During the Super Bowl, Foursquare plans to test a monetization strategy akin to Twitter's group of "Promoted" products, i.e., its Promoted Tweets, Promoted Users, and Promoted Trending Topics, all of which brands pay for to get more exposure. "Specifically, during the Super Bowl, Foursquare is going to have a 'Promoted Trending Venue' for the first time," reports TechCrunch. Rather than a real location, however, the "venue" will be 'Super Bowl Sunday,' which Foursquare hopes users will check-in to after it's placed at the very top of the 'Trending Now" area of the Places area on Foursquare's mobile apps. How …

Last week, Google received over 75,000 job applications worldwide -- setting a new record for the company, according to Bloomberg. With its bright interiors and culture of innovation, Google has always been seen as a highly desirable employer. Factor in the poor job market and Google's current hiring spree, and this was perhaps inevitable. This most recent application avalanche bested the company's previous record set in May 2007 by 15%, according to Google spokesman Aaron Zamost. Google, which had 24,400 workers at the end of last year, just announced that it would be adding another 6,000 employees this year. …

Audi says it will be the first brand in history to include a Twitter hashtag at the end of its 60-second Super Bowl spot. The hashtag "#ProgressIs" is expected to flash during the carmaker's TV ad during the first break after kick-off. Viewers who use the hashtag and the URL "audi.us/ProgressIs" in their tweets will be entered to win a trip to Sonoma, California, to test drive an Audi R8 supercar. "The theme 'ProgressIs' is based on the automaker's new brand positioning, which revolves around the theme expressed in the brand's new tagline: 'Luxury has progressed,'" reports Mashable. The …

Who is the mobile shopper and what are they doing? Those are couple of the questions Molly Garris, Manager, Digital Strategy, Arc Worldwide, tried to answer with research last fall. The agency found about half of the 18 to 64-year-old mobile users it surveyed were mobile shoppers. Of these about 40% were light shoppers and 10% were heavy. The latter use apps at least once a week are into trying everything from check-ins to barcodes. They also skew male and toward iPhone users. Light shoppers skew female and toward other devices like Android and BlackBerry. So among the takeaways, …

For all the buzz created by social media, a new study shows retailers may be barking up the wrong tree: ForeSee Results reports that social media drove just 5% of visitors to retail websites. On the other hand, "promotional emails, search engine results, and even advertising are more influential," it says. In fact, the study found that more traditional marketing techniques not only generated more traffic, they also they deliver better-quality customers. "Some of the most satisfied site visitors arrived at the site because of previous familiarity with a brand, promotional emails, word-of-mouth, and product review websites," it says in …

Despite plenty of bad weather, consumers shopped up a storm in January, giving stores plenty of good news. Kantar Retail reports that same-store sales grew by 4.9% in January, compared with the somewhat ho-hum gain of 3.2% in December. And the International Council of Shopping Centers, which tracks a slightly different group of stores, says its index grew by 4.8%. Experts say the stronger-than-expected results for some stores—on the heels of disappointing December, which followed a hot November--suggest that this recovery may continue to lurch along in this up-a-little, up-a-lot fashion for some time. "It's been volatile and …

What can consumers expect from Honeycomb -- Google's forthcoming mobile platform designed specifically to dethrone Apple's iPad? For one, smarter widgets, reports GigaOm. "These information-at-a-glance apps are based on collections of data, which can be grouped and there are several new navigation methods supported," the tech blog writes. "Expect to see more information faster, without opening up an app, as a result." Improved notifications are also on the way. "Gone is the pull-down notification shade used by earlier Android versions." What's more, Honeycomb will boost the graphics capability of consumers' tablets (and potentially other mobile devices) with its new …

AFCV Holdings has agreed to buy publicly traded Answers.com for $127 million. A Summit Partners portfolio company, AFCV is paying more than double Answers’ initial pricing of $5 per share when it made its IPO back in 2004. The Israel-based Answers.com hosts a varied selection of Q&A forums on its website, as Vator News points out. Its WikiAnswers product lets users pose questions to the community, which anyone can answer, edit, while ReferenceAnswers is a forum where questions are answered by editors. Video Answers maintains a library of some 200,000 videos in more than 200 categories, allowing users to …

Don't think of Microsoft as a social standout? Well, according to the software giant, its Windows Live Messenger is now responsible for driving over 2.8 billion minutes of Facebook. What's more, the volume of Facebook chat powered by Windows Live Messenger has almost doubled since Microsoft first shared usage statistics in November 2010, when the figure was at just 1.5 billion minutes. "The number of Messenger customers who have connected Messenger to Facebook has grown over 75% to nearly 18 million people," boasts Windows Live group program manager Piero Sierra. What's more, as Softpedia notes, Microsoft is expecting Messenger …

Condé Nast-owned social media service Reddit just broke the billion monthly page-view barrier. "That's up 300% from a year ago and a 20% increase from just last month," according to Mashable. To be exact, Reddit racked up 1,000,404,480 page-views last month. All those page-views, meanwhile, were generated from just 13.75 million absolute unique visitors, which accounted for a total of 68.11 million visits. "A big reason why Reddit can generate so many pageviews from so few people is that the average person checks out 14.7 pages per visit and stays on the site on average for 15 minutes and …