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Every day there is a new headline about mobile payments focused on using a mobile phone to pay at retail locations. Paypal, Google and other industry giants are racing to provide new in-store mobile payment solutions. Large merchants, such as Wal-mart and Target have contemplated their own mobile payment solutions. The debate about whether NFC will be the preferred technology to enable mobile payments rages. However, despite all this press and efforts by industry giants, there is stunningly little traction to use a mobile device to pay at retail locations. This is largely because the solutions offered by industry giants thus far don’t solve a meaningful problem in the daily lives of consumers or merchants. Few things in life are easier for consumers than swiping a credit card at checkout and in-store payment systems are as easy and ubiquitous as dial-tone for merchants. However, There is a massive mobile commerce opportunity that is a severe pain point for both consumers and...

If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. That’s why when my friend Andrew Chen posted an insightful analysis of Facebook user data, I was happy to get back to learning from what the company did right instead of debating what its bankers did wrong. Chen calculated Facebook’s historical ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) and the stats are startling. Since March 2009, when the earliest data is available, approximately 50% of Facebook users logged in daily. As other technology companies struggle to maintain DAU to MAU ratios of 5% or less, Facebook’s numbers appear stratospherically high in comparison. But what is equally surprising is the consistency of that ratio over time. Despite periodic user revolts in reaction to changes in the site, the ratio remained strangely stable. In fact, the number has risen over the past year and is now...

Livestand, Yahoo's iPad-based magazine, will no longer be published. Photo Credit: Getty Images

Car buyers are notoriously fond of focusing only on the purchase price of new vehicles, without much thinking about the total cost of ownership. For electric cars that may cost twice or more what a similar-size gasoline vehicle does, that’s …

Guest Post Yesterday morning I read Peter Yared’s provocative article, ‘What’s next for mobile now that adaptive design has failed?’ which is based entirely on the misassumption that mobile users don’t scroll. If that were true, the reasoning might be valid, but …

When Mashable took a look at the English Premier League’s social media side last week, the main takeaway was that the 2012 season marked t…

Mashable comments this week were more than fun to read. Our readers found many ways to express entertaining opinions while creating heated con…

In our social entrepreneurship series, The World at Work, Mashable interviews the faces behind the startups and projects that are working to mak…

As software patent litigation ramped up over the past few years, software patents have come under the microscope within the technical community. Many investors and technologists believe that software patents should be abolished all together, while others take the less extreme position that many software patents are obvious over known prior art ("prior art" being earlier publications that show a patent  is obvious or not new). Courts are increasingly cognizant of these criticisms. Though it is unlikely that software patents are going away any time soon, as the recent summary judgment in eBay v PartsRiver (PartsRiver is now known as Kelora) demonstrates, courts are beginning to do a more thorough job of applying the obviousness standard to software patents.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your st…

It was a momentous week for tech, where commerce met spaceflight, a popular smartwatch faced off with a wily competitor, a futuristic way to compute…

Like nerve endings which translate senses into electrical impulses in your nervous system, sensors can translate the physical world into the digital. In the process, they can help humans become more aware of ourselves. The “quantified self” is an increasingly …

Did you impulsive book a hotel for Memorial Day weekend late at night, tired and groggy eyed? Whether it was because you needed an emergency place to…

It’s Memorial Day weekend in the United States, and Americans are spending time with friends and family, enjoying the first barbecue of the sum…

Have you ever struggled with taking a picture outdoors on your iPhone because of the oppressive glare of the sun washing out the Retina display? A ne…

Similar to the way that hardcore PC enthusiasts overclock their CPUs to squeeze out extra performance, Ford is preparing a car with an “overclocked” turbocharger. The 2013 Ford Focus ST will have a turbo that provides extra power for longer …

Facebook’s first five days as a public company saw its value drop 13.1 percent, the worst first-week performance of any initial public offering in a decade. That’s the sorry picture compiled by Bloomberg at the close of trading yesterday. In …

The legend goes something like this: as a child, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's father would relentlessly hound him to "Get better", so Jack eventually banned the phrase from being tweeted. Go ahead and try it, the tweet won't go through. But the legend? It's hoax. Here's the real story...

California-based watch maker Devon made a name for themselves a few years ago when they released the Tread 1. The modern looking electro-mechanical timepiece dazzled people with its tread-based system to indicate the time. It was large, highly unorthodox for a high-end timepieces, and a little crazy. A full review of the Devon Tread 1 is here.

The game is over. That game where they get to hire you for 40 years, pay you far less than you create, and then give you a gold watch, and then you get bored, you get depressed, and you die alone. It wasn’t that fun of a game anyway. When I had a corporate job I would wake up depressed. I couldn’t move out of bed. The sun would be coming in. A cat on the fire escape staring at me through the window. Even it was more excited to be alive than me. And, by the way, I had the best job in the world. I interviewed prostitutes for a living at three in the morning. But they were going to kill me in my cubicle. In 2009 I asked about 10 Fortune 500 CEOs, “did you just use this crisis as an excuse to fire all the people you were afraid to fire before.” Only one said “of course” instantly. The others had to drink more. But then it was admitted: you’re all dead weight and there’s no loyalty. We’ve entered the “Choose Yourself” era. The era without middlemen. Without The Other telling you your...

Mashable‘s third annual Social Media Day is on Saturday, June 30, 2012! Social Media is quickly changing our world by bringing people close…

It can be tough to keep up with all the new apps that are released each week. But you’re in luck: We take care of a lot of that for you, creatin…

How many times have you gone out for a fancy evening of food and revelry, and ended up spending the evening yelling into the ear of your dinner compa…

Playing mobile games with your friends just got a little more vocal. Sing Something is like a combination of Draw Something and Karaoke —…

Guest Post Many entrepreneurs dream of starting their own company so they can be their own boss, call the shots, get the corner office nicest table in the co-working space. Turns out, being in charge is a lot harder than just ordering …

Guest Post “Startups are the sum of the decisions made by the people who run them,” Future Simple founder Uzi Shmilovici wrote in a recent post. Uzi’s absolutely right — the earlier startups begin collecting data, the better their decisions will be. …

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — explodes in opinions about Facebook IPO, Facebook privacy or lack of it, Facebook acquisition frenzy-to-be, and more Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Surprisingly, this one goes on for a record-breaking hour and thirty-nine minutes, proving once again that size doesn't matter. Except in electronic condoms. Also discussed; Why G-Tar didn't win the Techcrunch Disrupt grand prize, why Kevin Marks' Target knockoff doesn't come close, and why Keith Teare is a venture communist. No animals or Wall Street traders were harmed in the making of this film. As John Taschek implied, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Did I mention we talked about Facebook.

Mobile devices have become like wallets — among the must-have items on your person when you leave the house. Teens are no exception to thi…

TV critics predict True Blood, the hit HBO series about vampires and other superhuman characters, will dominate conversations online this summer. And…

Sponsored Post You're building a tablet app, and you need to make decisions on what platforms to support. Here's how to pick the tablet platform that's right for you...