Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Mark Angelino, formerly vice president at IBM and President at Sprint, was responsible for the adoption of Salesforce’s sales, call center and platform services in North America from May 2009 until last month.

As you can tell from the screenshot above, he left Salesforce.com in June to become Senior Vice President at another company, but he played coy and marked his new employer’s name ‘Guess Who!’.

No need to guess any longer, in case you were interested: turns out Angelino has joined HP as SVP of Global Distribution for its roughly $54 billion Enterprise Business.

Angelino will be responsible for managing HP’s relationships with ISVs, system integrators, managed services providers and channel partners for the business unit, which includes the technology giant’s portfolio of servers, storage, networking, software and services.

After months of waiting, it’s finally here. Streaming music service MOG has launched its mobile applications for Android and iPhone, giving subscribers unlimited access to its library of 8 million songs, which can be streamed or downloaded over both 3G and WiFi. If you listen to a lot of music, or just like being able to listen to music on-demand without having to sync to your PC, this is definitely worth checking out. Access to the mobile service costs $9.99 a month, but MOG is offering free 3-day trials when you download the apps (no credit card is required).

When MOG launched its All Access music service back in December, we gave it a rave review, but it was missing one key feature: mobile. These applications bring all of the functionality of the desktop service and they do it one better, by allowing you to store as many songs and albums as you’d like to your phone’s storage for offline access.

Navigating the application should come naturally to anyone who has used the iPhone’s music player (and it’s actually a big step up over the music player that comes stock on Android). After first firing up the app, the first feature you’ll want to try is search. You’ll find the regular options here, like searching by artist and song, but there’s also an option for Playlists, which allow you to search through user-curated playlists created by MOG’s large community of music fans. This is part of a recurring theme in the application: discovery, which is important if you’re keen on tapping into the service’s broad music library. The main navigation screen also includes a list of New Releases, top songs and albums across the service, and a collection of songs handpicked by MOG’s editors on a daily basis.

MOG really shines when it comes to actually getting the music you want to hear onto your phone. When you find a song or album you like, you have two options: you can stream it (just tap the song or album title), or you can download it and store it locally. Next to each song and album is an arrow pointing downward; hit that, and MOG will start downloading the files the background (it’s really nice to be able to download an entire album or playlist in one tap).

There isn’t any restriction on how much music you can download, other than the amount of storage you have available on your phone. By default downloads clock in at 64 kbps AAC+, but you can elect to download files at a much higher quality 320 kbps MP3 bitrate if you’d like (this obviously takes up more space).

You can also use MOG mobile to create custom digital radio stations, sort of like Pandora, but without the learning algorithms. Input a seed artist or song titles, and MOG will start playing similar music. Using a sliding scale, you can tell MOG to play only music by that artist, or you can increase the amount of variety you want to introduce into the station.

The applications have been a long time coming. MOG showed them off at SXSW in March, only to have its iPhone application sit in App Store limbo waiting for Apple’s approval for a month. Now that they’re out, you can expect MOG to push them hard, with help from the new $9.5 million funding round it raised earlier this year. Note that this release doesn’t include support for iOS 4′s multitasking; MOG says that it will be coming in the next two weeks in an update.

Of course, MOG isn’t alone in this space. The service will be competing against the likes of Rhapsody, and more competitors like Rdio and Spotify are on the horizon (the latter two have received plenty of press, but are not yet available in the US). Also note that MOG offers a version of its service that omits mobile access for $5 a month. Update: As the commenters point out, US users can request an invite code to Rdio from its site, but it’s still in private beta.

Foursquare may be helpful for seeing what your friends are up to, but the act of checking in — standing in a bar, face buried in your phone’s screen as you hunt for the right venue — is anything but social. Now, hot on the heels of its partnership with the New England Patriots, location-based gaming service SCVNGR is announcing a nifty new feature that could go a long way toward resolving this issue (and we’ll probably see other services copy it). If you’ve tried Bump, it will sound very familiar: a social check-in involves getting a group of friends to physically tap their phones together at the same time (it’s more fun than it sounds).

So why would anyone actually want to do this? First, it’s more fun than your standard check-in — I could see this working as a decent, albeit nerdy, icebreaker at bars. And it’s probable that the Patriots will be trying it out during a game as part of a stadium-wide social checkin. SCVNGR is also incenting users to do this by offering in-game bonuses that make social check-ins worth significantly more than most other actions.

SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch says that he initially hoped to implement the feature using Bump’s API, but found that that service couldn’t properly handle multiple phone taps at once — he says it’s designed for 1-to-1 transfers of contacts and other media. So SCVNGR designed a system that would allow many (even thousands) of people to tap their phones together in order to achieve a group checkin.

Of course, physically hitting devices that cost upwards of $500 isn’t always the best idea, especially when you’re trying to get a bunch of people to do it at once (some of whom may not be especially sober). Fortunately there’s an alternative: Priebatsch says that some well-timed phone shaking when you’re in the vicinity of your friends will work just fine.

The app store train seems unstoppable. According to a Juniper Research report out today, the number of “consumer-oriented handset downloads” is expected to rise from less than 2.6 billion per-year in 2009 to more than 25 billion in 2015.

The trend, notes the report, is being driven by industry players who are seeking to emulate Apple’s success with the App Store by launching their own branded storefronts, such as ‘Mobile Market’ from China Unicom, ‘Airtel App Central’ from Bharti and the ‘Apps & Games Shop’ on Vodafone 360.

And let’s not forget Google’s Android, Nokia Ovi, Palm, Windows Phone etc. or the independent giant GetJar, which passed 1 billion downloads earlier this month.

In other words, app stores are here to stay. Juniper has a warning, however: Copying the Apple model isn’t as straight forward as it would seem.

Viral video monitoring startup PopScreen aims to save you from the disgrace you deserve when you email all your friends and relatives a link to that super funny video on YouTube only to find out they’ve all seen it a couple of times yesterday.

The company is today launching what they dub a ‘video prediction engine’, which they claim is capable of detecting which videos will spread across the Web before they actually do.

PopScreen measures online videos from over 10,000 sources, including YouTube (duh), Vimeo and DailyMotion but also content networks like Revision3 and FunnyOrDie.

Its video prediction engine indexes around 15,000 videos per day based on those sources, and analyzes them in order to collect a number of unique data points – it’s unclear which ones exactly but the number runs in the ‘hundreds of thousands’ according to PopScreen – and processes them through a proprietary algorithm in an effort to accurately predict the viral potential of videos and to identify newsworthy content before your sister finds out about it.

Its main strength lies in filtering out duplicates, repeats and similar videos that are far less likely to scale up, tapping a network of influencers to determine which videos are most likely to go mainstream in the near future.

Not interested in content related to movies or music? Simply un-check the relevant boxes in the sidebar and have PopScreen cater potential hit videos according to your interests. Find anything you like in particular? Share away via the Twitter and Facebook buttons.

PopScreen says its engine will be rolled out on a larger scale over the coming months to allow partners across all industries including news, publishing, and search, to syndicate predictive data and provide their users with access to the most timely video content on the Web, tailored speci?cally to their personal interests.

Founded in 2008, PopScreen is privately-held and based in Houston, Texas. The startup was founded by Kevin Nguyen and Glenn Gutierrez, who in 2003 launched Zapmeta, a meta search engine which processed 25-35 million searches a month and self-reportedly generated over $15 million in revenue.

Karsa Flash Payer offers a way for content creators to monetize their online video using a bait and switch model in which payment is only requested mid-viewing, once the user is already hooked. The service was developed by UK-based Steven Carroll, the guy behind Documentary-film.net, which came very close to entering the Deadpool after he found it difficult to generate enough revenue to cover the hosting and bandwidth costs of the site.

Instead of forcing the viewer to commit to paying up front for content that they may not yet consider worth their cash, Karsa allows for it to be viewable for free for a set amount of time, after which the video pauses and the user is prompted for payment. Once paid-for, playback of the video can be resumed.