Walmart has purchased Small Society, a Portland-based mobile developer that's built apps for Starbucks, Amazon, Whole Foods, ZipCar, the Democratic National Committee, and others. Financial terms were not disclosed in an announcement on the retail giant's @WalmartLabs blog earlier today. Small Society's team will join an existing @WalmartLabs location in Oregon, according to the post. Launched in 2011, @WalmartLabs is designed to create technologies that propel the multi-channel brand as a social-mobile commerce player in the years to come. The company also appears to be mounting an agency-like infrastructure that could bypass vendors, keeping some digital marketing development in-house at the Bentonville, AR-based big box merchandiser.

Best Buy hasn't been doing so hot lately, and here's another example that shows why. The retailer has a Twitter account @Twelpforce that uses 3,000+ employees to help run it. So far it has worked without a major disaster, despite the exposure it has with so many employees working on it. But at least one Best Buy manager disagrees, and thinks it's basically a load of crap, reports Chris Morran at the Consumerist.

Sweden has surrendered its official Twitter account, @sweden, to the hoi polloi. The project, Curators of Sweden, signs up Swedes to tweet a week at a time. It started December 10 with Jack Wermer, a writer and marketing specialist. The second tweeter was Hasan Ramic, a Bosnian immigrant Currently, the position is filled by the moose-hunting, oral tobacco product enthusiast Anders Dalenius.

Alec Baldwin received a surprise apology from American Airlines over his ejection from one of its flights -- delivered by none other than Alec Baldwin. Dropping in on "Saturday Night Live"'s "Weekend Update," the most frequent "SNL" host in the show's history played the role of Capt. Steve Rogers, supposedly the pilot of the flight delayed by Baldwin playing "Words With Friends," or being a general nuisance, depending on who's account you believe.

what does "social" really mean? It's become a phonetic clue that whatever follows in speech is now connected, via the Internet, to a collaborative application. If that's even close to accurate, then as marketers we're way past "social media" as a thing to do. Instead, "social media" is firmly part of markets, customer tastes, and business innovation cycles. What's more, entire organizations are governed more by consensus than individual dictum.

Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth.  This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built. One challenge, which isn't new, is the battle for consumer attention.  If you're looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users?  I'm increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web. What is social proof?  Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something.  It's also known as informational social influence.

Has email become the new fax machine? Thierry Breton, Atos Origin CEO and Chairman, would have you believe so. Following through with a promise made earlier this year to eliminate email use among company employees, Breton plans to move beyond email within the next eighteen months and initiate a communication policy based on instant messaging and social media sites. As Atos Origin is a major international information technology company, the decision to abandon email has the potential to influence other companies' methods of communication among employees.

Communicopia undertook this research to better understand how non-profit leaders manage digital and online initiatives in their organizations. In our experience it's well led, well structured, and well resourced teams that are the fundamental building blocks for success online. We've gathered data from 67 senior level staff who run digital departments in non-profits and combined this with our own insights & analysis to help start a conversation in our sector about building better teams.

By Jeremiah Owyang with Andrew Jones, Christine Tran, and Andrew Nguyen Includes input from 63 ecosystem contributors, survey data from 144 social business program managers, and analysis of 50 social media crises

If you file your emails into folders in your email program you're wasting your time, according to a study by IBM Research. The 345-user study found that people who used the search function in their email program could find relevant emails as easily as those who had categorised each email into folders. Finding emails by searches took on average 17 seconds, versus 58 seconds finding the emails by folder. The likelihood of success - that is, finding the intended email - was no greater when it had been filed in a folder. "People who create complex folders indeed rely on these for retrieval, but these preparatory behaviours are inefficient and do not improve retrieval success. In contrast, both search and threading promote more effective finding," the study said.

Mobile quiz startup Qrank will announce next week that it has raised a seed round of funding, including an investment from early Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. Qrank is building out a platform that will let any organization with a backlog of content use it to create smart, fast-paced mobile trivia games. The games incorporate social networks, location, chat and other social features. It sounds awesome. Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement.

The time it takes for new products to come to market is getting ever shorter. As a consequence, goods are being produced using manufacturing facilities and IT systems that were designed with completely different models in mind. Fraunhofer developers want to make factories smarter so they can react to changes of their own accord.

Researchers interested in stress at work have been concerned at the increased intensity of work in the EU over the past 20 years. A more detailed breakdown has shown that this increase between 1995 and 2005 occurred in all countries with only one exception, the UK. Our early adoption of computers may be the key.

The media may portray text messaging and social networks as powerful new weapons for freedom fighters, but these new communication tools may not be as uniformly beneficial or as robust as suggested, according to Penn State researchers.

Do you know what the numbers 5683 and 3327 mean? According to a recent study, if you are a person who frequently sends text messages, your brain knows what these numbers mean and is unconsciously influencing how you feel about phone numbers you dial.

Social media websites, such as Facebook and MySpace, may reveal information that could identify underage college students who may be at risk for problem drinking, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

I was inspired by C.C. Chapman's post about how Ragu hates dads. He pointed out that the Ragu sauce Twitter account was out there spamming the heck out of dad accounts on Twitter. So, I looked around. I wondered, "Just how many other grocery shelf products are botching their chance to capture our attention on Twitter?"

According to an article that appeared in the Tennessean, two members of the Perry County Vikings - brothers Rodney and Ryan Belasic - were ruled ineligible by the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association because of residency issues. The reason questions about where the two brothers' eligibility came about from Facebook posts made by their mother. To play football for a county high school in Tennessee, the entire family must reside within the county lines, and thanks to complaints about the brothers not cleaning their room while visiting their mother in Henry County, something she complained about on Facebook. This, naturally, caught the eye of interested parties, opening the door for the TSSAA's eligibility investigation. It was believed that entire family had moved counties, but the mother's Facebook chatter revealed that wasn't the case

The iMedia 25: Brands Redefining Social Media list recognizes the brands that have done the best job of engaging consumers through the myriad social media platforms. But beyond mere engagement, these brands have used big ideas, bold action, and smart thinking to leverage passionate online audiences in a channel that is still quite new. Collectively, these are the brands that move, shape, lead -- and listen to -- the conversations that define social media.

New technologies bring with it a requirement for new abilities. Back in 1954, dialing a phone was new and potentially confusing. Bell created a 10-minute film to explain it all.