With all the emphasis placed on the entertainment and social media aspects of smartphones, academic functions are often overlooked.  This is a shame, really, as there are some pretty incredible applications being developed that have very practical use... 

A suburban house cat in Ireland boarded a train and ended up lost in the bustling city of Dublin, but she was returned to her owner thanks to Twitter . After train station staff discovered the cat named Lilou (not to be confused with the almost-iconic... 

It looks like that Xerox IP isn’t the only thing Steve Jobs appropriated for Apple. Here he is in all his chubby 1997 glory, introducing the TBWA/Chiat Day produced “Think Different” campaign with an unattributed quote from poet Jack... 

Twitter has been open about its desire for advertising to be a pillar of its revenue strategy. The company has launched a number of experiments with advertising on the site, rolling out Promoted Tweets , which serves up ads based on keywords in Twitter... 

As we noted yesterday, Netflix has just released its long-awaited iPhone app. The app , which is free for Netflix subscribers (subscriptions start at $8.99 per month), works with iPhones or iPod touch devices running iOS 3.1.3 or later. Like its iPad... 

Love your Galaxy S phone but hate TouchWiz 3.0? Fear not Galaxy S users, for there are some very crafty people working on getting vanilla Android 2.1 working on your precious Hummingbird driven devices. It’s not exactly working 100% though, with... 

Facebook has posted its highly-polished promotional video for Facebook Places online; it’s a glimpse into how the company hopes users will utilize its new location service. The world’s largest social network first played the two-and-a-half... 

Google has acquired visual search and price comparison engine Like.com, according to an open letter posted on Like.com’s website. “Since 2006, Like.com has been moving the frontiers of eCommerce forward one step at a time,” said Munjal... 

The venture capital arm of Verizon, Verizon Ventures, has invested $400,000 in CardStar . The Boston-based CardStar makes a mobile app for iPhone, Android and Blackberry that lets users store all of their membership cards in one digital repository. The... 

Sometimes, products go viral that are just too ridiculous for us to mock successfully. That’s why, in the light of the burgeoning virality of The Snazzy Napper, we’re calling upon you, our esteemed readers, to do that for us. Yup, we’re...