The world’s most popular portable gaming device is even more fun.

Now available in black and white, iPod touch includes iOS 5 with over 200 new features, like iMessage, Notification Center, and Twitter integration.

Send free, unlimited text messages over Wi-Fi with iMessage.

Record HD video and make FaceTime calls. Visit the App Store to choose from over 500,000 apps.

iPod touch also features iCloud, which stores your music, photos, apps, and more and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices.

Twitter tweets are the new means of information delivery today. This is true for users who had been exposed to Twitter for such a long time. Twitter has become a mainstream social networking site for everyone. Downtweet, a new and advanced Twitter search engine, expands that purpose. For many people, Downtweet is considered as an extension of Twitter—a rightful embellishment to one of the most famous social networking sites ever.

Tweets are like simple announcements made by an individual. These short announcements take place online and many people keep on doing them frequently. It is evident that most of these tweets are just simple expressions, opinions, and plain daily activities. However, some tweets are informational and can be great topics for any discussions.

Twitter is so massive that some tweets may get lost in the entire flurry. This is where Downtweet steps in. Downtweet is a Twitter widget meant to discover tweets that may be helpful for certain individuals. Twitter users are divided into several categories, and passive users take a large portion.

Passive Twitter users do not use Twitter on a frequent basis. They don’t tweet many times per day, or they don’t tweet at all. Some of them joined Twitter out of peer pressure and social experimentation. Downtweet caters to these users, granting them the opportunity to search for the best tweets of their choices.

In Downtweet, tweets are divided according to categories. Streams of the tweets are always updated, prior to the category being searched. This makes Twitter search more fun and organized. The best categories in Downtweet are business, comedy, food, gossip, sports, and tweets related to some famous celebrities. The tweets are also clickable so users can discover the sources and continue to learn more.

Downtweet can also be embedded to any blog and according to some bloggers it has more potential compared to other Twitter applications out there. Based on Downtweet’s uphill visibility climb, users expect to have more developments in the coming months.

Track Social used its proprietary Social Media Leaderboard technology to analyze Retweet activity for major brands on social media.

Savvy consumers are often wary of brands spamming across the social media platforms. But they’re increasingly open to receiving content from people they know. That’s why Retweeting – in which a Twitter follower forwards someone else’s Tweet to his or her own set of Twitter followers – is so potentially valuable for brands.

It is also valuable because a Tweet can get Retweeted by a follower, then any of its followers can Retweet that original Tweet, and so there is the potential for a cavalcade of viral messaging that turns a brand into the next @AngiesRightLeg.

Not only does it mean the content gets self-distributed to an exponentially wider audience, but the messaging is being delivered to consumers by people they trust, making them significantly more likely to engage with content.

The concept of sharing is embedded in all social networks, and much of the internet, however in Twitter it is far more implicit to the very concept of the platform.

Track Social has dug deep into its Twitter analytics to find out just which Twitter accounts see the most Retweet action per day. Lo and behold the Retweet Leaderboard:

Retweets Per Day For Brands

1. Joyce Meyer Ministries
2. ESPN
3. Joel Osteen Ministries
4. Miami Heat
5. Breaking News
6. NBA
7. CNN Breaking News
8. Los Angeles Lakers
9. Chicago Bulls
10. BBC Breaking News

At First Glance: Sports dominate this leaderboard.

[Note: Track Social tracks Brands only, not individuals. For more Track Social Leaderboards go here ]

Twitter is all about spreading the latest news, fast. That’s why Twitter’s up-to-the-minute headline stream is the perfect medium for sports and news. No surprise then that of the top ten (non-celebrity) brands on Twitter, five were sports-related, and ESPN, the leading sports news cable network, came in at number two.

Engaging with media-addicted sports fans is perfectly suited to Twitter’s format. Besides offering an instant portal to ESPN content through headline links, photos and video posts, ESPN makes sure to generate fan interaction – and get the Retweets flowing – by regularly asking followers to jump into the conversation. Not such a difficult task given that participation is written into sports fans’ DNA.

ESPN’s Tweets run the gamut from the sublime: “He’s 5’9 and DUNKS over anything” to, yes, the ridiculous: “What would make for the best #OfficeCombine drill? Reply with the hashtag #OfficeCombine. We’ll RT (retweet) our favorites.”

Keeping fans close to the action – with scores, plays, trades, and highlights – is what Twitter does best. NBA team Miami Heat came it at number 4 while the Chicago Bulls showed up at number 9. Both teams post upwards of 15-25 posts per day and load them up with pictures and player videos: “Joakim Noah dunks to record his 1st career triple double http://bit.ly/btvpotw.”

In just the past few years, Twitter has stolen the thunder from radio stations and television news broadcasters to become everyone’s primary go-to place for the most current events. Where did most people find out about Whitney Houston’s death? That’s right – Twitter. Three news organizations on the Leaderboard – Breaking News (an aggregate of many different news feed sources), CNN, and BBC Breaking News rank in at numbers 5, 7, and 10 respectively. These sources tend to rely more on the content of the stories themselves to motivate Retweeting, allowing followers to share with their followers, and more often than not, allowing these Tweets to become trending topics.

But perhaps the most surprising entry in the top ten comes in at number one: Joyce Meyer Ministries is the evangelical preaching and publishing organization of Fenton, Missouri-based preacher Joyce Meyer.

Catering to a largely female following, the posts (about four to six per day) range from cautionary wisdom: “The sooner you learn that feelings are fickle, the better off you’ll be” to motivational exhortation: “If you’re too busy for God then it’s time to change your schedule.” They also include the occasional Bible verse and update on where Joyce will be appearing next.

Given the lack of proprietary content coming through her feed (there’s nothing particularly exclusive about the Psalms), the success of Meyers’ Twitter strategy tells us something about the attraction of social media platforms like Twitter. The real power of this technology is to allow a personality (who would otherwise never be able to engage with one of “the masses”) to speak directly into a person’s daily life.

And that should say something about the power of social media platforms like Twitter to erase the distance between “us” and “them.” Social media users are increasingly comfortable with, and, indeed, increasingly demand a level of personalized interaction. Not just from preachers, or celebrities, but from brands as well. Because the goal of all this technology really is to connect – not just to ideas or entertainment or “content” but to other people – in a meaningful way.

Make the connection – and the Retweets will follow.

EarthBuzz Software has built a 3D engine capable of showing an interactive 160 megapixel NASA Blue Marble rendition with deep zoom in its latest product EarthBuzz Free Weather which runs on the Apple A4 processor at lightning fast speeds.

EarthBuzz Free Weather overlays live satellite weather data and Global Forecasting System image layers, over the NASA Blue Marble high-resolution earth imagery. In addition to the 160 megapixel Blue Marble rendition it also has overlays of animated real-time satellite clouds, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, live weather conditions and Twitter friends using geo-location.

The EarthBuzz engine uses a sophisticated tiling technique innovated by NASA. Instead of using Mercator projection tiles, like our competitors, the EarthBuzz Engine uses a technique known as Tessellated Octahedron Tiling. This gives EarthBuzz superior fidelity around the poles compared to competing virtual earth software.

The satellite cloud layers are currently only 1 megapixel due to bandwidth constraints although it is possible with sponsorship and support that EarthBuzz Software will release a high fidelity satellite cloud layer in an upcoming version.

The live weather condition data, forecast data, animated satellite cloud image layers and global forecast system image layers are made available from CustomWeather, Inc a San Francisco based weather data provider.

Michael Clark, Managing Director of EarthBuzz Software, tells us there is a back-story behind EarthBuzz Free Weather and the EarthBuzz Engine.

“It’s really a statement on the openness of information and respect for the creators and innovators that have made this information available such as NASA and NOAA. There is a huge investment in satellite remote sensing infrastructure for which data is made available to small companies like EarthBuzz Software, giving the potential to innovate and add value. These governmental open data initiatives create a huge downstream benefit that expands and enriches the entire application ecology.”

While EarthBuzz Software is based out of Singapore, the largest proportion of profits from the ad-supported EarthBuzz Free Weather and its companion ad-free paid version EarthBuzz Weather go to companies in the United States such as Apple, Inc, for its iTunes App Store channel, CustomWeather, Inc for its weather data feed and Amazon, Inc who host the cloud computing infrastructure behind the EarthBuzz Free Weather service.

EarthBuzz Software is hugely thankful to those who make their channels, information and infrastructure openly available to international companies such as EarthBuzz Software, based in Sunny Singapore. Apple has given small developers a wonderful opportunity to innovate and create world-class mobile applications.

In recognition of this, the initial release of EarthBuzz Free Weather is first available in the United Sates as a statement on our respect for openness and freedom of information. Europe tends to provide access to satellite weather data at prohibitive costs for small developers whereas the US government believes that opening this information up to innovators creates more downstream economic benefits from value added services. Many other countries such as Singapore and New Zealand have similar open access government data initiatives.

EarthBuzz would love to have the backing of NASA or Twitter. Imagine a mobile app visualizing real-time social network information on the EarthBuzz 3D earth engine. This would allow the potential to see trending topics and global sentiment in real-time with analytics from the Twitter fire-hose. The technology platform is available but EarthBuzz Software needs sponsors and partners to aid with development and cover bandwidth costs for a Twitter fire-hose feed of geo-located tweets. In addition, there are opportunities for visualizing climate change, and as a platform for crisis communication, education and travel.

Michael Clark the founder of EarthBuzz Software has invested 5 man years in engineering time in evenings and weekends to build up the cross-platform EarthBuzz Engine, the EarthBuzz Weather and EarthBuzz Free Weather iPhone and iPad apps along with server-side middleware to transform map projection into tessellated octahedron tiles. EarthBuzz Software now has a completely unencumbered virtual earth code-base using no proprietary components.

The EarthBuzz Engine currently runs on Windows / Linux / MacOS and iOS, is written in cross-platform C++ with OpenGL ES and there is also the potential for an Android version. The EarthBuzz Engine features asynchronous tile loading, time series display and point data visualization capabilities as well.

Please contact Michael Clark, EarthBuzz Software, if your company or organization is interested in sponsoring EarthBuzz Free Weather, licensing the EarthBuzz engine for embedding in branded applications or custom mobile application development based on the EarthBuzz engine.

Concrete5 today announced that it has redesigned the company’s admin dashboard to leverage Twitter Bootstrap.

An early pioneer of in-context editing, concrete5 gained popularity due to its ease of use for managing the content of websites. With this in mind, the company has leveraged the Twitter Bootstrap toolkit to offer a completely redesigned, centralized dashboard for backend administrative tasks with the release of concrete5.5.1.

While concrete5 is frequently used by webshops to deliver sites to clients who want to make edits on their own, many people who use concrete5 are DIY websites on budget webhosts where concrete5 is acting as a self-publishing platform. Over two-thirds of the traffic hitting concrete5 servers isn’t coming to its public facing community concrete5.org at all. The company knew it needed to improve the learning experience from within the concrete5 application itself.

“We started just wanting to make it easier to get around the Dashboard and browse our marketplace from within your own site, but we quickly realized we were going to have to touch every part of the interface to do it right,” said concrete5 designer Robert Huston. “Twitter Bootstrap gave us an amazing style guide, and much of the infrastructure we needed right out the box. With some addition icon work and thoughtful application of the rules the Twitter team devised, we were able to accomplish months of work in just weeks.”

“A lot of time has gone into tuning things under the hood with this release,” added Andrew Embler, CTO of concrete5. “Performance on a default install of concrete5 has improved dramatically in this version, and new features like Stacks and Global Block Areas provide best-practice solutions to problems that had been solved organically in the past.”

New installs now include a wizard explaining how people can get started, and a daily news feed laid out like a magazine helping people learn more over time. The browse marketplace functionality has been dramatically improved, and users can now even purchase add-ons and themes without ever leaving their own sites.

Spreaker announced today that its free app for broadcasting live high-quality audio is now available for Android devices. Spreaker empowers anyone to broadcast live over the Internet with nothing more than the existing microphone found on your Android or iPhone.

The emerging trend of audio applications in mobile and social has been advocated by tech luminaries such as Robert Scoble who recently featured Spreaker in this video exploit, and noted Silicon Valley VC Mary Meeker who predicted sound to be become a bigger category than video.

Spreaker harnesses Facebook’s 800MM global active Facebook users and the 835MM smartphone users, which is likely to ramp to more than to 1.4B within two years.

Spreaker does for audio what Twitter does for text and YouTube does for video: makes it makes it easy to share audio content across social networks. On both iOS and Android, you can easily connect the Spreaker app to social network accounts like Facebook and Twitter and broadcast live as a status update. Your friends and fans alike can listen live or later as a podcast.

“Sometimes just a text status update on Facebook or Twitter is not enough, and video often requires too much production, whereas a live audio update on Facebook or Twitter tells a much more colorful story,” said Francesco Baschieri, founder and CEO. “Now we can extend our app to millions more phones and devices using Android.”

Last quarter, Android represented 53% of smartphone shipments, according to Gartner – well over 60 million devices shipped worldwide.

Anyone who has ever wanted to create their own radio show is now able to do so without needing expensive equipment or a tech crew. With Spreaker’s advent, it’s easier than ever to distribute live audio content across the internet by using the web platform or mobile apps, which stream in high-quality 128 kilobits stereo.

Spreaker can also be used to record audio from one’s surroundings and distribute it later as a podcast. The Spreaker web platform allows users to edit their recordings and easily add sound effects and background music from a huge library of licensed content.

The Spreaker widget can be easily embedded on any website or blog, and customized, similar to YouTube. The archived audio or podcasts can be downloaded as MP3 files, and iTunes-compatible RSS feeds can be used to syndicate the content anywhere. Spreaker is available as both a free service with ads and a premium service, which eliminates ads, while providing more storage and bandwidth.

For those seeking additional airtime, less commercials and more features, Spreaker offers a Gold and Premium version starting at $19.90. The basic version is free and is brought to you by Spreaker’s advertising partners.

The new QWiPS (www.qwips.com) apps is available for download from the Apple app store – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/qwips/id473262882?mt=8 And MC Hammer has already sent a QWiPS message. http://qwips.com/4j5zx8

The premise of QWiPS is simple: We all know the billions of messages traded and shared via the social web every day. However, the large majority of those messages are text, photos, or videos – NOT audio. Right now, the social web is silent.

That’s odd right? Think for a moment about the power of voice and sound. The first thing a new baby hears is usually the sound of their parents’ voice. Every day, billions of voice mails are recorded – messages to boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, co-workers, friends.

What if we were able to add voice to all the social snippets that we are sharing today on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks? That’s the target of QWiPS new social voice platform.

Using the QWiPS app:

- You can spontaneously create 30-second audio QWiPS and tag them to any static image or text, Facebook or Twitter post, bringing those messages to life with emotion, personality, and authenticity.

- You can tell the story behind a photo in their own voice, share voice comments, jokes and anecdotes.

- With effects, you can alter your voice message to sound like a robot, chipmunk, etc.

- With themes, you can easily create a voice eCard and share it with your friends and family.

- Celebrities, musicians, athletes, brands and marketers can utilize QWiPS to stay in touch – via voice – with their social audiences and fans.

- Friends, colleagues, and family can easily respond to your messages via QwipBacks – creating a threaded, voice conversation via the social web.

Enjoy higher quality online content with our latest firmware update:

• Watch YouTube™ in High Definition and enjoy Facebook™ videos and photos in full screen
• Stay in the loop – Twitter Ticker™ shows rolling updates of the latest tweets while you’re watching TV
• Share your TrackID™ song search results straight to Twitter™

Experience YouTube™ as never before

Watching the latest Internet sensation on a smartphone or laptop simply doesn’t come close to the big screen experience. Now with our latest firmware update you can enjoy High Definition videos from YouTube™ in crisp, clear quality on your BRAVIA TV. What’s more, YouTube™ videos are further optimised by the advanced image-enhancing technologies already built in to your BRAVIA TV. From sports clips to music videos, YouTube™ has never looked better.

See the bigger picture

Expanding your social network will take on a whole new meaning too with our new firmware update. Log in to your Facebook™ account and view shared photos and videos in full screen on your TV – so friends and family appear larger than life. Follow any URL links posted by your friends direct from your TV screen, as well as updating your status, sending messages and more.

Let the news follow you

Another feature new to BRAVIA TVs is Twitter Ticker™. Follow a real-time Twitter™ newsfeed scrolling along the bottom of the screen and keep tabs on your favourite tweets without missing a moment of your favourite TV show. You can share Track ID™ results straight to Twitter™ quickly and easily too. Heard a song you like on an advert? Just hit Track ID™ on your remote to find the title and artist, then pass on the results to friends and followers on Twitter™ at the touch of a button. Simple.

Put your laptop to good use

You can already use your smartphone or VAIO keyboard to control your TV and surf the web – and now you can use other laptops too*. From typing a web address to searching for information about the latest movies, it makes entering text on-screen even easier than using your TV remote.

Never miss an update – connect your TV to the Internet

We are always coming up with new and innovative features to enhance your Internet TV experience. So it’s important to make sure the firmware in your TV is up-to-date. The easiest way to stay up-to-date is to connect your TV to the Internet, either with a cable or through a wireless network. Whenever you switch on your BRAVIA TV, you’ll be automatically notified of any available firmware updates.

Firmware updates are also available from the Sony Support website and can be transferred to BRAVIA TVs using a USB memory storage device.

This firmware update is available on FY11 models for BRAVIA TV only. (CX520, CX523, EX320, EX523, EX524, EX723, EX724, NX723, HX723, HX823 and HX923)

* 1) Remote Keyboard Lite is a trial application with no performance assurance by Sony.

2) Sony does not provide any official product or technical support for this feature.

3) VAIO owners who can’t download Remote Keyboard Lite and receive an error message should download from the VAIO support page or part as a VAIO update.

4) Only available for PCs running Windows 7 operating system. Depending on respective system configurations, some Windows 7 PCs may not work.

5) Bluetooth function is not available for Remote Keyboard Lite.

Frendz LLC is pleased to announce the addition of status post commenting to BuzzE for iPhone giving users a simple convenient way to share and comment on other user’s thoughts of the day. The original version of BuzzE offered users a friendly way to break the ice and meet people in their neighborhood or around the world with chat, media exchange, and ice breaker games as well as a way to find local social events. Version 2.4 expands on this basic premise and allows users to post messages, audio, and video to other user’s status post comments.

This extends the basic idea of BuzzE as a way to interact with new and old friends on an individual basis and opens up group interactions. A status comment is no longer just a status comment. It becomes a forum to share ideas, pictures, and even audio and video with a wide range of BuzzE users. This moves BuzzE from the realm of a social networking tool to a true mobile community.

With this offering BuzzE provides users with a simple straight forward way to interact and share their status with other users without the excessive complexity of the latest Facebook offering. In addition as always user’s personal and profile information is completely private except to their friends.

Commenting on the new release Frendz LLC managing partner Brett Rosen said “This seemed like a natural evolution for BuzzE. Some of our users have jokingly called us ‘Facebook for Strangers’. This seemed like an opportunity to give people just that a simple straightforward forum for people to share their ideas and lives while making new friends.”

With version 2.4 BuzzE offers the most complete proximity based social networking experience for iPhone. The team continues to build on that success and the BuzzE community should expect new and exciting features and enhancements in the months ahead.

LiveGO iPhone Application delivers more developed Facebook and Twitter interface with 1.2.1 version. It practically carries the Facebook and Twitter to the mobile. The main screen of the LiveGO iPhone allows access to both Facebook and Twitter and instant messaging with only one touch.

The new application is capable of keeping online status up to 36 hours via Push Notifications.
And has the Google Plus mobile interface now, to send status updates, and follow the G+ circles.

The founder of the LiveGO, Yusuf YILDIRIM tells following about the new application:

“As LiveGO, we esteem the mobile platforms. We aim to eliminate the complexity caused by number of applications, and to bring all social platforms all together.
Thus, users don’t need to download many applications and make continuous transitions between applications. We plan to provide service in all mobile platforms by posting iPad, Android and Windows Mobile versions in subsequent months.”

The LiveGO iPhone application includes the Google Plus interface to be developed in parallel with interest of users and this shows once again that the team follows up the innovations closely and cares the mobile users.

The LiveGO which reaches 1.8 million members for 10 months of time of period aims to exceed 2.5 million members at the end of the 2011.