New Social Apps Lightt and People+ Bring Cutting-Edge Solutions to Familiar Problems + MORE

Not long after losing its advertising and growth chief for Asia, Facebook said goodbye to its director in Europe. Christian Hernandez, who headed up Facebook’s Euro and Pan-European divisions, announced that he is leaving the company to join business partner Eric Martineau-Fortin in the growth of White Star Capital…

Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury has issued an Interim Management Statement for the quarter beginning March 1 2013, and ending May 31.
The UK-based publisher says that its trading figures for the previous quarter were “in line with management’s expectations,” with revenues rising 19% year-on-year and, more specifically, e-book income growing by almost a third…

Instagram is making moves to take its platform beyond its mobile applications. Today, the photo sharing application has made it easier to share photos and videos with web embedding. Users can now go to their Instagram web feeds to obtain a sharing embed code. It will usable for any site with HTML supported site…

Millions of photos are posted to Facebook every day — some of which are widely shared and become viral. A recent comprehensive study by Facebook shows that roughly 5 percent of photos uploaded to the site are then reshared.
While that might not seem like much, Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure Jay Parikh noted in January that there more than 240 billion photos on Facebook’s servers right now, with 350 million more added to the site each day…

Josh Williams is chief science officer and president of Kontagent.
By now you’ve already heard the news about Zynga. In the latest turn of events for the embattled casual gaming company, Mark Pincus has stepped down as its CEO. In his place, Don Mattrick, the former president of Microsoft’s Xbox division, will be taking his place…

Earlier this year, Facebook took a page from Twitter’s book and launched verified profiles, so users can know that they’re really getting updates from a celebrity or prominent person.
With the newest iOS app update, launched Wednesday, Facebook brings that verification to mobile. Now when a Facebook user on their iPhone or iPad sees the timeline of a celebrity (or searches their name), they’ll see the blue verified checkmark…

Does your business leverage the power of Facebook apps? Wondering how other businesses are using apps to better serve their customers? Keep reading to discover many ways businesses are using Facebook apps. Why Facebook Apps? There are many reasons why you may want to consider using Facebook apps. They can provide communication between your customers […

Looks like Latitude wasn’t the only Google product that got shut down yesterday in the wake of a new version of Google Maps. Alfred, the local recommendations app that Google picked up through its acquisition in December 2011 of developers The Clever Sense, is getting shut down on July 19.
The news was posted in a notification in the app itself (pictured here), which also notes that users have until July 12 — that is, this Friday — to get in touch through the app itself to request an archive of their data, in the form of places they have tagged…

We’ve been saying that it’s been on the cards for a while, but long-term Twitter numero uno Lady Gaga, who was the most-followed user on the micro-blogging social network for more than two years, has fallen to third place amongst the platform’s elite, being caught and passed by Katy Perry…

At the MobileBeat mobile technology conference this week in San Francisco, the focus was no longer on social applications: Investors and enterprises wanted to talk about money, and app-makers wanted to talk about infrastructure support. But the social apps that made the cut and competed in the startup competition that closed the conference highlighted innovations on familiar use cases, even on the new interface of Google Glass…

Today Instagram is giving businesses an easy way to add photos and videos to the stories you want to tell online. The company launched a new feature that lets you embed this content onto a webpage without having to rely on a third-party service.
This news comes less than a month after video support was introduced…

One of the most prominent Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers celebrated a new milestone Wednesday, as Ampush earned Facebook’s Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer badge. This will have Ampush working closer with Facebook on new products and other advances in the social marketing world…

When your house becomes a sauna in the humid summer, you can always count on over-air conditioned malls to cool you down. And with all those paychecks rolling in from your seasonal lifeguarding gig, who wouldn’t spend some of that hard-earned cash on food court milkshakes?
But before you flock to the nearest shopping center, there’s a number of characters you need to watch out for…