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New research from Nielsen shows that the No. 1 reason people remove others from their friend lists is something they said — or posted. Offensive comments were listed as the top reason for friend removals, with 55 percent of people in the study saying it was the primary motivator for cutting names off their friend list.

A new study and infographic from NM Incite shows us the specific reasons behind why we add and remove Facebook friends. It’s not groundbreaking nor is it a massive sample size, but it is interesting to see the various reasons why people change up their social graph.

Facebook’s “Subscribe” functionality has changed the add/remove process a bit, though, so I’m not sure how much stock we can put into these responses. For instance, I may unsubscribe from someone but not de-friend them. Upon implementation, it changed the way people shaped, added and removed from their social graph. Going off of de-friending alone may not be a full representation of who’s listening to who on the social network.

Per analysis from Trefis, iTunes and App Store each contribute approximately 2% to Apple’s market cap. For those doing the math at home, that means App Store contributes $7.08 billion to Apple’s market cap.” RIM’s current value? $7.04bn.

It can’t get much worse than this, can it?

Michael Liebhold, a senior researcher specializing in wearable computing at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., predicts that the next step in technology is the blurring of the real and virtual worlds.

Over the next 10 years, he says, he envisions that people will be wearing glasses with built-in screens and, eventually, contact lenses — with working displays.

“Kids will play virtual games with their friends, where they meet in a park and run around chasing virtual creatures for points,” he said.

According to Nick Bilton, wearable computers will become a new standard as people become “more absorbed by the [smartphone] screen.” While it’s hard to envision what exactly these prototypes could look like, it’s reported that Apple and Google have already begun testing prototypes of their own.

If anything, the smartphone — which already takes up a significant part of our daily lives, both in time and attention — will only grow in importance. And if Google and Apple are placing heavy bets in building and developing technologies around this device, then we have to assume that smartphones aren’t going away anytime soon.

First Acer, now Dell. Recognizing that the netbooks fad has quickly come and gone, Dell announced today that they will be shifting away from netbooks completely towards “thin and powerful” products, ultrabooks.

Now that more than one company is essentially mirroring Apple’s MacBook Air approach, can we agree that the MacBook Air pioneered the ultrabook industry? Think iPad to tablet, MacBook to laptop.

The phrase “It’s a copycat league” can easily be applied to consumer electronics, and Dell publicly admitting that netbooks haven’t worked and that ultrabooks do, says a lot. Even if we may not go to the extent of crowning Apple as ultrabook pioneers, the company’s tremendous impact on technological norms cannot be questioned.

Ben Parr has put together a nice comprehensive list of the major tech writer moves in the last year and a half. Wow, there has been a lot of movement.

Turnover in any industry is expected and journalism is no exception. But could all of the moves end up hurting some of these publications? As a reader, there’s immense value in visiting a blog everyday and reading posts from a group of writers you’re not only familiar with, but read frequently.

When a publication loses its best writer (or writers, in some cases), the impact is much greater than just lost pageviews — perception of a publication can shift dramatically. Publications must up their game and make retaining their writers a top priority. Especially now.

Android and iOS combine to secure a whopping 82 percent of the smartphone market. Apple has 29 percent of the market, while Android has the lion’s share with 53 percent. These two platforms were the only ones to record growth in 2011. RIM’s BlackBerry OS, which has struggled this year, declined to a meager 8 percent of the market share. Newcomer Windows Phone 7 didn’t plummet like RIM, but it didn’t climb either. Throughout 2011, the platform never went above 2 percent.

The NPD has released smartphone market share numbers for the year. They aren’t surprising. Apple and Google continue to lead the way, as Android and iOS were the only platforms that grew.

Windows Phone 7 didn’t move, which is a minor surprise considering that Microsoft seemed to advertise their devices on television fairly extensively. 

Jenna Wortham from the NYT:

But the figures on growth in this country are stark. The number of Americans who visited Facebook grew 10 percent in the year that ended in October — down from 56 percent growth over the previous year, according to comScore, which tracks Internet traffic.

Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner, said this slowdown was not a make-or-break issue ahead of the company’s public offering, which could come in the spring. What does matter, he said, is Facebook’s ability to keep its millions of current users entertained and coming back.

One of the most fascinating shifts for Facebook (and any social network) is the shift from user acquisition to user retention. It appears that Facebook has made retaining and engaging their users the top priority in their strategy.

The U.S. “roadblock” is partly attributed to young people refusing to participate, but also due to the fact that there are already millions of people who have, at a minimum, given Facebook a try. So the shift—from a user acquisition perspective—needs to be in other locations around the world.

From a user retention look, what could turn on Facebook? Their own “frictionless sharing” and features that result in lost privacy for users. Privacy has always been an issue for the social network, but it has been scrutinized and criticized highly for making oversharing the norm.

And that’s the overarching point the article is hinting at. Despite increasing peer pressure, Facebook holdouts are standing firm in their decision not to participate. If enough people recognize the overarching reasons why this group feels so strongly about the social network, it could eventually lead to once-dedicated users exiting the platform. 

Openspace has built a physical brick-and-mortar environment around a thing strictly digital: the app. Their “app gurus” help customers discover and identify new mobile apps relevant to them.

The big problem that the store is trying to solve?

Tricia Duryee of AllThingsD:

Developers often complain about how difficult it is for their applications to be discovered, and frequently pay for advertising or third-party promotion. So it’s possible that a physical app store could be one more way to get the word out.

If this is indeed the problem, then yes, a brick-and-mortar app store could be the answer. But there also have to be other ways to streamline the app discovery process. I think it’s a huge area of opportunity for anyone who can identify the best way to solve this problem.

It’s very possible that we are.

Underwriters Laboratories, the venerable nonprofit product testing and certification organization, issued a study last week that found about half of consumers, 48 percent, “feel high-tech manufacturers bring new products to market faster than people need them.”

Here’s the interesting analysis from Steve Lohr, who attributes this to innovation through two different lenses.

The consumers’ sense that high-tech companies bring out products faster than needed suggests two possible explanations. The first, obvious one is that the pace of innovation is too fast for consumers.

The second, less obvious explanation is that, in fact, innovation is too slow. That is, the new offerings companies are pushing out the door every six months or so are me-too products or ones with a just couple of new features or design tweaks. Marketing schedules, not product innovation, are driving the corporate train.

If gadget fatigue is attributed to too much (or too little) innovation, you have to consider leading gadget companies and their tendencies.

Apple has established fairly-quick product refresh cycles. Not every product refresh is a huge improvement over the last — the company realizes this — but the fairly quick refreshes are a key part of their business model. Competitors cannot keep up with the speed of Apple’s innovation (or perceived innovation), and they fall behind in the race for gadget market share.

As much as gadget fatigue may be a topic today, we must also realize what the long-term impact of gadget fatigue means for the consumer. Does it even matter? Will the consumer end up adapting to fast, paced product cycles? We may be tired now, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be tired five or ten years down the road.

While 2011 had its share of successes, there were plenty of failures in the tech world too. I’m not the biggest fan of slideshows, but this one seemed to encapsulate most of them pretty well.

Two “flops” that should have been higher on the list: the Gmail iOS app and the Jawbone UP. There was so much hype and excitement around Google’s app, but it didn’t take long until it was pulled from the App Store. The Jawbone UP looked like the perfect device to disrupt the health gadget market, but it hardly made a dent, with users complaining of bricked devices and lost caps.

Two of the top flops were tablet-related, and in general, if your tablet wasn’t named “iPad”, you probably had a tougher year than expected.

The HP TouchPad and Blackberry PlayBook tried their best to carve out a nice piece of market share, but both massively failed. The TouchPad was discounted to a ridiculously low cost, and it looks like RIM would have a tough time getting their PlayBooks off their hands even if they gave them away.

J.P. Morgan went out on a limb today (note the sarcasm), calling for huge MacBook Air sales and retention of dominant market share despite the increase in competitors.

Analyst Mark Moskowitz:

“Ultrabooks are not a competitive threat, yet,” Moskowitz said in an investor’s note released today. “In general, we think that ultrabooks are highly discretionary devices, and pricing on competitive offerings must fall below $800 before posing a viable threat to Apple’s MacBook Air.”

If pricing is the only way for ultrabooks to beat the MacBook Air, it will be a little while before they take a meaningful chunk of market share away. The MacBook Air is so far ahead of its competitors that unless companies take a super-discount approach (see Acer from the other day), they will have a hard time putting their products in winning positions against Apple.

As MG Siegler has mentioned before, it’s a possibility that the MacBook Air may result in a consolidation of sorts with regard to Apple’s MacBook line. The MacBook Air has all but killed the MacBook in terms of functionality and portability, so why can’t it become the standard?

So let’s turn the tables another way. Could ultrabooks made by direct Apple competitors completely replace established main laptop offerings by those companies? It’s highly doubtful, and that, by itself, makes the MacBook Air stand alone.

The Air is functional enough to replace a whole category of main laptop offerings. Sure, the Air has no optical drive and it isn’t the most powerful machine out there (buy a MacBook Pro for the power), but it just works. And that’s what consumers are ultimately looking for.

St. Louis area software engineer Lance Durham says he decided to get a couple of Kindle Fires to give as presents to his children. He was loading some games before wrapping them and realized he couldn’t turn off the single-click ordering, which charges his credit card.

“There was no password or pin, nor any kind of confirmation - the purchase immediately went through,” he says.

So Durham called Amazon and says he was told the ordering from Amazon could not be disabled, and the company suggested he “deregister” the device after every purchase. That, he says, caused the downloaded apps to stop working.

He returned the tablets.

If you ever thought there was no downside to Amazon’s 1-click ordering, well, this is it. In fact, it’s severely hurting customer happiness.

It’s appalling that the company’s only recommendation would be to de-register the device. Essentially, Amazon is acknowledging that they have yet to identify and implement a quick solution to appease these disgruntled parents.

In the long run, this problem could really hurt Amazon. Tablets, though mostly used by adults, are provided to children at times for educational purposes and as gaming devices. The sheer idea that a kid can click through several 1-click buttons and make an indefinite amount of purchases — well, that has to be frightening for any parent.

Amazon must put out this fire (no pun intended) as soon as possible, or they are going to lose many customers to tablet competitors. And with the iPad 3 on the horizon, they better get this feature fixed post-haste.

Apple fans will wake up to some exciting news this morning. Digitimes is reporting that the iPad 3 will launch in three to four months. Apple will phase out the iPad 2 gradually, declining iPad 2 production in Q1.

According to 9to5Mac, features include “a Retina Display, a faster A6 processor, possible Quad Core and be slightly thicker than the current model.”

I’ve been holding out for the iPad 3 myself, waiting on the iPad 2 after many failed visits to the Apple Store around release time. The hype is only going to grow as we go into the new year and more details are released about the new version.

Considering how well the iPad 2 initially sold, there’s no reason to expect a drop in product demand, even considering the initial success of the Kindle Fire. Simply put, the iPad 3 will be huge.

AOL’s ambitious hyper-local news platform is consolidating some Patch websites, and it’s not awfully clear why.

AdAge:

Yet internally, AOL is in the process of figuring out just how small (or large) a Patch should be, a calculation that includes available readership and just how “hyper” local advertisers want to go.

Patch’s model gets quite tricky when you break it down on a micro level. Local advertisers (as well as the demand for placement) vary significantly across the country. One strategy for acquiring local advertisers may work for one city, but be completely ineffective in another.

And from that, a major problem arises. AOL is trying to figure out the proper size of a Patch, but they fail to realize that Patch sizes, by number of users, will vary greatly. Throw in the fact that Patch’s model is built off strong SEO, assume that some people click through and never return, and you have an immense challenge.

The other incorrect approach was to name a solid number of Patch websites for the end of the year. Why hold yourself to a number (1,000) in this case, when there was so much testing and tweaking that would need to be done at a later time?

Quite frankly, I’ve never been a believer in Patch, and today’s report only serves to further my thought process. I don’t think they know what they are doing, and I think AOL executives are sweating bullets as each day goes by. Not to mention, people are really starting to question whether the initial heavy investment in the platform was justified.

Talk about a dark horse in the tablet wars. Barnes and Noble has called for a larger order of the Nook tablets due to strong initial sales. And it screams of silent confidence.

While it’s unlikely that this device would pass the Kindle Fire in sales, B&N has the chance to carve out a nice part of the lower-priced tablet market.

Nothing about the Nook Tablet excited me when it released, but after this report, I’m making a trip to Barnes and Noble a priority on my list. I have to try one of these things out.

I wouldn’t go as far as TechCrunch’s Matt Burns in coining it a “top player”, though. Why don’t we wait until post-holiday-season numbers are released before we crown the product. That being said, there is some value here, and people looking to purchase a tablet for the holiday season should not automatically rule this gadget out.

It’s a question we’ve all pondered one time or another. Turns out, Apple employees are actually very productive.

The stores generate over $100k per employee per quarter. In 2010, revenue was $481,000 per employee. This year the average is around $320k excluding the fourth quarter. In 2009 the average revenue for the technology sector was $388k/yr. A retailer like JC Penney generates about $124k of revenue per year per employee.

One thing to consider is that Apple rarely puts their products on sale — so to compare Apple to JC Penney, a retail store that routinely puts items on sale — may not be the best comparison. That being said, Apple Store employees are absolutely killing it when compared with the tech sector. And that matters.

Apple Store employees can’t be viewed as vastly superior salespeople compared with direct competitors, but Apple does appear to make a nice chunk of change off their brick-and-mortars. Don’t expect that to stop.

The worst thing about AT&T’s throttling is that there is no specific amount of data that notifies the user what constitutes the Top 5%. If you’re going to throttle the top data users, it’s important that users understand what “heavy usage” means to the company.

Heavy data users on AT&T’s network could always switch over to Sprint, which offers (and has constantly pushed) unlimited-everything on their network. But with analysts calling for the end of unlimited data for smartphone users on Sprint’s network, it looks like data usage will only shrink from here on out.

A few months ago, I deactivated my Sprint mobile hotspot when the company began to cap 3G and 4G data at 5GB a month. As someone who had used the hotspot as a replacement for home wireless, the device essentially had no further value to me.

While AT&T says that this decision would only affect jailbreakers, some people are complaining that they received this message after consuming as little as 2.5GB of data.

Something seems a little fishy to me.

Acer CEO J.T. Wang:

“We will shift our strategy to improving profitability from pursuing market share blindly with cheap and unprofitable products. Ultrabooks will become our key growth driver next year as customers want a lighter, thinner notebook with longer battery life. Selling more ultrabooks will also help improve our profit margins as they command higher prices.”

Two things. When was “blindly pursuing market share with cheap products” ever a good idea, much less a long-term strategy? Also, if you take out the word “Ultrabooks” from the quote, it sounds an awful lot like another computer we all know and love.

The bottom line: If you build a quality product and price it at a quality price, you can’t lose. While not necessarily true 100% of the time, it still baffles me that the Acer CEO would refer to his products as “cheap and unprofitable.” Even if it’s true, why shoot yourself in the foot?

It’s about time. The Instagram Android app is in development, and it inevitably means a nice bump in user numbers for the popular photo-sharing iOS app.

But the “casually-late” approach has hurt Instagram. Even just a few months ago, I considered Instagram an app that you would want to purchase an iPhone for (no pun intended). Some fantastic, beautifully-designed apps that compete alongside Instagram have emerged recently — Path, for example. Instagram may be concerned that even though their service continues to chug along, they need to find new, excited, engaged users.

Logically, it makes sense for Instagram to go after avid Android users who have never used the app before. But with Path (and a bevy of other apps) there too, Instagram shouldn’t expect to see as big of an active user bump as they would have seen, say, in October or November 2010.

Better late than never, I suppose.

If you have an alarmingly fast internet connection, own a tablet and have the slightest interest in gaming, you must give this a try. It really is the future of gaming — and it is here now.

I find it hard to grasp that we are moving away from game consoles completely, but this is an encouraging first step. And the detail that OnLive has taken with regard to the user experience — down to the low latency with AT&T — is impressive.

No one is going to run out and sell their Xbox 360 or PS3 tomorrow, but there are so many positives to a service with a relatively low start up cost and barrier to entry.

I’m not a huge fan of the controller, though. It looks like a modified, bigger Dual Shock. For such a disruptive service, people probably expect the controller to be aligned with the technological advancement.

I’m glad someone took the time to write this. As someone who has thought this in the past, it’s a clear problem in companies of all shapes and sizes.

People are trained into using business jargon that ends up having little to no meaning. But what’s worse: Many people come to believe that all businesses use this unnecessarily-complicated terminology.

It’s a problem. The more people who use complicated language, the more people who use complicated language. It snowballs on itself.

The final sentence sums it up well:

You will gain tremendous credibility, become much more productive, make those around you much more productive, and experience a great deal more joy in your working life if you look someone in the eye after hearing one of these verbal brain jammers and tell the person, “I don’t have any idea what you just said to me.”

Count me among the relieved that I didn’t pick one of these up on release day. I almost did though.

I browsed through the Jawbone forums one day prior to release. People were already disgruntled with many of the issues mentioned in the AllThingsD post. Lost caps and bricked devices were amongst the biggest complaints, and it seemed like a lot of users were experiencing one problem or another.

Despite all this, I went to two Target stores with all stock sold out. I was bummed out, but it turns out it was for the better.

The problem? It’s broken. Not ready for a public release.

There was so much hype and excitement around this device. It’s truly a shame to see it stumble out of the gate to the extent it has. And though Jawbone would never want to admit it, they’ve lost a ton of customers for life because this release was so poor.

People don’t go out to the store with $100 in hand to purchase a device that may work. The best course of action — though it may not be an option in Jawbone’s mind — is to pull the device from store shelves until these major problems are fixed.

Talk about a vote of confidence. Bob Iger is a firm believer in Apple’s future.

With some people calling Apple the most-undervalued large cap stock in America, perhaps he got in at the perfect time. The average purchase price came out to approximately $375.

Big props to Wal-Mart, who launched an algorithm-based Facebook application that recommends what gifts to buy for your friends.

Venky Harinarayan, founder of Kosmix and co-founder of @WalmartLabs, said developing the application was surprisingly difficult. First, they had to find the relevant information on a person’s Facebook page. Then, they had to find products that best matched those interests.

But I’m not sold. Facebook users like pages that they may not necessarily have a personal interest in, whether that be for professional work (clients, etc.) or just to track campaigns or updates. For instance, I don’t follow the Skittles fan page because I like Skittles per se, but because their status updates and brand assets are very interesting.

Tricia Duryee also mentions that if someone already likes something on Facebook, it’s likely that person owns merchandise surrounding the brand already.

So not every recommendation may be perfect — or even close — to what a user would want for the holiday season. It’s a bold step for a retail chain in social, and while it may not be there yet, Wal-Mart is on the right track simply through using social to drive recommendations.

Here comes Cluzee, a third-party app considered by some to be Siri’s first real competition. BGR had a nice writeup, coining the app as “a Siri-like service that includes capabilities even more impressive than Siri in some cases.”

ExtremeTech, however, highlighted that the app could only recognize one out of five popular Siri commands successfully — which does not bode well for an app that is trying to position itself as a more-capable Siri alternative.

IntoMobile probably had the most telling stat of them all:

Be warned, there are currently 133 1-star ratings out of a total of 241, so Cluzee may have some improvements to make.

We all realize it’s a rush to get the best Siri alternative to market, but so far, many have tried and many have massively failed. If the ratings are any indication, Cluzee looks to have the features but simply lack the functionality.

App developers also have to be wondering if Siri is too established to be overtaken. What if the key to beating Siri is not to build a better Siri, but build a better voice-activated app that serves a different purpose?

Then again, Android users probably want to see a Siri clone on their OS sooner than later. It seems that Cluzee has a lot of work to do before they are even mentioned in the same breath as Siri. Perhaps the winner here is a company that won’t rush their app to market for the sake of getting it out.

This feature allows shoppers to ask for assistance when they feel comfortable doing so, unlike in other retail stores where customers are hounded by employees eager to make a sale, Mr. Aguirre said.

“It’s more toward customer experience,” Mr. Aguirre said. “We don’t want to feel like we’re hassling our customers to shop. We want them to feel at home.”

Apple has single-handedly changed the way retail stores interact with their customers. I’ve been in plenty of retail stores where I’m constantly hounded by store salespeople trying to close sales. Apple approaches it completely differently — Through making the customer feel at home and comfortable, they believe they can do retail better.

I got a chance to speak with a store representative from the Clarendon Apple Store, who demonstrated the technology for me. It’s an impressive system. Of course, not all retailers are as tech-savvy as Apple, but I would also argue that you don’t need to be a genius to grasp the interface and understand how it works.

I also learned that there was no formal training on how to use it. Store employees picked up the technology and essentially taught themselves. There may have been an in-store training session, but according to this source, Apple didn’t send any implementation consultants out to the brick and mortars.

It’s a disruptive system that will eventually make its way into more retailers and more brick and mortar stores.

Well this is interesting. Best Buy has been canceling Blackberry PlayBook orders with little explanation. Perhaps the biggest head scratcher: the PlayBook was part of a larger RIM promotion that was supposed to go at a minimum, through the start of December.

Electronista Staff:

RIM has had a difficult time persuading some to adopt the BlackBerry PlayBook regardless of discounts. It already slashed the price temporarily to $300, and it has been giving free units as bonuses under certain conditions. Most often, the hesitation has been pinned on the lack of native e-mail and other basics, which make it hard to pick over either a higher-end but complete tablet like the iPad or else the simpler, PlayBook-based Amazon Kindle Fire.

Bottom line, the PlayBook is a massively underwhelming tablet in an increasingly crowded market. Why would anyone pick one of these up instead of the Kindle Fire?

If Best Buy can’t get these off their hands, even with a massively depressed price, it says a lot. Even though there’s a chance they already have, they likely don’t want to take the risk of taking more units on and not being able to move future shipments.

It’s great to see Oink doing so well after just two and a half weeks on the App Store. Oink has quickly become a go-to home screen iPhone app. I use it frequently to browse and find great things.

What excites me the most is that it takes a very basic idea (micro-recommendation) and executes it near-perfectly. The possibilities are endless. Pro features and monetization are eventually going to come.

From the looks of it, Kevin Rose has a clear vision for where he wants the app to go. He’s disrupted Yelp’s long-form review system and made it simple for people to find what they are looking for with a few taps of the touchscreen.

Who isn’t looking forward to what’s coming next?

Urban Meyer isn’t heading to Columbus to coach Ohio State, at least not now. WKMG was the first to report that Meyer had agreed to a 7 year/$40 million contract with the Buckeyes.

Then he denied it all.

So this means one of three things — Urban will join Ohio State later on, he has been in talks but won’t take the job, or he hasn’t been in any kind of discussions like he says. And if by chance Urban is being truthful, it also means that David Pingalore’s sources are spitting pure bullshit.

The story is too big for sources to miss this bad.

And what about the assistant coaches? How awkward is it for Durkin and Mariotti, two of the coaches that are supposedly going to join Urban in Columbus? Their phones and inboxes must be blowing up. How are the sources so aware of these details when they can’t even get the main story right?

Perhaps the gem is found in the student newspaper: “An OSU spokesman on Wednesday did not deny that Meyer will be the Buckeyes next coach.”

“We have not been commenting on rumors and speculation,” university spokesman Jim Lynch said in an email to The Lantern.

Here’s a hint: Go get the actual story from football sources and don’t rely on a university spokesman who probably has no insight into the situation to begin with.

This whole situation…what a disaster all around.

And just like that, Apple removes Big Fish’s subscription service. Jason Kincaid thinks that a reviewer may have slipped up with the application approval process.

Looks like we’ll need to wait a little longer for game subscription services for the iPad. Hey, it was exciting while it lasted.

A gamechanger? Sure, it’s cliche, but Big Fish Games is pioneering a new way to pay for iPad games. Apple is letting Big Fish offer all of their games to their users for one monthly subscription price.

Big Fish founder Paul Thelen calls it an “all-you-can-eat” service.

iPad app makers rely on app purchases and in-app add-ons to monetize. But the bigger companies that offer multiple games on the App Store will now need to think about how they can best offer their games to users.

Is the subscription model right for all? Nope — Big Fish Games is just one of a few established, recognized companies on the App Store. Regardless, it’s an intriguing new option that will provide app developers with another option to sell their games and build brand awareness and affinity amongst gamers.

Here it comes, but don’t get your hopes up too much. Last year’s discounts were minimal among all products. There’s little indication that discounts will be higher this year. Apple has a hard enough time keeping their products on the shelves even at full price.

When you’re comparison shopping, don’t forget about Amazon. Checking Apple Insider’s price guide is also recommended.

UPDATE: 9 To 5 Mac has revealed the deals from a trusted tipster.

While the Moneyball approach has changed the way baseball GMs build their MLB rosters, it has had a dramatic effect well beyond baseball. People think about how similar strategies could be used in other parts of life.

Applying Moneyball to Jeopardy is not just brilliant, it’s also immensely profitable, as one man found out. Genius. Why didn’t people think of this before?

Jeopardy, in itself, is a tough game to prepare for. Literally any topic or question can come up. But aggregating topics and keywords over time can lend a tremendous amount of insight into what topics show up more often than others. Sure, it’s a small advantage, but in an unpredictable game, any small advantage would help the contestant.

I’m a big fan.

For a device that had a pretty decent amount of hype around its release, the Blackberry PlayBook sure has underwhelmed. Despite a fairly successful launch day (~50,000 units sold), the PlayBook had struggled to achieve widespread adoption after that. Today, RIM announced a limited-time price point of $199.

But for a seemingly below-average device and the newer, exciting Kindle Fire now available on the market at the same price point, will people flock to stores to pick one of these up? It’s doubtful.

Like MG Siegler noted, a $199 tablet is a $199 tablet. You get what you pay for. People are questioning whether the Kindle Fire is a good value at its price point, so that can’t be good news for an underwhelming product from a struggling company. Look elsewhere.

LivingSocial is taking big steps to differentiate itself from its biggest competitor, Groupon, by expanding into takeout, delivery and room service.

It’s an interesting step for the Washington, DC-based startup, which has focused on Daily Deals as their business model to date.

In the creation of their newest service to consumers, LivingSocial is taking a bit of a risk. Their value prop to consumers with Room Service won’t come through monetary savings, but convenience and an “experience” instead. Instant Ordering doesn’t seem to be anything more than a glorified takeout and delivery service.

LivingSocial is such a powerful brand that it should be able to build up quite a roster of participating restaurants in their new offerings. The brand recognition should be the biggest catalyst in helping Instant Ordering and Room service get off the ground and gather lots of active users. But will it be profitable?

It’s great that LivingSocial is looking to expand into new areas, but time will tell if users recognize the value from convenience and experience like the monetary savings from daily deals.

It’s been a while since Foursquare has done anything with their website. Now, users will be able to experience the same magic of the Foursquare mobile app on their web browser. Foursquare announced that their redesigned website is now live for all.

The first thing that catches your eye is the new map at the top, which is quite detailed. It shows your current location as well as a mix of other points of interest that your friends and others have been to. While not a perfect mix of recommendations (I spy a Walgreens, TGI Fridays and Chili’s), I’m sure it will only get better over time.

I’m also a big fan of the new place pages, which have been cleaned up a bit and are much more visually appealing. Users see the place on the map, the mayor and top four photo thumbnails. It’s a lot easier to find what you are looking for.

I have to say, I’m very impressed with Foursquare’s recent moves. Expertise badges and the website are sure to increase user engagement and activity. Keep it up Dens, Naveen and team.

While I certainly haven’t paid for a ringtone since 2002 (or earlier), apparently many people actually have.

The (sad?) reality is that mobile ringtones and ringbacks still bring in a combined $2.1 billion…IN 2011. Perhaps the most disturbing part: Gartner believes this business will still generate over a billion dollars four years down the road.

The Gartner study lends a lot of insight into a key business that many thought peaked only a few years back. I mean, people actually still pay for ringtones? Perhaps it’s about time I bring back that explicit Jay-Z ringtone that I so graciously loved — in middle school.

9 to 5 Mac is reporting that despite Apple releasing an update to iOS 5, many users are still complaining of battery life issues.

While turning off Location Services, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi should provide temporary relief, it still comes as a massive disappointment for users who were looking for the fix.

Hopefully, Apple will be able to come up with a prompt update that fixes the problem for all users. With new Android phones on the horizon (including a sweet deal on the Motorola Droid Razr at Amazon), iPhone 4S users who value battery life may be inclined to switch over to one of the new Android handsets coming out.

As someone who has had major battery and random restart issues with the HTC Droid Incredible, I’m fairly positive that a brand-new Android handset is not in my immediate future. Luckily, my 4S handset has not suffered from any major battery issues as of late.