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Whether a website sells off your email address or forces you to install some pop-up plagued toolbar just to get 10% off your next online purchase, searching for online coupons can involve treading in dangerous waters. Enter CheapTweet , which uses both algorithms and crowdsourcing to verify its content, and suddenly looking for the best deals online isn't quite so scary. The self-described "Twitter-based social deals search engine site" does precisely that - it finds tweets about deals and coupons through a custom search algorithm and then allows its users to upvote or downvote the deals on its site. Sponsor Tweeting deals, if your wondering, can be big business. In 2009, Dell made more than $6.5 million through Twitter deals and CheapTweet probably sent a few of those customers their direction. The ad aggregator is actually celebrating its 5 millionth indexed deal with a roll-out of a refurbished website, which includes upgrades to its search engine, the voting mechanism, a redesign and and new feature, the "DealStream". CheapTweet allows its users to search for deals by category and keyword and will customize the stream of tweets according to their votes and Twitter conversations. They can also up and down vote tweets, like they've become accustomed to on sites like Reddit, Digg or Google Moderator. The "DealStream", which contains a user's customized results, can also be read as an RSS feed. As CEO Hayes Davis points out in a press release, CheapTweet is poised to help distinguish the good from the bad as more and more companies prepare to monetize through Twitter. "Online channels will only become more cluttered, as social networks start to monetize with ads," said Davis. "CheapTweet's service makes it easier for shoppers to sort through the clutter online and shop more effectively." We've not only heard a number of rumors and anonymous tips on what the Twitter ad platform will look like, but other companies like 140 Proof have begun to enter the market, bringing tweet-like ads to third party clients. This doesn't even account for the vast number of small businesses taking advantage of the service to pass out Web-only deals and coupons. With all of these ads, CheapTweet will help weed out the bad apples. Its users down vote nefarious tweets, the algorithm cuts out spam using a form of natural language processing and the multiple tweets about the same deal are combined to cut down on the noise. We think that a service like CheapTweet has found a perfect niche and its the ideal service to recommend to your less technically-savvy relatives, as well as those just looking for a deal. Like we said, searching for online deals can put you in some dangerous waters and this service helps clear out some of the flotsam and jetsam. Discuss

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CheapTweet Wades Through the Sea of Tweet Deals

Our readers know ReadWriteWeb as the blog that's ahead of the technology curve. Our sponsors know us as that, too. Once a week we introduce our sponsors to our readers and let them know a little more about who they are and what they do. You can say thanks to the companies that make ReadWriteWeb happen by tweeting them (see the link below each sponsor) or following them using our Twitter list. Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? Our readers are smart, tech-savvy decision makers; 40% have a graduate degree or PhD, and over 45% play a key role in information technology purchasing decisions. More than 1 million people on Twitter follow us to stay abreast of the latest Web technology trends from around the globe. To find out more about our sponsor packages, visit our advertising page or email our COO . Sponsor Skip to info about: Tableau : Data visualization | Crowd Science : Demographic data | Medill School of Journalism : Digital journalism programs | Mashery : API management services | Rackspace : Cloud computing experts | Sproutbox : Start-up investors | Aplus.net : Web hosting | Clickatell : SMS provider | .Me : Domain Registrar | Conduit : Customized components | MyDomain.com : Domain registrar | Toopia : Our iPhone app developer Tableau Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the web in interesting and compelling graphs. Download Tableau Public and in minutes, you can create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog in minutes. Anyone can do it. You don't need to be a programmer or hire one - no language to learn, no plug-ins, no API. Your blog or website will stand out with colorful, interactive data visualizations. Bloggers using Tableau Public are averaging 3 times more reader comments. And, once on the web, anyone can interact with your graph and the data. They can re-embed your work, download the data, or create their own visualizations. Check out our gallery to see some of the cool graphs bloggers have created. Or learn how in our 5 minute video . Thank Tableau on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Crowd Science Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use. Sign up to get demographic data from Crowd Science. Thank Crowd Science on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Medill School of Journalism The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University offers programs that combine the enduring skills and values of journalism with new techniques and knowledge that are essential to thrive in a digital world. You might have a passion for creating finely crafted prose, or for telling stories using visual tools. Maybe you are invigorated by the possibilities of interactive publishing , or by videography for the small screen . Maybe you are an experienced professional looking to renew and retool your multimedia skills. You can find your niche in Medill's graduate journalism program. Thank the Medill School of Journalism on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Mashery Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper " Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services " to discover how you can use APIs for your business. You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com . Thank Mashery on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Rackspace Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution. Explore Rackspace 's hosting and cloud computing solutions. Thank Rackspace on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Sproutbox SproutBox is an elite team of product developers, creatives, and business experts that invest their talent full-time in start-ups. SproutBox's new approach to venture capital has helped launch several successful companies including: CheddarGetter , a subscription billing and analytics tool; ScheduleThing , an online scheduling and reservations app; and Squad , a web-based collaborative code editor. To apply for start-up funding or find out more information visit sproutbox.com . Thank Sproutbox on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Aplus.net Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration. You can register for Aplus.net here . Thank Aplus.net on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Clickatell Clickatell has over 22,000 customers utilizing our service from small mom & pop outfits to large Fortune 500 companies including Avaya, Oracle, Shell, Barclays, BP, CNN, BBC and more. Here's why you should trust us to mobilize your business: Our SMS gateway offers you wider coverage than any other SMS provider delivering messages to 600 network operators in 200 countries. Our gateway is not limited to SMS text messaging. You can also send a number of other message types including Ringtones, VCards, Binary, EMS, Unicode, Flash SMS, WAP Push, and more. Clickatell offers you direct connectivity to its core SMS gateway platform via a number of APIs (application programming interfaces) including; HTTP (internet post), SMPP , FTP , XML , SMTP (email to SMS), SOAP and COM Object . Each API has full documentation with sample code where applicable. Learn more about Clickatell here . Thank Clickatell on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. .Me .Me is a Top Level Domain of a small, south-east European country of Montenegro, which restored its independence in 21st century. Due to its unforgettable meaning and truly personal tone, most of the registration restrictions have been cancelled. Some of the prominent tech and advertising savvies recognized TLD's potential and grabbed their .Me domain name. In less than 20 months 360.000 domains were registered by people from 200 different countries.ME is perfect for " yourname.me " blog or " yourname@surname.me " email address. It is also widely used as a call-to-action domain ( notify.me , retwt.me ) and as a social (YouAnd.Me) or community network (Missouri.Me, Oklahoma.Me). One may also choose to send a cool personal message (WillSheMarry.Me). In addition, some of the biggest companies recognized its branding potential and started using .ME for various purposes. Check out Facebook (Fb.Me), WordPress (Wp.Me), USA Today (USAT.Me), Universal Pictures (Despicable.Me) or Zappos.com (Zapp.Me).  It seems that some countries are luckier than others when it comes to domain names. Are you lucky enough to grab your own .ME? Thank .Me for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Conduit Conduit enables Web publishers to distribute their offerings both directly and through its global network of 220,000 publishers and their 100 million users. The Conduit platform is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to offer the best of your site through a custom App or Community Toolbar , send desktop alerts to your users, and much more. The Conduit platform opens a new world of content sharing. Your site visitors can add your content right to their browser by clicking on a branded 2go button that you place on your site. You can also share your content in the Conduit Marketplace , where all the publishers and users in the Conduit network can grab it. The platform has been adopted by major brands such as Fox News, iWin, Major League Baseball, TechCrunch, and Travelocity, as well as thousands of small and medium organizations in 120 countries. If you would like to Conduit your website, go to www.conduit.com . Thank Conduit on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. MyDomain.com MyDomain is a leading ICANN-accredited provider of domain name registration and online business solutions. For over 10 years, MyDomain has offered low-cost domain names and free domain services including complete DNS management. Today, sub-$10 domains without the constant upsells you'll find at some competitors are the norm at MyDomain. MyDomain's complete range of solutions include Web hosting and VPS hosting, email, SSL Certificates and more. Toopia Nicolas Koenig is the developer who made our beautiful iPhone app a reality. He runs an iPhone development shop from the Netherlands called Toopia . Toopia also created the Thermometer iPhone app, which enables your iPhone or iPod touch to get the current temperature based on your location. The RWW app lets you read us on the go, follow us on Twitter, share stories on Facebook and Twitter, and browse at your leasure using Read it Later and Instapaper. Download the ReadWriteWeb iPhone application here . Thank Toopia on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer. Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb's? Drop us a line and let's talk. Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support! Discuss

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Check Out the Companies That Make ReadWriteWeb Possible

What's the best way to leverage the most information out of 140 characters? Should you get to learning Mandarin so each character can be a word? Or start forming German-style pseudo-word hashtags to get the point across? Or perhaps, you could parse the natural language, encapsulate the tweet in meta data and go from there. We've already seen additional information stacked onto our Tweets, as with the geo-location API released last November , but Cascaad's SuperTweet API does more than wrap your tweet in client-provided data like GPS coordinates. Sponsor Cascaad has released its first beta of the SuperTweet API, which it says will allow third-party Twitter applications to "add smart contextual information and monetization , including semantic entity markup, nonintrusive in-text affiliate commerce links, related content [and] social relevance scores". The SuperTweet provides users with "an at-a-glance view of additional information about stories, things and places discussed in the message, without forcing them to leave your application," according to the API documentation . The API allows developers to parse a tweet, identify separate "entities" and then gather external contextual information on those entities. It then adds this information to the original tweet to create a "SuperTweet". If a tweet mentions Lady Gaga, for example, the name "Lady Gaga" becomes a link to a biography pulled from semantic-web database Freebase . Next to that, the SuperTweet gives an affiliate link to Amazon, where you can go buy Lady Gaga CDs. And if a link to an article about Lady Gaga is included in the tweet, the SuperTweet provides a thumbnail preview. In addition to wrapping these entities in contextual information, the SuperTweet API unwraps shortened URLs back into the original link so the user has an idea of what they're clicking on. And, although not yet available in this release, the Conversation API will put the tweet in the context of a conversation, providing access to other public messages in the same conversation thread. The challenging part of all of this is that the API needs to parse a rather variable piece of content - a user created tweet - and find the appropriate meta data. Just like a search engine, it needs to recognize misspelled words or other slight variations to find the proper content. One Twitter developer we spoke with said that, while they like the idea of outside information being added to the base tweet, they have found the contextual results to be hit or miss. It would seem that the concept is solid, but the execution is still in the difficult learning stages. While we like what we've seen of the SuperTweet so far, it will only be worthwhile if it can provide accurate results. If we tweet about the iPhone and it links to the Amazon page for the iPad, the service will fall flat on its face. Get this part right, though, and we're willing to be you're going to start seeing Super Tweets in some Twitter apps soon. Discuss

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SuperTweet: Moving Beyond 140 Characters

According to Gartner , the worldwide market for mobile devices with touchscreens will grow over 97% this year . Last year, consumers bought 184 million devices with touchscreens. Gartner predicts that this market will surpass 362 million units this year. By 2013, Gartner predicts, touchscreen mobile devices will account for 80% of all sales in North America and Europe. Once the domain of high-end devices, touchscreen are now finding their ways into midrange phones and a growing number of consumers now expects all of their screens to be touch-enabled. Sponsor As Gartner analyst CK Lu notes, a touchscreen alone won't be enough to convince users to buy a specific phone, however. According to Lu, "Consumers won't buy a mobile device purely for the touch UI, Touch technology is just an enabler, and ultimately, it is a compelling user experience -- which includes good UI design, applications and services -- that will make or break a product." Indeed, Gartner advised manufacturers to double down on their efforts to create good touch-driven UIs. While Gartner doesn't mention the iPhone explicitly, it is clear that Apple's popular phone has set the standard for touch-driven UIs and most manufacturers are still struggling to catch up. Bonus: What Does the Mobile, Touch-Friendly Web Look Like Today? The mobile web, according to a new report from mobile search engine Taptu, is currently all about shopping and services. Taptu - which specializes in indexing mobile sites - surveyed about 326,000 sites that are optimized for mobile, finger-friendly browsing and found that the largest concentration of these sites falls into Taptu's "shopping and services" category. In total, Taptu found 83,000 mobile-enabled commerce sites, ranging from mobile shopping assistants to banks and mobile real estate sites. According to Taptu, mobile shopping and services sites make up close to 25% of all mobile-friendly sites in the company's index, followed by sites in the "photo and design" category (17.7%). Social sites rank third with 9.2%. Personal blogs only make up 1.5% of Taptu's index, a number if is easily bested by adult sites, which account for 3% of all mobile-optimized sites. It's worth noting that if we combine news and weather sites (3.3%) together with sites about world affairs (8.1%), this category would easily fall into Taptu's top 3. Discuss

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Gartner: Touchscreen Mobile Device Sales will Grow 97% in 2010