Head

For years, runners have been able to take advantage of Nike+, a nifty accessory that lets your iPod communicate with your shoes to turn it into a personal running coach of sorts. Soon, cyclists will have access to a tool that’s in the same vein as Nike+, but far more powerful. It’s called Pedal Brain, and it allows your iPhone or iPod Touch to receive and interpret data from a variety of exercise devices that use the ANT+ wireless protocol.
» Read more

We mixed up our weekly Web Faceoff series a bit this time, with a novel head-to-head battle between Twitter’s old and new style of retweets. In the previous 3-way matchup we saw Digg beat out Reddit and StumbleUpon for social news supremacy, and this week we saw another heated battle come to a close with perhaps a surprising winner. It’s been a controversial topic since the new feature was first announced, and the results of this week’s poll show that it may still be a contested issue.
» Read more

Over the last decade or so, the public perception of online dating has shifted from being a bit odd to something that’s pretty normal. But even as people get used to surfing the web as they look for a potential date, there’s a new trend emerging: location aware, mobile dating services. Skout, a social dating service with a strong mobile component, decided to conduct a study to see how hesitant people are to make the move from mobile messaging to in-person meetups. The company surveyed 1000 of its users 20-30 years old, with an even gender split.
» Read more

If you’ve tuned in previously, you’ll know we throw out a Lunchtime Poll topic weekly to get a zeitgeist of Mashable readers’ opinions on your favorite software and services out there. Recently we saw your top blogging platforms, and next we took a look at your favorite mobile social apps. We took a broad definition of social app, so specifically mobile apps like Foursquare and Gowalla went up against mobile components of more concretely web-based apps like Facebook and Twitter.
» Read more

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: Giddi Quick Pitch: Product rating engine built on data collected from eCommerce and media sources designed to help consumers make better purchasing decisions.
» Read more

Sometimes it takes a while for a site to find its legs. Hunch, which launched last March to much fanfare, is only now in the past few months capturing the attention of consumers. As the comScore chart above shows, Hunch recently hit a growth spurt, jumping from an estimated 130,000 unique U.S. visitors in August, 2009 to 371,000 in November, 2009. While the overall size of the audience is still small, nearly tripling it in three months certainly makes for an eye-catching chart. Hunch takes a little getting used to. It is not a straightforward Q&A site.
» Read more

We’ve seen some epic battles in our weekly Web Faceoff series, where we put opposing social media and tech tools into the Colosseum and have them go to war for your vote. Our very first faceoff, Firefox vs. Chrome, had over 8000 votes, while only 31 votes separated Last.fm vs. Pandora. None of those battles compared to the clash that occurred this week, though. We asked you, the readers, to choose between Digg, Stumbleupon, or Reddit for social media supremacy.
» Read more

Rummble, the location-based social ratings mobile startup, has just released a new version of its iPhone app containing what is effectively its answer to Foursquare. The feature is called “Local Heroes” and is billed as “the fun side of Rummbling” but it is quite obviously going to be Rumbble’s way of attacking the buzz surrounding the game of checking-in and becoming a “Mayor” of a location as propogated by the New York-based Foursquare.
» Read more

Before there was Gowalla or Foursquare, there was location-based social network Loopt. Launched in 2006, Loopt was one of the pioneers of the location-based mobile social network. And Loopt has gained a huge number of users of its mobile apps; the social network currently has 3 million mobile users, 1 million of which are on the iPhone. Compared to Foursquare and Gowalla, which have 150,000 and 50,000 users respectively, Loopt has a pretty significant user base.
» Read more

Two weeks ago we wrote about the story of developer Romy Maxwell, who had built a Craigslist mashup using Yahoo Pipes. A few weeks after sending his app to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (who forwarded it to other members of the Craigslist team), the world’s largest classifieds site blocked Maxwell’s app. And then it blocked every other application built on Yahoo, much to the chagrin of many developers. Tonight, Craigslist has ended its ban of Yahoo Pipes, according to a tweet from Craigslist (and former Yahoo) employee Jeremy Zawodny.
» Read more