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"Google's search and map offerings are go-to products for many people, and now the company wants to be your tour guide, too, with a new Android app called Field Trip. In the vein of Google Now, the company's smart new virtual assistant software that aims to anticipate information you may want, Field Trip pings you every so often with notifications about your surroundings that range from historical data to special deals to cool sight seeing attractions."

In a reflection of its expanding premium content strategy, YouTube has unveiled two new original channels focused on cars: Motor Trend and Drive. The Motor Trend channel, created by Source Interlink Media, will include original content from the likes of Motor Trend. Meanwhile Drive will take viewers behind the scenes and "[celebrate] the rich culture of cars." Content will include news, reviews and commentary from industry figures such as Chris Harris, Mike Spinelli, Leo Parente, and Alex Roy.

Data visualizations of social conversations and sentiment have also been used on air like never before. As these historic nights unfold, Bluefin Labs will be monitoring public reaction to televised events and providing real time feedback to ABC News anchors, correspondents and producers giving ABC News viewers one more way to see the whole picture.

Taking just the use of paid content on tablets in Q4 2011, Nielsen found that in the U.S., a majority of tablet owners have already paid for downloaded music, books and movies, with 62 percent, 58 percent and 51 percent respectively saying they have already made such purchases. The one area that really fell down in the U.S. was news, where only 19 percent said they had ever paid to read news on their tablets.

The Web site, at eonline.com, has had a fairly traditional layout, following the blog model. In terms of ads, display units have appeared across the top, down the right side and in between stories. Executives at E! described the new model for eonline.com as a "liquid" publishing and advertising platform that is intended to change dynamically, reflecting the purpose of the Web site as a go-to source for pop culture news and information. In keeping with that new format, the Web site can be expanded to five columns from three, depending on the device on which it is viewed.

"Amazon's new lineup of tablets don't just differ from the original Kindle Fire in their hardware. Like last year's cheapest Kindle e-reader, all three new models - that's the Fire, the HD 7, and the HD 8.9 - will display Amazon's "Special Offers" promotions and advertisements on their lock screens. Unlike the low-end Kindle, however, Amazon isn't offering the devices in more expensive, ad-free models, nor is it making mention of any way to opt out for a fee."

Flock is not just a brand new app; we see it as a brand new *kind* of app.  While most apps today jockey for our ever-dwindling time and attention, attempting to become one of the apps that we think about the most, Flock is different.  We designed Flock so you don't have to think about it at all.  You just live your life like you already do.  Spend time with your friends and family; take photos with whatever camera app you prefer.  There's no work for you at all, really.  Flock uses new battery-friendly location technology and sophisticated algorithms to magically know which of your Facebook friends you are with when photos are taken.  After you leave your group hike, or the night out on the town, or Thanksgiving dinner, Flock will check if anyone wants to share the photos they took and then bring those photos together into a single group album for everyone to enjoy.  And because most photos taken by iOS devices are geotagged, Flock can even work backwards in time from before you installed the app!  So if you and your friends and family install the app today, you'll likely unlock lost memories that were trapped on each other's phones for years.

a campaign from New Balance to promote their new store in NY.  Urban Dash challenges people to collect virtual batons.

Twitter is currently in talks with a mix of large and small PR firms with offices in New York, where the company has just opened a new office on Madison Avenue

Newscast using Foursquare to report news.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) expanded its Google Wallet push Monday, adding new coupon and loyalty card services to its mobile payments product as well as a few new retailers hoping to make it easier for customers to spend money.

""We're a direct response shop and we are held to a strict ROI metric," said Will Ferguson, senior director of online marketing, display advertising & social media at 1-800 Flowers. The company uses AddThis--which offers a toolbar that enables users to share content over Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere-to help it collect data from billions of search queries, domains and URLs. "We are able to leverage this data to introduce new audiences to our product," said Ferguson."

"Citi piloted LinkedIn's first branded community in April, erecting Connect: Professional Women's Network as a sponsored group for members to discuss topics online, such as women-on-women bullying in the workplace. Then in late summer something unexpected happened: Members began taking things offline. One New York-based member posted a question, asking if others would like to meet in person. That has spawned nine different meet-ups in not just New York but Seattle and Miami. "That's not necessarily behavior we could have predicted from an online social network," said Citi's managing director and head of North American marketing Vanessa Colella."

"BMW last year invested in the mobile app MyCityWay, and soon it will find if that was money well spent as its eco-friendly Born Electric road show rolls into New York. The luxury automaker next week will run locally targeted display and video ads on the city- guide app, which developers said has 1.2 million users in Gotham."

"Found at CNN.com/Trends, the section is a frequently updated countdown of the most popular stories on the web. A large CNN article anchors each spot, while a bar to the right and a drop-down "see more" option augment that with related news and analysis from other sources. "What we realized as we went about building this is that when a big story comes out, you don't just read a single source anymore," Zite CEO Mark Johnson told Mashable during a demo of the new section. "We want to facilitate that process in the product itself, so we thought why not use some of Zite's technology to do that?""

"The new chat feature is pretty easy to access. Users simply swipe right on someone's username in their inbox to start a conversation. Before, Snapchat users could only send text in the form of captions on photos, resulting in a lot of terrible pictures being sent for the sake of the messages that accompanied them. Now, conversations don't look much different from those in other mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp and GroupMe, except these ones disappear after they take place."

Hawthorne Labs just released APOLLO for the iPad - unique in that it uses an algorithm to evaluate news consumption and deliver increasingly customized content.