A company logo makes all the difference in today’s competitive online marketplace. Making the design one of the most important jobs a business owner will ever entrust to someone. One website has decided that crowdsourcing will yield the best results, and has introduced an intriguing new concept to logo design for business.

LogoDesignGuru.com invites business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs to visit the site and fill out a form with the creative specifications and concepts of a project, which will be sent to a community of thousands of designers who will compete for the job. The project owner sets the amount of “prize money” to be awarded to the winner. The websites fee of $19 and 7.5 percent goes to Guru for listing and processing fees. The project holder can upload as many return submissions as they choose and have unlimited collaborations with the designers. Guru offers a money-back guarantee if they do not receive at least 30 logo concepts in the initial exchange.

Use of social media networks has been increasing dramatically across all age demographics, but it is the older users that are adopting social networking tools particularly faster. Pew Internet released new research that indicates social networking in the 50yrs. and older market has nearly doubled in the last 12 months. In April 2009 they represented 22% to May 2010 representing 42% of the market.

Key findings in their research included:

It’s not a mystery that Google has been hard at work developing their ChromeOS tablet in an attempt to bring it to market soon. It has been rumored for a while that Google is pushing for a Black Friday release for the holidays. A recently discovered trademark filing might clue all of us in on what they are going to call it, or are at least considering calling it. Keep your ears open for talk of a Google ‘Speedbook’ come the holiday season. Having the word book in the name sounds like it may be geared towards the netbook market. But we are going to be tthat it is still aimed at a ChromeOS tablet.

There is always the speculation that the filing could be for something else, entirely different. It could even be an Android-related device such as the Motorola tablet Google has been collaborating on. Although this seems unlikely, since a Verizon released Android products would practically guarantee a DROID branding attached to it. We could speculate all day with how Chrome OS tablet plans affect Google’s commitment to Android as a tablet OS in the long run. But there is room for both since they offer two different approaches to the same market. 

The AARP – one of the largest membership organizations in the United States with 40 million members – has been ratcheting up its social media efforts over the last six months, and is even evaluating geo-location services for its members, all of which are over 50 years of age.

In an interview lastweek, the AARP’s Tammy Gordon, a senior advisor to the AARP’s Chief Communications Officer told us that about a quarter of the organization’s membership is on Facebook right now, and that’s where they are understandably focusing their efforts.

New data from comScore shows that mobile usage of social networking applications is exploding — to the tune of a 240 percent increase from April of this year, compared to April, 2009. Mobile visitors to social networking sites via browsers grew 90 percent, to 30 million users. This data points to the importance of a social and mobile strategy for businesses, including apps. The same study found that mobile application usage overall increased 28 percent, including news apps (124%), sports information (113%) and online banking (near double usage).

So, now would be a good time for you to head on over to http://nexusclub.net and check out the network we have created as an alternative to some of those that have privacy issues. We are open to the comments and suggestions you have for what you would like to see in a social network. 

Apple’s proposed new developer terms would prohibit any apps that include AdMob mobile ads from all of Apple’s mobile devices, including iPhone and iPad. Instead, Apple will use iAd, its own advertising platform. Omar Hamoui, founder of AdMob, had this to say on his blog: “This change is not in the best interests of users or developers. In the history of technology and innovation, it’s clear that competition delivers the best outcome. Artificial barriers to competition hurt users and developers and, in the long run, stall technological progress.” He added, “…we’ll be speaking to Apple to express our concerns about the impact of these terms.

courtesy of WS Mag

Creating videos to market your products and services became much simpler thanks to the introduction of a new set of cloudbased video editing tools from YouTube. Web marketers and content publishers can now build a library of online videos and increase opportunities for brand exposure at the same destination. YouTube users have the capability to cut from videos, create montages of different clips and add or change accompanying music using YouTube’s commercial library of licensed songs. While in itself a significant development, there’s also the possibility that the new video editor may be integrated into Google’s Chrome operating system to provide a completely Web-based tool for businesses looking to expand their use of YouTube.

Google’s new Web indexing system, Caffeine, is giving consumers a much different encounter when viewing search results. The impact on Internet businesses will be substantial as it moves forward. According to Google, Web search listings are 50% fresher now, as Caffeine enables index updates on a continuous basis, instead of refreshing every few weeks.  This is an environment where universally acceptable content such as video, images, audio, and reviews are available and is intersecting with real-time search in a more prominent way. The new index is forcing Web professionals like us step up content development and creation, as well as our social media creativity to stay ahead of the competition, and to remain relevant to our customers. 

The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to make their publicly available information private. However, Facebook downplayed the issue, saying that no private data had been compromised.

Mozilla’s Firefox 4 (beta 2) released on Tuesday, a fulfillment of the developers’ plans to offer increased releases during the developmental process. Which demonstrates the project’s intent to compete against both Google and Microsoft in the browser war.