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AT&T to Create Buzz in the Social Recommendations Market

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With the success being reaped by location-aware social recommendation sites such as Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and even Google Places, it’s not surprising that a new player wants to join in the party – AT&T.  According to a report by Forbes, AT&T is currently testing a new social recommendation site called Buzz.com.

The site which is currently on a by-invitation-only alpha mode is geared to provide  “deeper and more relevant” local business searches that will utilize AT&T’s information about local businesses.  Through social connections and technology, AT&T hopes to give  the most reliable and useful search recommendations to users based on what other people’s  favorites and comments.

But don’t think of Buzz.com as just another social networking site despite having some similar features with Facebook or Foursquare.  The site was developed  by leveraging social graphs that already exist. So the site’s would-be members will be able to invite groups of friends from their email contacts or even Facebook profiles and link their activities on Buzz.com instead of duplicating their social networking profiles.

In addition, Buzz.com is not a review site.  You either post a brief comment about a particular local business or favorite that site instead.  This in effect will spare AT&T of all the troubles that may arise from not so great reviews about business establishments that might be posted by people.

Buzz.com is set to debut to some 500 users next week . In the meantime you might want to sign up to make sure that you’d get an invite as soon as they let people in.

Originally posted on January 27, 2010 @ 12:56 pm

Pizza Hut iPhone App Scores Another Award, Order your Pizza Now!

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After getting various mobile innovation-related awards from several advertising organizations, here comes Pizza Hut iPhone app again bagging another prestigious plum. This time it’s from “the” Forbes Magazine, which named it the #Branded Mobile Application of 2009. Of course, Pizza Hut iPhone app was also named as the first national pizza chain to release an ordering app, and that’s not counting the millions of profits generated by the app for the Pizza store.

If you’re an iPhone users and you have not downloaded the app yet, you might be missing a lot. Actually I might be missing a lot because I haven’t downloaded the app yet. But I have a good excuse, the app is not available in the country where I am located. [Read more…]

Originally posted on November 27, 2009 @ 5:52 pm

Life goes on for Fake Steve Jobs

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The Real Steve JobsIn a not-so-new but still widely-talked-about news, life goes on for Fake Steve Jobs even after his real identity — Daniel Lyons, 46 years old senior editor of Forbes magazine — was unveiled to the world wide web.

After more than a year of anonymity, with the past months growing with more and more rumors on who the real FSJ is, New York Times journalist Brad Stone cracked the mystery that has long been speculated upon and revealed Lyons as the man behind The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

Now as a reaction to the unexpected revelations, Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) posted “Damn, I am so busted, yo” in his usual satiric style of writing that Silicon Valley and the blogosphere has grown to hate and love. “Well it had to happen. Honestly I can’t believe it’s taken this long. But as you may have heard, I’ve been busted by a newspaper reporter. My cover has been blown,” Lyons said.

In spite of the blown cover, however, there’s no stopping Fake Steve Jobs. Lyons keeps his fake identity and continues to blog about Apple, as well as Silicon Valley elites, as if not swayed by the revelation. And since his cover has already been revealed, Forbes.com will soon be hosting his blog as well, to their pleasure.

“Apple faithful, here in our darkest hour I know what you’re thinking: What’s next for FSJ? Well, I’m taking a few days off to sit in a lake and do some yoga and meditation and non-thinking. Then I’m coming back next week, badder than ever, with a new sponsor — my homeboys at Forbes.com.” Lyons said in the same comeback post.

Some of us would think (including Lyons himself) that by revealing who the real “Fake Steve Jobs” is, Stone singlehandedly “robbed thousands of people around the world of their sense of childlike wonder”. After all, it was the mystery blogger that made the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs more.. well, mysterious.

Still, all worked out well for Lyons (whose secret diary now gets almost half a million page views a day), and Forbes.com (who didn’t know that they have in their payroll the Fake Apple CEO) and Steve Jobs himself (who seems to be enjoying his very own satire). Also, at least the real Steve Jobs won’t have to wonder if it was Bill Gates who was blogging as him.

Postscript. The photo above is of the Real Steve Jobs.

Originally posted on August 9, 2007 @ 3:43 am