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illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage. .... Fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials. In New York state, 205 water systems have broken the law by delivering tap water that contained illegal amounts of bacteria since 2004. - Petr Buben from Bookmarklet

iPhone owners may love Apple’s sexy mobile device, but they absolutely can’t stand AT&T. It ranks dead last in customer satisfaction for dropped calls and spotty 3G service, a sore spot that Verizon has been poking at with new ads. Now the U.S.’s second largest wireless provider is looking to turn things around, hopefully before it loses iPhone exclusivity rights. Its newest strategy is especially unique though, because it comes in the form of an iPhone app called Mark the Spot [iTunes Link]. The free customer service app is really quite simple. Whenever you experience a problem with your service (e.g. a dropped call, bad 3G connection, poor quality), you can open up the app and report the issue right where you are. Once you cite the problem and add additional info, it gets submitted to AT&T’s customer support team. The key to the app is that it’s location-based, meaning that AT&T can aggregate this data to find dead spots and trouble areas. This app is simple but smart – it provides...

If you grew up watching cartoons like I did, then it’s impossible not to have known Popeye the Sailor, the Olive-loving, spinach-eating hero who used his unusually large arms and magical spinach powers to thwart the evil schemes of Brutus and other cartoon adversaries. But even before Popeye was a beloved cartoon, he was a storied comic book character created by cartoonist E. C. Segar. E. C. Segar, born on December 8th, 1894, created his iconic balding hero in January of 1929, when he appeared in Segar’s Thimble Theatre comic strip. The rest is entertainment and cultural history. Now, 105 years after his birth, Google is paying homage to the legendary cartoonist with a Popeye Google Logo. This is something Google does on occasion to remember people and events that have touched our culture. H.G. Wells, the Bar Code, Confucius, and even Sesame Street have received the honor. The design for this logo is absolutely fitting: it pays tribute to Popeye’s old comic book roots while capturing...

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: Flypt Quick Pitch: Flypt is an iPhone app that allows you to remix your favorite jams with the iPhone’s most advanced effects. Genius Idea: Most of us music lovers will never have the opportunity to try our hand at professionally remixing popular tracks from our favorite artists. Should you have a secret fantasy to digitally remaster the latest Lady Gaga or Rihanna song, however, then you’ll no doubt flip over Flypt. The app [iTunes link], which costs $2.99 and requires in-app song purchases for 99 cents, makes remixing tunes child’s play. Once you pick the song you want to rework, you can then use the prefabricated lyrical phrases to piece together a completely new version, and optionally add in screw, muffle, roll, and spinback...

Google really unleashed a torrent of news and updates today. While events such as the launch of Google Goggles are very interesting, the big news is clearly the launch of real-time search within Google. Now as events unfold, Google will capture the chatter about it in real-time from sources such as Twitter, Yahoo Answers, news media and Facebook. The inclusion of Facebook in this list of real-time sources is one of the most important aspects of today’s announcements, and it is something that could have major implications for Twitter and its ambitions to become the world’s water cooler. In fact, Facebook held back the opportunity to deal a heavy hit to its microblogging rival. But why? Facebook Didn’t Treat Google and Microsoft Equally The new integration of Facebook into Google Search doesn’t actually feed all that much Facebook information into Google search results. In fact, only the updates of public Facebook pages are included in the real-time stream. Profile updates are not part...

The other big announcement at tonight’s Boxee Beta Launch is the Boxee Box. Boxee runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Ubuntu Linux, but the plan has always been to expand to other set-top boxes, consumer electronics and even Boxee specific boxes. The full technical specifications wont’t be announced until CES, but the Boxee did announce some basic details about the Boxee Box at tonight’s event. The big news is that the box is being made by D-link, is WiFi enabled and has an SD slot. Astro, the designer of the XBox 360 is designing the Boxee Box. Oh, and the price is expected to be around $200. Boxee will have a live demo at CES but $200 for an Internet-enable fun machine will certainly appeal to a lot of users. The Boxee Box will have HDMI, SPDIF and RCA Audio connections, plus two USB ports and it will work on both 802.11n In the press release, D-Link’s senior director of marketing, Daniel Kelley, said: “By pairing Boxee’s innovative social entertainment platform with D-Link’s technology...

Social media’s power to spread the word is well known, as is its ability to help fuel charitable causes. The examples are many, including TweetsGiving, #BlameDrewsCancer, the Social Media Smackdown, Twestival, and the Mashable Summer of Social Good. Need we go on? Now social media’s help is being enlisted to once again take up the fight for clean water. Next month, a group of people (including Jessicia Biel, Lupe Fiasco, and Kenna) will climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in an attempt to bring over 2.5 million liters of water to those in need. But they are looking to Facebook, online video, and the social media masses for help. That’s a Long Way Up… Here’s the basic gist: on January 7th, a group of celebrities, well-known figures, and social entrepreneurs will attempt to climb to the summit of the 19,340 foot African peak. At every step of the way, they will upload pictures and videos, as well as tweet about their progress. The goal here is awareness about the 1 billion people that don’t have full...

At the Boxee Beta Launch event tonight, Boxee showed off a ton of a ton of new features and enhancements for its media center with a social twist. Boxee officially launched in June of 2008 but it’s really been in the last year that the software — and the company — has picked up some major, major steam. Although I couldn’t be at the event in person (Adam Ostrow is representing for Team Mashable), I got a look at some of the new features and changes headed towards the platform. Boxee in beta is more streamlined, optimized to run on less powerful hardware and better integrates with digital content from multiple sources. Select users will start getting invites soon and the beta will open up to everyone at CES. Local and Online Content Come Together Boxee is a great media center but one of the areas that has always been problematic is systemwide searches. If you’re like me and you have 4 TB of local media data running on a media server, but you also want to access your online options....

When Google asked what you liked and disliked about their new real-time communication application, you unquestionably said that you wanted more invites to share with friends and family. Problem solved! Today Google decided to play Santa with Wave invites. It has just doled out significantly more invites to existing users. In conjunction with the invite rollout, Google is also hinting that they’ll soon reach the 1 million user mark. The title of their post suggestively hints that “a million stamps” have been licked, which we take to mean that they’ve now opened up Google Wave to a million users. While invites may be more readily available, be forewarned, Google is still not ready to graduate the service from preview phase to beta stage. Still, we’re excited that more of you can get in on the shared experience that is Google Wave. Reviews: Google, Google Wave Tags: Google, Google Wave

With the announcement of Google real-time search, the world’s most popular search engine has thrown down the gauntlet in a battle it was already winning. Clearly recognizing the threat that the instantaneous nature of Facebook and Twitter represented, Google was smart to sign search deals with both companies, even if those deals aren’t exclusive. Google’s new strategy has huge implications across a number of different industries. (The advertising and tie-in opportunities — especially in the geolocation space — are mind-boggling.) So what does this mean for Google’s biggest competitors? What does this mean for Google? What it Means for Bing Even if it is still a distant third in terms of search rankings, Microsoft’s Bing is Google’s biggest rival. Microsoft is hungry and isn’t afraid to spend money to build up features and technologies. In its first six months, Bing has made a lot of progress. There are some aspects of Bing — like product search, the new Bing Maps beta and mobile...

On the consumer side of things, Google has just released a bevy of new features like Google Goggles and real-time search. But the search giant hasn’t forgotten about its business users. For you they offer up a holiday present. Now Google Analytics users can add annotations to dates in order to better document spikes in traffic, use custom variables in advanced segments and view them in custom reports, and even use a super simple analytics tracking code wizard for setting up specialized situations. Google also took to their Analytics blog to announce that a new version of the Analytics API is coming soon and will support advanced segmentation. Annotate Your Graphs The majority of Google Analytics users will get the most value out of annotations, especially since the notes can be used to designate why there were peaks or dips in traffic, campaign launches and other information to help team members process traffic data. To use the annotations, simply click the tab below the date on the...

The sheer size of Apple’s app store makes it difficult for independent developers to stand out from the crowd. Some developers come up with creative concepts to get the word out, others rely on scamming and gaming different iTunes policies. Fortunately, Apple has decided to kick the scammers out of the app store. As first reported by iPhoneography, Apple has thrown app developer Molinker out of the app store after receiving an e-mail from the community regarding fake application ratings. Gaming the App Store, a How Not-To Guide One of the easiest and most targeted ways for developers to “game” the app store is to manipulate the search and ratings process. From practically the minute the app store opened, developers were already employing tricks in the names of their apps to make them show up higher in the list when users were browsing by application title. People figured out how to hide the first character, making it appear that an app was called “Solitaire for iPhone,” when it was...

On Friday, we learned that Apple had acquired streaming music service Lala. While the terms of the deal were undisclosed, Peter Kafka at All Things Digital speculated that Lala was sold at a “fire-sale” price. Today, however, Kafka is amending his story, reporting that multiple sources estimate that Apple paid around $80 million for the online music site. While the rumored price is much higher than anticipated, not all of Lala’s investors will be recouping their investments. Kafka writes: “That’s less than half what investors valued the company at in 2008, but it’s more than the $35 million the company raised throughout its life. Which means that some investors could get their money back and more. But not all of Lala’s investors. Warner Music Group (WMG), for one, ended up getting back about half the $20 million it put into Lala, I’ve confirmed with people familiar the company.” What Apple plans to do with Lala remains to be seen, although we do know that the Lala team will be joining...

Josh Warner is president and founder of Feed Company, which promotes and distributes brand videos, including campaigns such as Levi’s “Backflip,” Ray-Ban’s “Catch” and Activision’s “Bike Hero.” In three years, Feed has seeded more than 100 videos across the social web. 2009’s crop of top viral video advertisements show us that people are willing to embrace a host of creative approaches on the social video Web, from beguiling mini-films, to user-generated advocacy, to YouTube celebrity endorsers, to elaborate commercial-grade productions. That’s good news for creators. Regardless of the approach, the key for marketers is a solid understanding of what a brand is, who is the brand’s audience, and what moves them. Strangely enough, this formula sounds like traditional advertising. This year’s Top 10 is certainly a glimpse of how the viral video ad business is evolving, and as marketers, what we can learn from that evolution. 1. Inspired Bicycles Advertiser: Inspired Bicycles Ad Agency:...

Google’s breaking news left and right today. Of course the big news is that real-time search is live, but the release of Google Goggles can’t be overlooked. The brand-new addition to Google Labs is an experimental application for Android devices that supports visual search. How does it work? Just open the app, snap a photo and voilà: Google will process the image and return search results. The photo search functionality eliminates the need to type or say anything on your mobile device, and it adds context to your real-world surroundings. While the technology is pretty remarkable, Google admits that it is still in its infancy. So while some image searches work brilliantly — think photos of books, business cards, artwork, places, logos and landmarks — don’t be too disappointed if your image searches for food, animals, plants and cars are less than stellar. Still, the application should prove useful, and we hope to see versions of it made available for other smartphone users as well. For...

QR codes are those funky-looking barcodes that you’ll sometimes spot on print marketing materials or even pedicabs. While QR codes do offer you a unique way to use your mobile phone camera to capture/scan the code to retrieve a message, they haven’t been embraced by the mainstream population. But can Google change that? In an effort to beef up attention for their Place Pages project within Google Maps, which is in direct competition with Yelp, Google has started an online and offline program. The new initiative is centered around putting decals with QR codes in store windows, designed to draw your attention to the Favorite Places in your neighborhood. Google is sending window decals to more than 100,000 U.S. businesses that they’ve identified as the most sought-after on Google and Google Maps. Much like the Yelp stickers you’re accustomed to seeing in businesses around town, these decals will appear in store windows and highlight the business’ status as a Google Favorite Place. The...

What does the future of search look like? In Google’s world, much of it seems to revolve around getting away from the desktop. At an event in California today, the company unveiled a number of new search technologies, including a Labs feature it calls “Google Goggles” that allows users to snap a picture and get information about it (not unlike other technologies we’ve previously written about). Google’s also demonstrated a number of new voice search features — such as the ability to speak in one language and have resulted translated on the fly into another — as well as new location features, like making the mobile Google.com homepage location-aware. The event is still ongoing, and we’ll post updates as we learn more. Reviews: Google Tags: Google

We knew it was coming, and now it’s here: Google has just launched real-time search, integrated into search results pages. Google real-time search updates as stuff is happening around the Web – for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles, and web pages now stream in on the actual result pages for your query. It works on mobile too (at least iPhone and Android for now). Here’s a video demo from Google: That’s not all though. Google’s announced that they’ve inked partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace to pull in data in real-time. For Facebook, that means public Facebook Pages, and for MySpace, it means any stream data that is publicly available. This is on top of the partnership that the company announced with Twitter back in October. Google says the features might not be available to everyone yet, but will be within the next few days. More to come on this developing story … Reviews: Android, Facebook, Google, MySpace Tags: Google

Thanks to phones like the Droid, more and more online services are taking an interest in developing mobile apps for Google’s Android platform. The latest company entering the Android pool is Yelp. Yelp already has mobile apps for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Pre and WAP phones. Yelp for Android determines your current location (either using built-in GPS or a Wi-Fi-based location) and then lets you search for nearby businesses, read reviews of establishments and access a moveable Google map that can help you easily redefine your search based on locale. Yelp’s game plan for its mobile apps: Release an app that’s a useful, stable product first, and then add bells and whistles and other updates over time. Yelp says they plan to release more updates to the Android app before the new year, but wanted to make the app available so Yelp users could start taking advantage of the service now. In addition to location-aware searches, Yelp for Android also lets users filter their search by “Price,”...

In some ways, Ustream can be considered reality TV. Anyone with a webcam and an Internet connection can broadcast his life to the world. Celebrities, professionals and wannabe Web stars have all turned to the medium to try their hand at producing their version of reality TV. The Internet network’s latest venture, Ustream All Access, is now upping the reality factor with hours of live footage of big-name celebrities and athletes streamed to the site throughout the day. The Ustream All Access reality series kicked off on December 1 with Will.i.am, but tomorrow cameras will follow Snoop Dogg on the day his new album, Malice N Wonderland, hits stores. Viewers can tune into Snoop’s channel to watch an unfiltered stream of the rapper as he attends events and interviews in Los Angeles. Unlike the reality content you see on your television, however, the Ustream All Access series will feature only unedited footage. Depending on the celebrity, the unfiltered broadcasts could make for...

The dating arena can be a dangerous place. It’s a battleground out there, and you need every tool at your disposal. It’s not cheating — it’s just using the resources available to you. Here we’ve hand-picked 10 iPhone apps that will help you navigate the dating minefield and avoid potential disasters. From asking that special someone out, to knowing what fork to use, to how to make a hasty escape if things don’t quite go according to plan, these apps should be part of every dater’s arsenal. 1. Awesome Pickup Lines To get to the dating stage you’ve got to meet someone first. Imagine you’ve just seen the human of your dreams across the room but your mind’s gone utterly blank. There are tons of apps offering pickup lines on the App Store, with some even specializing in pirate, ninja, vampire or robot-themed conversation starters. But we like the “Awesome” offering as it serves up hundreds of tried and tested lines added by users — you know, real people like you. Price: Free 2. Date Smart...

It’s a brand new week, which means it’s time for Mashable’s guide to upcoming social media and web events, parties, and conferences. For more upcoming event listings, check out Mashable’s Events section. Is your event not on this list? Contact us at least one month before your event and let’s establish a media partnership. Mashable’s Weekly Social Media and Marketing Event Guide is proudly supported by Eventbrite, the Web’s Event Marketplace. December 7, 2009, San Francisco, CA: The SF MusicTech Summit brings together more than 600 of the best and brightest developers in the Music/Technology space, along with the musicians, entrepreneurial business people, press, investors, service providers, and organizations who work with them at this exciting convergence of culture and commerce. We’ll discuss the evolving music/business/technology ecosystem in a proactive environment, conducive to deal making, and connect with friends and business partners old and new. Get your Mashable 15%...

At this point, not many new high- profile sign-ups to Twitter are worth reporting, sans perhaps the guy that invented the Internet and Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Twitter nemesis Facebook. But according to reports, another Twitter rival’s CEO — Eric Schmidt of Google — has joined the service. His account’s not verified, he has a weird username, and he hasn’t bothered to upload an avatar, but tweets from several current and former Google employees seem to suggest that it’s real. Nonetheless, Schmidt either has an ironic sense of humor, questionable taste, or is simply being imitated by a prankster, because among the tech titan’s follows include the polarizing reality TV star Heidi Montag, someone you would certainly think operates in a different social sphere than the Google CEO. A bit more understandably, but still somewhat surprising, Schmidt is also following 50 Cent, Diddy and The Dixie Chicks. Also peculiar, Schmidt’s following the wrong Marrisa Mayer (the real one is a...

December has been a busy month for Boxee, the media center with a social twist. Last week, the company partnered with Sony to bring Crackle.com content to Boxee users, and tonight the company is showing off the first beta version of Boxee at an event in New York City. At the event, Boxee will also be displaying some mock-ups for the Boxee Box. If you’re like me and stuck some place that isn’t NYC, you don’t have to miss out on the fun. Boxee will be livestreaming the event through, you guessed it, Boxee. Even better, Boxee is partnering with Cliqset so that users can choose to connect either anonymously or through their Cliqset accounts and talk to each other while watching the event. When I wrote about Cliqset in September, one of the features that really stood out was the Boxee app and integration. The idea of bringing real-time communication to areas other than those that employ text and to devices that aren’t personal computers or mobile phones is really exciting. With the live...

Foursquare players in New York opened their eyes this morning to a spiffy new leaderboard for the week. No, the rules of the game haven’t changed, but there’s now even more reason for New York Foursquare users to check in; every point they add to the leaderboard through December 13 equates to four cents for CampInteractive. This move to support CampInteractive, an organization that aims to inspire inner-city youth through technology, is a joint venture with Pepsi, who is sponsoring and financially backing the endeavor. In exchange, Foursquare’s New York leaderboard now sports Pepsi blue and includes a call to action encouraging users to compete for leadership. Dennis Crowley, CEO and co-founder, tells us that they’ve had their minds set on using the location-based game to raise funds for charity for some time now. Should this first endeavor be proof of concept for Foursquare as a platform for raising money for charity, then we expect that you’ll start to see more of these branded and...