While many point towards piracy when trying to rationalise the fall in music sales in the past ten years or so, its also worth noting that another factor at play here is that people are simply doing other things aside from just listening to music, and one such activity is most certainly gaming. To compound this, social games on mobile phones and Facebook are now likely played in short bursts at times where people might have traditionally been listening to music – such as on the train on the way to or from work – and are being played by the kind of young audiences that record labels are always keen to attract....

Charitable organizations are nothing new, in fact, they’ve been around for ages. Over the years we’ve some amazing and unique organizations try to tackle disease, illness, or causes in a “new” way. A Different way. For example, the Lance Armstrong Foundation which promotesLIVESTRONGhas built an amazing Community around runners and cyclists to raise awareness for Cancer as well as money for Cancer research. It came up with something very simple, and very unique at the time....

Ina previous announcement,PeerIndex(a direct competitor to Klout which claims to be a more “accurate assessment of personal influence”) released a new Firefox plugin for their social capital analytics platform. This time around, PeerIndex is rolling out a new feature that allows you to log in through Facebook — a login feature that was formerly only open to Twitter users. PeerIndex is a London-based startup that hopes to facilitate both product sampling for brand consumers on the platform, as well as drive positive word of mouth marketing activities....

A new startup is offering a unique service for employers, that may come as unwelcome news for jobseekers.Social Intelligenceruns social media background checks for potential job candidates, so the company is alerted to potential problems or issues that might be considered contentious. While this is something that many companies practice anyway when they’re recruiting for jobs, Social Intelligence formalises this service, making it a lot more official, and visible for candidates....

NewsMixis an elegant ‘Social magazine’ app for the iPad that, very much in the vein ofFlipboard, pulls in links shared by your Twitter and Facebook friends, displaying them in a magazine format. Now developerSobeesis expanding the service by pushing users’ personalised magazines onto the Web. On the iPad, NewsMix displays articles in an easy-to-browse format that’s almost, but not quite, as easy-on-the-eye as the genre’s pioneer, Flipboard. However, Sobees doesn’t see the app as purely a social magazine, describing it as “The first application to cover aggregation, semantic enrichment / filtration and sharing/read it later functionalities”....