Mobile advertising is changing the game. While you might put the television on mute when advertisements appear, mobile device owners know mobile ads (especially location-based ones) can save you money and better your shopping experience.

Sense Networks, a company that extracts mobile location data for predictive analytics in advertising, gathered mobile CTR (click through rates) to compare what makes consumers click ads and compared the shopping habits of East Coast and West Coast consumers.

SEE ALSO: Why Mobile Shopping Could Be As Big As Online Shopping

East Coast mobile shoppers were most likely to click on ads for optical and eyewear deals. Consumers on the East Coast also had…
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Who needs ultrasonic baby pictures when you can have a resin-cast 3D model of your live fetus? That's the latest development in 3D printing, now available at a health clinic in Tokyo.

The clinic, Hiro-o Ladies, is working with a 3D printing company called Fasotec to create what they call "Tensi no Katachi," or "Shape of an Angel." The printer renders the model in various shapes and sizes, all of which float in clear lucite.

It's kind of like a snow globe -- of your unborn child.

The service costs 100,000 yen, or about $1,300. A dual-resin extruder makes the baby part and the hardened amniotic part at the same time.

Clients can choose to h…
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More About: 3d imaging, 3d printing, Mobile, Newsy

Name: NoWait

Quick Pitch: Restaurant wait list that replaces pagers and eliminates lines.

Genius Idea: iPad app lets the restaurant notify their guests when their table is ready -- via text message.

Restaurant wait lists can be unorganized and frustrating – guests are often waiting for their pager to buzz or name to be shouted long after their expected wait time.

Instead of shouting names or tracking wait lists on paper, NoWait lets restaurants send a text message to their guests when their table is ready.

The innovative app eliminates pagers and lines, and allows guests to wait where they want until their table is ready.

"In today's information age, everyone…
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More About: bizspark, restaurants

You may know YouTube primarily for its awesome sports highlights, classic TV clips and popular music videos, all of which are offered on-demand in easily clickable playback format.

But the 2012 Olympics represent the service's biggest live streaming effort ever. The Games also offer a window into the changing nature of online video and where YouTube is headed next.

YouTube partnered with NBC to deliver the American broadcast giant's online Olympic coverage, delivering 34 million live streams to customers over the first week of the Games. Nearly 1.5 million people watched live streaming coverage of the U.S. women's gymnastics team winning a gold medal.

Nearly 1.2 million watched v…
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More About: Sports, YouTube, olympics

Who knew texting at the dinner table, during class and all hours of the day would eventually pay off?

Seventeen-year-old Austin Wierschke from Rhinelander, Wis. -- a high school senior who can type up to six characters in just one second -- won $50,000 for the second year in a row at the sixth annual texting event LG U.S. Texting Championship held on Wednesday in New York City.

Standing on a stage in the middle of Times Square, Wierschke beat out 10 other finalists, who competed in a series of rounds using a LG Optimus Zip QWERTY keyboard smartphone. The preliminaries started several months ago when the competition had about 100,000 contestants.…
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Ever wished you could zoom through a hyper-realistic map of the universe at many times the speed of light? Now you can.

Newly released to the public this week, the largest-ever 3D map of the universe includes includes galaxies that date back seven billion years. The map was created by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, an association of two dozen universities from around the world.

The group uses a massive wide-angle optical telescope at New Mexico's Apache Point Observatory to record the cosmos bit by bit. The telescope's findings are then used to piece together an unprecedented look at our universe. The animation in the YouTube video embedded above includes more than 400,000 gala…
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YouTube first introduced its editing tool for YouTube video around this time last year, and now editing videos on YouTube is even easier.

Thursday, the company rolled out an updated and simplified interface for editing clips. The editor now has a quick-view for all of the available filters, and as you're editing your video you can check out a real-time interactive preview of any enhancements you've made.

YouTube's video editor offers many of the same features you might find in traditional editors such as the ability to add a soundtrack or transitions between clips. Unlike most other editors, however, you are still limited to just one video tr…
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Ever been a huge fan of a cartoon series, only to watch the show run out of ideas and introduce an overly cute character as comic relief? If the name "Scrappy Doo" means anything to you, then you likely know what we're talking about.

Now it seems popular cartoonish videogames are not immune to this trend, either. Angry Birds -- a game that rode to worldwide dominance on the back of some great physics and the observation that all birds look fundamentally furious -- is set to introduce a new character in its latest update to Angry Birds Seasons. The character's name says it all: Pink Bird.

In sharp contrast to the hilariously frowny faces of Red Bird, Yellow Bird, Black Bird et al, P…
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Zach Seward, like several of us at Mashable, is qualifiably obsessed with "The Internet of Things" -- connected objects that email you when your clothes are dry, or turn on your sprinklers when the temperature gets hot.

To indulge his obsession and distract himself from work, Seward, social media editor at Quartz, a mobile-first business publication The Atlantic is planning to launch next month, has engineered a lightbulb that lights up every time someone mentions @quartznews on Twitter.

"Now, when you interact with us, our newsroom is literally brightened," Seward explained in a Tumblr post.

The lightbulb also goes off when Facebook's share price drops below $20, and every time Chi…
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Every year, great filmmakers create excellent movies that the general public never sees.

With the cost of film production continually decreasing due to more affordable cameras and post-production software, this problem is only getting worse. How do filmmakers take advantage of new technology to distribute their films successfully? SnagFilms, a new media startup may have the solution.

Founded by Ted Leonsis, who also founded AOL, SnagFilms uses online streaming to connect films with the appropriate audiences, across multiple devices.

In an exclusive interview with SnagFilms CEO Rick Allen, we discuss some of the issues that independ…
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More About: facebook open graph, independent film, sundance film festival, valleygirltv, video streaming

Let's get the caveats out of the way: no one knows anything for sure about the next iPhone, not even its name. (Sure, iPhone 5 is a pretty good bet, but it could just as easily be "the new iPhone.") There have been no official announcements from Apple. The best launch date report we have, September 12, is based on some (very good) guesswork.

Apple's top suppliers have recently reported a massive jump in sales, prompting suggestions of one of its biggest launches ever, but it's guesswork still.

Got it? Good. Now: are you an iPhone owner who's prepared to roll the dice on a new model coming out in a little over a month? Do you want one? And most importantly, can you do without your…
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More About: apple, iphone, nextworth, trending

The Microsoft-powered police surveillance system being installed in New York City is an impressive bit of innovation: It connects a wide variety of technology already in use by the New York Police Department in a way that gives police a powerful new tool in preventing and solving crime.

The system, dubbed the Domain Awareness System (DAS), sounds like science fiction: Part Minority Report, part 1984. It connects thousands of security cameras in the city owned by the NYPD and private businesses, collecting and archiving up to 30 days worth of their archival footage at a time.

Meaning: If there's a crime committed, police can use the system to see the crime but also backtrack, easil…
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More About: US, World, microsoft, new york city, privacy, security, technology

Online shopping still hasn't overtaken the traditional brick-and-mortar retail store, but according to eMarketer it's projected that U.S. online shoppers will spend a total of $224.2 billion by the end of 2012. That's a huge opportunity for online retailers. The fundamental problem is that almost every major brand has an online shopping experience in place, and with growing competition it's hard to stand out from the crowd.

If you're wondering how your company can stand out, here are four instances of innovative ecommerce experiences worth exploring.

1. The Hashtag Photo Feed
The Australian-based women's retailer, Black Milk Clothing, motivates its customers to become a…
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More About: contributor, ecommerce, features, online marketing

Zynga is expanding the "With Friends" franchise Thursday with the launch of its newest title: Gems With Friends.

The game consists of three rounds in which players combine three or more numbered gems together to create a higher-numbered gem. For instance, combining together three gems with a 1 on them will create a single 2 gem. Combine four gems, and you've got a 5.

The higher-numbered gem will always appear where you dropped the last piece, allowing players to create chain combos by strategically placing the last piece.

SEE ALSO: Zynga COO Resigns as Game Maker's Stock Falters

Each round lasts only two minutes. "The game plays like Word With Friends, but sped up 100 times,…
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Forget London. Much of the 2012 Summer Olympics action is happening on Twitter. Athletes have used the social network to share photos and status updates that take their followers inside the Games. Fans have used it to revel in Olympic drama and -- in the U.S. -- tweet result spoilers for viewers stuck waiting for NBC's tape-delayed primetime coverage.

How did all the Twitter chatter stack up over the event's first 10 days? Mass Relevance, Twitter's official social curation and integration partner, tracked the tweets to produce the infographic below, which shows just that.

Through 10 days, there were more than 28.4 million Olympic-themed tweets, according to Mass Relevance, and users…
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More About: Sports, Twitter, infographics, olympics

Technicolor disco lights, glow-in-the-dark blow-up dolls and zillions of bubbles are either the makings of an epic rave, or Pixar's new animated short Partysaurus Rex.

Set to play in theaters before the feature film Finding Nemo 3-D starting on Sept. 14, Partysaurus Rex is the third in a series of Toy Story Toons shorts. The flicks follow Woody, Buzz and the rest of our favorite plastic friends in the care of their new owner Bonnie, to whom we were introduced at the end of Toy Story 3.

The latest installment follows the anxious and excitable Rex doing a tour of duty in the bathtub. He soon learns that while rubber duckies can be the life of the party at bath time, they are, for t…
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More About: EW, Entertainment, Film, animated, movie, pixar, rex, short, toy story

Too many so-called Ultrabooks render the label nearly meaningless. The thrust of the idea is a category of extremely thin and light laptops that also perform well. However, Intel owns the trademark, and its standards sets the bar laughably low (case in point: the bulky HP Spectre actually qualifies).

That's why it's so good to see Samsung taking the idea seriously with the Series 9: a laptop that is very much in the spirit of the original concept. The "ultra" is supposed to allude to ultra-thin design, and the Series 9 isn't just a good example -- it's a head-turning one. At its thickest point, the notebook measures just 0.64 inches, which is 0.04 of an inch thinner than a MacBook Air…
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More About: Ultrabooks, features, laptops, reviews, samsung

Thanks to multi-platform voting for the upcoming MTV Video Music Awards, artists are seeing noticeable spikes in both their sales and their social fan base.

More About: Awards, Entertainment, Music, Social Media, VMA, mtv, sales, television, vmas

As space enthusiasts worldwide tuned in online to watch and follow the historic landing of the NASA rover Curiosity on Mars earlier this week, Facebook found that men were significantly more interested in the event than females.

Although Facebook didn't provide percentages for the male to female ratio, it said men ranked 6.08 on a buzz scale of one to 10, compared to an overall score for women of 4.76.

Using a tool called the Talk Meter, Facebook examined how much buzz the Mars landing generated across the social network and noted trends in age, demographic and location. It tracked search terms such as "Curiosity" and "Mars" and conducted searches during the time period that the r…
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More About: Facebook, Mars, Mars rover, NASA, Social Media, space

Facebook is testing a feature that allows you to turn your Facebook photos into physical postcards that can be sent to your friends.

Originally started as a hackathon project, the feature allows Facebook users to send any of their own photos to friends. You won't be able to send public photos or photos from pages.

Just like a traditional postcard, the photo will be displayed on the front of the card, and you can type a personalized message to your friend on the backside. Postcards will allow you to type in your friend's address if you know it, or ask him or her for their physical address is you don't.

The service is powered by Sincerely, the company behind Postagram, an app…
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Carl Sagan's passion for astronomy made him one of the most respected and celebrated space geeks of the 20th century. The science legend's enthusiasm for exploring worlds beyond our own began as a child growing up in Brooklyn.

At age 5, Sagan began frequenting the New York Public Library to browse books that could give him a better understanding of the stars. He later reflected on the what he discovered: "There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me." The experience got him hooked on outer space.

Sagan's fixation continued and as a pre-teen he sketched his vision for the future of interstellar space exploration. The draw…
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More About: Carl Sagan, NASA, Watercooler, space

Fashion designer Nicole Miller is expanding her social media presence to video, becoming the first designer on VYou. Miller, a self-proclaimed social media fanatic (the designer is a regular poster to Instagram and Facebook) is using VYou to interact more with her fans and show the authenticity behind her label.

"VYou lets us show it is Nicole Miller answering the questions and just talking to people herself," Allison Hodge, Miller's vice president of communications and marketing, tells Mashable. "It isn't like the man behind the curtain; it's actually the designer."

As the first fashion designer on the site, Miller has the opportunity to shape her brand in a new way. Hodge says…
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It's been long reported that Google treats its employees well, from offering them free food and fitness classes to laundry service and car washes. But according to a recent report, Google recently rolled out death benefits to employees, including a generous offer to pay the spouse or partner of a deceased staffer half of their salary for a decade.

The news of these death benefits -- which was first reported by Forbes -- also comes with "no tenure requirement," which means each employee in its 34,000 workforce qualifies. It was put into place earlier this year.

Mashable confirmed with a Google spokesperson that the benefits don't just stop at salary. The surviving spouse or partner…
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As we move toward an increasingly connected society, people around the world are gaining access to digital tools and technologies to solve global issues. Millions are using social media to to debate, discuss and act on both the challenges and opportunities we all face. This Sept. 22-24, the 2012 Social Good Summit will highlight solutions to the most pressing problems shared around the globe.

Brought to you by Mashable, 92nd Street Y, the United Nations Foundation, Ericsson, the U.N. Development Programme and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the third annual Social Good Summit promises to once again showcase the unparalleled effects of citizens united through social media and…
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More About: Conference, Social Good, UN, event, social good summit

Got a question for Cook? Use the chat feature above to get it answered live.

Catherine Cook is the co-founder of MeetMe, the public market leader for social discovery.  

Cook co-founded myYearbook with her brother Dave in 2005. The company merged with the Quepasa Corporation in November 2011 and in June 2012 rebranded to MeetMe, Inc. Cook is responsible for creating some of the most important applications on the site, and has been instrumental in driving the site's growth by conceiving the next popular features. As part of MeetMe's management team, Cook continues to drive innovation toward its mission -- to be the best place to meet new people.

Cook graduated from Geor…
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Who is Gary Connery? He's the skydiver who doubled for the Queen of England in the awesome stunt that kicked off the 2012 Olympic Games. But he's also the star of this video, shown gliding in a wingsuit and then dropping an iPhone from 1,000 feet.

Just one day before his Olympic stunt, Connery joined a couple of other base jumpers to launch themselves off the Eiger mountain in Switzerland. During the descent, they dropped the iPhone and kept the camera active, recording its entire free fall.

SEE ALSO: iPad Survives 100,000+ Foot Fall From Space [VIDEO]

The iPhone survived, but with a little help in the form of a smartphone case made by G-Form. G-Form builds cases from the same R…
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More About: YouTube, iphone, iphone cases, olympics

A new virus capable of spying on bank transactions and stealing sensitive data such as browser passwords, cookies and network information has been discovered infecting computers in Middle East.

Called "Gauss," the virus was designed to siphon data from several major Lebanese banks as well as users of CitiBank and PayPal, sending the stolen information back to its still-unknown creator.

It was detected by Kaspersky Lab, the same security firm that found the Flame virus earlier this summer.

Gauss is very similar to Flame -- in fact, it was discovered by Kaspersky exactly because the two share so much DNA. Flame and the new virus have "similar architectural platforms, module structu…
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More About: Tech, World, cybersecurity, flame, lebanon, malware, stuxnet, technology, virus

1. Cosmology

Click here to view this gallery.

Real science sure is great, with its disease curing and space travel and whatnot. But most of the time, it's way too serious.

That's where Fake Science comes in. The Tumblr has blown up in recent months, and folks can't stop sharing the hilarious sciency posters that explain genetics and cosmology in less than accurate terms.

SEE ALSO: 10 Must-Follow Tumblrs for (Actual) Science Lovers

It's the brainchild of Phil Edwards, and he's turned the blog into a book deal with Fake Science 101: A Less-Than-Factual Guide to Our Amazing World.

How does Edwards come up with these little gems?

"Sometimes, I'll be lucky enough to be inspired by current events, as with the recent Mars Cu…
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More About: BLOGS, Science, books, features, humor, tumblr

Nikon is reportedly working on an Android-powered camera later this month, according to a camera-enthusiast blog. The camera will be part of Nikon's CoolPix line of point-and-shoots, and it's said to connect directly to the Google Play market to download apps that will run on the camera.

The blog Nikon Rumors posted the report on Wednesday. Citing a filing with the Indonesian Communication Agency, the report suspects the model number will the CoolPix S800 or S800c. Although it doesn't cite any other sources, the site says the camera's "expected" specs: a 25-250mm lens, a 3.5-inch OLED screen, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi.

The camera is supposed to run Android 2.3 Gingerbread and will be…
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More About: Nikon, android, instagram, point and shoot

Social media is often credited with helping spread the Arab Spring, as activists shared messages of discontent and organized protests using Facebook and Twitter. More than a year after the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, it has become a megaphone for propaganda from both sides of the struggle in conflict-ridden Syria.

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are replete with propaganda from Syria -- government forces and rebels have been using the networks to spar for the attention and support of the outside world. The Syrian government even has a division, the Syrian Electronic Army, assigned to the task.

"It's not surprising that Syria has attempted to develop a cyber warfare capability," J…
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More About: Arab Spring, Facebook, Social Media, Syria, Twitter, World, YouTube