:

Facebook Like

The following function uses the Facebook API to return how many people liked a specific post on Facebook. Add this function into functions.php:

In single.php add this code into the loop to display the number of people who liked the current post:

That’s it! Do you have any suggestion to improve the code or other interesting “social” snippets to share? Please leave a comment!

I just finished doing something I wanted to do for a while. I browsed through my entire timeline on Twitter, going backwards until I found my first tweet on the 20th of October 2007.

Then I started to retrace my steps tweet by tweet for the last three years of my life. It really felt like going “back to the future” through a load of often insignificant but funny events of my own recent life stream.

Two months after my first tweet, the number of my Followed was more or less equal to the number of current Ashton Kutcher?s Followers. Back then I hadn?t started to write this blog yet and I only had around twenty strangers following me upon trust. Shortly after Twitter became a kind of drug for me. I began to talk about every single thing I did.

The day before Christmas Eve of that year I wrote: “I’m in Rome, Via del Corso. I am doing some shopping with my beautiful girl”. Of course I never would have thought that she would leave me over the phone just a week later.

Later, in April 2008, in a club in Rome I met a girl named Katherine. She was so hot. After ten minutes of talking she asked me to take a picture together. Shot it to her satisfaction and posted it on Twitter. Katherine and I got more intimate that night, she told me she lived in Los Angeles, that she was a model, and that she occasionally appeared in some unspecified movie production. Looking at her, I must confess, for a second I pictured her in Vivid Video Studios while filming a lesbian scene with Jenna Jameson.

That evening, I posted more than a dozen tweets about the evolution of our relationship, until at some point, when she stuck her tongue in my mouth, I found something more interesting to do than sending 140 character messages to Twitter.

On September 4, 2009 I played down a sudden nuisance: “I have a severe pain in my left ear. I think it might be otitis.”

Two days later I was in the hospital with half my face paralyzed, my mouth closed tight and one eye I wasn?t able to close, wide open. I was diagnosed Bell’s palsy. Forty days later, after a cure based on cortisone injections that would have probably smashed a mammoth, a medical report certified that I was finally healed. In the meantime I kept posting a long bulletin made of regular tweets worthy of a medical encyclopedia.

My next tweet will be about this post. It will be something like “New post up on Woork Up > Back to the Future With Your Twitter Timeline” What happens next, I’ll tell you next time. Meanwhile it would be nice to know if you had any particular experience you kept track of on Twitter. Did you ever look back on those days?

To be continued…

The war against Adobe Flash has just begun. The broadcast of audio and video contents is actually one of battlefields where the conflict is on. Developers and providers of media contents are switching slowly to the new HTML5 supported formats. Flash is not more the only solution to distribute that kind of contents in streaming.

Here is a collection of five interesting fresh resources for HTML5 video and audio support.

FlareVideo is probably one of the most interesting HTML 5 video player in circulation, completely open source and free for commercial use. Created by Alex MacCaw, FlareVideo supports fullscreen visualization and the interface is easily customizable via HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Video JS is a free and open source javascript-based video player that uses the HTML5 video functionality built into advanced browsers. Video JS is really simple to use, lightweight and fully skinnable using CSS. It supports H.264 MPEG 4, Ogg format and is compatible with iPhone and iPad.

As you probably know, not all browsers natively support <video> and <audio> HTML5 tags. html5media is not a video player but a useful JavaScript tool which enables these tags in all major browsers. The only thing you have to do to use these tag is to add this line of code in the <head> of your pages:

html5media support h.264 (mp4) or Theora (ogv) format for video and mp3, AAC (m4a) or Vorbis (ogg) for audio.

Open-Player is a cross-browser player for <video> and <audio> HTML5 tags. Media playback uses embedded support based on HTML 5 spec or, in lack of options, using Flash player fallback.

jPlayer is a jQuery plugin that allows you to play mp3 or ogg format on all browsers which support the HTML5 <audio> tag while for other browsers (not HTML5 ready) mp3 format with no visible Flash.

A frequently asked question I often receive – mainly from people who start having a hand in developing WordPress themes for the first time – is: what’s the right way to proceed for implementing a custom theme? What’s the order with which modifying all various files which compose the default theme?

As I already said in other posts replying to similar questions, there are not fixed rules (it much depends on how you used to working) but there are some simple guidelines which can be follow to proceed with method and work more efficiently.

Draw a sketch — Before having a hand in writing the code (html, css, php, and so on) of your WordPress theme I always suggest to draw a sketch of the layout on paper. This is a good practice you should adopt every time start to design a website. In my opinion, if you don’t want to wast your time, you should never start writing directly the code without a precise idea about how your theme will look like.

Thinking with a blank paper helps you focus on ideas and is an useful way to identify the main sections which will compose the final layout. At the same time, in this phase, you can define on paper some general CSS attributes for each section such as weight, margin and padding.

Start coding — The default theme of WordPress is a good base from which to make a custom theme. As you know WordPress themes are composed by several PHP files which represent each a specific page or a portion of page. As first step, I suggest you to start customizing these files in this order: header.php, footer.php and single.php. In this way you’ll have quickly enough a first idea of the final look of your theme. Then reuse the code you already used in single.php to customize all other pages (tags.php, categories.php, search.php,…). Leave index.php (the home page) to last.

Optimize the PHP code — When your new theme is almost finished take some time to optimize the PHP code. If you have a code snippet repeated in different pages you can think to create a new PHP file which contains that portion of code and include it in every page where it recurs. A typical example is a “popular posts” section to repeat in many pages such as home.php, single.php, tags.php, and so on. In this way, every time you need to change something in that section you’ll have to modify it just one time in a single file.

Optimize the CSS code — Another important step before releasing your theme is to clean up the CSS code in order to remove unused classes and unifying common statements with same attribute values. Lastly use a CSS compressor to create a lightweight version of the CSS file.

Test and publish — After a session of test with all major browsers, your theme is ready to go live. In that regard if you are a Mac user and you need to test your website on IE7 and IE8 I suggest you to download WineBottle a free application which emulate Windows based systems and allow to install several IE version directly on your Mac.

Do you have any suggestion about this topic? Share your though, thanks!

When I started working on the new Woork Up I spent some days thinking about how the layout of the new interface of this blog should have been.

Before even getting my hands into the CSS code I identified five guidelines for the new layout, the same I want share with you in this post.

1: Rethinking the home page as a set of focused information readily available at a glance and not as a long vertical list of posts organized by date.

For the home page of Woork Up I wanted to create something different from the typical blog layout we’re used to see. The result is a “compact” home page with a main section which contains the current featured article and a left column that lists some less recent featured articles.

2: Organizing the page elements so that their disposition quickly directs the readers to the contents which must have greater emphasis and visibility.

On the post page I added a section on the left of the text which contained a list of articles related to the current post and some recent featured articles.
The sidebar contains a “popular posts” section whit a list of the most recent popular post on Woork Up. The main section contains only the text of the article and the comments area.

3: Optimizing the number of links on pages
Too much information is equal to none. Do not fill your page with links.

4: Reducing the number of social buttons to share posts on social networks and integrating them harmoniously with the design of the page.

Social buttons are useful to make articles popular on social networks and drive more traffic on a website. The only problem is not all social network are appropriate for all websites. In my experience Twitter, Delicious and Facebook are the best sources of traffic for Woork Up. That’s why in the new layout of this blog I decided to add only three social buttons, integrating them with the style of the page.

5: Making advertising elements minimal and deleting every kind of advertising from the body of the articles.

Advertisement is fundamental to monetize the contents of websites. But I admit, as a reader, I hate pages full of banners and in general all kind of invasive advertisement on a website. So I decided to limit advertisements only on the sidebar: this position is perfect for your advertisers and your readers will love you!

What do you think about this topic? Do you have other useful suggestions to improve blog layout? Share your ideas with a comment.

Los Angeles, CA – There’s this girl whose name is Kate. She’s about twenty years old. She is blonde, pretty, sporting an outstanding breast implant.

She smiles uninhibited in front of the camera. She is one of the many girls coming to Los Angeles from all over the country every year, looking for a chance of a career in the porn industry.

Her partner is a familiar face in the field, a muscular guy covered in tattoos, looking like an grown up version of Big Jim. He is wearing a Lakers cap, a singlet and a pair of kaki shorts.

The setting is a wonderful villa in Santa Monica with a garden, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

The two exchange a few introductory words and then the scene changes, it reaches the apex, following the usual script, rated too high for families. Seven minutes and twentyfour seconds later our Big Jim lays exhausted on a wicker deckchair while Kate happily jumps around and says bye to the camera.

The video has almost six hundred thousand views, thirty comments and four stars on average. And you can easily see it on your iPad.

In a recent e-mail exchange with Ryan Tate, Steve Jobs has declared he wants an iPad that’s free from porn. This sentence felt a little out of place, it sounded like a sort of manifesto I’m honestly having troubles understanding. The question is simple: how? And even more: why?

If Apple can have a sort of censorship on downloadable applications within the Apple Store, it certainly cannot control everything that happens in the whole web galaxy. In fact, YouPorn, Tube8 and many other similar sites have already converted their videos from the Flash format to HTML5 thus making them perfectly usable on the Apple devices, among which you can of course find the iPad.

Actually I think that the point behind this wave of Puritanism apparently circulating throughout the corridors of Cupertino, has to do with the personal crusade led by Steve Jobs against Adobe Flash technology.

One thing is for sure: if the iPad does indeed win over the competition as a platform for the fruition of Internet content, it will be up to those who manage entertainment websites to choose whether to stay with Adobe Flash or to catch a growing business opportunity.

Needless to say they will probably go for the second one and we’ll see a mass migration to HTML 5. Maybe these events will not mark the decline of Flash as a technology but for sure they will force Adobe to find a convincing strategy on what the future of their flagship player will be.

Maybe, again, there is something more Machiavellian to it than just Jobs looking for a porn-free iPad or a Flash-free iPad: and it’s Job’s vision of a Flash-free web.

Some days ago I bought an iPad (3G+ Wi-Fi model). I used the tablet for two days without any problem until this morning, when I noticed several issues with the connection to the web with both Wi-Fi and cellular data networks.

I read this is a common problem and in a note on the support site, Apple reports that a small number of iPad users are experiencing similar issues connecting to Wi-Fi networks and suggests some workarounds to solve it.

I followed all the steps described on that article but the connectivity problems were still there because as I said, my issue is not only limited to the Wi-Fi network but also involves 3G connection. So, after many attempts, I found a way that works in my case in order to reactivate the connections when this kind of problem occurs.

If you have the same issue try to follow this process to fix it.

First of all if you want to use a Wi-Fi network to connect to the web you need to turn off the cellular data network (Settings > Cellular Data) and the Wi-Fi connection. Than you have to turn on only the Wi-Fi connection to make it work again.

The same process applies if you want to browse the web using a 3G connection. Turn off both cellular data and Wi-Fi connections and then turn on only the cellular data connection. If the problem with the cellular network persists, after doing this process, you have to connect the iPad to the power adapter (it won’t work via USB only) and than wait a few seconds. This way, your 3G connection will work again.

Please share your story here adding a comment, tell us if you have any problem with the connection and if this solution works for you too!

Hello fellow surfers, welcome to the new Woork Up, Nicola Armellini speaking. I’ve just been appointed Executive Editor by Antonio and together with him (and you!) we’ll move forward towards a new way of creating content and sharing fresh news from the web.

In the last few weeks we’ve been talking a lot about what will go into making Woork Up bigger and more interesting and we’ve come up with quite a few brilliant ideas we are going to share with you in the coming weeks.

This is absolutely incredible if you think how Antonio and I came to know each other. Do you believe in those events that completely change the course of your life? Our first contact has been exactly of that type. And it all started with a tweet and a Facebook message (to those who say social media is bad… HA!). From a cold business relation we rapidly got to a close encounter of minds that went into building together the future of Woork Up itself. And I’m glad I’m here to tell you about it from a privileged point of view.

The same point of view from which I can give you two insights on what you’re going to see in these pages in the near future.

First: we will update Woork Up regularly, following a defined calendar so you will know when to check your RSS feeds looking for a new post and what to expect. Despite the crowded start we won’t flood your reader, don’t worry.

Second: we’re going to emphasize and stimulate discussion and criticism, we won’t just re-post facts from other sites like many others do. We want to give our take on the most relevant things happening in the tech world and we want to know where you stand and discuss with you. Sterile criticism won’t do here. We both are openly declared Apple fans, but all the same we won’t go for pointless fanboy biased exchanges. Don’t try it with us… (because we could fail!)

This said, please remember that nothing I said is taken for granted and we’re definitely willing to listen to what you have to say and improve the experience on our site as we move on.

Thanks a lot and speak to you soon.

When I started this blog on Blogger, just a little more than a couple of years ago, I was going through the darkest period of my life.

A series of personal events had undermined my balance and completely screwed up my projects of the previous six years. All the things I cared the most suddenly crumbled. So quickly that I couldn’t but let myself be overwhelmed by that storm, unable to react. I sat back and watched the wave sweeping away my life and then slowly going, leaving nothing on its way back.

Until that moment I had always been a positive-thinking and resolute person. From then on I found myself facing the quintessence of misery. I couldn’t sleep, I began to lose weight, and spent a lot of time blaming myself for mistakes no one ever made.

The worst part of the day was night. It never ended. It was a long and distressing monologue between myself and the ceiling. The nightmare lasted for more than one month. If I look back now it feels like an eternity. When I reached the bottom, a part of me decided not to persevere with the recent nihilistic attraction towards self-destruction.

I began devoting myself to my blog regularly, mainly at night. Writing helped me to focus on something else. It was a small personal success. This blog worked as a real rehab program. Things improved over time, with the same speed with which they fell a few weeks before. It was a kind of tiny and unexpected miracle.

Starting today, Woork Up changes radically in style and content and thanks to the collaboration with Nicola Armellini, new executive editor of the blog, it will lead a path we hope you’ll enjoy. Nicola and I will have a more journalistic, more personal and opinion-driven approach to the articles that will cover various topics, from business, to social media, to tech trends and innovations.

If I look back at what already happened, it feels like it could work.

And I know it will.

It was the summer of 1989. For my tenth birthday my parents gave me a portable dual plate cassette recorder.

It was an old model from Sony, it was black with green and purple stripes on the sides. Anything but attractive on the design side, but doing his job nonetheless.

I spent my afternoons with a classmate of mine duplicating tapes with the tunes of our favorite cartoons. We sold them to our friends at low prices, typically the cost a blank cassette or even free if the request came from a girl we liked.

One day we got our hands on the album “Foreign Affair” by Tina Turner. We duplicated it but we also kept a copy with us. We did the same for “Like a Prayer” by Madonna and “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits. At the time that stuff was incredibly popular on the radio. A guy asked us a dozen copies of each album. We sold them with a 30% markup over the price of the blank tape. In mid-July, a month after the start-up of our business, we had sold more than a hundred tapes. By the end of the month we had gained the equivalent of one hundred dollars. It was enough for us to enjoy our summer holidays. We split the revenues evenly and quit our activity.

In the late Nineties, with the lightning fast growth of the Internet, Major record labels invested heavily in the online market in order to address the crisis, significantly affected by the piracy of physical media. The web, however, proved to be an endless nightmare for the entire entertainment industry from then on, rather than the opportunity everyone was foreseeing.

Just for the record industry, according to the latest figures published by the Institute for Policy Innovation, the losses from digital piracy score around 13 billion dollars every year. Statistics show that 95% of the music downloaded from the web is illegal. On the average teenager’s iPod there are about 800 dollars of illegaly downloaded music. If you multiply this value by the number of iPods in circulation, excluding other devices, the total is easily done.

DRM systems are just worthless gibberish. They are an easy mechanism to be bypassed and they prove totally useless if a simple search on any search engine or file sharing client grants you the access to an unlimited amount of illegal data. Despite the efforts by the agencies responsible for fighting online piracy, the phenomenon is not
directly controllable and involves, on a larger scale, the regulation of the Internet at a supranational level.

Meanwhile, I actually wonder if excluding sites hosting illegal material from search results, thus making it more difficult for users to get to the files, could be a first shy step towards downsizing the problem. It wouldn’t be the solution for sure, but it would at least make the match between supply and demand more complicated.

Some days ago I saw a young girl who was showing the entire discography of Lady Gaga contained in her iPod to a friend in the subway. Her friend asked: “Where did you download it?” The girl replied: “From a site I found on Google!”

Palo Alto, California – It’s a beautiful day of late May. Facebook headquarters are permeated by anxiety and nervousness.

Mark Zuckerberg canceled the vacations for his twenty-sixth birthday, ran back to his company offices and gathered his closest collaborators in order to stem the umpteenth wave of criticism sweeping the social network he founded.

Only a few days ago, with the same indelicacy a novice politician would have used to reprimand his voters declaring that their rights are meaningless, he claimed that the age of privacy is over. More than a statement, it looks like a justification for the arrogance and recklessness used by the Palo Alto company to manage its users’ data.

Zuckerberg clumsily stumbles upon a hornet’s nest of biblical proportions, unleashing a swarm of controversy and causing a revolt among those willing to defend their privacy rights who now threaten him with a mass exodus from the popular social network, planned for the end of this month.

Probably there won’t be a real bleeding of users. The exodus will only have a marginal and limited impact on Facebook numbers.Yet something in the foundations of that solid fortress, built by more than four hundred million people, is starting to crumble and Zuckerberg knows it perfectly. The signs are too many, they have been there for too long and they can’t be dismissed like passing storms any more.

The effects in the medium term could be catastrophic. The primacy and the incredible success reached by Facebook are not to be read necessarily as a life insurance for the social network. The Internet creates and destroys with the same speed with which it consecrates personalities and their successful ideas in history. Again, Zuckerberg knows this perfectly. In fact, there was a time in which MySpace was Goliath and Facebook was David. We all know how it turned out.

Zuckerberg now finds himself besieged and forced to do more than one step backwards in order to find the way to quell a revolt that began to take on the profile of a genuine global revolution. Getting out of this mire will not be easy for him. To begin though, it would suffice for Facebook to start dealing with its users showing more respect, because no business guideline can overcome the duty to ethically and responsibly manage a valuable asset consisting of more than four hundred million people.

These people are the soul of a network that would lack the very reason to exist otherwise. They are four hundred million men and women from around the world, not bargaining chips like someone has probably thought with a hint of cinicism in the corridors of Palo Alto.

Maybe, among other things, this is what Zuckerberg should really take into account.

The e-book market is in turmoil. In the next months new models of e-book readers will be launched and this confirms the fact that many companies are interesting in entering into this profitable and growing business.

While we’re waiting for what will be the impact of the iPad and Apple’s iBook store on the e-book market, according to a Digitimes research, the global e-reader sales totaled 1,43 million units in the first quarter of 2010, and will hit 11,4 million units to the end of the year with a 298% increase from the prior year.

Amazon Kindle remains the favorite device for reading e-books and accounts for about 60% of the market. In a recent note Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, commenting the significant growth of Amazon sales in the first quarter of 2010, said Kindle is the Amazon’s #1 bestselling product with over 500,000 available titles.

Nook, the Barnes & Noble’s ebook reader launched in November 2009, is filling the market gap with Kindle and in March 2010 the B&N device accounted for about 53% of readers shipped to the U.S. Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble, said “in addition to the accelerating online sales trends, nook sales have been strong at our bookstores since the product became available”.

Sony with its readers family could be an interesting alternative to the Amazon’s Kindle. The Sony’s readers (Touch and Daily model) have a touch interface, while Kindle uses buttons, 3G connectivity and are cheaper then the Amazon’s device.

Borders plans to release its Kobo e-reader in June. This device comes with a 6-inch display, 1GB memory and an elegant design. The price is considerably chaper than other e-readers ($149) and the E Ink display gives a book-quality printing with no backlight, glare, or reflection.

Samsung announced the launch in the next months of its E60 e-reader, an E Ink based device that allows to read e-books, list your favorite music with the integrated MP3 player and save handwritten notes with the stylus pen included.

For the third-quarter quarter ended Mar. 31, 2010 Microsoft reported record revenue of $14.50 billion with a 6% increase from the same period of the prior year.

Windows 7 sales had a relevant impact in this result. Six months after the launch, the new Microsoft’s operating system has sold more than 100 million copies and, according to the Microsoft note, more than 10% of all PCs worldwide are running Windows 7 today. This is certainly comforting for the Redmond’s company after the bad parenthesis of Vista.

Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft, said “Windows 7 continues to be a growth engine, but we also saw strong growth in other areas like Bing search, Xbox LIVE and our emerging cloud services”.

Windows & Windows Live Division leads revenues with $4,415 millions with a 128% growth with respect the same period of 2009 followed by Microsoft Business Division ($4,243 millions), Server and Tools ($3,575 millions), and Entertainment and Devices Division ($1,665 millions).

On May 18, 2010, in a note on the Associated Content blog, Luke Beatty — AC founder — announced the community was acquired by Yahoo!.

Associated Content was founded in 2005 by Luke Beatty and publishes and distributes more than 50,000 original articles, audio and video contents every month provided by its contributors.

With this move, Yahoo plans to deliver more relevant contents to attract more readers and advertisers. Financial terms of the acquisition, which will be completed in the third quarter of 2010, were not disclosed.

The past week I preordered an iPad (32 Gb model + Wi-Fi + 3G). I’m going to replace my old netbook – a HP mini with Windows XP – with the Apple’s tablet to update this blog, browse the internet, check my e-mail and work on new articles when I travel or I’m away from home.

Probably someone is thinking the iPad isn’t the most appropriate device for my needs and I could buy a powerful netbook at a smaller price.

This is true – in part – but I can’t deny I was look forward for some time to have in my hands the last Apple product and experience if and how it’s can be used effectively not only to enjoy contents but also as a device to create them. If you have my same needs but, for several reasons, you prefer something more traditional, the best choice remains without doubt a netbook which offers a good balance among performances, portability, connectivity options and price.

Market offers a variety of products for all needs and different consumer groups.

Nokia Booklet 3G

Recently Nokia launched its Booklet 3G one of the best mini laptop on the market with a beautiful design and, broad range of built-in connectivity options including 3G and Wi-Fi, and with an exceptional battery life up to 12 hours. It comes with a powerful Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor, which ensures high performances, and Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium. This netbook is perfect for people who need to stay always connected. The only negative aspect is the price €699 (or $549 for US market).

Dell Inspiron Mini10

A more affordable alternative is the Dell Inspiron Mini10 (starting price $279.00) available with Windows XP Home edition or Windows 7. Its comfortable keyboard is perfect to work on your documents (text files, spreadsheets) and the model with optional built-in GPS ($399.00) is perfect to navigate and stay connected with your coworkers, friends and family.

Acer Aspire One 532h

The new Acer Aspire One 532h is another interesting and powerful netbook which provides up to 10 hours of battery life, good performances and good connectivity options (3G optional). It comes with Windows 7 and a multi gesture touchpad which simplify the way you interact with your laptop (starting price $300.00). The only weakness in my view is a low appeal of its design but overall is a good compromise between price and performances.

If you have any suggestion about other netbook model leave a comment.

According to a Google note, the company of Mountain View plans to close the Nexus One on-line Store due to deluding sale results of its device through the internet.

The Google’s strategy to deliver the Nexus One exclusively online had a sharp impact in limiting the diffusion of the Google smartphone. Google says: ” While the global adoption of the Android platform has exceeded our expectations, the web store has not.”

According to the analytics group Flurry Google sold about 80,000 Nexus One mobile phones in the first month of market (January 2010) versus 640,000 iPhone units sold in its debut month (June 2007).

In March 19, 74 days after the launch of the Nexus One, Google sold approximately not more than 135,000 units of its smartphone. In that same period, after the iPhone initial launch, Apple reached 1 million units sold.

Google currently plans to sell its Nexus One through existing retail channels and enforce his presence on the market of operating systems for smartphones with the new version of Android (2.2).

In fact, although Nexus One sales are not encouraging, Android OS is gaining a significant share in smartphone OS market. In the first months of 2010 Android-based smartphone sales in US exceeded for the first time iPhone OS sales.

This week our weekly inspiring playlist for web designers contains eight new beautiful tracks. Any suggestion for the next issue? Please leave a comment or subscribe to our RSS feeds to stay update on our news!

Fink – Sort Of Revolution

Goldfrapp – Utopia

Madonna – Substitute For Love

Cinematic Orchestra – All That You Give

Naomi – White

Loner- Lights Which Pass

Tina Dickow – All I See

Mozez – Feel Free

Are you looking for the best places online where to find free ebooks? Take a look at the following resources that allow you to quickly find everything you need.

Mega PDF ebook search engine

Mega PDF is an ebook search engine with more than 370 millions of free downloadable ebooks. You can find all kind of books such as manuals, novels and so on. You absolutely must try.

PDFgeni allows you to find free PDF ebooks, novels and manuals for business, education, finance and programming.

Search PDF eBooks is a free PDF search engine to search millions of PDF ebooks.

PDFQueen is another interesting PDF search engine for ebooks.

Free eBooks is an online source for free ebook downloads, ebook resources and ebook authors.

If it looks like a pig and it smells like a pig, then it probably is a pig. That is how I am feeling about betweeted.com right now. Betweeted.com is another one of those companies who places ads on your Twitter account and pays you when people click on the ad. I have earned over $50 in a relatively short time and I found Betweeted to be one of the easiest ad companies to use.

Bank Run is an interesting game for the iPhone, produced by SilkTricky, that uses high-quality real video footage to immerse the user into a fun game experience which includes a side-scrolling shooter and a third-person shooter.

In this game, players take the role of Evan Sharpe, a young financial analyst that have to save itself and his girlfriend from a deadly conspiracy. The first part of Bank Run, which you can play online, is an interactive movie where player’s choices influence the course of events and it’s characterized by a series of simple challenges in order to escape from your office and survive. The second part, you can play on your iPhone, is instead a typical shooter game. The game costs $1.99 and you can buy it on the iTunes store.