Foursquare, the location-based mobile application, announced yesterday it scored a fat $20 million investment and a new funding partner, Andreessen Horowitz, the VC co-founded by Netscape whiz kid Marc Andreessen. What will the loss-making start-up look like …

Morgan Stanley’s latest crystal ball-gazing reveals some fascinating insights into how far we’ve come and where we’re heading with online innovation. Amazingly, we’ve downloaded roughly 4.5 billion apps and, by 2012, smartphone shipments (all those …

We’ve written a lot here about PepsiCo’s philosophy on social media, a philosophy that starts with using the public’s feedback to not only connect with its customers’ likes and dislikes, but to make better products and to possibly bring about some worthwhile change to the communities where we live. What’s next for PepsiCo’s social brand crusade? Crowd-sourcing the perfect Pepsi mobile application, apparently.

The battle for supremacy in the billion-dollar e-reader market keeps getting better and better. For us, anyhow. Now, the Kindle e-book reader is set on providing readers with a new social reading experience that–get this, Jane Austen fans–allows you to share book passages with your friends. Is that enough to silence the iPad buzz?

Google and Microsoft are making moves to reorganize the way we use email. It comes at a stage when we’re using social networks more and more in favor of the old email inbox. Why then all the fuss and investment? And, what does it mean for us?

Still think Foursquare is just a silly fad for wired extroverts with too much time on their hands? Starbucks is one marketer who sees it differently, eyeing serious sales potential from the location-based social gaming app, announcing this week it will create a U.S.-wide loyalty program for the mayors of Foursquare.

If you’ve ever spent any time in Seoul or Tokyo you’ll have no doubt seen the locals flashing their mobiles to hunt around for last-minute shopping bargains, the details of which were beamed to their screens as they stood feet from the retailer, or using the handset to pay for anything from a carton of milk to cab fare. And this was years before the iPhone and the resulting apps economy explosion. Now, in 2010, is it possible the West is finally catching up?

Which airline – British Airways, Easyjet or Virgin Atlantic – gets the highest marks from customers? What about Vodafone vs. T-Mobile? A new customer rating service, Pownum, has launched that tries to remove a bit of the mystery about which companies are the best do do business with.

Remember Blippy, the social shopping service that works by sharing your credit card purchases with your friends and the wider Web community? It couldn’t work. Right? Well, in the past week a direct competitor, Swipely, came online in full force testing-mode to challenge Blippy.

We’re pretty sure that Twitter has transformed before our very eyes over the last 12 months. Way back in, oh, May 2009 we followed a smallish group of friends, contacts and people whose opinions we respected so that we could enjoy a slice of their life and thoughts as expressed in nice 140 character digestible bites.