Casinos are warned about card-counting iPhone app

Nevada gambling regulators have warned casinos in the state about a card-counting program that works on Apple Inc.‘s iPhone and iPod Touch that illegally helps players beat the house in blackjack.

Card counting itself is not illegal under Nevada gambling laws, but it is considered a felony to use devices to help count cards.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board sent a memo to casinos last week warning them of the program.

See the full article at Yahoo! News.

Mining The Thought Stream

What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right now about any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.

In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem. Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought stream on the Web (because more people enter their thoughts directly into Twitter’s database than any other, and are doing so at an increasing rate).

What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google.

See the full article at TechCrunch.

MTV Pulls The Plug On Embeddable Videos

When NBC Universal and News Corporation-backed Hulu launched in Fall 2007, it was a signal that old television media might actually grasp the distributive power of the internet. Not only were great programs made available for free as streaming videos, users could grab and embed them anywhere online – in their entirety or just as clips.

So it’s a bit of a shame to see another giant media conglomerate, Viacom, buck this trend and actually clamp down on the embedding of videos from the MTV Network. Yesterday in a post to its developer blog, a staff member for MTVN developer services announced that video embeds would no longer be available through MTV’s API, starting sometime in early March.

Currently, developers can build websites that embed videos from MTV, VH1, CMT and Logo (such as this one that also embeds videos from YouTube). But soon developers will be allowed to display only thumbnails and meta data associated with MTV’s videos. If users want to watch the actual videos, they’ll have to follow links back to webpages that are owned and monetized by MTVN.

See the full article at TechCrunch.

Android: Fastest Growing Smartphone Platform?

AdMob today offers up some new insights to the mobile space. The company reports on a small sampling of the handset market by tracking device usage through the AdMob advertising network. It’s not an exact representation of the market by any means, but it gives us a glimpse at trends. You can see the latest PDF report here.

One focus from the reports is the growing usage of WiFi for mobile browsing due to the Apple iPod Touch. But perhaps the bigger news is what AdMob found about the Android platform. With just a single model out, the young T-Mobile G1 shows a 50% jump in market share in the U.S. for the month of January. Again, this is strictly a small sampling on one advertiser’s network, but I find it impressive regardless.

In December, Android reportedly had a 2% share and January saw the platform move to 3%. It’s certainly easier from a mathematical standpoint to show high percentage growth when just starting out, so I’m curious how the trend plays out over the next several months. Maybe that makes the “fastest growing smartphone platform” claim a little dubious, so here’s more AdMob data to sift through.

See the full article at jkOnTheRun.

Been there, did it!

Social media tech firm Ludic Labs announced it raised $5 million in funding from Accel Partners, KPG Ventures and a number of private investors. The San Mateo, CA-based start-up also launched a new community site called Diddit to give us an idea of what they’re up to (as in “been there, did it.”) Diddit allows users to share their experiences with communities of interested parties including everything from trying new restaurants to visiting national monuments to snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef. There are 23 categories of things to do. It’s not a bad idea for an online recommendation engine and the interface is fun and easy to use. If it catches on we can see a number of integrations that can be baked in to the experience.

Source: Cynopsis: Digital