The Pepsi Refresh site is similar in functionality to other crowdsourced idea generating efforts such as Dell’s IdeaStorm (which is run on top of Salesforce.com) and the type of sites created by UserVoice, although it is not clear who created the site on behalf of Pepsi. I have contacted Pepsi to find out and will update if I hear back from them.

Regardless, this is not a good way to launch a massive social marketing campaign aimed at fostering warm-and-fuzzy feelings towards Pepsi. Hopefully, it can fix things quickly and recover because it’s actually a pretty good idea if Pepsi can get past the technical and privacy snafus.

Microsoft hired a qualitative research firm to study if Google users were willing to switch to Bing. The firm in turn recruited 15 Google users and instructed them to use Bing, exclusively, for one week without revealing to them that the study was sponsored by Microsoft.

Out of these 15 participants, the study reveals that 10 indicated that they’ll switch from Google to Bing. Here are all the promo clips:

It might take you a while to ask them all, so to make it easier Google launched a new effort to send window decals to over 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. that have been the most sought out and researched on Google.com and Google Maps. Google is calling these businesses the “Favorite Places on Google” and you’ll now start to find them in over 9,000 towns and cities, in all 50 states.

You can also explore a sample of the Favorite Places, in 20 of the largest U.S. cities, at google.com/favoriteplaces. Each window decal has a unique bar code, known as a QR codethat you can scan with any of hundreds of mobile devices — including iPhone, Android-powered phones, BlackBerry and more — to take you directly to that business’s Place Page on your mobile phone. With your mobile phone and these new decals, you can easily go up to a storefront and immediately find reviews, get a coupon if the business is offering one, or star a business as a place you want to remember for the future. Soon, you’ll be able to leave a review on the mobile page as well, just like on your desktop.

The Nook is finally here. It turns out to be much less Kindle-killer than Kindle-clone, and a slow one at that.

Barnes & Noble Inc.’s (BKS) new electronic book reader, which goes on sale today, bears a striking resemblance to the Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) device that ignited the e-reader market. It adds some useful features the Kindle doesn’t have, and many of those it lacks won’t be missed.

But the Nook falls short in one critical area: speed. In just about every important function—opening a book, turning pages, and especially starting up—it lags behind its competitor.

How slow is it on start-up? Achingly slow. Might-as-well- go-pour-yourself-a-cup-of-coffee slow. Maybe two cups.

Amazon’s current-model Kindle 2 takes about three seconds from the moment you release the power button until you can start reading. On the Nook, it takes a minute and 50 seconds.

Luckily, most users let an e-reader go to sleep rather than power it down, making the Nook’s pokiness less evident. Still, speed is a glaring issue—one that Barnes & Noble says it’s aware of, and promises to address in a software update early next year.

Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO, signed up to Twitter this morning – leading to speculation over a tie-up between the two tech firms. TechCrunch reported Schmidt’s account after some Googlers welcomed him on Twitter.

With a press conference at Google HQ due for later today, Schmidt’s entry into the Twitter fray has raised the prospect of the search engine giant and the micro-blogging site joining forces.

His first tweets – as @eschmidt0 – are not about what he is doing right now, but what he is thinking of, and that is his own performance.

So his first Twitter step was a bit of self-promotion, a link to his Wall Street piece “How Google Can Help Newspapers” and an attempted link to CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria – but unfortunately CNN has removed the link (in case you are interested, you find the show here).

If this is his real account let’s hope that we get a more direct glimpse of what Schmidt is about in the near future as his activity on Twitter would definitely interesting to watch.

However, the move is a bit of a surprise, because in spring, his opinion about the micro-messaging system wasn’t so good: “Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of a poor man’s email systems”, he said.

@eschmidt0 already has more than 2,000 followers and is following 73 Twitter accounts – a mixture of showbiz, politics and news organisations. Of course eschmidt0 is following the Google account, too, and Marissa Mayer – the company’s vice-president of search product – who hasn’t sent a single tweet.

Source

Mr. Butterfield worked at Yahoo for a few years in California, but he tired of the big-company scene and quit in the summer of 2008. He attended a meditation retreat and did some day trading – including a bad bet on shares of Lehman Bros. before the startup itch set in again.

Now he’s back in Vancouver, and his new company, Tiny Speck Inc., has big plans to tap the online interactive wave he helped create.

Can Mr. Butterfield hit another grand slam? What’s different this time around is the audience for social networking online is far more vast than college kids and computer geeks. And Tiny Speck has some serious Silicon Valley backing that will help his company avoid running out of cash before the job is done.

“The Internet’s moving towards fulfilling the promise everyone who was online early saw in it,” Mr. Butterfield, 36, said in an interview. “It always seemed everyone would eventually be on it and we’re getting to that point. The idea of going on the computer at night to socialize doesn’t seem deviant or creepy any more – it’s what normal people do.”

That includes people like Mr. Butterfield’s mother, who recently signed up on Facebook, joining more than 300 million active users and adding to the site’s fastest-growing demographic – people older than 35. Ms. Butterfield promptly added her son as a friend.

According to Google product manager Prem Ramaswami, the company’s engineers have been working to improve DNS over the last few months. Instead of performing DNS lookups on an ISP’s DNS server, Google will use its data-center and caching infrastructure to resolve these domain names.

After SPDY (which augments HTTP), this is Google’s second major project that touches upon the core infrastructure of the Web.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? And it marries with Google’s previous efforts to expand its services very neatly–particularly since Google is now the world’s expert on “looking things up.” But the potential effects are pretty huge. Because the big dictionary makers each have their own effort at capturing an online audience to supplement falling sales of their ink and paper copies–a change caused by automated spell-checkers and the rise of the Net. And now they’re simply going to lose some of their online business to Google without Google having to make much of an effort. Of course those with an academic bent will probably want to know the authoritative definitions and etymology of particular words, and they’ll continue to be big-name dictionary customers. For now. Because you can bet it won’t be long before Google’s mastery over the dictionary is total.

Aaron Patzer launched Mint.com as a user-friendly alternative to Quicken and other personal-finance software out there. Little did he know that just two years later, Intuit, which makes Quicken, would fork over $170 million for his website. Patzer, an Inc.com 30 Under 30 alum, is also featured in the new book, Upstarts! How GenY Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the World of Business (www.upstartsrock.com), by Inc. contributing editor Donna Fenn. She recently caught up with Patzer to discuss the big sale, what his new role with the company will be, and how he’s planning to change the future of transportation.

The rankings overlap a bit—Apple, LG, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are on both—but the order is quite different. At BusinessWeek, Apple is first, followed by Google, Toyota, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Strategos puts LG in the lead, trailed immediately by Nintendo and Microsoft. As for Apple, it ranks 10th.

One obvious reason for the different lineups: The Strategos list includes only consumer electronics companies, while ours encompasses all companies. I’ve asked Strategos CEO Peter Skarzynski for an explanation of Apple’s relatively poor showing. I’ll fill you in when I hear from him.

Here’s the entire Strategos Top 10:

• LG
• Nintendo
• Microsoft
• Sony
• Hitachi
• Canon
• Sharp
• NetApp
• Audiovox
• Apple