“Location” has become the new keyword over the past few months with the rise of geo-based sharing services, most notably Foursquare. But many observers are skeptical, and a new report by Forester Research has everyone wondering: if they build it, will users actually end up checking-in? We think they will.

The battle for global social media markets is heating up as Google’s Orkut social network, popular in Brazil and India, gets a revamp that allows users to pick which friends can see which saucy updates, and which ones get the generic off-to-the-gym salvo. This move may highlight what’s to come for Google’s new Facebook killer, Google Me. But with recent reports showing that Facebook is now beating Orkut in India, could these latest changes be Orkut’s last stand?

LG, the South Korean electronics manufacturer, is making use of Twitter functionality for in-house communication on a new company mobile application called BizTweet that has proved so popular it just start pitching the service to others. It’s a fantastic idea for improving informal communication and creative idea-sharing between employees. There’s just one problem. The idea isn’t exactly new, and there is already a Twitter plug-in called BizTweet.

With hundreds of new iPhone applications appearing every day, and with a cut-throat economy of third-party developers all competing for the top spot, how are these apps builders to stay ahead of the pack? The answer may just lie in crowdsourcing.

Philips head of global internal comms, Cameron Batten, spoke to Simply-communicate recently about a new internal communications channel the consumer electronics powerhouse has implemented to bring its disparate and nearby employees together to collaborate, inspire and promote knowledge sharing.

The mobile apps marketplace will top a staggering 25 billion downloads by 2015, according to new research by Juniper Research. To put that in further perspective: the estimate is that smart phone sales will reach 1 billion annually by the same period. That’s an impressive number of downloads per handset user.

The London 2012 Olympic website is expecting an astonishing 10 billion page visits by the end of the games, making it one of the most visited web sites ever in the world of sport. But there’s one fickle group that still must be won over: videogame-obsessed teens.

Seven out of ten retailers have already implemented or plan to implement the Facebook Like button into their websites, concludes a new survey by SeeWhy Research. But taking a closer look at online retailers, the ground-zero for next-generation social shopping, it seems like the biggest retailers are merely paying lip service to “Like.”

Is Twitter adding a new pay-for-followers scheme to boost sagging brands and would-be celebs? What about a new real-time analytics tool to make sense of up-to-the-minute conversation streams?

When a tech giant like Microsoft releases a device specifically targeting the hundreds of millions of us who use social networks each day you might expect greater than 500 units sold