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:

Twitter enlisted Citysearch as the first user of its Sign-Up API, which helps new users create Twitter accounts from other people’s web sites. Citysearch gets a sprinkle of social media goodness from the arrangement, fostering real-time interaction between consumers and companies, while Twitter — which has a notoriously inscrutable new user experience — gets someone else to handle customer acquisition of smaller brands as it prepares to offer corporate accounts. Citysearch says it has direct relationships with some 200,000 local merchants, and it wants to build a multi-service social media directory for small businesses.

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.

On a global basis, we might already be seeing a recovery, at least for search advertising. The online advertising revenues of the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) increased 1.2 percent in the fourth quarter. Google accounted for all of that growth, however, so we are still waiting for display advertising to find its footing.

It is likely that in the U.S. alone, search advertising is also leading the recovery. But now that Google is mixing more visual elements into search ads (are those display or search ads?), perhaps display ads will see a boost as well.

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.