Mashable: Latest 8 News Updates - including “Hangover II’s Mr. Chow Guest Stars in Mike Tyson’s iPhone Game”

Mashable: Latest 8 News Updates - including “Hangover II’s Mr. Chow Guest Stars in Mike Tyson’s iPhone Game”


Hangover II’s Mr. Chow Guest Stars in Mike Tyson’s iPhone Game

Posted: 28 May 2011 06:28 PM PDT


The Hangover Part II made its debut on the big screen this weekend, and along with it, made an appearance in Mike Tyson's iPhone game in a Warner Bros. promotion for the film.

Specifically, a free update to the game (Mike Tyson's Main Event [iTunes link]) features the ability to fight Mr. Chow (played in The Hangover Part II by Ken Jeong) in Bangkok (where the film is set), watch the full trailer within the app and buy tickets.

For those unfamiliar with the Hangover series, the update is especially fitting since Tyson, playing himself, was the breakout star of the first movie and makes a return appearance in the sequel.

So far, the update seems to have ignited more interest in Main Event, which was downloaded more than one million times in its release week back in March. The creators of the game, RockLive, tell Mashable that they saw more than 120,000 active users of a new "city leaderboard" feature on Thursday, which allows users to see the top scorers in their area based on geolocation.

The game, which is very much modeled after the classic NES title Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, has also added more virtual items, such as a "Power Balance wristbrand" that helps users beat more challenging opponents in their quest to get to Mike Tyson. It's those virtual items — along with promos like the one for Hangover II — that RockLive hopes will help the monetize the free game.

Below, an interview I shot with Tyson back at SXSW before the release of the game:

More About: Film, kien jeong, MARKETING, mike tyson, Movies, rocklive, the hangover part ii, warner bros

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This Week in Politics & Digital: The Online Influence Issue

Posted: 28 May 2011 03:33 PM PDT

us flag tech image

Online influence is the golden fleece for politicians. Control of the digital world is becoming just as important as control of the offline world.

This week we saw former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announce his presidential bid online, a breakdown of online Klout for presidential candidates, Twitter’s CEO announced as part of a White House telecommunication advisory council, and an official White House rapid response Twitter feed.

This weekly series picks out the week’s top stories in the intersection of digital technology and politics.


Tim Pawlenty Announces Presidential Bid on YouTube

Tim Pawlenty announced he was running for president last Sunday in a video posted to YouTube. Oddly enough, the video actually pre-empted Pawlenty’s formal announcement planned for the following day, reported the New York Times.

Pawlenty calls out President Obama for giving fancy speeches rather than fixing problems and claims that he, and not Obama, has the courage to tackle tough issues. Using YouTube may also help give Pawlenty’s image some color.

Which Presidential Candidate Has the Most Klout?

klout image

Every 2012 presidential candidate has so far embraced social media … but has social media embraced them? Lee + dela decided to take a look at the group’s online influence according to their Klout scores. Klout is an online metric that measures the reach, power and general influence of any Twitter account. Though it’s far from a definitive standard, the scores give a good impression of how the candidates stack up. Obama leads with with a score of 88. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is second-highest with 79; Newt Gingrich is at 74; and Pawlenty is the lowest with 66.

Twitter CEO Named to Obama’s Advisory Committee

Seems like Obama really likes Silicon Valley. In a White House statement released Thursday, Obama named Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, along with Scott Charney, corporate VP of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, McAfee President David G. DeWalt and three others, as potential appointees to his National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. The group oversees the availability and reliability of telecom services in the U.S.

White House Launches Rapid Response Twitter Feed

response image

The White House launched a Twitter feed aimed at finding and deflecting negative online commentary. The account is listed under Jesse Lee (@jesseclee44) according to Online Social Media. Lee is the White House’s new Director of Progressive Media & Online Response. The account was set up as a way of "helping coordinate rapid response to unfavorable stories and fostering and improving relations with the progressive online community,” according to Huffington Post.

The fact that the account is under Lee’s name rather than an official-sounding government title hints that the role will be more about personal outreach than top-down story squashing. Although Lee only has a little more than 1,800 follows at time of writing, the account is verified and is likely to grow with use.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, Pgiam

More About: barack obama, pawlenty, politics, President, president obama, week in digital politics, White House

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RIP Gil Scott-Heron: 5 YouTube Videos To Remember Him By

Posted: 28 May 2011 02:30 PM PDT


The great Gil Scott-Heron died Friday at age 62, and across the Internet, the American poet, musician and author is remembered for his groundbreaking music and influential style.

One of his most popular compositions was “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” but when he recorded that poem and song back in 1970, he didn’t realize that a lot of his work would be immortalized on YouTube decades later.

We’ve scoured YouTube and found the 5 most popular official videos of Gil Scott-Heron‘s work, giving you a small taste of his recording and performing career that spanned four decades. Gil, you’ll be missed:


Gil Scott Heron - Washington D.C


from black wax gil scott music poet


Gil Scott-Heron | We Almost Lost Detroit


Gil Scott-Heron and his Amnesia Express from March 14, 1990 in London, UK.


Gil Scott-Heron - The Bottle


Video clip for Gil Scott-Heron's The Bottle.


Gil Scott-Heron - 'I'm New Here' (official video)



Gil Scott-Heron - 'Me And The Devil' (Official HD Video)


Graphic courtesy The Guardian

More About: Gil Scott-Heron, rip, the revolution will not be televised, trending, videos, youtube

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Google’s New Quick Flight Search Makes Your Life Easier

Posted: 28 May 2011 01:16 PM PDT


Google just made it a lot easier to quickly look up flight information. Now you can type “flights from [a city] to [another city] in the Google search window, and it’ll quickly display a summary of flight information right there on the results page.

Could it get any easier? We tested this new feature that was announced Friday on Google’s Inside Search blog, and it works beautifully, especially if you’re talking about major cities.

For instance, type “flight LA SF”, and you’ll get a long list of flights when you click on the resulting drop-down list:

Or you can simply type “flights LA” and Google will helpfully show you each flight to Los Angeles from all airports, including numerous airlines and flight durations. Find out what flights originate from your local airport by typing “flights from [your airport here]“.

It works in 10 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Turkish and Catalan.

It’s not quite so easy if your destination is not served by a nonstop flight. For example, we tried entering “flights from Milwaukee to Tahiti” and got nothing but the usual list of travel sites.

Smaller towns with tiny airports aren’t particularly well served, either. Type “flights from Topeka” and again you’ll see those usual travel sites. But city dwellers will almost always get results when they type the word “flight” and the name of a city.

There are a lot of trick searches you can do on Google that have been around for a while. A favorite of ours is to do quick conversions of currency, weights and measures using the power of Google. For example, type “300 gbp in usd” (which stands for 300 Great Britain pounds in U.S. dollars) and you’ll immediately see the answer: $494.19. The key word there is “in”. It’s especially handy with metric conversion. Try this one: “250 km in miles.”

Thanks, Google. This is yet another life-enhancing improvement added to your search repertoire.

Graphic courtesy Googlylessons.com

More About: flight lookup, flights from ny, Google, new feature, Search, trending

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Internet Drama [COMIC]

Posted: 28 May 2011 12:02 PM PDT

Here’s a show I’d watch.


Mashable Comics are illustrated every week by Kiersten Essenpreis, a New York-based artist who draws and blogs at YouFail.com.

Hat tip to Josh Catone for his encyclopedic knowledge of Law & Order.


More Mashable Comics:


- The Earliest Social Network Ever Discovered
- The 19th Annual Internet Meme Convention
- Stand-Up Web Developers
- The Secret Social Media Lives of Goldfish
- There's a Badge for That

More About: cat videos, comics, humor, mashable comics, memes, television, viral videos, youtube

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4 Fun Apps To Enhance Your Digital Lifestyle

Posted: 28 May 2011 11:11 AM PDT


The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable handpicks a few startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products. This time we’ve curated a list of lifestyle applications for our uber-social readers to gain even more fulfillment from their digital activities.

If you’ve developed an affinity for Instagram, for instance, consider signing up for MorningPics to revisit your past photo moments. Love to IM with friends on Facebook and Google, but hate the clunky interfaces of mobile chat apps? Tap to Chat for iPhone and iPad should suit you nicely.

Do you often miss the best of your friends’ Facebook updates? Try Feedkite for a traveled-filtered view of what’s happening in your social graph. And, if you want to collect and save your entire social networking life, use Patchlife to automatically build a digital journal you can reference and add to on the web or iPhone.


Patchlife: A Journal For Your Social Networking Life


Quick Pitch: Patchlife records all your online moments in digital journal entries.

Genius Idea: A modern-day journal that’s automatically written by your status updates, photos, videos and blog posts.

Mashable’s Take: Digital denizens share photos via Instagram, Facebook and Flickr, recount significant moments on Twitter and share where they’ve been via Foursquare. Patchlife weaves these disconnected status updates into interconnected colorful daily diary entries that document our lives.

Use the web application to connect to the social networks that you use and Patchlife will import your content, sorted by date, and build out an interactive digital diary of shared moments that you can relive on the web or via the companion iPhone application. You can also use Patchlife to compose your own entries and attach links, photos and documents.

The app reminds us of Momento for iPhone, but offers a slightly different take on social network journaling.


Tap to Chat: Facebook & Google Chat for iOS


Quick Pitch: Chat with all your Facebook and Google friends on the go.

Genius Idea: A slick interface for lean-back IMing with friends via iOS devices.

Mashable’s Take: Tap to Chat for iPhone and iPad, by Osmosis Apps, connects to Google Talk and Facebook to create an application experience that is centered around and optimized for instant messaging on mobile devices.

Tap to Chat’s biggest draw is its elegant interface, but it’s also packed with fun features. You can view open chats, star conversations, change the color theme, quickly switch between chats and receive message notifications.

The application, which costs $0.99, is proving to be quite popular with iOS users (we like it best on iPad). The startup says its seen more than 500,000 downloads of Tap to Chat in the past five months.


MorningPics: Memories Via Email


Quick Pitch: MorningPics is a simple service that emails users each morning with an Instagram photo they’ve taken in the past.

Genius Idea: Relive past Instagram moments one day at a time.

Mashable’s Take: Take a trip down Instagram memory lane every morning with MorningPics. The super simplistic application connects to Instagram to do just one thing — it emails you a randomly selected photo you took in the past. The MorningPics daily email includes one Instagram photo per day, as well as all the associated comments and “likes.”

“Unlike other email, these messages don’t require anything of the user,” creator Brenden Mulligan explains. “They exist to make a past memory more fresh, and hopefully give the user a nice way to start the day. That’s the goal.”

MorningPics is currently in private beta, but Mashable readers will be granted priority access.


Feedkite: Follow Your Friends’ Travels


Quick Pitch: Feedkite is building a social travel graph by identifying & organizing all the authentic travel resources buried inside Facebook.

Genius Idea: Surfacing friends’ trips and travels on Facebook.

Mashable’s Take: Feedkite is a Facebook application that finds travel updates and photos of your Facebook friends. The app digs through the status updates of your friends to present you with a place and photo-centric view of where they’ve been traveling.

Use Feedkite to search and see where your Facebook friends have traveled, browse through photos of friends’ trips and explore a map of destinations where your friends have been. You can also see how you’re connected to destinations, and can mark places to your destination wish list.

Feedkite is ideal for those looking for an alternate way to consume their friends’ Facebook status updates and photo uploads.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ozgurdonmaz


Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, Feedkite, MorningPics, Patchlife, spark-of-genius, startups, Tap to Chat

For more Startups coverage:


HOW TO: Set Up an Online Resume

Posted: 28 May 2011 10:12 AM PDT


Your resume is boring. How do you expect to stand out in a crowd of job seekers when your black-and-white, list-formatted resume and formulaic cover letter blend with all the rest?

Luckily the Internet is here to save you. With the coming of social media resumes, video resumes and visual resumes, the world of job seeking just got a lot more interesting.

If you’re looking for ways to make your resume stand out — whether that’s on your personal website, video hubs, document-sharing websites or LinkedIn — here are some ideas to get you started, along with examples for each format.

If you’ve posted your resume online in a creative way, share a link and your story with us in the comments below.


Your Website


First, if you don’t have a personal website, get one. It’s a great way to showcase your passions, thoughts and experience, whether you’re searching for a job or not. If you name your website after yourself (i.e. ericaswallow.com, in my case), it will probably rank highly when people search for your name online.

Now that that’s taken care of, consider listing your resume (or at least an “about me” page) on your website, so site visitors can learn more about you.

Hagan Blount, a self-described writer, editor and producer, hosts a compelling infographic resume (pictured above) on his personal website. The “Resume” tab on his site includes his resume, alongside a stream of his most recent tweets. The resume is creative in that it includes a non-traditional approach to his professional (and personal) history, complete with fun stats, QR codes and recommendation quotes from influential business people.


Video Resumes


A well-edited and informative video resume could be the perfect complement to a traditional resume. Videos enable job seekers to showcase their personalities, something that isn’t quite as easy with your standard cover letter and resume package.

PR executive Graeme Anthony, put together a creative and engaging resume on YouTube, outlining his portfolio, skills and other details. Using YouTube Annotations, he created an intro video (embedded above) that showcases a series of other videos describing his qualifications. His methodology enables users to click through to sections they are most interested in viewing.

His project was a hit. To date, the six-video series has garnered more than 200,000 views.

To mimic Anthony’s success, it’s important that job seekers create video resumes that add value and fully utilize the video format. For a complete guide to creating a show-stopping video resume, check out Amy-Mae Elliott‘s recent post on the “Top 5 Tips for Creating Impressive Video Resumes.”


Document-Sharing Websites


You probably already have a DOC or PDF format of your resume in your job-searching arsenal. To get the most out of it, upload it to document-sharing websites such as SlideShare or Scribd.

Both sites enable viewers to download, embed and share your resume, giving it the opportunity for many more eyes to see it. As a bonus, these sites often appear at the top of search inquiries for an individual’s resume. So, the next time someone is searching on Google for your resume, it’s likely he or she will stumble upon your uploaded versions on these sites.

Both sites allow users to upload revisions of a document. As you change your resume, you can replace it on SlideShare or Scribd to keep it up-to-date. This is particularly useful because the URL never changes, so you won’t lose search cred or confuse recruiters who already have links to previous versions. Furthermore, the view count on each document never starts over, and the upload date, tags, description and document title stay the same.

Slideshare tends to have the best upload quality, because the formatting of the preview stays true to the original document. But it’s advisable to use both sites, as search rankings can vary.

I keep my resume on both document-sharing sites. Since uploading it to both sites in July 2009, I’ve experienced more that 6,000 total views and nearly 250 downloads across the two sites. And that’s just for a plain, ol’ Word document. Imagine if I would have gotten creative, like Chris Ferdinandi, a human resources professional based in Boston. His visual resume (embedded above) has nearly 29,000 views and showcases his “not-so-traditional” approach.


LinkedIn


Of course, there’s always LinkedIn, a staple of the professional’s online presence. LinkedIn has become the standard online professional network, and like Facebook and Twitter, it often appears near the top of search inquiries involving people, as a result of its high ranking across search engines. When a potential employer searches for information about you online, you’ll want some semblance of your professional life to appear in search results.

Once employers find your LinkedIn profile, you’ll want it to be flawless. For the most part, you can bling out your profile by filling in the basics, asking for meaningful recommendations, using value-added applications and becoming an expert with LinkedIn Answers. For more detailed tips on creating a picture-perfect LinkedIn profile, check out my recent post on “HOW TO: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile.”


Share Your Online Resume


If you’ve highlighted your resume in an interesting way online, share the details with us in the comments below!


Social Media Job Listings


Every week we put out a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we post a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!


More Job Search Resources from Mashable:


- 10 Creative Social Media Resumes To Learn From
- 9 Dynamic Digital Resumes That Stand Out From the Crowd
- HOW TO: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile’s New Skills Section
- 12 Ways to Use Quora For Your Job Search
- 10 Tips for Aspiring Digital Marketers

Image courtesy of Flickr, tychay

More About: job search, job search series, jobs, linkedin, resume, scribd, slideshare, trending, video resumes, youtube

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Naked Gaming Craze In New York? It’s a Hoax [VIRAL VIDEO]

Posted: 28 May 2011 08:52 AM PDT

Those crazy New Yorkers! Are they really playing video games in the nude? Yes, some probably are somewhere, but this viral video is a hoax, populated with actors and friends of adman James Percelay. [Warning: No naughty bits are visible, but the video might be disturbing for sensitive viewers.]

Percelay is a promoter for ad agency Thinkmodo (also responsible for this viral video hoax from last November), and created this video that swept across the Internet this week. When you watch it, you’ll start getting suspicious when you notice the precise delivery of each line, carefully orchestrated shots, the well-placed black boxes covering you-know-what and the unusually attractive group.

So just what is being promoted here? Notice in the hands of many of the actors the Xtendplay gaming accessory, supposedly making Xbox 360 and PlayStation controllers easier to handle during those marathon gaming sessions? That’s the company we’re supposed to remember here.

Percelay insists his hoax was never meant to be taken seriously. He told the Daily Mail, “The art form is progressing where people presume now that these videos are hoaxes,” he said. “We’re entering into an understanding that, it’s kind of the implicit agreement now where the audience just wants to figure out how we did it.”

Oh, to be a fly on the wall on that video shoot.

More About: gaming, hoax, James Percelay, naked gaming, Thinkmodo, trending, viral video, Xtendplay, youtube

For more Business & Marketing coverage:


Top 10 Twitter Trends This Week [CHART]

Posted: 28 May 2011 07:32 AM PDT

Twitter Chart Image

We really can’t add any additional jokes about The Rapture that haven’t already been made. Some of the best Twitter humor we’ve seen sent this topic to the top of the week’s trends. We can confirm that The Rapture did not, in fact, happen as scheduled, but has been postponed until October 21. We look forward to seeing if there will be similar spikes on Twitter’s Snark-o-Meter.

As we’ve seen in Twitter trend charts of yore, U.S. award shows are almost guaranteed top play. Were it not for the impending apocalypse, the Billboard Music Awards might have taken the number one spot. Appearances by American pop royalty got tweeters chatting, sending sentiment about the show to number two on our chart.

And the world’s favorite pastime, soccer, remains at the top of the trends for weeks on end, this time falling in at number three.

To see the full list, check out the chart below. Because this is a topical list, hashtag memes and games have been omitted from the chart. The aggregate is based on Twitter’s own trending algorithm, and does not necessarily reflect raw tweet volume.

You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section.


Top Twitter Trends This Week: 5/20 – 5/26

Rank
Topic
Intensity
Description
#1
May 21st Rapture
3
People shared what they wanted to do before the world ended on May 21. Most users were not surprised when the Rapture didn’t happen on schedule.
#2
Billboard Music Awards
2
Ken Jeong hosted the little known Billboard Music Awards, which was heavy on musical performances. The awards show made it to the weekly top 10 thanks to fans of Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, Rihanna and Black Eyed Peas tweeting about their appearances.
#3
Soccer/Football
1
#SurvivalSunday was the top football trend and was related to the final day in the English Premier League and not about how everyone survived the rapture. Football figures discussed Jorge Valdano, José Ángel Valdés Díaz, Augustine Azuka "Jay-Jay" Okocha and Kolo Touré who tested positive for a "specified substance."
#4
American Idol Finale
1
While Scotty McCreery won American Idol’s 10th season, the primary trend was "Damn Beyonce," referring to Beyonce’s single "1+1" which she performed for the first time on American Idol. Users also talked about former contestants who showed up this week as well as other guests like Marc Anthony.
#5
SHINee
1
Fans of the Korean band SHINee sent several members’ names into the top 10 trends as the boy band celebrated their third anniversary.
#6
Towel Day/Nerd Pride Day
1
The 25th of May is a bit of a mashup. For fans of Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the day is Towel Day. But, recently, users in Latin America, particularly Brazil, have been celebrating Towel Day as "Nerd Pride Day."
#7
NBA
1
Mike Brown is the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers and was recently ejected from their game against the Boston Celtics after drawing two technical foul calls. Fans also discussed player Derrick Rose and baseball player Sammy Sosa who attended the Bulls vs. Heat game but whose skin appears to be lighter.
#8
Kim Possible
1
Kim Possible was an American animated television series that ran from 2002-2007. It was about a teenage crime fighter who has the task of dealing with worldwide, family, and school issues every day. Fans were reminiscing about the show.
#9
Lady GaGa
1
Fans of Lady Gaga caused several of her songs ("Born This Way," "Electric Chapel," "Edge of Glory," "You & I") to trend on Twitter.
#10
Randy Savage
1
Former WWF and WCW Champion "Macho Man" Randy Savage died on May 20, 2011 after suffering a heart attack while driving and crashing into a tree. Fans are remembering his great wrestling career and also that he was a colorful spokesperson for Slim Jim.

Data aggregate courtesy of What the Trend.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, 123render


Interested in more Twitter resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.

More About: List, Lists, Top Twitter Topics, twitter, Twitter Lists, twitter trends

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