This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: MixMobi

Quick Pitch: MixMobi provides easy, fast, realtime, graphics-rich promotions for any social media, SMS or email campaign, reaching all web-enabled mobiles.

Genius Idea: MixMobi lets you create

In a new deal announced today, Microsoft and Amazon will gain access to each other’s portfolio of patents, including patents related to the Amazon Kindle and the shopping giant’s Linux server technology.

The patent cross-license deal makes both companies closer allies, as they are now sharing some of their most important intellectual property, although Microsoft didn’t specify in its announcement exactly which product IPs it would share with Amazon. However, it is known that patents for the Amazon Kindle and the shopping giant’s Linux server technology are part of the patent-sharing deal.

In addition to the sharing of intellectual property, Amazon has also agreed to pay Microsoft an undisclosed sum. Microsoft says that it has engaged in over 600 of these types of agreements, although we bet the Amazon deal is one of the more high profile agreements.

Details are limited at best, and we’re emailing both sides to get more information. At first glance though, it seems that Microsoft’s interested in bettering its cloud computing and

Communities are groups of people who, for a specific subject, share a specialty, role, passion, interest, concern, or a set of problems.  Community members deepen their understanding of the subject by interacting on an ongoing basis, asking and answering questions, sharing information, reusing good ideas, solving problems for one another, and developing new and better ways of doing things.

I particularly like the sense here that the community is about people sharing common interests without need for specific deliverables.  There may be a lot of reasons for those common interests in real-life communities, but the key thing that brings them together is that shared passion for their subject of choice. 

The main space for discussion has been the SIKM Leaders group that Stan created several years ago.  And that discussion has been one of the more interesting and involved on this particular mailing list.  (The main

Social media monitoring and analytics company Viralheat put together this graphic that shows the initial positive response to Google Buzz on Twitter, followed by shifts in opinion based on events in the developing privacy story.

The graph categorizes the Buzz-related tweets that went out during the first few days after the launch as “positive,” neutral” or “negative” and shows how three turning points affected public response — first the launch, then Harriet Jacobs’s blog post

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Facebook is known for its uniformity. You can post all sorts of content, but the actual design and layout of your profile is the same as everyone else’s.

But with Facebook Fan Pages and the array of apps you can plug into them, there are a few ways you can customize what people see when they land on your Page.

You’ve probably seen custom Fan Pages like those of

More and more celebrity holdouts are joining the Twitter bandwagon. First Bill Gates started tweeting, then yesterday rapper Lil Wayne joined the service. Today, another famous figure has his own Twitter presence: The Dalai Lama.

There has been an @DalaiLama account for some time. In fact, a fake Dalai Lama fooled the media and the twitterverse early last year, which was part of what spurred the creation of verified Twitter accounts.

This Dalai Lama is verified by Twitter, though — it is the real deal. Currently, the account is pulling albums and blog posts from his website and tweeting them via

First the SATs, then those godawful essay topics (“Who is your personal beacon?”), now this: YouTube videos have become a part of the college admissions process — a prospect that could be simultaneously exciting and terrifying.

According to The New York Times, Tufts University has begun accepting YouTube videos as an application supplement, an idea that arose last spring when Lee Coffin, dean of undergraduate admissions, saw a particularly impressive teen-made video.

In addition to voluntary essays and the option to “create something” out of paper, applicants can now show who

Shiv Singh is the VP & Global Social Media Lead at Razorfish.com. For more information on social influence marketing, you can read his book Social Media Marketing for Dummies, visit his blog, and follow him on Twitter.

There’s no question that Toyota is in deep trouble with its current recall crisis. But could these issues actually be helping its brand? Shockingly, an analysis of Toyota shows that

A recent Apple Inc. job posting has revealed that the company intends to focus on bringing the iPhone OS onto new gadgets, devices and platforms.

The job posting from the Cupertino, CA, company specifically calls for an engineering manager to handle “platform bring-up.” In the job description, Apple states that it’s looking for a manager “to lead a team focused on bring-up of iPhone OS on new platforms.” It seems like Apple wants some outside talent with very strong technical experience, especially when it comes to bringing software onto multiple hardware devices. Computerworld first caught the job post.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the job posting, which explains exactly what the company is looking

New stats released today by Twitter reveal that users now send out more than 50 million tweets per day. That means every second, 600 tweets fly through Twitter’s network.

As we reported two weeks ago, Twitter saw more than 1.2 billion tweets in January, or around 39 million tweets per day. These numbers came from Royal Pingdom and not Twitter itself, though.

The new numbers blow past Pingdom’s stats. Some of the highlights:

- In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day.

- By 2008, the number grew to 300,000 tweets per day.

- By 2009, around 2.5 million tweets were sent through Twitter every single day.

- Tweet growth shot up by 1,400% in 2009, reaching 35 million tweets per day by the end of

The Google Earth app for the Nexus One Android smartphone is now available for download. The app won’t work on every Android phone, but the Droid version is coming soon. Eventually all phones that run Android 2.1 will be able to use the app.

Previously Apple’s iPhone was the only phone with a Google Earth app. The Google LatLong blog post announcing this new version argues that the Nexus One is a better fit for Google Earth’s 3D interface thanks to its 1 GHz processor and 800 x 480-pixel display. Google says

Twitter, as a platform, played a big role in the instantaneous spread of information following the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January. Today the microblogging site is officially supporting the exchange of real-time information and offering free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers.

As of now, Digicel Haiti customers won’t incur charges for the SMS tweets they send and receive through Twitter’s 40404 short code. The bottom line is that Haitians can now experience an entirely free, mobile version of Twitter.

In Twitter’s blog post on the matter, Biz Stone

Guinness World Records has purchased Bragster, a video-sharing site where you can “dare your friends and brag about it.”

On Bragster, users post dares — for example, “I dare everyone to drink five raw eggs” or “I dare everyone to make as many spins in an office chair as possible (in 1 min)” — and other users respond by posting videos of themselves fulfilling the task. Selected winners get bragging rights points and compete in a site-wide leaderboard. Each initial dare also gets voted up or down, so you can weed through the news for the most interesting dares.

There are even levels to be acquired and Xbox Live achievement or

Denny’s dine-in menu invites customers to “Join the conversation!” and follow @Dennys on Twitter. The problem is that the account in question belongs to a Taiwanese Twitterer — Dennys Hsieh — and not the American restaurant chain, which manages two official accounts: DennysAllNightr and DennysGrandSlam.

The inaccurate menus (pictured below) have been in circulation since October 2009 at more than 1,500 locations nationwide.

One would think that such an oversight in these social media times would prompt immediate action, but such is not the case. Per a

Yeah, everyone has stolen Wi-Fi at one point or another, but not everyone has called into a tech show in order to complain about the fact that someone put the kibosh on said stealing.

Meet Jennifer, she had been unwittingly yoinking Wi-Fi for more than a year and a half when the gravy train ran out, after which she called into Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy radio show in a state of utter confusion.

After hitting YouTube this weekend — the show aired on Saturday — the video depicting Laporte interviewing the confused woman has gone viral, racking up 122,661 views at the time