Yogi Land

Tablets, iPhones, Android phones, broadband, mp3, 3G, 4G, MacBooks, Ultrabooks, Facebook, Twitter, hard drives, the cloud, text messages, apps and Google Maps.

Humans have access now to more information than ever before. But with the constant stream — more like a flood — of information and storage, we often forget how much of that data just sits unused, neglected and forgotten in the digital ether.

It’s clear most of have and hold on to more than we need. Just how much more? The average smartphone owner has 65 apps installed on his or her phone, but only uses 15 in a given week, according to a study by the mobile analytics company Flurry. More than half of computer users say the data on their computer is irreplaceable, but most only use a fraction of what they store. And the amount of media people upload is mind boggling — 60 Instagram photos per second, 5 terabytes worth of Facebook photos per week and 60 hours of YouTube video per minute.

SEE ALSO: Which Social Network Should You Use — and When? [INFOGRAPHIC]

These stats are all according to research pulled from more than a dozen sources including the Pew Research Center, ComScore, The Wall Street Journal and others. The online security firm Trend Micro aggregated it all together to produce an infographic shedding some light on just how much digital space we use and whether it’s more than we need. Check out the full infographic below for the fuller picture.

Is your digital life over-cluttered? What are the drawbacks, or does it even matter? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, Clicknique

More About: android, infographics, ipad, iphone, smarthphones

The media, forever a navel-gazing industry, worked itself into a fever earlier this week after evidence emerged that usage of Facebook’s social reader apps is declining.

In an article designed to further dramatize The Washington Post‘s recent tension between its editorial and financial divisions, Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pulled up a chart from AppData illustrating a falloff in the number of monthly average users of the Washington Post Social Reader app.

John Hermann at Buzzfeed quickly pointed out that usage of social reader apps was down for many news publications, not just The Washington Post.

Why the dropoff? Herrman blames the apps themselves, which he calls annoying. He writes:

“Social Readers always seemed a little too share-y, even for Facebook; they felt more like the kind of cold, descriptive, invisible and yet mandatory services we’re used to seeing from Google rather than genuinely new and useful tools for spreading information. And they feel, I don’t know, kind of broken right now? My brain already associates those little blocks of auto-fed stories with second-class content. I mean, I know my friends didn’t really mean to show to it to me. Why would I click? And god, why would I sign up for the thing that seems to have tricked its way into my timeline? It’s an app that broadcasts Internet illiteracy for everyone to see.”

I see his point — but Facebook doesn’t. A spokesperson tells me that although the number of people using social reader apps has fallen at some publications, engagement levels are up as the company introduces new tools and adjusts its algorithms to display more relevant content to users.

“We’re trying to get the right content in front of people, to up the signal to noise ratio,” the spokesperson explained.

The Facebook representative added that although some apps have seen “short-term traffic swings,” which is typical in the ongoing development of any online product, Facebook is committed to the long-term evolution of these apps “to create a good social news experience.”

User numbers are also up for The Huffington Post‘s, MTV’s and ESPN’s apps, the spokesperson noted.

Social reader apps were first introduced in September. Through the apps, which are built on Facebook’s Open Graph, publications like The Washington Post and The Guardian are able to serve users a mix of content based on the information they’ve shared with Facebook, including their interests, “likes” and stories that are trending among their friends. Those stories are displayed in the apps and make frequent appearances in the Newsfeed.

The numbers may be up for debate, but there was some surprising consensus among media critics — like Herrman, above — about the poor user experience offered by social reader apps. We’re curious: Do you use any of these apps? What do you like or dislike about them?

Front page thumbnail courtesy of iStockphoto, -Oxford-

More About: Facebook, Media, Social Reader

Several weeks after making history with the world’s first live-tweeted open heart surgery, Houston’s Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital is dusting off its social media chops again.

The plan this time? To live tweet a brain operation performed by one of the world’s foremost neurosurgeons.

Live social media coverage from the hospital’s in-house team will begin Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. EST. The hospital’s Twitter page, @houstonhospital, will relay the operation’s preparation, play-by-play and wrap up over the next four hours while using the hashtag #MHbrain. The first actual incision is scheduled for 10 a.m. EST.

The operation is called a brain tumor resection. It’s designed to remove a tumor to prevent seizures. It will be performed by Dr. Dong Kim, a neurosurgeon who helped lead the team that treated former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in the head in 2011.

A two-inch by two-inch window will be cut in the skull of the patient, who is a young woman, Dr. Kim told Mashable in an interview. The window will leave her brain exposed for between one and one-and-a-half hours. That will give Dr. Kim access to find and remove the tumor, which he says is probably located between two and three centimeters beneath the brain’s surface.

“What will come out of this is a detailed, real-time sequence of what happens in a brain surgery through all the stages from preparation, to shaving the hair, to making the incision, to draping,” Dr. Kim says. “People are very anxious and want to know what goes on in a brain surgery like this.”

While Dr. Kim works in the operating room, a team outside the room will work the social platforms. A brain tumor specialist will be present to help answer questions from the digital audience via Twitter. But the operation will expand to other social networks too.

Video clips from inside the operating room will be posted to YouTube, and photos shared on Pinterest. Storify compilations will recap each hour of the broadcast.

Natalie Camarata, Memorial Hermann’s digital marketing manager, told Mashable the plan to live tweet the operation was hatched following the open-heart surgery, which was viewed an estimated 125 million times through Twitter, Storify and media coverage.

SEE ALSO: Behind the Scenes of the World’s First Live-Tweeted Open-Heart Surgery

“We had a lot of success with the open-heart surgery and saw there was a lot of interest in seeing what goes into something that’s an everyday thing for some people,” Camarata says.

Memorial Hermann’s open-heart surgery live tweet was a world first, although other hospitals have used to Twitter to cover different operations before, including a few brain surgeries. But Camarata and Dr. Kim say Memorial Hermann‘s social broadcast will break new ground in brain surgery live tweets by sharing the feed from Dr. Kim’s fiber optic microscope to give viewers a new level of access and understanding.

“One neat thing about this is we should be able to get actual images of the brain surface itself,” Dr. Kim says. “Hopefully you’ll see video of the brain actually pulsating with heartbeats.”

Do you think this is a good use of social media? Will you follow along Wednesday morning? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy Memorial Hermann Healthcare System

More About: Twitter

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Klout has had a busy few weeks, unleashing an iPhone app, brand pages and a new API. But more changes are on deck.

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez hinted at those developments on stage and backstage at Mashable Connect in Orlando.

The San Francisco-based startup will announce this month four more partners for its version of brand pages — Brand Squads. The feature launched in April with Red Bull.

Fernandez also says users should anticipate a redesigned website this year, possibly rolling out this summer.

Klout’s February acquisition of BlockBoard, an app that gives people a way to communicate with neighbors, will eventually spawn a new local feature on Klout. Fernandez was sparse on details but says ideas are still in “white board” phase.

“We’re going to be an incredible tool to help people; right now we’re just a benchmark,” Fernandez said in an onstage interview with Mashable‘s Lance Ulanoff.

Fernandez, aware of some of the negative feedback people dish about Klout, asserts that the good and bad buzz is a “huge victory.”

“There’s no way to get around the fact that we put a number next to your face and it’s tied to your ego,” he says. “I think the controversy and conversation around what we’re doing is ultimately good. The world is changing and we’re doing something completely new.”

The still-in-beta Klout measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Foursquare to assign Klout users scores from 0 to 100, but it’s algorithm is hush-hush so people don’t game the system.

Prodded by Ulanoff to disclose more details about the algorithm, Fernandez discussed Klout’s evolution of tracking influence, saying calculations began on an Excel spreadsheet before becoming too “dynamic” for that as more social networks were integrated onto Klout.

“We generally look at Twitter, Facebook and Google+,” he says. But “there’s definitely a weighting system.”

He also reminded the audience that the algorithm measures each user’s top social network first — primarily Twitter or Facebook — and the others are additive, meaning adding more networks would never lower a person’s Klout score.

“I don’t think we’ve really built the real Klout product yet — what you see now on Klout is just a thin layer of what the data is,” Fernandez says. “It’s something we’re excited to move beyond.”

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BONUS: What Else Does Klout Have in Store for 2012?

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Looking ahead, Klout is still building scoring models for seven more services (YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.com, Last.fm and Flickr) that have already been integrated onto Klout users’ dashboards. Klout also plans to add Quora, Yelp, Posterous, Livefyre, Disqus, bit.ly and BranchOut.

SEE ALSO: The Remarkable Story of How Klout Got Started [VIDEO]

Klout likely will continue improving its Topics feature (see screenshots below) and Klout Perks platform. The Topics feature, which rolled out in September and lets you gain insights on top influencers and +K recipients for specific content areas, got a visual update in December with a “sashes” and an “Add a Topic” button.

Another feature on the horizon is an “oAuth2-based authentication system” that will soon let users give +Ks to people from outside of Klout.com. For example, a person might give someone else a +K while browsing Tumblr.

Clickable Topics on Your Dashboard

On your Klout dashboard, you can click on a topic to open its Topic Page.

In December 2011, Klout rolled out sashes and an "Add a Topic" button. A blue sash goes to users with the most +Ks for any topic, while a gold sash is given to influencers based on Klout's algorithm. People who fall into both categories receive a blue-and-gold sash.

Click here to view this gallery.

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MashableConnect-Friday-616px006

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Mashable Connect Sponsors

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Buddy Media is the social enterprise software of choice for eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers, empowering them to build and maintain relationships with their consumers in a connections-based world. The Buddy Media social marketing suite helps brands build powerful connections globally with its scalable, secure architecture and data-driven customer insights from initial point of contact through point of purchase. For more information, visit http://www.buddymedia.com.

AT&T is bringing it all together for our customers, from revolutionary smartphones to next-generation TV services and sophisticated solutions for multi-national businesses. For more than a century, we have consistently provided innovative, reliable, high-quality products and services and excellent customer care. For more, visit http://www.att.com.

Barnes & Noble College Marketing (BNCM) helps brands thrive on campus. It is a division of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, Inc. that operates more than 640 college bookstores across the country, serving more than 4.7 million students and faculty members. BNCM has the on-campus access and student understanding to deliver superior marketing programs for its brand partners. BNCM’s capabilities include: experiential and event marketing; product sampling, sweepstakes and promotions; digital marketing (social, email, web); on-campus advertising and postering; and programs targeting freshmen, graduates, alumni and athletic event fans. Visit www.bncollegemarketing.com.

Hiscox specializes in tailored insurance coverage for a range of professional services firms in industries like IT, marketing, consulting and more. Hiscox Insurance Company Inc. has been protecting clients for over 100 years and is rated ‘A’ (Excellent) for financial strength by A.M. Best.

We offer professional liability insurance, general liability insurance and other policies direct, either online or over the phone, with customized coverage starting from just $22.50/month.

Visit hiscoxusa.com/smallbiz for a fast, free quote now.

Webtrends powers digital marketing success. Webtrends is at the forefront of real-time digital marketing relevance and customer experience management through unified customer intelligence. Our industry-leading analytics across mobile, social and web enables marketers to optimize campaigns, maximize customer lifetime value and deliver highly relevant digital brand experiences in real-time.

Webtrends dramatically improve digital marketing results for more than 3,500 global brands including, in EMEA and internationally, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, HSBC, ASOS, Orange, T-Mobile, Microsoft, BMW, Toyota, Play.com, AllSaints, The Telegraph, and many more.

www.webtrends.com

Definition 6 is a Unified Marketing Agency that creates brand experiences that unite brands and people in motion. Through imagination, innovation and insight, we execute ideas that deliver continued value across all brand interactions. For more information, please visit http://www.definition6.com.

The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite is an integrated set of applications which allow businesses to gather customer insight and optimize advertising, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, e-mail, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to automatically adjust to customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which leads to a positive impact the bottom line.

http://www.adobe.com/solutions/digital-marketing.html

The leading resource for human resource and business leaders to explore and discuss the latest workforce and workplace trends including social innovation—providing the in-depth research and insights needed to adapt and take advantage of what’s next.

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More About: klout, mashable connect, online reputation, Social Media, web design

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Try to guess America’s most engaging social network. Facebook? Wrong. Twitter? Wrong. Pinterest? Wrong again. According to comScore‘s most recent social networking data, from the month of March, the San Francisco based site Tagged engages users like no other service. It was the only site to finish in the top two in both of comScore’s engagement metrics.

Tagged users visited an average of 18 times each during March according to ComScore, second only to Facebook’s average of 36 visits per vistor. And each time a Tagged user visited the site, he or she stuck around for 12.1 minutes — which trailed only Tumblr (14.7 minutes) and beat out Facebook (10.9 minutes).

Tagged co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng says he’s happy about ComScore’s March data, but that his company has been among America’s most engaging social networks for about a year now. The secret to Tagged’s success? A pivot Tseng and co-founder Johann Schleier-Smith made around the beginning of 2008.

The longtime friends started Tagged in 2004, at the time angling it to be a Facebook-like social network for high schoolers. Eventually, however, Facebook expanded beyond a closed college network and allowed anyone over the age of 12 to join.

“We took a hard look and decided we weren’t going to win,” Tseng says. “But we had found out a lot of our users were actually using Tagged to meet new people, so that led us to pivot into a new space called ‘social discovery,’ where people use sites to make new social relationships.”

As opposed to sites like Facebook, where people primarily organize and maintain relationships established offline, Tagged functions mostly as a portal to meet new people online for romance or simply friendship. The site’s algorithms encourage users to connect based on shared interests, tastes and hobbies.

Tseng says Tagged’s 10 million core monthly active users form an average of 100 million new connections per month. The site has been profitable since 2008, and over the past year tripled its staff to a current count of more than 170.

With social discovery as a whole seen by many to be a rising tide, Tseng believes Tagged’s success will continue to grow.

“If I look out at the next five or 10 years, I really see social discovery as big as social networking — in some sense I think you can think of social discovery as the engine for social networking,” he says, referencing Dunbar’s number, which theorizes that humans can maintain an average of 150 connections at a time.

“Facebook is the place where you maintain your current 150,” he says. “And Tagged will be the place where you refresh that 150.”

Do you think social discovery is the next big thing? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, akinbostanci

More About: social discovery, Social Media, social networking, tagged, trending

American Express went from virtually zero social media presence in 2009 to being hailed by Advertising Age as the “real winner” at South By Southwest this year.

How did AmEx do it? Leslie Berland, SVP of digital partnerships and development at the company, attempted to retrace the brand’s steps during a talk at Mashable Connect, and then dispensed a few social media tips on Friday.

Berland highlighted two major inflection points in AmEx’s social media marketing history: its introduction of Small Business Saturday and its promotion of Sync at SXSW. The former started with a “lofty goal,” which was to “start a movement,” Berland said.

Launched in 2010, Small Business Saturday was designed as a response of sorts to Black Friday, which comes the day before. The idea is to motivate consumers already in shopping mode to spend their cash at their local mom and pops. Berland says her aha moment with the program was realizing that it was a great fit on Facebook, where the SBS Page drew 1 million fans in three weeks. (It now has 2.8 million fans.)

That’s a respectable showing considering the brand only began focusing on social media in 2009, when it set up AmEx’s first Twitter account. Berland recalls that it took three weeks to come up with the account’s first tweet. No wonder she likens getting a large brand on social media to giving birth.

Berland’s coup de grace was this year’s SXSW promotion for AmEx Sync‘s Twitter tie-in, which appears to have captured the hearts and minds of much of the event’s attendees.

The effort, which introduced a program that offers cardmembers discounts for tweeting advertised hashtags, began before SXSWers even arrived. Berland secured 30 minutes of free Wi-Fi from GoGo to 80% to 90% of the flights to Austin, Texas, that included a plug for Sync. Then, once in Austin, AmEx offered 700 tickets to its Jay-Z concert. The concert became a major draw at the show, an outcome that reflects Jay-Z’s popularity as well as AmEx’s exacting standards as an entertainment partner. As Berland recalls, there was a long list of potential concert draws, but the brand was seeking someone who was both hip with the local crowd and popular nationally. (Justin Bieber was among those who didn’t make the cut.)

Though Berland’s talk included some trite advice (“Think like a startup”), she was more candid in her Q&A with the audience. When one attendee challenged her about her statement that “90% of our strategy is defined by the things we don’t do,” Berland said she meant, for instance, that it’s wise to resist the pressure to embrace all formats. “What I’m often challenged with often is a lot of ‘I want this, we want that’” she said, referring to internal pressure. However, “It’s not a ‘build it they will come,’ thing.”

Berland also said it doesn’t make sense to back a Facebook campaign with traditional media like print and TV ads. “If you’re running a program on Facebook, buy ads on Facebook.”

Swag Bag

The contents of each bag given to Mashable Connect attendees.

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Mashable Connect Sponsors

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Buddy Media is the social enterprise software of choice for eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers, empowering them to build and maintain relationships with their consumers in a connections-based world. The Buddy Media social marketing suite helps brands build powerful connections globally with its scalable, secure architecture and data-driven customer insights from initial point of contact through point of purchase. For more information, visit http://www.buddymedia.com.

AT&T is bringing it all together for our customers, from revolutionary smartphones to next-generation TV services and sophisticated solutions for multi-national businesses. For more than a century, we have consistently provided innovative, reliable, high-quality products and services and excellent customer care. For more, visit http://www.att.com.

Barnes & Noble College Marketing (BNCM) helps brands thrive on campus. It is a division of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, Inc. that operates more than 640 college bookstores across the country, serving more than 4.7 million students and faculty members. BNCM has the on-campus access and student understanding to deliver superior marketing programs for its brand partners. BNCM’s capabilities include: experiential and event marketing; product sampling, sweepstakes and promotions; digital marketing (social, email, web); on-campus advertising and postering; and programs targeting freshmen, graduates, alumni and athletic event fans. Visit www.bncollegemarketing.com.

Hiscox specializes in tailored insurance coverage for a range of professional services firms in industries like IT, marketing, consulting and more. Hiscox Insurance Company Inc. has been protecting clients for over 100 years and is rated ‘A’ (Excellent) for financial strength by A.M. Best.

We offer professional liability insurance, general liability insurance and other policies direct, either online or over the phone, with customized coverage starting from just $22.50/month.

Visit hiscoxusa.com/smallbiz for a fast, free quote now.

Webtrends powers digital marketing success. Webtrends is at the forefront of real-time digital marketing relevance and customer experience management through unified customer intelligence. Our industry-leading analytics across mobile, social and web enables marketers to optimize campaigns, maximize customer lifetime value and deliver highly relevant digital brand experiences in real-time.

Webtrends dramatically improve digital marketing results for more than 3,500 global brands including, in EMEA and internationally, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, HSBC, ASOS, Orange, T-Mobile, Microsoft, BMW, Toyota, Play.com, AllSaints, The Telegraph, and many more.

www.webtrends.com

Definition 6 is a Unified Marketing Agency that creates brand experiences that unite brands and people in motion. Through imagination, innovation and insight, we execute ideas that deliver continued value across all brand interactions. For more information, please visit http://www.definition6.com.

The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite is an integrated set of applications which allow businesses to gather customer insight and optimize advertising, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, e-mail, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to automatically adjust to customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which leads to a positive impact the bottom line.

http://www.adobe.com/solutions/digital-marketing.html

The leading resource for human resource and business leaders to explore and discuss the latest workforce and workplace trends including social innovation—providing the in-depth research and insights needed to adapt and take advantage of what’s next.

www.shrm.org

More About: american express, Facebook, Marketing, mashable connect

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Could this guy be the one true hipster to rule them all? Could be. Let’s take inventory.

Micro-managed facial hair? Check. Vintage coat? Check. Stack of vinyls? Check. Legs crossed, European style? Check.

Portable vinyl player, with headphones? Bonus points. Hipster babe companion in retro dress? More bonus points. Sitting outside at a bar, during what may well be normal working hours? The deal sealer.

The photo, uploaded to the image sharing site imgur, has been viewed there more than 617,000 times in 11 hours. That may just make it the most viral hipster photo of all time, pending further research and confirmation.

The hat-tip here goes to Twitter user @burnSTYLEr, who hat-tips @MarcusAHall, who hat-tips @ramit…clearly, this thing has been making its way around the Interwebs.

But who saw it first, before it was trendy? Could it possibly be … the second hipsterist hipster in hipster history?

More About: viral

A patent filed by Apple suggests the company may start offering the ability to gift songs to friends via a future iPhone, using Near Field Communication (NFC). Published by the US Patent & Trademark Office on April 26, the patent talks specially about transferring digital media content from one user’s account to another.

NFC — a feature not current available on any iDevice — would allow you to make the transfer by simply tapping devices together. For sharing gifts with people you’re not standing next to, purchases could also be transferred via email.

Gifts could be sent along with a personal voice message, as well as an image. So you could send a friend or loved one a singing telegram along with a copy of your favorite song. The sender would only be charged for a song once the receiver decides to download it.

If your account doesn’t have enough cash to cover the transaction, those receiving the gift will also be given the option to cover the balance of the purchase and download it anyway. While that may be awkward for actual gift giving, it could come in handy when a friend loves a song you’re playing at a party and wants to to tap their phone against yours to purchase the track for themselves.

In addition to sending individual tracks, the patent suggests that Apple will allow users you share playlists with others -– like a modern day version of the mix tape — for a yet-to-be-determined fee.

Which songs would you want to gift? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

[via Patently Apple]

More About: apple, itunes, patent

ORLANDO — So far at BlackBerry World, there hasn’t been much talk about the “enterprise refocus” that Research In Motion CEO Thorsten Heins made headlines with at the company’s last earnings call.

At all the meetings, panels and keynotes I’ve attended so far, it’s been clear the siren call of the consumer market still commands a large portion of RIM’s attention.

Take one example: The way-cool time-shifting camera functions in BlackBerry 10 that Heins showed off in his keynote.

Although other hardware companies are doing impressive stuff with camera phones (notably HTC), RIM’s approach is novel and innovative. Still, it’s difficult to see the feature being spectacularly useful in a corporate boardroom, or even a factory floor.

The hypothetical situation Heins gave was when someone — specifically a family member — closes their eyes during a shot. Sounds pretty consumer to me.

You can hardly blame RIM for these continued consumer overtures. After all, companies its size don’t turn on a dime. BlackBerry 10 has been in the works for almost three years, and Heins has only been CEO for a couple of months. And many mobile features have crossover appeal between business customers and the consumer on the street.

However, the downside to operating with consumer-focused strategies means RIM inevitably plays the role of underdog. Just look at what it’s doing on the developer front: RIM is showering developers with love here at BlackBerry World, doing its best to elevate its software tools by giving app designers access to core device functions they might not get on, say, iOS.

They also make it super simple to create apps, throwing lots of weight behind the platform-agnostic standard of HTML5.

But wait, there’s more! At Tuesday’s BlackBerry 10 Jam developer keynote, RIM said it would guarantee that anyone who makes an app for BlackBerry 10 (and it’s approved) would make $10,000 minimum.

If the app falls short of making that much, RIM will write a check for the difference.

SEE ALSO: RIM’s Secret Weapon for Reviving BlackBerry: HTML5

This why it’s so clear RIM is still fighting the war of consumer platforms with Apple and Google. Writing $10,000 checks to developers is one way to boost its relatively miniscule App World selection so it can compete with the big boys.

Alas, it’s not going to work. RIM is trying to date developers that are already married to iOS and Android. Sure, they might hang out with BlackBerry a little — if you’re a developer, why not be on as many platforms as possible?

But there’s no way they’re turning their back on their sugar daddies. Apple and Google’s stores are where the big money is — enough potential cash to dwarf that $10,000 guarantee.

That’s why it’s perplexing to hear RIM backtrack on the enterprise angle. Being the mobile choice for business is the BlackBerry brand’s clear differentiator, but it appears to be taking a lot of its enterprise relationships for granted.

It shouldn’t, for many reasons — one being Windows Phone.

While RIM has been focusing on fighting Apple and Google, Micorosoft has been making headlines with its Windows Phone hardware, such as the Nokia Lumia 900. Around the same time BlackBerry 10 launches this fall, so will Windows 8, along with (presumably) Windows Phone 8.

If Microsoft follows its present course, Windows 8 will finally unify Windows as a platform, with all devices — PCs, tablets and phones — running the same software. And that’s going to present a huge opportunity for Windows Phone as a go-to mobile platform for business.

After all, if you’re already using Microsoft products on the PC side of your workflow, why wouldn’t you integrate them in mobile as well?

That strategy take a while to get going, since Microsoft still hasn’t put all the pieces in place. Once it does, businesses tend to upgrade to the next version of Windows at a snail’s pace. Still, it represents a long-term challenge for RIM on the business side, one that Microsoft has been readying for years.

That’s the war RIM needs to start prepping for — not just with Microsoft, but with Apple and Google encroaching on its territory via the “consumerization of IT” phenomenon. RIM still has a shot with BlackBerry 10, but it needs to stop playing by others’ rules (such as the app count of your store).

It also needs this reminder: trying to compete for every single mobile customer is exactly what got the company into trouble in the first place.

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BONUS: BlackBerry 10′s Best Features

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Glance Back

Saying BlackBerry 10 is all about the "flow" between apps, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins showed how users could quickly see other apps running by "glancing back" via menus that peek out from the side.

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More About: blackberry, BlackBerry 10, enterprise, research in motion, RIM, windows phone, Windows Phone 8

So maybe that $1 billion it cost Facebook to buy Instagram was a bargain after all.

The photo-sharing app is on fire. It now has more than 50 million users — and is adding new ones at the rate of roughly 5 million per week, according to its API.

Instagram hit 40 million users around April 13, and 30 million at the start of the month (no April Fooling). This is astonishing growth for an app that started 2012 with just 15 million users.

Of course, the fact that the app was recently released for Android — after being iPhone-only for its first two years — is likely driving a lot of those sign-ups. But Instagram also hit number one in the iOS App store for the first time in the wake of the Facebook acquisition.

Google doesn’t break out exactly how many Android downloads an app gets on its Google Play page. But Instagram did cross the 10 million download threshold two days ago, so it’s a safe bet that roughly 40 million of those users are on the iPhone.

In other words, iPhone and Android have divided Instagram sign-ups fairly equally since it became available for both platforms. (So much for Apple executive Phil Schiller’s claim that the app had “jumped the shark.”)

And who is Instagram user number 50 million? According to Gramfeed, it’s a user named fox289. All we know about the user is drawn from his or her profile picture: an FC Barcelona soccer shirt. Just how many accounts are like fox289 — with no photos posted, no users followed — is something Facebook will be very interested in.

Thanks to alert Mashable reader and web developer Rakshith Krishnappa for the tip. Where does Instagram go from here? How big can it get? Let us know in the comments.

25. Jason Mraz

Username: Jason_Mraz Followers: 363,621 Number of Pictures: 254

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More About: android, Facebook, instagram, iphone