Photo by Charline Tetiyevsky.

Why would you want to run a background check on yourself? We’ve offered reasons before, but as Consumerist puts it:

Now you can know what Big Brother knows about you and get access to the same dirt everyone from your boss, landlord, insurance agent, to your favorite casino has on you. Here is a comprehensive list of websites and phone numbers for most of the “specialty” consumer reports, like your employment, rental, and check writing history. Be sure to check them out and correct any errors, before a crisis hits.

Their list covers the gamut of online info checkers, from employment and tenant history to insurance claims, credit reports, check-writing histories, prescription drug histories, and more—and most of the services appear to allow consumers to run a free report on their own information. If you’ve gone down the background-check road in the past, let’s hear what you used—and what you discovered—in the comments.

Do A Total Background Check On Yourself [Consumerist]

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Palm unleashes webOS PDK beta on the public

Palm unleashes webOS PDK beta on the public originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gallery: Motorola CLIQ XT with MotoBlur hands-on

Continue reading Motorola CLIQ XT hands-on

Motorola CLIQ XT hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Elgato rolls out smaller, Windows 7-supporting EyeTV Hybrid originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is Amazon hiring devs to build a robust web browser for Kindle? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Photo by net_efekt.

Yau lays out the skills and mindsets that have served him well in his studies and analysis. As he puts it, he can’t shoot from the hip with questions about proper sampling size or rendering formal analysis, but he’s learned what to look for when looking at data—something we all do regularly, whether in monthly budgets or spreadsheets at work.

Two of his suggestions:

See the Big Picture
… It’s important not to get too caught up with individual data points or a tiny section in a really big dataset. We saw this in the recent recovery graph. Like some pointed out, if we took a step back and looked at a larger time frame, the Obama/Bush contrast doesn’t look so shocking.

Ask Why
… This is the most important thing I’ve learned: always ask why. When you see a blip in a graph, you should wonder why it’s there. If you find some correlation, you should think about whether or not it makes any sense. If it does make sense, then cool, but if not, dig deeper. Numbers are great, but you have to remember that when humans are involved, errors are always a possibility.

It’s not a top 10 list or secret hacks—just smart advice, and worth looking back at when you’re vexed by a hidden message beneath all the numbers and lines you see in any data set.

Think like a statistician without the math [FlowingData]

Gallery: Motorola Devour goes hands-on

Continue reading Motorola Devour review

Motorola Devour review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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They are the attendees of tech parties, the “Twitter consultants,” the armchair generals of the Internet, and their numbers grow by the day. Yet most of them couldn’t distinguish a line of code from a badly punctuated haiku.tweetmeme_url = ‘http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_thread_should_social_media.php’;tweetmeme_source = ‘rww’;

What’s to be done with the social media experts? Accept that their blathering may contain some wisdom? Or require technical exams for all Twitter users with more than 1,000 followers? You decide! And make the NMDs among us take our “technical” quiz.

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There is always grave danger when amateurs turn overnight into experts. This sub-professional clown town is where B movies and Soulja Boy come from. It’s also the birthplace of every blowhard who tells you you’re “doing it wrong” without any technical knowledge or original thought to back it up.

Sometimes, it’s not such a bad thing – in fact, there are a great many non-technical social media folks who are doing a great job of creating quality content and helping brands get themselved situated on the Web. But most of the people I can think of who fit this description have been doing their thing for so long that they’ve had to pick up a few technical tidbits along the way to ensure their continued success and to ensure they weren’t sounding like idiots.

However, I hold the strong opinion that if you’re working in technology – even as a PR flak or social media consultant – you should be able to understand some of the terms, concepts and people that make your business possible. Otherwise, you risk your own reputation by taking the chance that you’re scarily wrong or laughably vague, and you risk gumming up the works for your clients by not knowing how to communicate with their audience, many of whom are very technical folk.

Ultimately, taking the time and effort to understand the technology you use is simply a matter of taking pride in your work, just like the barista who knows all the ins and outs of the perfectly pulled free-trade organic espresso or the skilled sommelier who, though he may not make the wine himself, knows everything about who did and where and how.

Take this quick survey, my social media gurus. (Techies, don’t take the survey; you’ll skew the results.) If you can’t work out the answers, you might be sounding like an idiot – I tell you this because I’m your friend and I care about you. And remember, when you cheat, you’re only cheating yourself, so no Wikipedia for you.

Let me know in the comments what you think about the issue. Am I being an elitist prig? Did I not take my rant far enough? How much do you think a social media expert should know about tech? Would you work with someone who couldn’t sail through this “technical” survey?

var PDF_surveyID = “0CB7279E686F7832″;
var PDF_openText = “View Survey”;

View Survey

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The story became particularly interesting today: Hendrickson’s new company Plancast is submitting its much-anticipated iPhone app to Apple days before SXSW and announced on Hendrickson’s alma matter tech blog TechCrunch that it has raised just short of $1m from a list of industry stars. We offer below some perspective on what Plancast aims to do: nothing less than “to be the platform for all ‘intent’ data,” Mark Hendrickson says.

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Plancast is a website where people post their plans. Plans to attend a conference, plans to go to a party, perhaps plans to get a haircut. “We have the same ‘who wants to share that?’ issue as Twitter,” Hendrickson told us today, “the standard ‘I dont use Twitter because i don’t care you’re eating a sandwich.’ What we’ve learned though is that semi-mundane stuff is actually interesting. So, perhaps we wont have a lot of the ‘getting a haircut’ stuff because that’s indeed quite mundane, but we will get ‘getting drinks tonight downtown’ or ‘heading to Palo Alto for the day’ type stuff. Which actually leads to very cool serendipity.”

Now that Twitter is such an unqualified success in all but monetization, it’s cool to say you’ve got the same problems Twitter had.

Mash up all those plans from friends and you get an interesting stream of forthcoming events.

The site is simple, if smart, today. The little company has big plans for the future, though. “We want to host and distribute all content that pertains to what individuals, organizations and businesses have planned for the future,” Hendrickson says. “If you break the idea of an ‘event’ down into its basic units (what’s going to happen, when, and where), there’s a ton of relevant social content through the long tail. We’re designed to host a superset of all this event data.”

Leveraging the Future

If the web first enabled people to publish diaries of their past actions, then moved on to status updates and check-ins about current thoughts and locations, then Plancast aims to be focused on the Future. “I think [the future has] been a neglected area in geo-location discussions,” Hendrickson says.

“Check-ins have dominated the conversation over the past year, and check-ins are great for what they are – but they have a certain limited value. If someone checks in somewhere across town, what are the chances you’re going to get up and hustle over there to join? You also have limited data — often you dont know why they’re there. From an advertiser’s point of view, you have to grab their attention immediately. Whereas if you have intent, you have more time to give them an offer and have them consider that offer and act on it. The scope of planning data is larger than check-in data in other ways too. Check-ins are really specific to particular venues — bars, retaurants, parks etc. so the scope of content/ads you can serve up is quite local.”

This conversation about the future needed to move on to something other than advertising.

“It’s absolutely a platform,” Hendrickson told us.

“It’s not just a consumer destination. We’re building our API early [expect to see it launch very soon] because we want to be the plumbing for future intent data. We want to power third party website calendar systems, third party apps, mash ups, etc. We want to do analysis on big data sets that compile intent data from all over. Once we start pulling from lots of sources — Facebook, Meetup, Linkedin, Twitter, Dopplr, Tripit, etc etc — we can then match intents and figure out really cool stuff. 50% more people are planning to see Avatar this weekend vs Hurt Locker. And we can pump this data back out to other companies that have special needs for it.

“Let’s say one day you can search ‘movies’ on Plancast and it knows A) your location, B) your past behavior, C) your friends’ activity, and D) aggregate activity. The top result could be a movie showing that 2 of your friends have already planned to see and which is very popular in aggregate in your city.”

Hendrickson says he’s hard at work building out privacy settings that will help more people feel more comfortable sharing more plans. That’s easier said than done, of course. This young, philosophically-trained startup co-founder from Palo Alto would be well-served by reaching out and bringing close to the company some advisors who specialize in understanding the privacy concerns of everyday people online, if he’s going to build a platform for the future of our communication around intent. Location based social networks in general face a big challenge in making people comfortable using them and demonstrating their utility before they can become mainstream phenomena.

For now Plancast is hiring engineers with its new money, which was just announced today. Investors include SoftTech VC, True Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, and Zelkova Ventures. Angels Aydin Senkut, Saul Klein, David Cohen, Joshua Schachter, Dave McClure, Dan Martell, Ron Bouganim and Paige Craig put in money as well, bringing the total to $800,000.

Things have come along quickly since Hendrickson was writing blog posts at TechCrunch, he left the staff there one year ago this Wednesday, and bought the domain Plancast.com for $500 last summer. (”I thought about buying Plancaster,” he says, “but some guy named Paul Lancaster had it.”)

Can this young man and his team build “the platform for all ‘intent’ data?” Marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang has been bullish on Plancast for months. He described it as a leading example of the forthcoming “intention web” in December.

Expect the real-time web to quickly evolve into the intention web. People will work together to share their information about what they plan to do, and improve how they work or organize. Expect Social CRM systems (Salesforce, SAP), Brand Monitoring vendors (Radian6, Visible Technologies), and Search Engines (Bing and Google) to quickly try to make predictive models on what could happen, and what are the chances. Businesses that have a physical location like retail, events, or packaged goods can use this data to anticipate consumer demand. They may offer contextualized marketing, or increase or decrease inventory or store hours to accommodate. Don’t be surprised in the future and you walk into a store with your preferred items, meal, or drink already nicely packaged for you.

Plancast may or may not play a big role in transforming visions like that into reality, but it’s definitely a startup worth watching either way. Look for the company’s iPhone app later this week (built by high-profile developer Leah Culver) and check out the many listings of SXSW events on the site already, including our very own ReadWriteWeb event on Saturday night. We’d like to know if you plan on joining us.

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According to Data Outage News:

“A number of users are reporting and an escalated RIM tech support call has confirmed data issues affecting WiFi devices NOT connected to a WiFi network. The outage is sporadic and issues are confirmed on at least on Verizon and T-Mobile on both US east and west coasts. Again, if you are connected to WiFi, you likely won’t notice any problems until you are out of WiFi range. This is not affecting ALL WiFi users, the reports are sporadic, but across all carriers, BIS and BES included.”

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What’s going in with the Blackberry? Once the enterprise stalwart, it is now looking like a struggling behemoth. Its interface almost seems antiquated. An analyst group is now saying the iPhone is expected to beat out the Blackberry in 2011 for the number one spot. And now we have another outage.

Twitter users are all over today’s outage. Some people are saying their service has been out since the morning. There have been some reports that the outage is international in scope.

The last Blackberry outage came in December. Reported outages also came in 2007 and 2008.

Blackberry has been facing a lot of of market pressure. The iPhone, the Android and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series all present challenges to the Blackberry.

A report by Trefis shows the iPhone beating out the Blackberry by 2011.

The iPhone’s surge into the business community is a major reason for it overtaking the Blackberry.

A Trefi analyst write in Forbes:

We expect Apple’s market share to overtake that of RIM by 2011, and for Apple and RIM to have 11% and 8% market share, respectively, by the end of Trefis forecast period. We believe sales of the iPhone will eventually outpace BlackBerry sales for the following reasons:

1. Apple’s ecosystem of consumer products (Macs, iPad, Apple TV) and services (iTunes, iPhone apps) make the iPhone a more attractive phone for many consumers compared to the BlackBerry

2. End of AT&T exclusivity will give Apple’s iPhone wider distribution in the US (comparable to BlackBerry distribution)

3. iPhone is making inroads with business customers that have traditionally preferred the BlackBerry

Discuss