The City of New York is reportedly planning to revive 250 old phone booths with the introduction of 32-inch Internet-ready “smart screens” throughout the five boroughs, The New York Post reported on Monday. The touch-screens will display local neighborhood information in multiple languages, including lists of nearby restaurants, stores in the area, traffic updates, landmark information and safety alerts. If the pilot program is successful, the futuristic screens could replace all of the city’s 1...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have found that mobile applications that integrate advertisements pose privacy and a security risks. The team conducted a study that examined 100,000 apps from the Google Play market and noticed that more than half contained “ad libraries,” while 297 of the apps included “aggressive ad libraries” that could download and run code from remote servers. Researchers also found that more than 48,000 of the apps that were examined could track l...

Amazon announced on Thursday that Amazon.com customers are now purchasing more books for the Kindle than print books — including hardcover and paperback — combined. Since April 1st, for example, for every 100 print books that were sold on Amazon.com, the site sold 105 Kindle eBooks. “Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,” Amazon’s CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos said. “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happ...

According to Amazon’s “Bestsellers in Electronics” list, the company’s $114 ad-subsidized “Kindle with Special Offers,” is the most popular model in the Kindle family of eReaders. The device — launched on April 13th — is just $25 cheaper than the $139 Kindle Wi-Fi version, but it comes with sponsored screen savers and advertisements on the bottom of the screen. We originally suspected that most people would splurge for the Wi-Fi version and avoid ads, but perhaps users ...

Skype announced on Monday that it will soon add advertisements to its desktop software. The move is thought to be an effort to introduce a new revenue stream ahead of the company’s IPO, which will occur this year. The new display ads will be rolled out in the U.S., U.K. and Germany this week, and they will appear on the Home tab of Skype’s desktop software. Initial ad buys that will begin running as soon as Skype’s new ads go live come from companies including Groupon, Universal Pictures an...

Google has introduced new location-aware advertising for iPhone and Android handsets. Advertisers will now have the ability to select a “location extension for display” option that will serve up their ads based upon a user’s GPS coordinates. Ads will appear within mobile applications and mobile browsers and will allow users to get mapping and contact information for businesses that are within the immediate area. This feature is pretty cool once you get over the creepiness of Google sending a...

Rumors of a Superbowl ad for Google’s search service began circulating the internet last week when Google CEO Eric Schmidt tweeted: “Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter. (someone said, ‘Hell has indeed frozen over’).”  Google, a company known for it’s web advertisements, rarely (ever?) spends company dollars on television-based ads for its line of web services. However, as tweeted by the CEO, a Google spot did air d...

Microsoft has started to ramp up its advertisement of Windows 7 and they’ve enlisted some serious star power to do it; Stewie and Brian Griffin. A special titled “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show” will air November 8th on Fox at 8:30p  (EST and PST). You won’t have to deal with any commercials, just the constant subtle placement of Windows 7 into the plot line.  The deal is also said to include a 12-week college tour with outdoor movie nights hoste...

Remember last month when a developer revealed some hidden functionality in webOS that periodically reports a user’s location back to Palm? Well as it turns out, the reasoning behind the Big Brother-esque move may be even worse than you think. Drum roll please… Location-based advertising. We’ve uncovered a patent application filed by Palm in November of last year that could end up being one of the worst things to happen to webOS since its birth. As described within the application itself, the...

We’ve been wondering how long it would take Microsoft to kick things up a notch with its responses to Apple’s I’m a Mac smear series. Times are tough these days and it looks like Microsoft is finally starting to target cost with its latest TV ad. Titled Windows Laptop Hunters, the spot features a young woman named Lauren tasked with finding a laptop that meets her requirements — “speed, a comfortable keyboard and a 17-inch screen” — for under $1,000. If she finds one,...

Apparently, thinking Windows Vista is a crappy OS is equivalent to thinking the Earth is flat. Mmm. The above image is a teaser of Microsoft’s upcoming $300 million Vista ad campaign, and we’re not quite sure $300 million is going to be enough to accomplish what Microsoft has set out to accomplish. This is an anti-smear campaign in its truest sense. Vista has been nothing short of a whipping boy for the blogosphere since its trouble-riddled release a year and a half ago. All the cool kids hate Vis...