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Mocha frappuccino and soy latte lovers rejoice: Starbucks is rolling out its Starbucks Card Mobile App for BlackBerry tomorrow, September 2.In September 2009, Starbucks introduced its Starbucks Card Mobile app for iPhoneiPhone and iPod touch, enabling the owners of those devices to reload their Starbucks payment cards, monitor their rewards cards and even pay for their purchases at 16 stores in Seattle and the Silicon Valley region. In June, the coffee company extended its mobile payment system to 1,000 Target stores in addition to the roster of Starbucks venues.Now all of this functionality has been adapted -- and, in some respects, improved -- for BlackBerry Bold, Curve, Storm and Tour users. For instance, BlackBerry owners can use the app's store locator to identify all Starbucks and Target venues where Starbucks is sold, not just the ones that support mobile payments.In an interview with MashableMashable, Chuck Davidson, the category manager for innovation on the Starbucks Card team, described the group's painstaking efforts to optimize the app experience for BlackBerry users. "We didn't just want to put an iPhone app on a BlackBerry, which would have shocked BlackBerry users," Davidson explained. "We had to get inside a BlackBerry head and use the right workflow."Thus, instead of embedding rich graphics and video for navigation, the team utilized the menu key, resulting in a much more intuitive experience for BlackBerry users.With the addition of BlackBerry support, Davidson said that roughly three-fourths of its customers now have access to the Starbucks Card Mobile app. While he didn't confirm that an AndroidAndroid app was in the works, he did say it was the third-most requested app after the iPhone and BlackBerry.To get the Starbucks Card Mobile BlackBerry app, text the word “GO” to 70845 or visit the Starbucks mobile site.

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At Apple's special event today, the company announced a redesigned and re-formulated Apple TV. As expected, the new device comes with support for Netflix, streams content and offers affordable rental pricing for TV shows.The new Apple TV will be available later this month (you can pre-order it now) for $99.99. While most of the changes to the device were expected, not everything that was predicted was announced.For instance, although the new device sports an A4 processor like the iPhone 4 and iPad, it isn't being classified as an "iOS" device. Presumably at its core, the new Apple TV is running iOS, or at least something very similar to iOS, but the App StoreApp Store is not coming to the television, at least not directly.Because content is not stored on the device, instead streamed from a computer or from an InternetInternet service, Apple has introduced a new rental pricing plan. TV show rentals are just $0.99 for HD and first-run movies are $4.99 for HD. These prices are very competitive, especially in the HD space.Netflix, YouTubeYouTube and FlickrFlickr support are all built into the device itself. Users can also stream content from a Mac, PC, iPhone or iPad. This is where it gets interesting. Using something called AirPlay, users can share video, photos or music on their iPhone or iPad with Apple TV.This has some pretty powerful implications, especially if Apple opens up the AirPlay API to third-party developers. In theory, that could mean that third-party content that isn't accessible directly from the Apple TV could be streamed to the TV anyway via an iOS device.At $99, the new Apple TV is coming in at a very attractive price point. The device is one-fourth the size of the original Apple TV and is said to be completely silent.Still, the device will face stiff competition from the upcoming Google TV, the Boxee Box and existing connected devices like Roku, the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and other connected TV sets and BluBlu-ray players.What do you think of the new Apple TV? Is Netflix, iTunes rentals and streaming enough to make you spend $99? Let us know!

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Today, a Verizon-backed startup is releasing its iPad application and introducing a new functionality -- digital coupon clipping.CardStarCardStar makes mobile applications to digitally manage retailer club and membership cards. CardStar for iPad doubles as a personalized, digital circular for coupons. The app lets users discover coupons relevant to each of their stored rewards cards, clip and save them to their loyalty cards, and redeem them on their next shopping trip. Clipped coupons will automatically be deducted at the register for all applicable purchases.At launch, Zavers, an online coupon provider, is powering CardStar's repository of coupons, but the startup plans to work with additional third-party online coupon services moving forward. Zavers primarily issues online coupons for grocery store chains such as A&P and Superfresh on the East Coast. With the CardStar iPad app, users can add their Zavars account to browse and clip coupons with ease.Users can fire up the iPad app to browse available coupons by club card. They then simply click a coupon to attach it to their card for future redemption. They can also view coupons by All, Unsaved and Saved filters; send a coupon via e-mail to a friend; and track how much they're saving.The iPad app comes with a few additional nice touches, including Foursquare integration and the ability to view nearby coupon offers on a map.Given that coupons are limited to Zaver's offerings, CardStar for iPad's coupon clipping functionality is a bit premature to be useful for everyone. Still, the app was released to keep CardStar ahead of the curve and prove that the service can be a platform with the power to complete the loop between loyalty card, consumer and retailer coupons. On those fronts, it certainly delivers.Would you find this app useful? What other coupon sites should CardStar include next?

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FoursquareFoursquare now has more than 3 million users, if the site's public user registration numbers are correct.The 3 millionth member appears to be Brian S. from St. Louis, Missouri, who has yet to check in to any venues via the mobile-based social network.Foursquare's growth has been accelerating rapidly lately. The service hit 2.6 million users on August 2, up from 725,000 in March. The launch of Facebook Places, which many thought would bring about the startup's demise, instead resulted in the biggest day of signups ever, CEO Dennis Crowley recently revealed.Given that Foursquare appears to have a little more than 3.02 million users now, we can determine that it is growing by more than 15,500 users per day (a little less than the 18,000 per day Crowley told the LA Times last week), or nearly half a million users per month.Although already rapid, that rate may very well pick up now that Foursquare has taken over Times Square.Update: The team at Foursquare has informed us that they have not, in fact, reached 3 million users yet, but expect to hit that number either today or tomorrow.[via TechCrunch]

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Taking an if-you-can't-beat-them, join-them-and-beat-them attitude, SCVNGR is today unveiling its integration plans for Facebook Places and launching new features to take of advantage of both Facebook Places's read and write APIs.SCVNGR is just one of a handful of companies that has access to both APIs. The startup believes it is the first mobile game to integrate with Facebook Places.SCVNGR's mobile game layer for the real world possesses checkin functionality akin to FacebookFacebook checkins, but the integration is designed to magnify what SCVNGR does best -- "the cool things you can do beyond the checkin," says CEO and Founder Seth Priebatsch.He's not kidding. Instead of just posting checkins to Facebook Place Pages, SCVNGR users will notice that the activity they share with Facebook is kept in tact to maintain its original form on Facebook. Should a SCVNGR user perform a social checkin, that story is tied to a Facebook location, posted to the Place page and shared on the user's wall. The same rules apply for captured photos, scanned QR codes and other completed app challenges.The Facebook Places integration extends outside of Facebook and into the SCVNGR iPhone and AndroidAndroid apps as well. App users will now have access to the wealth of checkin activity happening on Facebook, further enriching its update stream. For a startup that's just recently started to go after consumers, this could be just what the service needs to attract and keep new users.At the end of the day, SCVNGR wants to share Facebook's expansive playground. "Facebook Places is beneficial for anyone in the location space not specifically doing something around the checkin," says Priebatsch.In fact, Priebatsch believes that Facebook's location direction cements the soundness of his own decision to go after building a game layer and not a checkin application. To that end he says, "FoursquareFoursquare and GowallaGowalla are in a less advantageous position. At [Facebook Places'] core, it's competitive."Those are fighting words that the young CEO cannot yet back up with proof. The Google-backed startup says it's sitting pretty and seeing "phenomenal" new user growth week over week, but no concrete numbers have been released.

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Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. We’re keeping our eyes on three particular stories of interest today.Google Testing Gmail-based Calling ServiceGmailGmail users may soon be able to make phone calls from their inboxes, CNet has learned. GoogleGoogle is reportedly testing a new web-based VoIP client, which will allow users to place and receive calls via the Google Chat contacts widget on the lower left side of the Gmail page.Google Finance Optimized for MobileGoogle has launched a new mobile-optimized edition of Google Finance for AndroidAndroid and iPhoneiPhone device owners. The new design brings nearly all of the same functionality as the desktop browser version, allowing users to quickly tab through news and market information, as well as data about their portfolios.Real-Time Phone-to-Console Gaming Coming to WindowsWindows 7Greg Milligan, a mobility solutions manager at Microsoft Canada, revealed at Microsoft's X'10 event in Toronto this week that real-time phone-to-console gaming over Wi-Fi is coming to the company's Windows Phone 7Windows Phone 7 soon.In addition, the company plans to release mini-games on the phone that will unlock functionality in console games, which will be priced in the $1.99 to $2.99 range [via rgb filter].Further News

• Three teenagers, whose names all appeared on a "kill list" posted on FacebookFacebook, have been killed in the past 10 days in a southwestern Colombian town.
• Apple is preparing for the launch of iTV, the successor to Apple TV, according to multiple sources. The technology giant is reportedly in talks with News Corp. and other media conglomerates to bring $0.99 TV show rentals to iTunesiTunes.
• WikiLeaks has announced via TwitterTwitter that it will be releasing a leaked CIA paper sometime later today.
• Mozilla has released Firefox 4 Beta 4, which includes two interesting new features: Panorama (previously called Tab Candy) and Sync.
• Ad agency Wieden + Kennedy’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” TV spot for Old Spice was awarded this year's Emmy for Outstanding Commercial.

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Series supported by HTC EVO 4G

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This series is brought to you by HTC EVO 4G, America's first 4G phone. Only from Sprint. The "First to Know" series keeps you in the know on what's happening now in the world of social media and technology.

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Today Qualcomm is formally announcing the launch of Qualcomm Services Labs (QSL), an incubation program that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm. QSL is meant to serve as a platform to fund, commercialize and launch innovative consumer-focused mobile services such as Neer, an application that cleverly interprets location-sharing for the more private types among us.Qilroy, Tapioca and Vive are three of the other mobile services and apps participating in the incubator program. Each has been selected for its potential to make an immediate impact on the market. As QSL services, each will also eventually become its own business entity or be integrated into an existing Qualcomm division.Of the four incubated apps launching today, Neer is by far the most interesting and practical of the bunch. Not only is it market-ready and sleekly designed, but it tackles location-sharing in a way that a majority of mainstream mobile users will find is much more relevant to their lives than location-sharing a la FoursquareFoursquare, Facebook Places or Google Latitude.

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Neer: Location-Sharing for Private Types

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Neer is a fantastic app currently available for AndroidAndroid devices, and soon the iPhone. The application is designed for private, automatic location-sharing, which makes it opposite in purpose and function to Facebook Places and Foursquare.When demoing the application for MashableMashable, creator Ian Heidt described Neer as occupying, "the middle ground between Foursquare and Google Latitude."Neer creates an ideal mobile location-sharing experience for close friends, family members and spouses who want to automatically share their whereabouts with the people they trust. The application is integrated with the user's native contacts, and even goes so far as to use calling and texting behaviors to determine a user's closest contacts and automatically generate recommendations for inclusion in the user's default group, the inner circle.Users can create their own groups and control on a group-by-group basis who can view their location and when. others can also send notes to groups.Neer runs in the background and automatically updates a user's location, but it only shares place names, not physical addresses. Neer users must define and label preferred locations and then decide which groups to share those places with.Right now Neer is perfectly structured for routine lifestyles. When you leave to drop the kids off at school, your significant other can know when they arrive. When you're working late, your inner circle can know not to expect you for dinner.Because Neer requires users to define the places that peers can see them at, however, Neer is less practical when you break from the routine and venture out to a new venue. Heidt promised that the mobile application will be enhanced to better handle less routine schedules and tackle real-world location problems that often face good friends in close proximity in the future.

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Qualcomm-Incubated Services

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Qilroy

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Qilroy -- pronounced "kill roy" -- bills itself as a conversation platform organized around location. The service also doubles as a comprehensive search engine for public geo-located status updates, and hence a convenient utility for surfacing time and place-specific news.On Qilroy, users can search location updates nearby or filter for places or events. Users can start conversations on site, with replies pushed out to the respective social networks where the original updates were posted. Replies to tweets, for instance, will show up as mentions on TwitterTwitter for the original author and include a link back to the Qilroy thread. Conversations can continue in a thread-like fashion on-site.At launch, Qilroy pulls in geo-located updates from Twitter and TweetphotoTweetPhoto for users on the web or via its iPhone app [iTunes link]. Eventually Qilroy plans to aggregate and create conversations around a majority of location-based updates from other services such as Facebook Places, Foursquare and GowallaGowalla.Service creator Mike Bailey tested the application with student interns, who found it to be a "real-time bulletin board that allows for ad-hoc interactions and conversations." In one example, an intern pointed to using Qilroy to find out whether or not the college library is crowded. Another cites using Qilroy as a way to find out about free food or promotions happening at the student center.Even though Qilroy only surfaces content that users have selected to share publicly elsewhere, it's still a bit jarring at times. Search for "lunch" and you'll see a bevy of recently published geo-located tweets broadcasting where people are eating. Sure, users searching for a lunch buddy will find the information handy, but there's also a handful of less-than-ideal scenarios that come to mind as well.

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Tapioca

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Tapioca generates short URLs -- called Magic Links -- for multimedia content. Content providers can use the service to generate shortened URLs and share multimedia that is consumable on all smartphones and feature phones.Right now Tapioca is primarily a business-to-business play, but it ultimately aims to graduate to focus on consumer multimedia sharing as well. As such, end users could use Tapioca to generate a Magic Link to share cross-platform video formats with friends. The idea is to dramatically enhance the distribution and consumption of video media on mobile phones.Tapioca was acquired by Qualcomm in April 2010. Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but Tapioca had previously raised $5.5 million from Venrock.

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Vive

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Vive is focused on enhancing the social recommendation experience across web and mobile platforms. Publishers and retailers can add Vive buttons to their sites to allow for seamless product-sharing. Users can use Vive to recommend products, services and content to friends; active users are rewarded for their behaviors.Vive's behind-the-scenes technology is quite impressive and can translate content type on-the-fly to ensure that each user is served up with device-appropriate content. Vive is available as a FacebookFacebook application and soon as an iPhone and Android application.Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, ariusz

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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 Wall Street Journal is reporting that the investment is part of Verizon's continued interest in mobile commerce, an interest that also extends to the carrier working with AT&T and T-Mobile in a separate initiative around mobile payments.CardStarCardStar hopes to capitalize on the intersection of traditional loyalty, reward and club programs with mobile technology, a hot trend of late that will only become more relevant with time. Users can replace their physical club cards with a digital replica and potentially receive merchant-provided extras for doing so. The application also integrates with Fousquare for convenient in-store checkins."The carriers have long been looking at the mobile wallet idea, especially mobile payments ... But mobile payment is not here yet. So, what else is in someone’s wallet? A lot of different cards, and the common thread is loyalty cards," CEO Andy Miller explained to the Journal.With Verizon's investment, CardStar has raised a total of $1.4 million in funds. CardStar is also said to have been downloaded more than 1.4 million times and have 700,000 users. [img credit: shanecurcuru]

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Soon, some New Yorkers will be able pay for their purchases with their smartphones rather than their credit cards.Bank of America and Visa are working together to launch a new test program that will bring digital wallet capabilities to smartphones. The program will start in New York in September and run through the end of the year. Visa is planning on rolling out a similar test program with US Bancorp in October.Users in the test program will be given small chips to insert in their smartphones. These chips emit radio signals over very short distances and can communicate directly with point-of-sale systems in stores. By waving their smartphones near cash registers, users can automatically send payments and banking information.This sort of technology has existed in Europe and Asia for the better part of a decade, but mobile-based purchases have yet to really take off in the U.S.As smartphone and mobile usage continues to climb, however, it looks like U.S. consumers might finally join the revolution. In addition to the Bank of America/Visa program, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Discover Financial Services are also working together on a joint mobile payment system.Startups like Square are also jumping into the mobile and micro-payments arena. Likewise, PayPal has been ramping up its mobile offerings. Both the iOS and AndroidAndroid versions of PayPal Mobile include Bump technology that allows users to easily transfer payments by waving or bumping their devices. In our discussions with PayPal, the company has also indicated that it is very interested in working with other partners to make it easier for businesses to collect payments using PayPal from mobile devices.As a consumer, I would love to be able to pay for things just by waving my phone at the register. What about you? What are your thoughts on mobile payment systems?

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Look out, world -- Lenovo's on a serious tear, and it doesn't look to be stopping anytime soon. In the company's latest earnings report, it proudly announced its first-ever double digital market share of 10.2 percent. As if that milestone wasn't enough to make upper management grin, the outfit also nailed down just under $55 million in net income (a pre-tax income of $75 million) on sales of $5.1 billion. This quarter also marks the third in a row that it has been the fastest growing of the top five PC makers, and the fifth consecutive quarter that it outgrew the industry. Specifically, the outfit's PC shipments increased some 48.1 percent year-over-year, and consolidated sales for its fiscal Q1 saw an insane 49.6 percent uptick from last year. As of now, things are looking mighty rosy for Lenovo, and it just seems logical for the company to revive the Skylight in celebration. Who's with us?

Lenovo sees $54.9 million net profit in Q1 earnings, hits double digits in global market share originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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