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Google Latitude has allowed its 10 million users to see on a map approximately where their friends are. But until now, it provided no way for a user to pinpoint his own location with a check-in, a la Foursquare and others. Now users will be able not only to broadcast their exact location to their friends on Latitude but also to publicly share their check-ins through their Google Profile. They’ll also be able to garner “VIP” and “Guru” status based on the number of their check-ins. This is rather ho-hum news, considering so many other check-in services do much the same thing. But where things get interesting is that Google will allow users to automatically check themselves in to specific locations, without having to whip out their phone.

Promoting Events Electronic Arts U.K. hosted a “Play4Xmas” tour at six different shopping malls across the UK in November and December. Those who checked in at each event had a chance to win up to 10 games per day.

Ambush Marketing Instead of paying an arm and a leg for an exhibition table at the ITB Berlin (the world’s largest travel tradeshow), Germanwings used Facebook Places to create check-ins at each one of its competitors at the fair. When someone checked in at an airline’s booth, their status update would read something like “Air France: France for a bargain price is only available from Germanwings” thanks to their hidden messages.

Facebook Places provides viral marketing for a company since every check-in shows up in the news feed of the user’s friends. It allows businesses to create incentives for those who come to their physical location or events.

The Games Businesses Play with Customers Boomers and Generation X will remember the days when the Yellow Pages was the encyclopedia of local business. Now services such as Foursquare bring the Yellow Pages alive. Add to the fact that the people we know and trust share their experiences and endorsements or critiques with every checkin, we’re given access to something quite remarkable. Additionally, businesses are given a special opportunity to learn more about the people who are checking-in and also about those who are not. Foursquare offers a powerful set of business tools that can help local businesses, chains, destinations, you name it, more effectively connect with the people who can not only keep them in business, but grow it as well.

STOCKHOLM - Visitors to a Stockholm hotel will be able to use mobile phones instead of keys to unlock the doors to their rooms.

Repeat visitors during a four-month trial will be able to check in through their phones before arrival and have their phones activated as "keys." They will then be able to skip the registration desk and unlock the door by holding the phone next to it.The short-range radio technology, known as Near Field Communication, is expected to be built into smart phones in the coming years. It is also envisioned for ticketing and card payments. Assa Abloy says it wanted to test the system before expanding it to other hotels, commercial buildings and homes.

But once people have the technology in their own phones, he said, it will save them time at check-in and improve security because the access credentials in a lost phone can be revoked remotely.

Typical instructional design and pedagogy focus on breaking down a subject into component parts, gaining mastery of those parts, whether they are steps in a process or techniques or parts of the anatomy, and then reassembling them in the learner's mind and in practice so that the result is overall mastery of the broader subject. That may be oversimplified, but this basic approach goes back to Aristotle, at least. It's not debated in education, it's assumed that this is the best approach for learning anything, including complex processes or highly nuanced behaviors in shifting contexts.

Centola's conclusions. He studied positive changes in people's behaviors regarding health care, changes that resulted directly from placing subjects in carefully designed social networks with the goal of improving their health decisions. What he concluded was that smaller, tighter social groups had more success improving health behaviors than larger, looser social groups (ie, the typical Facebook connections). Maybe you already see what it took me a while to notice. Both of them had success. Social networks designed for a specific purpose can do something pretty amazing: They can change people's behaviors. Any educator or trainer whose goal is actually to impact both thinking and behaviors (to change lives!) rather than just getting people to pass a test or check a box, should be paying close attention. And maybe getting a little excited.Researchers in education have long known the power of social groups to alter behavior. Brown, Collins, and Duguid made this case a while back

these three went on to say that highly complex behaviors are picked up, absorbed, through relatively informal social exchange more quickly than they could be if they were "taught" in the usual break-it-down sense. We're talking about complex behaviors. Processes. Highly nuanced interpersonal interactions. Centola's study suggests to me that we now have an online tool, the social network, that is fully capable of carrying the power of culture to shape behaviors and establish norms. And it can be done on purpose.

Scrolling Long Lists Another big problem with iPhone web apps is presenting very long lists efficiently. Digg has this problem with their stories and comments and they work around it by breaking stories into pages of ten and omitting all but the top five comments. Apple solves this problem nicely in their Mail app by loading 25 messages at a time and putting a link to get more at the end. Clicking it loads those messages and appends them to the end of the list, allowing you to use the joyous flick gesture to scroll the complete list at once. In my view, this is nicer than breaking the list up into separate pages. iUI makes it easy for you to use this convention in your own web apps. Simply create a link with target="_replace" and iUI will load the URL it and replace the <a> with the contents of the URL. Again, the URL should not point to a complete HTML document, but only the fragment you want to replace the "Get More" link with. For an example of incrementally loaded lists, look at the Digg demo again. Scroll to the bottom of the stories list and click on the "Get 10 More Stories..." link.

Integrated campaign to launch the new range of Canon Pixma printers.

Use the % Feedback metric in Facebook Insights to see which status updates generate the highest %. Replicate that type of content, as this is the kind of content with the highest engagement and best value for news feed optimization.

There is no doubt mobile web has taken the world by storm. Even more people today are equipped with smartphones running on iOS or Android, both of which provide exceptional web browsing platforms. And this number is only expected to increase as the average population wages and growth rate expands. However the process of designing and coding a mobile template can be very tedious. I’m hoping to provide a creative outlet in this gallery of 29 intuitive mobile designs. These are websites rendered in mobile browsers which have specific templates in place for these devices. Check out my examples below if you’re in need of creative ideas for your own design.