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href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http://mashable.com/2010/01/28/announcing-mashbash-sxswi-2010/&service=bit.ly">Mashable is excited to announce MashBash SXSWi, our second annual official SXSWi event, taking place on Sunday, March 14th at Buffalo Billiards in Austin, Texas.

To kick off the celebration, we are giving away two full SXSWi conference badges and access to the MashBash VIP List via a sweepstakes on Facebook! Check out the href="http://www.facebook.com/mashable?v=app_192579026668" target="_blank">contest here and enter to win before February 5, 2010 at 11:59pm ET.

Join Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, Adam Ostrow, Barb Dybwad and myself, along with our sponsors Cliqset and Sony Electronics and 1600 SXSWi attendees for a night of music and networking. In addition, there will be a 3 hour open bar, strong WiFi, a game room, and plenty of surprises!

Don’t forget to RSVP to let us and the other attendees know you are coming at our rel="nofollow" href="http://sxswi.eventbrite.com/" target="_blank">Eventbrite page. We will be selecting winners at random from the Eventbrite RSVP list to get special VIP Access to the event.

More MashBash SXSWi news, updates and excitement to come!

The Contest

Apply: href="http://www.facebook.com/mashable?v=app_192579026668" target="_blank">Facebook Contest powered by rel="nofollow" href="http://wildfireapp.com/">WildFire

Prizes: 2 Winners will each receive 1 SXSWi Conference Badge and VIP Admission to the MashBash SXSWi 2010 event

Rules: 18+, US Only (see application for full rules)

Thanks to: Special thanks to SXSW team for the 2 SXSWi Conference Badges

Details

Date: Sunday, March 14, 2010

Time: 10:00 pm – 1:00 am

Location: rel="nofollow" href="http://www.buffalobilliards.com/austin/" target="_blank">Buffalo Billiards, 201 6th Street, Austin, TX

Admission: Open to SXSWi attendees

RSVP for Chance to Win VIP Access to MashBash SXSWi 2010: rel="nofollow" href="http://sxswi.eventbrite.com/" target="_blank">sxswi.eventbrite.com

Socialize: href="http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=276489013406" target="_blank">Facebook

Many thanks to our sponsors:

“Sony Electronics has created high-quality, innovative and stylish products for over 40 years. Thanks to Mashable, Sony’s new MP4 bloggie™ camera will make its SXSWi debut. Capturing everyday moments in 1080p HD MP4 video and 5-megapixel photos, the compact device has advanced features like Face Detection and SteadyShot™, a large LCD screen, a built-in USB for uploading and charging, integrated software for easy Web sharing, and allows for expandable storage with Memory Stick PRO Duo™ or SD media cards. The bloggie camera is one of many products just launched under Sony’s new global brand message – make.believe. Believe that anything you can imagine, you can make real. For more information go to rel="nofollow" href="http://www.sony.com/bloggie">www.sony.com/bloggie.”

“Cliqset makes it easy for people to share, discover, and discuss content from everywhere on the Web. Cliqset helps you filter through the activity, like status updates, reviews, blog posts, videos, articles, music and pretty much everything that’s online, and consume the social stream the way you want to. To connect with Cliqset, visit us at rel="nofollow" href="http://www.cliqset.com/" target="_blank">www.cliqset.com.”

Reviews: href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/336650-Facebook" target="_blank">Facebook, href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/337174-Mashable" target="_blank">Mashable

Tags: href="http://mashable.com/tag/events/">Events, href="http://mashable.com/tag/mashbash/">MashBash, href="http://mashable.com/tag/sxsw/">sxsw, href="http://mashable.com/tag/sxswi/">sxswi

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The holidays were good to Amazon, which just announced fourth quarter 2009 earnings. Sales were up 42 percent to $9.5 billion in the quarter, and net income shot up 71 percent to $384 million (or 85 cents a share, well above the analyst consensus of 72 cents). Free cash flow was up 113 percent to $2.9 billion. For the full year, sales were $24.5 billion, and net income was $902 million.

Amazon highlighted the success of its Kindle in its earning release, which is not surprising given all the comparison to the iPad which Apple announced yesterday. The one quote from CEO Jeff Bezos in the release is about the Kindle: “Millions of people now own Kindles. And Kindle owners read, a lot. When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books. This is year-to-date and includes only paid books — free Kindle books would make the number even higher. It’s been an exciting 27 months.”

Beyond being vague about how many “millions” of people own a Kindle (is it two million or 20 million?), Amazon also mentions that there are now 410,000 books available on the Kindle. The depth and breadth of that catalog is the Kindle’s greatest strength.

I’m going to keep this post short and sweet because no one likes a blogger who says “I told you so.” But, Spotify fans: Paul Carr and I told you so.

StrategyEye reports that less than 4% of users of Spotify—the gorgeous online music app with a troubled business model—are paying subscribers. StrategyEye quotes Universal Music International digital VP Rob Wells who says the company needs 10% to 12% of its users to subscribe to be a sustainable business. It’s only at the 10%-12% threshold that Spotify is able to ink revenue share deals with labels, until then, it has to pay for music by the stream, driving its costs up substantially.

While everyone is raving about the iPad, one person who doesn’t like it is Hitler. The YouTube parody above takes the now all-too-common final scene from the movie Downfall and replaces the subtitles with a rant against the iPad. It’s the meme that will never die (there are at least 50 Hitler parodies using the same scene with different subtitles, here’s one about Facebook buying FriendFeed).

So what exactly does Hitler have against the iPad? Watch the video after the jump.

href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/apple-ipad-sharing/&service=bit.ly">Unless you were under a rock, it was virtually impossible to miss today’s unveiling of the href="http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/apple-ipad/">Apple iPad. Nonetheless, people wanted to make sure their friends knew about it too, and have been retweeting, sharing, and email forwarding stories about the new device in droves.

Clearspring, whose AddThis sharing widget is viewed more than 50 billion times per month, tells us that shares about Apple-related news are up more than 600% today. The massive volume spike is illustrated in the chart below:

It’s even more pronounced when you look at it on an hour-by-hour basis:

These numbers only represent shares that took place via the AddThis widget, which is common on blogs and news sites. For other types of sharing like retweets, Facebook shares, and Diggs that take place natively in social apps, I’d imagine the spike was even more pronounced. We should have some more stats on that later on.

Reviews: href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/517813-AddThis" target="_blank">AddThis, href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/338030-Clearspring" target="_blank">Clearspring, href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/336650-Facebook" target="_blank">Facebook

Tags: href="http://mashable.com/tag/apple/">apple, href="http://mashable.com/tag/apple-ipad/">Apple iPad, href="http://mashable.com/tag/apple-tablet/">Apple Tablet, href="http://mashable.com/tag/ipad/">ipad, href="http://mashable.com/tag/social-media/">social media

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One of the features highlighted on the location-based service Gowalla that I’ve never gotten into is Trips. The idea behind this feature is to give a list of spots to check-in at to complete a certain trip and earn its badge. For example, the Golden Gate Gallop contains 18 stops that you must hit to complete it. It’s a good idea from a game-perspective, the problem is that most of the trips don’t mirror my actual social life, and so I’d have to go out of my way to do them. That is, until today.

Starting today, Gowalla is opening the ability to create trips to all users. Previously, it was only the Gowalla team and a select group of their friends that have made these. To make a trip, you simply have to visit the Gowalla webpage of a spot you want to add to a trip and click the “Add to Trip” button. From here you’ll be able to name your trip, give it a description, and add up to 19 more spots needed to complete your trip. In other words, this makes Gowalla the perfect app for creating your own pub crawl among friends.

Two years ago, former Googlers Jason Liebman, Daniel Blackman and Sanjay Raman launched Howcast, a site filled with originally-produced how-to videos on everything from “How to Ice Skate” to “How To Deal With a Mean Boss.”  Today, Howcast is streaming 25 million videos a month across its network, which includes its own site, popular channels on YouTube and Hulu, and an iPhone app (iTunes link) which has been downloaded more than one million times.  A year ago, the startup was streaming about 10 million videos a month.

To put this in perspective, YouTube streams more than 12 billion videos a month and the next nine video properties on the Web all stream north of 200 million videos a month.  But Howcast’s growth is still very respectable for a niche video site.  The niche Howcast is going after, however is a very broad one.  Informational videos can be applied to practically any topic, are always in demand, and are search-engine friendly.  Its YouTube channel alone is in the top 100 channels, with close to 100 million cumulative views so far and 111,000 subscribers.