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""I really think there is a need here. Simplicity, efficiency and fun," he said. "There is a lot of power in being able to push coupons, updates to loyalty cards, tickets and payment options right to the lock screen of a consumer's device. Geo-locating passes is an incredibly powerful feature of the Passbook platform. Nothing could be simpler than shopping at a mall and automatically seeing the passes that are relevant to what's around me: 'Oh yeah, I forgot I had that 15 percent off coupon at Bose. I might as well stop in.' " That's exactly the sort of practical perk that Passbook's early adopting brands seem to love. Online movie ticket service Fandango was a Passbook launch partner, and the company president tells Adweek that the brand's iPhone app downloads skyrocketed with the debut of Passbook. While mobile tickets were already available through the Fandango app for select theaters, Passbook simply made them easier for customers to use. When you arrive at the theater before the movie, your mobile ticket pops up on your iPhone lock screen. Swipe the icon to open the ticket in Passbook (without even having to unlock your phone), and you're good to go."

The Big Issue In The North, a U.K. magazine sold by homeless street vendors to give them a steady income, is launching a digital edition, alongside its print edition. If a customer wants the digital version street vendors will sell them an access card with a QR code plus one-off access code on it which will enable them to download the edition to their smartphones or tablet.

"Google earns 56 percent of all mobile ad dollars and 96 percent of mobile search ad dollars, according to eMarketer. The company said it is on track to earn $8 billion in the coming year from mobile sales, which includes ads as well as apps, music and movies it sells in its Google Play store. But the vast majority of that money comes from ads, it said."

"Facebook is making strides towards becoming a multi-media communication juggernaut, its head of Messenger David Marcus announced today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Out of Messenger's one-billion users, 300 million people use its audio and video calling features each month. That's around the size of Skype's entire user base. Facebook is uniquely well-suited to disrupting traditional home and mobile phone voice calling and their successor, video calling. It has the most complete social graph of family, friends, and acquaintances - going beyond what's in most people's phone contacts. It has a one-billion user chat app where people are already spending tons of time. And it has the technology infrastructure to support high-bandwidth transmissions."

These apps will bring new actions such as "want" and "own" - descendents of the "Like" button - to Facebook and sites that use its plug-ins. Eventually, the verbs will appear in display ads on the site's right-hand side, as well as in users' news feeds while labeled as "featured." When it comes to retail, seeing what shoes, clothes, movie tickets, music downloads, and so on a friend "wants" or "owns" within a brand ad could positively impact the performance of paid Facebook promos. Since implementing "want" and "own" buttons in November, one of Facebook's partners - Payvment/Shopping Mall - has seen customers rise from 500,000 to more than 1.3 million without making an ad buy on the social site. The Facebook-only e-commerce player has been a partner since the f8 developer conference last fall, and it credits the new buttons with spurring a substantial holiday sales period. The Amazon-styled business has placed the "want" and "own" buttons next to each of its thousands of SKUs.

But perhaps more importantly, the company this week is delivering what it's best known for - deals. Ideeli has partnered with Carmen MarValvo, BCBG Max Azria, Nicole Miller, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Betsey Johnson, and other well-known fashion shops to pitch exclusive Fashion Week-focused offers from those designers. Manela added, "The fact that now…we can offer customers not only a strong lineup of [Fashion Week] featured designer sale events, but also exclusive on-site interviews and insight from designers themselves can be directly attributed to the strong relationships [we have] built across the industry."

ZipList (Igrocery list and recipe service) not only had to face off against a growing number of recipe aggregation and shopping services, like Paprika, Yummly and Grocery IQ, but also found it couldn't compete for attention against entrenched cooking brands on the Web, such as the Food Network and Epicurious. So ZipList changed tack. Last summer it began partnering with big food brands MarthaStewart.com and the Daily Meal, as well as small food blogs that began integrating the ZipList recipe box directly into their sites. The results were impressive: In nine months it signed up 120 big-name food sites and 6,500 small blogs, which in turn generated 1 million customer accounts for its digital recipe and shopping list service.

Well, the number of American Express members who chose to participate are impressive, as is the resulting activity. Here are the statistics to date as reported by Visibli, which is keeping a real-time tally: 25,705 members have joined the program (72 new users per hour); 156,415 special offer hashtag messages have been tweeted (286 tweets per hour); $7,051,729 total dollars have been spent; $1,402,625 in discounts have been collected; And the numbers continue to mount!

It's back and it's better then ever. Believe it or not I'm actually talking about Internet Explorer (gasp). You may be hearing your friendly neighborhood nerds whispering about how good IE 9 is. Or maybe it's your annoying friend who still insists that windows is better then OSX. Well IE 9 is said to be a very solid release, supposably it even handles html 5 better then those other pesky browsers. 

"Guess what? Former CNN host Larry King will be anchoring live election coverage this year, (sort of) competing with his old friends at CNN. King will be anchoring coverage on YouTube the last two nights of both the RNC and DNC, as well as following the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates later this year. On election night, he will also be anchoring a live special online."

"President Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention fueled a outpouring of tweets, spiking at 52,757 tweets per minute. Twitter called it a "record political moment," adding that Obama's next two biggest spikes (43,646 and 39,002) surpassed Romney's peak at 14,239. In all, 9 million tweets about the DNC this week were sent by the conclusion of the president's speech. Of course, volume isn't everything. Obama's score on Twitter's political index rose just 2 points when we checked it after the speech. Politico reported that it dropped 4 points. And for a bit of context, the VMA's on MTV - which aired Thursday night against the DNC - attracted a record 7.9 million tweets, well above the network's record of 5.5 million from the year before."

Mentions scion as well as some competitors

Nice follow up on the Amazon Price Check app; apparently most people found out about the promotion because of all the PR it got over brick-and-mortars and politicians denouncing the app. Impulse Commerce

Good for publishers and could be good for us as well.

Behold the world's first crowdsourced movie-poster campaign created through Instagram! It's the pinnacle of creative achievement! Sigh … humankind's obsession with the ubiquitous photo app continues, this time in Canada, where ad agency Taxi teamed with the Instagramers Montreal collective to create 87 posters promoting the new film J'Espère Que Tu Vas Bien, which roughly translates to Instagram Isn't So Great. Actually, it means I Hope You're Well, and the number of posters corresponds to the 87-minute running time of the movie, an experimental piece-entirely improvised, with no script written beforehand-that follows two friends as they saunter around Montreal. The Instagramers walked for 87 minutes, visiting locations used in the film, and submitted more than 600 shots all told.

Mobile messaging application Viber has released version 2.2, introducing group messaging as well as improved call quality and several user interface enhancements. The company also said it has reached 90 million users, with users making over 1.5 billion minutes of calls each month. This is a jump of 20 million users in just over two months.

What Matters to the Junkweb? There are probably 3 key ways one might engage the Junkweb for your own betterment: Make interesting graphics worth sharing. Make it easy to share them. Evoke an emotion. That last one is tricky. But when you do it right, it works quite well. People share emotions in the Junkweb. Oh, and I predict that the tech will adapt to better support this kind of web. It's mobile. It's fast. It's something that will fairly quickly stand a chance of replacing the Smartweb.

Indeed, each of the top five video ad properties,  including BrightRoll, Hulu, Adap.tv, and TubeMogul, as well as YouTube, delivered more than 1 billion video ads last month, according to the new data from comScore.   Following Google's prized property -- which ranked first with 1.41 billion ads -- the BrightRoll Video Network accounted for nearly 1.39 billion ads; Hulu was responsible for 1.33 billion ads; Adap.tv chalked up 1.15 billion ads; while the TubeMogul Video Ad Platform recorded 1.04 billion ads.

The social media marketing vendor tracked campaigns for 276 clients in the last quarter and reported Facebook's new mobile ads are already outperforming desktop ads in click-through rates and CPMs by 14 times. Mobile newsfeed ads garnered a 1.14 percent CTR on average. Facebook is banking on the success of mobile ads as well, earning $9.86 for every thousand mobile ads served. That's 13 times more than it receives for desktop ads.

AppFlood comes with 1,000 install credits, meaning that when people see your ad on another app, up to a thousand of them can download your app at no cost to you.  You can purchase more credits when you run out. At the same time, other developers' ads will appear on your app so that you can earn credits for referring downloads as well.