Pinterest follows Facebook in adopting the “@” mention convention first pioneered by Twitter. The mention feature is supported by augmented notifications. Users can opt to receive notifications only within the app or to see push notifications without opening the app.

Pinterest rolled out Android and iOS updates simultaneously, suggesting that its apps are performing well on Android. But iOS users get an additional feature in their update: Pinning from websites. To access the feature, users hit the “+” sign and type in a URL box that appears. (Pro tip: Go to the website first and copy the URL, then simply paste it in the Pinterest app.)

iOS users can also invite other members to co-curate boards with them using the mobile app.

Both updates also introduce a simple form of cross-device synching: The user can see and access searches s/he has previously conducted on the Pinterest website. The search function also adds  auto-complete, sparing users some stabs at the mobile keyboard.

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The feature relies on mobile and web apps that enable users to share their app activity to their Google+ profiles. The information the search provides is based on aggregate user activity.

The search will first work for a limited set of movie and music apps. Users who click popular audio or video content will be taken to the content within the app itself, which include Fandango, Flixster and SoundCloud.

Google first launched Google+ social login in February. It expanded the number of sites using the feature earlier this month through partnerships with social identity management platforms Gigya and Janrain.

Google says the in-app search feature will roll out for desktop users “over the next few weeks.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The numbers reflect activity in the three-month period of December 2012 through February 2013.

In the quarter that saw smartphone ownership break the 50 percent point, rising to 57 percent of all U.S. residents over age 13, Apple controlled nearly 40 percent of the device market. Samsung took a distant second place at 21 percent. HTC, crowned today as the first home for Facebook’s quasi-operating system Home, accounted for just 9 percent, but still edged out Motorola. Motorola is owned by Google.

Google’s Android was the dominant operating system, running on more than half of all U.S. smartphones with service subscriptions. But its market share fell slightly over the quarter, from 54 to 52 percent. Apple snapped up its lost market share and then some, boosting its slice of the pie from 35 to 39 percent. Microsoft’s Windows mobile OS accounts for just 3 percent of the market.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

5. Vimeo Becomes Vimeow: You’ve got to put those cat videos somewhere, and Vimeo[w] wants to be your host.

4. Hulu is promoting some fake shows from real shows in its carousel today, including Itchy & Scratchy, the cartoon the characters of “The Simpsons” watch.

3. Oberlin becomes Meowberlin: It’s a big edgier for an institution of higher learning to go for a Catpril Fools joke, but Oberlin has pulled it off with aplumb. For users clicking to get more information about the kitteh image featured on the homepage, Oberlin has provided link to a local animal rescue organization, tugging at our bleeding heartstrings.

2. Mobile design optimized for cats: We like this joke because it’s not entirely fake. There is a YouTube channel for cats, and just a couple of weeks ago Friskies hosted a hackathon for mobile apps for cats.

“YouTube has recently been dominated by cats. Even the simplest video of a cat using an iPad app easily gathers millions of viewers. Bowing to this takeover, our clients are increasingly asking us, “How can we improve our site or app for cats?” With their lack of opposable thumbs and ever-shifting focus, cats are certainly a challenging target audience,” said the Nielsen Norman Group.

Early research has found that “Rapid double and triple taps are common among felines, especially kittens.”

1. The army has a sense of humor, but Grumpy Cat is annoyed. She’s annoyed, among other things, by threats to our national security. So the army plans to send her and her feline ilk off fight for our freedom.

The army says cats will make useful additions to their battle regiments.

“For example, dogs can hear five times more acutely than humans, and cats about twice as acutely as dogs. Also, a domestic cat’s sense of smell is about fourteen times as strong as a human’s,” the army said in a press release.

The army has already begun collecting stray cats from Northern Virginia, Alas, some appear to be conscientious objectors and have sent several soldiers to the infirmary with scratches.

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The update will allow the popular 6-second, looping videos to appear around the web.

“When we launched Vine, we described posts as ‘little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.’ With today’s update, you can display them almost anywhere,” wrote co-founder and general manager Dom Hofmann on the company’s blog.

Users create an embeddable version of their videos from the app itself or from the video’s page on Vine.co.

After a rocky start, Vine has gained enthusiasts as users have made clever use of the app’s stop-motion capabilities and its GIF-like loops. The app is, as yet, only available for iOS.

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Ulrich / Shutterstock.com

Twitter will reach $1 billion in ad revenue in 2014, up from $583 million this year, according to revised estimates from industry analyst eMarketer.

The new numbers have Twitter beating previous eMarketer estimates by 20 percent.

More than half of Twitter’s ad revenue will come from mobile advertising this year in 2013, according to the estimates. By 2015, the company will earn 60 percent of its ad dollars from mobile platforms.

Twitter has proven adept at mobile advertising because all of its ad units form part of its basic product, allowing the company to deploy the ads easily across devices and platforms, eMarketer said.

The microblogging social network has also benefited from the efforts of its competitors, including Google and Facebook, to persuade advertisers to spend more on mobile ads.

In 2011, Twitter saw virtually no advertising revenue from mobile platforms. Last year, it made $138.4 million from mobile ads.

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Evernote hopes that many of those customers will get hooked on the features exclusive to the premium version of the app, which costs $5 a month. The premium app is Evernote’s chief source of revenue, according to a Wall Street Journal interview with CEO Phil Libin.

The cloud-based premium app supports more uploads note-sharing and offline access to notes and other features.

The company launched and update for Android users today that adds to the list of features for free and premium users.

Premium users can now use the app’s search function to search documents created in Microsoft Office or Apple’s iWork and saved to Evernote’s digital file cabinet.

All users can create menu shortcuts on their mobile devices, a feature that was previously only available for Mac users.

Other improvements to the app target users who employ their mobile camera to photograph notes created on paper. Users can save multiple photos as part of the same note in the app. The camera is also better optimized to capture paper documents, particularly those created in the Evernote Smart Notebook, a Moleskin notebook with stickers that double as tags and dots that help the app correct images for camera angle.

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When mobile users were tracked, Groupon’s traffic increased has 223 percent, Zynga’s increased 211 percent and Pandora’s 183 percent.

Groupon and Zynga have faced business headwinds in recent months.

Twitter, Pinterest and Yelp brought in more than half of their traffic from mobile users. LinkedIn and Facebook drew about a fifth of their unique visitors from mobile devices. Overall, mobile users accounted for just 7 percent of the visits to the top 50 most-visited sites.

Topping the list of the biggest properties across devices were Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. Microsoft drew fewer visits from mobile users than its competitors.

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The announcement comes a year after social discovery apps were the hot new trend at South by Southwest 2012. (The 2013 event starts next week, and SocialTimes will be there.)

Since then, Facebook acquired the social discovery app Glancee, using it to power Friends Nearby, while apps Highlight and Sonar have been relatively quiet.

By tapping in to a user’s profiles on Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and LinkedIn, Sonar alerts the user when friends or friends of friends are nearby.

The company praised Bing’s use of “location and social” in its announcement of the partnership.

“They’ll be great friends to have along on our adventures in helping customers connect with the most relevant people, places and things nearby,” Sonar said in a blog post.

Bing’s investment hints that the search engine may be looking to make its social search results location-sensitive. Microsoft has endeavored to differentiate Bing from Google Search with more extensive social search results which are kept separate from standard Web results.

“Utilizing tech in an innovative and unique way is a quality the Bing Fund champions, like many investors and accelerators do,” Bing Fund’s senior program manager Aya Zook said of the investment.

Social discovery apps have triggered some privacy concerns. One such app, Girls Around Me, controversially advised men when a particular night club had a favorable gender balance and displayed the profile photos of the women there.

Brett Martin remains convinces that social discovery will become a fact of life.

“There’s just no possibly way that I can envision a world three to five years from now where you can’t open your phone and interact with people in the same room as you as easily as you can with people across the world,” he told SocialTimes’s parent company, MediaBistro, last year.

Martin also told MediaBistro CEO Alan Meckler that Sonar, whose main existing investor was Blumberg Capital, was only looking for additional funding from “value-add investors.”

Here’s MediaBistro an elevator-pitch interview with founder Brett Martin last year.

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The product, Uber Perks, was developed as Uber’s internal method of providing employee transportation benefits. The program was beta tested with “a handful” of other companies prior to its public launch today.

HR administrators can provide benefts for anyone with a confirmed company email address. Employees can use their existing Uber account if they have one or create a new one. Credits are distributed each month, and the app, which processes payment for taxi and private-car rides, automatically applies any credits on the user’s account. Administrators get a monthly usage report.

Perks credits are valid anywhere Uber operates. Of course, with ongoing regulatory skirmishes threatening Uber’s operations in some cities, companies may be loath to use the credits, however. But Uber is offering the program with no contracts.

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The update allows users to edit their shared images, or “pins,” from their mobile devices. Users can also move and delete pins, edit the text accompanying a pin and moderate comments using the apps.

Scrolling has also been smoothed, Pinterest said.

Pinterest users do more pinning from tablets than from desktop Web, according to the Pinterest analytics company HelloSociety.

The move suggests an uptick in the pace of improvements at Pinterest. Last week, Pinterest also launched a closed beta of a redesigned website. In addition to design changes, the redesign claimed to speed navigation.

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The Lyft app, operated by Zimride, allows users to arrange transportation for pay with other users. Because public transportation is heavily regulated, Lyft and other apps, including SideCar and Uber, have faced regulatory battles in many U.S. cities.

“Over the last five years, Zimride has focused on improving the safety and convenience of peer-to-peer transportation. We’re strong believers in the idea that community can solve the largest problems of our time, but we also knew our vision would be met with adversity along the way,” the company said on its blog.

After issuing fines in November to the companies and cease-and-desist letters to several ride-sharing apps, including SideCar and Uber, the CPUC agreed in December to convene a proceeding to work toward balancing public safety and innovation.

Today, the CPUC suspended the cease-and-desist notice and the fine citation pending the outcome of the rulemaking process, and Lyft launched in Los Angeles.

The CPUC has not made similar deals with other ride-sharing apps.

“SideCar is a technology platform that enables peer-to-peer ridesharing and should not be regulated as if it’s operating as a transportation service. We believe that having the right to offer a technology platform that enables the sharing of resources is an important principal for the entire sharing economy,” SideCar spokeswoman Margaret Ryan said.

The rulemaking process is expected to end in six months.

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Uber supplies a mobile app that allows users to arrange for town cars to pick them up directly with the drivers, and the app sets a rate based on the distance of the ride.

The proposed rules would make it illegal for town cars to charge a distance-based rate. It would ban town-car pickups within 200 feet of a restaurant, bar or hotel, which would apply to much of Denver’s downtown area.

But according to the Public Utility Commission, which regulates car services but not taxis, the regulatory changes began prior to Uber’s launch in Denver and are intended to affect transportation companies, not Uber.

Colorado law already forbids distance pricing by requiring that a price be set in advance of the trip, according to PUC Spokesman Terry Bote. It also forbids private car pickups near restaurants, bars and hotels, he said. Bote said those laws come from the legislature, and the PUC is tasked with enforcing them.

The proposed rule changes “are not intended to put anybody out of business. These rules are for public safety, consumer protection and fairness,” Bote said.

Uber also says the law would make it illegal for it to partner with drivers at existing town-car services, which is its basic business model. Bote said he didn’t know where the company got that interpretation.

Uber, which also connects users and taxi drivers in some markets, has met with a maelstrom of opposition from officials who oversee the highly regulated industries. In many cases, including, most recently in Washington, D.C., Uber has ultimately prevailed.

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