If you are waiting on someone, commuting on the train, or otherwise away from your computer with time to kill, then you might as well get some holiday shopping done. Thanks to the iPhone’s excellent Safari browser, you can simply shop your favorite sites. However, if you are looking for a more “specialized” experience, there is no shortage of shopping apps available.

App Suggestions:

Ebay Mobile (free): Shop, bid, and get alerts on items. Also try the recently released eBay Deals (free) for a new way to discover daily deals.

Amazon Mobile (free): This app delivers Amazon’s huge inventory in a simplified interface, while still offering access to your account’s wish lists payment details, etc. Also try simply visiting Amazon.com on Safari. Usually I am not a fan of watered down mobile websites, but Amazon’s version is excellent.

2-Price check on register 3

You found the perfect gift, but is it the best price? You could use your iPhone to Google the item. Or, you could use a really cool app to scan the item for a price check.

App Suggestion:

RedLaser ($1.99): This app “scans” barcodes and searches for online and nearby prices. Well worth the $1.99 price.

4-Who’s been naughty and who’s been nice?

Not sure what to get someone? Try poking around on Facebook or Twitter for hits about what your family and friends want under the tree.

App Suggestions:

Facebook (free): Enough said.

Tweetie 2 ($2.99): There are a number of good Twitter apps, and asking which is best often ends in a PC vs. Mac style debate. Tweetie is one of the better ones.

3-Make a list, check it twice

A list is essential for smart holiday shoppers. A lot “holiday list” apps have popped up lately, but you might be better off getting a task list app that you can use all year around.

App Suggestions:

To Do’s (free): A simple and to the point basic list manager.

Remember the Milk (requires a $25 a year pro account): One of the better cloud syncing, flexible, advanced list managers out there. You can even share lists with other users, or use RTM’s “location awareness” feature to alert you when passing by that shop on your list

4-I’m dreaming of a…er…Black Christmas

It is never fun to find out that your holiday shopping spree put you in the red. Use your iPhone to keep track of your bank balance, or get fancy and track/budget your finances.

App Suggestions:

Your Bank’s App (typically free): Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and many other banks have apps that will allow you to find the nearest ATM, check your balance, and more.

Mint Personal Finance (free): Mint is like a better version of Quicken (the makers of Quicken, Intuit, recently realized this and purchased Mint). It is an excellent online personal finance manager with an accompanying iPhone app.

6-Get in the holiday spirit

Finally, download some holiday songs from iTunes, plug in the white earbuds, and get in the spirit!

We’ve already written about what sells in advertising… babies, pets and sex. The new PETA ads hit 2 out of 3 on the money.

PETA’s latest ad featuring Joanna Krupa has already managed to piss off the Catholic Church. Fox 411reports:

“The fact is that cats and dogs are a lot safer in pet stores than they are in the hands of PETA employees,” Catholic League President Bill Donohue said in a statement. “Moreover, pet stores don’t rip off Christian iconography and engage in cheap irreligious claims.”
“PETA is a fraud,” Donohue continued. “It also has a long and disgraceful record of exploiting Christian and Jewish themes to hawk its ugly services. Those who support this organization sorely need a reality check. They also need a course in Ethics 101.”
Krupa issued a statement responding to the Catholic League, saying: “As a practicing Catholic, I am shocked that the Catholic League is speaking out against my PETA ads. I’m doing what the Catholic Church should be doing, working to stop senseless suffering of animals, the most defenseless of God’s creation.”

Here are the ads, in all their glory, plus a little reminder from past PETA classics along the same theme lines:

Talk about information overload & technology forging ahead! If you had any doubt that we are more connected (at least via keyboard & wi-fi) then give this video a spin. You’ll be full of interesting cocktail chatter for the next month.

Did you know that -

• Over 1,000,000 books are published every year
• We have access to 1,000,000,000,000 web pages <– WOW
• There are 65,000 iphone apps
• There are 240,000,000 TVs in the US (2,000,000 are in the BATHROOM!)
• Over 40,000,000 people have been Rick Rolled?

Watch the video to catch it all (including how much we’re texting!) it’s scary, fascinating & informative.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

What do YOU think? Is the propensity to connect via the laptop & phone making us more or less social? Depends on how you look at it.

Twitter may seem simple to use: type your thoughts, find cool things. But there are Golden Rules for all Tweeters to consider, and if you don’t want to be shunned by your fellow peeps, here are some laws to abide by:

1. Don’t try and hawk your free crap – nobody wants it
2. Give recognition where it’s due – don’t RT without giving credit
3. Give thanks to those that RT you
4. Add to the conversation, don’t dominate it
5. Don’t use up all 140 if you want someone to pass it along
6. Don’t auto DM your followers
7. Don’t include someone you don’t know in your conversation to make them read your tweet
8. Don’t feed & leave – nobody wants to talk to a bot (we’ll still love you when you return in person)
9. Follow back peeps that RT you regularly
10. Report spammers to SPAM – be a good neighbor & do your part
11. Be sincere – we love that (we like funny too)
12. Try & include a morsel of the conversation in your reply so the recipient knows what you’re talking about
13. Don’t feed 25 tweets and fill up someone’s screen
14. Check your followers & keep your ratios in balance
15. DO NOT PUT AN RT IN FRONT OF A NAME THAT DIDN’T SEND IT

Being on your own isn’t easy, and fearless leading is the essence of the successful entrepreneur. Here we have 25 of the essential tools (some for sale, some innate) gathered so you can to bulk up your utility belt for success.

1. A relationship with your banker ~ we’re not talking a little nod, but a first name basis & a handshake that seals deals over friendly conversation
2. The maximum credit line you can get. This sits on the back shelf, unused and awaits the rainy day with the BIG IDEA
3. iPhone – The apps alone will justify the purchase of this little gem
4. Netgear Wireless 3G router & cell card – make an instant hot-spot ANYWHERE
5. A Blog: You have important things to say – you need a stage. Start a blog & commit to post once a week
6. A Twitter posse…. these are your foot-soldiers for social media & assist you in spreading your word
7. Membership to Entrepreneurs Organization (which includes a forum/Board of Advisors)
8. Great set of headphones for desk & travel – I recommend Bose Head Phones
9. That fabulous power suit or ensemble that makes you look & feel great
10. 3 confidants you can be completely honest with (there’s that Entrepreneur’s Organization membership again)
11. A well made 2 day carry-on (Tumi if you’re feeling rich, Samsonite is dandy too)
12. 1 person that can back you up if things go awry – a strong virtual assistant
13. 3 clever ice breaker/conversation starters (book/movie/vacation/current events = all good starters)
14. Ability to ball-park price in your head without trouble, embarrassment or flinching
15. Enough poise to speak well in front of an audience without hesitation
16. 1 press person/contact that will run your story in a pinch
17. A good elevator pitch
18. Confidence to lead, even when in doubt
19. A comfortable bluetooth headset
20. A superfast laptop with WI-FI that travels well
21. Phone Jammer - we all need some silence when conducting business
22. Mind mapping & organizational software
23. A traveling Nuvi, or other GPS smartphone software
24. A Kindle, subscribed to all the blogs & periodicals that are relevant to your industry
25. Access to peer learning and stimulation (there’s that Entrepreneur’s Organization membership again)

Add your own essentials into the comments area

If you thought social media was a fad or a trend, read the FACTS. Here are the staggering stats at a glance:

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network

• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web

• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media

• Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.

• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia

• Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)

• comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

• 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction

• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum

• % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%

• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females

• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama

• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen

• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…

• The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube

• Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English

• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs

• 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily

• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth

• If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour

• Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0

• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands

• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them

• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

• Only 14% trust advertisements

• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI

• 90% of people that can TiVo ads do

• Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009

• 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone

• According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available

• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.

• In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media

• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.

• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second

• Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

MG Siegler of TechCrunch Reports

It looks like Facebook has tonight turned on a feature called “Facebook Lite” for some users to test out. We’re getting bombarded by tips about it, and some of us are seeing it as well. Unfortunately, it appears that it may not be fully ready for prime time yet, but we have more information and what looks to be a screenshot below, so keep reading.

[Update: See Facebook's response at the bottom, the test was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended tonight.]

So what is it? Well, it looks to be exactly what it says it is, a lighter version of Facebook. The beta tester message reads:

We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.

The URL for the feature is http://lite.facebook.com. So far, users are reporting not seeing much different about the site, if anything.

You’ll recall that MySpace launched a “lite” version for its profiles in April.

Update: Okay, while it seems that most of the users who are getting this message now are not seeing much different, earlier this week, it looks like a very select few may have gotten a sneak peak at Facebook Lite. According to their tweets on it, it appears to be a more Twitter-like. One user notes that it, “looks like a simplified version of twitter with comments enabled. On 2nd thought, it looks like simplified FriendFeed.”

That is of course very interesting since Facebook just bought FriendFeed for around $50 millionyesterday.

Update 2: We just found a screenshot of what this apparently looks like. Again, this was taken a few days ago.

Update 3: FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit shared our story on FriendFeed, so naturally I asked if he knew about this beforehand. “Someone mentioned it earlier today. It sounds very promising,” he says.

Update 4: And here’s Facebook’s official response:

We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook “Lite” is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept Friend requests, write on people’s Walls, and look at photos and Status updates. We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience.

This evening, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake. We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time. People who are not part of the test and are trying to access “Lite” will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.

Whoops, looks like someone at Facebook jumped the gun on this new feature. Too bad, looks like most of us will have to wait awhile to try it out.

Update 5: And here’s what Facebook Lite is really all about.

Update 6: And here are some more pictures of Facebook Lite.

Add your own insights into the comments

How clever – the ice cream maker has just released their new Flipped Out sundaes, and to celebrate the event and spread the flipped out word virally, they’ve cooked up FlipMyText. The app is just a quick way to input words, flip them upside down, and copy and paste them anywhere, but the transfigured text is already making waves with flipped out status updates being posted to both Facebookand Twitter.

FlipMyText lives on Ben & Jerry’s Flipped Out Facebook Page, and anyone can use the mini app to type, flip, and paste upside down text. It’s seriously simple – just type and watch the widget flip on the fly.

The FlipMyText social media marketing campaign is a perfect tie-in with the new sundaes, which require flipping for full enjoyment, and we think it’s not only fun, but a fantastic way to reinforce the Ben & Jerry’s flipped out message.

Thanks to Jennifer Van Grove for this post today on Mashable!

Add your own insights into the comments (extra points for upside down)!

You can find more here.

1. You proudly display no less than 5 Pantone Ringed Binders
2. You know the difference between Reflex Blue, Cyan & PMS 300
3. You have used a waxer with a foot pedal
4. Working a photostat machine is an essential resume tool
5. You used a Mergenthaler & love/hated it’s painful existence
6. Rubylith xacto skills are to be revered
7. Clip art arrived monthly, & was inserted into giant blue 10lb binders… much of it was unuseable
8. You routinely decorate a soda can to discard Xacto blades
9. Your first mac (512) didn’t have a hard drive… just disk swapping
10. Proportion wheels are super easy to use & essential to life
11. You know what bestine is, & secretly love the smell
12. Metallic ink on uncoated or unvarnished stock is a rookie move
13. You know what color PMS 485 is
14. You embrace: double hit ink, spot varnish & press checks
15. You can proof a blue-line without hesitation
16. Typos live forever
17. Lorem ipsum means NOTHING… why do clients insist on translating?
18. Rapidographs are to be nurtured & cared for (especially the lavender)
19. You understand that press checks happen during non-business hours
20. You know how to SPEC type – an ancient, exotic & forgotten skill!

Add your own insights into the comments!