This isn’t as weird as the girl who got a cryptic, anti-capitalist note instead of her iPod, but it’s potentially far more damaging. This guy bought a refurbished iPod Touch through Buy.com for $99 — what a deal, right? As it turns out, not so much. It was infected/infested with a trojan that quietly installs a backdoor on your Windows system. Nasty.

He contacted Buy.com and they quickly sent him a brand new one, then Buy.com contacted the factory where it had been recertified. They concluded that it was “not a significant problem that is happening with any frequency at all.” Reassuring. Personally, I’ll be reformatting every piece of used hardware that comes my way from now on.

Filed under: Portable Audio, Wireless

If you've done anything other than mash F5 (or similar) at Hercules' website the past few seasons, you've likely forgotten all about that sub-$100 Mobile DJ MP3 that surfaced over a year ago. For whatever reason, the thing is just now shipping, but we suppose obnoxiously late is better than never, right? Dubbed the world's "first wireless digital mixing mini-controller," it's available as we speak in black or white hues for $99.99. Release is posted in full after the jump.

Continue reading Hercules Mobile DJ MP3 finally available for $99

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Are we as citizens ready for icons from our 8-bit pasts to make their way into our kitchens?

Yes, yes we are.

Take this Triforce cutting board. It’s fully usable and will remind you of your quest against Gannon every time you dice onlines. It’s sold out, but you can get your hands on a Space Invaders villian for only $125. If I was really into cutting boards, I’d get one.

I’ll admit it, I was in a laptop pop band in the 90s called ABC/DefG. We used the keyboards on our laptops to play music live shows. We were laughed at, but the guys in this video make me feel better.

That being said, the truly geek half of me thinks this is badass cool. Could you imagine doing this with an Optimus keyboard?

via Make

We’ll just come out and say it - we’re fans of CoverItLive here at Mashable. In case you haven’t noticed, most every time we do a LiveBlog or LiveStream event here at Mashable, we tend to incorporate the CoverItLive mode of liveblogging, which prevents us from asking you to reload the site every few seconds and keeps our live coverage within the site (as opposed to it being offsite somewhere like on Twitter).

Keith McSpurren, President over at CoverItLive sent over a list of new changes and upgrades they’ve implemented this week, and a list of features that they’re planning on integrating in the future.  Some of the upgrades include faster loading times, new network setup on the backend (for better reliability and speed), as well as increased focus on the media library aspects of CoverItLive.

These things are nice, although we’ve never really noticed much of a weakness in these areas in the past. Still, to know that the service will withstand the next time someone tries to use the service from a Steve Jobs keynote is a good thing.

What’s more interesting to us are the planned features they say they’re working on.

Soon, Keith tells me, they’ll have iPhone operability for readers, which is an interesting proposition for the expansion of our audience.  Especially with the types of events we cover, we can imagine more than a couple of folks that might actually be out in the audience of a keynote following our coverage on their iPhone as a supplemental while the event is ongoing.

Also interesting is planned Twitter integration.  So far there doesn’t appear to be any details as to the nature of the integration, but I know Keith and I had a conversation when I was first getting acquainted with the service in which I described my dream situation - the ability to syndicate the posts to the CiL window directly to my Twitter feed.  I’m not certain if that’ll be the nature of the planned integration, but a fellow can dream, can’t he?

Another quite revolutionary update appears to be the ability to liveblog via mobile devices. This, too, will increase the usefulness of the tool, putting it a notch above Twitter itself for liveblogging events.

We look forward to seeing these updates as they roll out from this solid and useful service.

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Chinese social networking site Xiaonei has raised $430 million in funding from Softbank, according to a report from VentureBeat.

Xiaonei was founded in December 2005 by Qinghua University graduates Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang and Jacky, then was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive in 2006 for an undisclosed sum. As of November 2007, the site was said to be the most popular social networking site among university students in China, with 15 million registered users and 8.8 million active users.

The company likes to call itself the Facebook of China, and we’d never guess why (note, shot as run through Google Translate, they don’t offer an English version from what I could see):

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

It rains every day and the birds won't shut up -- yeah, spring's here, and Samsung's celebrating by dressing up the T10 in this fetching black and purple floral number. Details are scarce, as the "La Fleur Special Edition" of the well-regarded PMP isn't official yet, but we'd expect to see it pop up rather soonish.

[Via PMP Today]

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Yahoo has launched a new version of their popular instant messenger client, Yahoo Messenger, for the Windows Vista system.

Though their previous version would work with the newer Microsoft operating system, this new version has added features such as more skins, scalable contacts so you can choose how much about them you see, tabbed messengers windows and more.

You can download the new version now, but they do warn it is a beta, and they would appreciate feedback on it so they can continue to improve it.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Yahoo Messenger Updates Vista Beta Release
Yahoo Messenger for Vista Preview Now Live
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Live, Local News on Your Yahoo Messenger Chat
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Windows Live Messenger Malware Forces Upgrade for Users

A US Congressional Representative has introduced a new bill that would make it illegal for US tech companies to assist any foreign country in attempting to censor the internet or in handing over data on users to the government except for "legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes." This is targeted at companies such as Cisco, which has supplied some of the technology used in the Great Firewall of China, as well as Yahoo! which got into some hot water for supposedly handing over information to Chinese authorities on some critics of the Chinese government.

While the goal is certainly admirable, the implementation is troublesome. First, it's putting liability on tech companies for something they may not have much knowledge about (how countries are going to use the tech or whether the info is needed for "legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes."). Furthermore, where this is really hypocritical is that the law apparently does not apply to the US as well. While certainly not as bad as some other nations, the US has certainly requested data for questionable reasons, and has also been seen trying to censor parts of the internet at times. While I'm certainly not equating the efforts of US politicians to filter the internet with massive operations such as those seen in China, implementing this type of legislation does seem a bit hypocritical.

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What's more stereotypically trivial than shoe shopping? Using Twitter, of course! Online shoe retailer Zappos does shoes and social media remarkably well. Scores of bloggers, lots of video blogging and 198 employees on Twitter help keep the company's profile high and humanize the folks behind the shoe sales.

Of all the different types of social media the company uses, none are as interesting as its use of Twitter. Twitter may sound cliche, but it's not just about Twitter as one single service. Twitter is symbolic of rapid, short, synchronous and public conversations. Zappos has bitten off a big chunk of that paradigm.

Zappos on Twitter

The most remarkable of all the social media efforts underway at Zappos is the company's use of Twitter. Zappos has a dedicated page for Twitter on its site that's linked to from every other page on the site with the words What are Zappos employees doing right now?

There you'll find all 198 of the Twittering Zappos employees' most recent messages. Employees tweet about what they are doing at work and about interesting resources on and off the Zappos site.

Traditional Concerns

It's a daring step for a brand to take; you never know when someone is going to post a message like "I <3 clubbing baby seals. =) " on your company website. Zappos employees also drink a lot, but always in moderation - a Tweetscan search finds that no one inside or outside the company has ever tweeted the words Zappos and "drunk" in the same message! I'd have thought excessive drinking would lead to shoe loss and thus replacement but apparently the company is taking a longer-term approach to its social media strategy.

Instead, the aggregation site highlights words throughout the page that link back to search results pages in the Zappos catalog. Could this really drive sales? Conceivably, I suppose.

Leadership, Twitter Style

There's also an employee leaderboard that shows who's on Twitter and how many followers they have. Tony the CEO has five times as many followers as anyone else, perhaps because there's a link on every page encouraging people to follow him and perhaps because CEOs are always the most interesting people at any company (sarcasm). Notably, Tony has taken the time to follow even more people than are following him - he's got 2800+ followers and 3200+ friends.

Tony's also penned a prominently placed introduction to using Twitter. Check out the intro paragraph:

Remember back when sending SMS text messages on your cell phone was a new thing, and it seemed kind of strange to use your cell phone to do that? And today, you probably wonder how you ever lived without text messaging.

Well, Twitter is the same way. It's going to seem a little weird at first, but I promise you if you can talk your friends into joining it and you all use it for 2 weeks, it will change your life. You will wonder how you ever lived without it.

Talk about drinking the kool-aid! The introduction is actually one of the most accessible introductions to Twitter I've seen and something that anyone interested in getting started could learn from.

Transparent Brand Tracking

Additionally, there's a page that aggregates all the public mentions of Zappos from Twitter users at large. This is a great example of openness and transparency - something the company would probably be less inclined to do had they not already developed a wildly loyal customer base thanks to their famous customer service.

Who wouldn't like to have messages like this on their website, though, without exercising any control over what appears there?

Now if there were shoe factory employees in China or Indonesia tweeting in English about their working conditions making shoes that will be sold on Zappos ("carpal tunnel for dollars an hour pays rent on hovel-like family dorm in company compound. damn these shoes. pic: tinyurl.com/...") - that might not be so desirable. Luckily for the brand, like people say - Twitter isn't mainstream yet.

Celebrating Your Super Fans

Finally, Zappos has set up special Twitter tracking pages for some of its favorite outside fans. Check out this page for the super charming WineLibrary.TV founder Gary Vaynerchuk, and this page for author and social media consultant Tara Hunt. That's a great little way to say thanks to Twitter savvy brand super fans.

There are lots of companies using Twitter these days. Not because it's a reaching a mass audience but because it's reaching an early-adopter, tech-savvy, presumed-influencer audience. We wrote about many others last month in a post about customer service via Twitter. If the spammiest business Twitter users are on one end of the spectrum, that's the heavy side, unfortunately. The air is clearer and the examples are sparser on the high end of the Twitter engagement spectrum. Zappos is a great model for other companies seeking to get engaged.