The calendar is coming in the next few weeks and will feature improved navigation capability. Here’s what Yahoo has promised users with its release:

*Cleaner design with easy discovery and navigation
*Much faster interface
*New toolbar buttons to navigate between day, week, and month views
*Improved month view with full event titles and all the day events
*All the themes that you use with the latest version of Yahoo! Mail
*Holiday calendars from 15 new countries
*And a lot more…

Exciting news! A new calendar on the horizon….I can’t wait!

Since it’s European debut in March 2010, as part of the Nintendo DS range, the Nintendo DSi XL has sold over 3.6 million pieces of hardware globally, taking the total number of Nintendo DS range of consoles to over 132 million systems. In addition to the stylish wine red and dark brown consoles still available in stores, players will be given a wider choice of colours to choose from as yellow, green and blue join the offerings!

The latest iterations of the Nintendo DSi XL will offer the same functionality as the wine red and dark brown consoles; featuring the same glossy sheen on top, matt finish on the underside that provides extra grip, bigger screens and wider viewing angle. It will still continue to be pre-loaded with two Nintendo DSiWare software: A Little Bit of…Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training: Arts Edition and Dictionary 6 in 1 with Camera Function, as well as the Nintendo DSi Browser, which enables you to easily access the internet wherever a wireless Internet connection is available

The yellow, green and blue consoles will arrive just in time for players to enjoy some enjoyable new software on offer this season.  Join the supreme puzzle master Professor Layton and his young apprentice Luke, in their brand new engaging adventure ‘Professor Layton and the Lost Future’ when this launches for the Nintendo DS family across Europe on 22^nd October. Players can attempt to solve more than 165 brand new brain teasers, riddles and logic puzzles guaranteed to challenge and delight both newcomers and fans of the Professor Layton games.

Players with a Nintendo DSi XL will be able to experience the adventure with added comfort on a 93 percent bigger touch screen than the Nintendo DS Lite and with the larger pen like stylus which comes with the Nintendo DSi XL, and now in your chosen new colour!

So get ready to be presented with a colourful choice this autumn, when the new Nintendo DSi XL in yellow, green and blue launch across Europe on 8^th October 2010. It’s a bright future ahead of colours for Nintendo!

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I’m seeing the same thing with Foursquare today. Early adopters are using it, it’s starting to spread, and once again people I know are confused by it, think it’s useless, and that it has no real business.

However, in some ways it may even have a brighter future than Twitter based on creating the location to local business connection. They’ve started to roll out some very interesting partnerships which I assume have revenue implications. If they don’t now, they will in the future as Foursquare’s user base takes off.

Check out this quote for example:

“Being able to drive foot traffic into our restaurant partners and our retail partners is a huge opportunity, because that’s where our product is sold,” said B. Bonin Bough, director of social and emerging media for PepsiCo.

There are going to be some very interesting things that can be done with this, and it’s going to drive Yelp, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, and others after checking in and driving local traffic to businesses.

I had my first real example of this when I checked into my hotel for Ad Tech San Francisco, and Foursquare alerted me that I could get half off appetizers in the hotel bar. I had already settled in my room, but it made me think about actually taking advantage of the deal which would have driven more revenue to the hotel. That is worth something to the hotel, something worth paying Foursquare to drive to them. Foursquare also doesn’t appear to be waiting until they’re huge to make this happen, which seems like a wise move to get established as the early player working with businesses.

Here’s a good video overview of the upgrades recorded by someone who appears to either be on speed or trying to finish really quickly so he can take a bathroom break.

YouTube also recently added features so users can share videos to Twitter, Facebook or Google Reader., as well as, Facebook Connect.

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I think we’ve all heard rumors of a credit card reader for the iPhone—and this is it. A small, white plastic cube plugs into the audio jack of an iPhone or laptop (with software planned for Blackberry and Android). It scans the card, geotags the transaction and emails a receipt to the buyer. And just to be clear, Square is an app for merchants, not a way for individuals to electronically zap their bucks into the nearest Starbucks to pay for their latte.

And that may be the problem, too—because the product isn’t designed for big retailers like Starbucks. Its users will be smaller vendors, “who don’t qualify for accounts with traditional credit card processors because the would be deemed ‘high risk’ by these companies,” as Read Write Web puts it. According to the CEO of competitor Billing Revolution, Andy Kleitsch, that’s not going to be enough of a market, and bigger vendors just aren’t going to be interested in the product.

RWW also notes the potential for fraud:

Square will also have to deal with potential fraud. While we don’t know the exact details about how Square will operate, chances are that the company will have to keep a large reserve in an escrow account with the credit card processing companies that power Square’s back-end. Anybody who sits on a pile of stolen credit cards, Kleitsch pointed out, could use Square to run up charges on these accounts. Once the defrauded credit card owners dispute these charges, Square could be left with a large bill to pay.

However, one would hope they’ve taken precautions against this.

While Square’s website contends that processing card payments is “difficult, requiring long applications, expensive hardware, and an overly complex experience,” Kleitsch says that a payment terminal is typically free, with $20/month + 2% of all transactions as the monthly fee for the service. (While Square’s service is free, last time I checked, an iPhone runs $200, plus Square’s hardware investment, plus a monthly fee—AT&T’s$60 data fee. Ouch—unless you truly already need the iPhone for your business.)

Although one of their examples is of a local coffeeshop (of which Dorsey is a part owner), Dorsey appears to be targeting vendors even smaller than coffeeshops as well—vendors that may or may not have brick-and-mortar establishments, like artists or flower carts (another of the examples on their site).

What do you think? Does Square have the potential to take off—and if so, with small businesses or just micro ones?

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The “Connect Wizard” distills integrating Facebook Connect into a website into three steps. Many popular websites have long used Facebook Connect as a method of signing in to comment, and this effort expands that capability to any size website, even those without awesome tech staff. Facebook reminds us on the developer blog that Facebook Connect gives participating websites “identity for a great registration system, and immediate access to 300 million active global users.”

As part of the effort to bring Connect to the masses, Facebook is also launching a playground. Wait! Before you all run outside for recess, you should know that this playground doesn’t come with a merry-go-round or monkey bars. Says the blog, it “provides code samples for adding profile pictures, user names, and friends to your site.”

Talk about your disappointments.

Just before they announced the Connect Wizard yesterday, Facebook also announced a new translation feature through Facebook Connect. Unaccountably called Translations for Facebook Connect (where do they come up with these names?!), the service can translate participating pages, widgets, IFrames and apps into any of the 65 offered languages.

(You know, as well as machines can.)

(Unless this is secretly a Mechanical Turk. I hear that Facebook is really popular in Turkey.)

Naturally, if you don’t want the most popular search engine in the world handling your site translation, you might be happier with the most popular social network in the world doing it for you. Plus, Facebook has fourteen more languages than Google—though I’m not sure if that includes the regional varieties they offer for Facebook itself. Like English Upside Down. Very useful.

What do you think? Will you add Facebook Connect now that it’s just three easy steps? If you already use Connect, have you seen any advantages? Will you use it to translate for you?

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The latest attempt to move to the next level, according to TechCrunch, is the hiring of Feedburner co-founder and CEO Dick Costolo as the new COO of Twitter. Costolo left Google in July after spending enough time with Feedburner’s new owners to watch them drop the ball. What makes this hire significant (aside from Costolo being an early investor in Twitter) according to TC’s Michael Arrington is

Costolo, who is also an early Twitter investor, is someone who has actual experience building scalable infrastructures, which Twitter sorely needs. The company hasn’t launched any new features in recent memory, and continues to have regular downtime. In fact, Twitter’s inability to build features and keep the service live is a serious competitive disadvantage. Costolo can presumably fix all that.

So here we are living out another day in the never ending soap opera of hope and flame-outs that is Twitter. From the confusion of “How does thing work for business?” to the predictions that the service is woefully undervalued and underhyped and all stops in between, everyone wants in on the Twitter phenomenon. Fortunately, it looks like Twitter is taking notice as well by hiring the likes of Costolo. They recently hired Google’s top legal ace as well.

So Twitter is still busy in the background trying to get the right people on the bus. Stay tuned as something is likely to change or be predicted in the next 15 seconds or so that will keep everyone busy for another short period of time.

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LinkedIn has now announced the move of making president, Jeff Weiner, the new CEO of the company. Weiner came over from Yahoo in January and this move is not raising any eyebrows. Hoffman had stepped into the CEO role for the past 6 months or so after Dan Nye left in December of last year after two years in the post. Now the transition to Weiner looks complete.

cnet reports

“LinkedIn was founded to harness the power of the Internet to create a tool that would help individuals become more effective and successful professionals,” Hoffman said in a release. “Over the past six months, Jeff has done an exceptional job leading the company and I look forward to continuing the work that we have begun together.”

LinkedIn claims 42 million members which makes their audience bigger than Twitter but far smaller than Facebook’s 200 million plus members. What LinkedIn can claim that neither of the other two can is that it

hopes to be profitable this year for the second year in a row; it makes money not only from ads, but from premium subscriptions and “corporate solutions.”

Profitable? For a second year in a row? Not often we use that word here in the present tense when it comes to social media companies let alone talking about starting a ‘profitable year streak’. In the past, Hoffman has expressed the desire to go public and last year was looking for a billion dollar valuation when raising $53 million. If you want to play the “What is LinkedIn worth now?” game go right ahead. In this market it looks like anyone’s guess is as good as the next.

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Mashable’s Pete Cashmore tells of the new process

The feature has been a long time coming, and many celebrities will jump on the opportunity to prove their legitimacy. It’ll also solve the entrenched problem of celebrity impersonations, which are confusing for users and unwelcome by those being impersonated. Businesses, however, will have to wait: the feature has not been rolled out to corporate entities yet.

Cashmore also says, “The process to become verified appears to be limited to power meaning that celebrities, musicians, athletes, actors, public officials and public agencies on the service can now display a “verified account” button on their Twitter pages.” Well, one thing is certainly a relief here. I wouldn’t want any public officials being portrayed as lying or bending the truth to fit into 140 characters at a clip. That would certainly be seen as unusual for that group (my apologies as to my level of sarcasm, when it comes to politics it’s hard not to be at least a little cynical).

To see if you meet the standard of requiring account verification you can visit the verified account page for more information. There will probably be confusion and wondering whether someone is ‘verification worthy’ (remember Elaine’s ‘sponge-worthiness’ measurement from Seinfeld?) and what does it mean if the verification badge is absent?

With this feature, you can easily see which accounts we know are ‘real’ and authentic. That means we’ve been in contact with the person or entity the account is representing and verified that it is approved. (This does not mean we have verified who, exactly, is writing the tweets.)

This also does not mean that accounts without the ‘Verified Account’ badge are fake. The vast majority of accounts on the system are not impersonators, and we don’t have the ability to check 100% of them. For now, we’ve only verified a handful of accounts to help with cases of mistaken identity or impersonation.

Twitter left the door open for expansion of the service but also covered their bases just in case it doesn’t scale easily

We may verify more accounts in the future, but because of the cost and time required, we’re only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months.

And for those who are of the belief that they are truly important and suffer from impersonation issues on Twitter but don’t fit the initial verification profile there’s this

Although we’re not verifying all accounts, we’ll try to work with you if your account is constantly competing with parody or impersonation accounts. Fill out this feedback form so that we know your situation.

Twitter’s ‘Good Tweetkeeping Seal of Approval” has been launched. Will you be the first on your block to get a badge?

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