Snickers is offering 17 exclusive trips to the Super Bowl via the “Go Nuts At The Super Bowl with Snickers Instant Win Game.” Seventeen Grand Prize-winning NFL fans and their guests will win a trip to Super Bowl XLV in North Texas, while more than 2,200 additional winners will receive other great prizes including flat-screen TVs, gift certificates or Snickers bars.

Fans can enter by logging onto to www.Snickers.com and entering a “Game Code” available on inner packages of Snickers Brand 2-To-Go Bars and outer packages of specially-marked Brand Miniatures products. Participants can also text “SBTIX” to 50503 and follow the instructions contained in the text reply to enter. Sweepstakes runs 8/16 - 12/16.

Source: Marketing Daily

Does it seem like every other person you know is getting a smartphone these days? Whether its the new iPhone4, HTC Incredible Driod, or Blackberry Curve, everywhere you look someone is clicking away on their web-enabled handheld device. Americans are falling deeper, and deeper in love with their smartphones and just between March and May 2010 smartphone usage among those age 13 and older is up a dramatic 8%.

Check out MediaPosts recap of comScore’s MobiLense report on the category leaders here.

Link up via twitter with fellow stranded travelers when you are stuck in any airport with Boarding.fr.

How it works:

Just tweet #boarding along with the airport code to get in touch with the service. You’ll get a reply with the list of the other users in the same airport in the last hours.

Your avatar will also be displayed on www.boarding.fr. Only the 100 latests tweets appears on this map. All you need is a public Twitter account.

You and your newfound pals can hit up DD’s or Starbuck’s and share travel horror stories until your flight gets back on track.

Conde Nast is introducing a slick platform for selling, displaying and enhancing its titles’ regular print issues on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Issues rendered for the iPhone screen will sell as apps, starting with this December’s issue of GQ, priced at $2.99 in the app store.

Users will be able to see every page as it appears in print as well as renderings of all the content tailored for display on the small screen. They will also be able to watch related videos, hear audio and visit advertisers’ sites without leaving the app.

It’s a potentially significant step in print publishers’ efforts to make something positive out of digital media. For one thing, the iPhone app puts Conde in position to play on new e-readers and tablets, the company said today. “If you can get here, you’re ready to go there,” President-CEO Charles H. Townsend said in a presentation to reporters. “That’s what this is about.”

This could pave the way for other magazine titles to follow suit, and could be pretty interesting.

Source: Ad Age

Verizon offically announced its new Google Droid phone, with an ad campaign pointing out all of the iPhone’s weaknesses. The phone is rumored to be available at the end of the month, but no offical release date has been set. You can however, sign up to be alerted once it’s available.

Has the iPhone finally met it’s match? Check out the “iDon’t” ad campaign here

Pepsi has come out with an iPhone app called “AMP UP Before You Score” that offers to help guys “get lucky” with 24 different “types” of women — and then brag about it.

For each type of girl, a guy can get a crib sheet of info, pickup lines, and more to help him “know what makes her tick before you open your mouth, so she’ll like what she hears when you do,” according to the iTunes description.

Following the outpouring of criticism that greeted the release of the app, Pepsi and AMP offered an apology over Twitter to irate consumers. AMPwhatsnext wrote:

Our app tried 2 show the humorous lengths guys go 2 pick up women. We apologize if it’s in bad taste & appreciate your feedback. #pepsifail

The “AMP UP Before Your Score” app, which was released to promote Pepsi’s AMP energy drink, presents hopeful guys with cartoon drawings of each of the female “types.”

Among the 24 types, there’s the “Rebound Girl” who’s got mascara tear-tracks and clutches a a carton of ice cream, the “Aspiring Actress” who’s dressed like a waitress, the “Artist” who’s pictured chewing on a paintbrush, and 21 more, including “Married,” “Twins,” “Women’s Studies Major,” “Cougar,” and “Foreign Exchange Student.”

The new “Save to Card” function will allow users to register their active loyalty cards for such retail grocery and drug chains as Safeway, Vons, Dominick’s, Genvardi’s and others in their Coupons.com profile page. They can then browse available coupons on the Web site either via a PC or a mobile device, looking under the “Savings Card” tab to find discount offers for which their cards are eligible and selecting those they want added to their cards.

When user swipe those loaded cards at the checkout, the discounts are automatically applied to the eligible purchases, eliminating the need to present paper coupons or the market’s need to clear them.

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CNN launched its new iPhone application Tuesday morning, featuring breaking news, video, personalization options, and, most notably, an interactive iReport feature.

The application allows you to search for and follow topics of interest to create a personalized “MyCNN” news feed — from breaking stories about your home state to gossip about your favorite celebrity. Tapping any news story from the main screen leads to two summary bullet points, the main story, and any relevant video. An additional tap on the share button allows you to email the story, choose to follow the topic, or save it to read later. The app also pinpoints your current location to provide weather, traffic, and breaking news near you.

Get the app at CNN.com or read more about the app here

The skirmish between Apple and Palm over whether owners of Palm devices can sync them up with their iTunes libraries has come to something of a resolution — though maybe not the one Palm had hoped for.

Earlier this summer, Palm filed a complaint with the USB Implementers Forum, an industry group that oversees standards for USB connections, claiming that Apple was restraining trade by only allowing Apple devices to access iTunes, its popular media management software.

On Wednesday, the group replied to the letter, dismissing Palm’s assertion that Apple was in violation of its policies. It also said that Palm’s strategy of having its Pre phone masquerade as an iPod so it would work with iTunes was a violation of the group’s membership agreement.

Get the full story here

Source: New York Times

Twitter users will soon be able to make short phone calls for free directly through the microblogging service. JaJah, an Internet telephony company that allows you to make VoIP calls using your landline or cell phone, launched the beta version of its new Twitter calling service, named @call yesterday. 

Jajah says its service will work whether you’re using Twitter directly via its site or are logged on using a third-party client like Seesmic. Jajah says you’ll even be able to make calls when using Twitter clients like Tweetie and TwitterBerry on your smartphone.

To place a call via Twitter, you and the person you are calling must be Twitter users and Jajah users (you can sign up for both services for free). The person you want to call must be following you on Twitter, and you both have to sign up for the @call beta.

Let’s say someone I follow wanted to call me using Twitter. All they would have to do is type into their Twitter client “@call @ianpaul” and Jajah would connect us for a free, two-minute call using the voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). At launch, @call will connect only to U.S. numbers.

To read more about this service and how it works click here