Sugar Me on Valentine's Day

Want to make your Valentine's heart skip a beat?

Nothing says Valentine’s Day like a box of chocolates. But, despite your best intentions, a box of mass-produced Russell Stovers from the drug store says all the wrong things. Instead, let me play Cupid. I’ve got a few sweet arrows in my quiver that are sure-fire hits.

Chuao's Elegancia Bonbons

Want a gift that’s as beautiful and unique as your special someone? Set the mood with artisanal chocolates hand-crafted right here in San Diego.

Chuao Chocolatier, with three locations in La Jolla, Del Mar and Encinitas, is offering up bonbons infused with aphrodisiac ingredients like honey, wine, chilies, strawberries and spices.  The Elegancia box holds 32 of these decadent treats for around $50.  Or, go traditional with the Sweetheart – yes, it’s a heart shaped box – filled with 22 of the upscale candies in flavors like Firecracker, Passion, and Fragolina (a port-drenched dried strawberry enrobed in dark chocolate ganache) for $49.

The Sweet Heart Collection from Eclipse

The team at North Park’s Eclipse Chocolat are already busy making a few thousand pounds of chocolate in anticipation of the big holiday.

Try the Sweet Heart Collection which includes heart-warmingchocolate bars in flavors like blackberry-sage, macadamia-ginger, chile-hazelnut and orange peel-anise plus creme fraiche caramels topped with pink peppercorn, merlot-infused sea salt, or candied rose petals.  Priced at $30 and weighing in at over a half pound, it’s sure to hit the sweet spot.

If candy isn’t your thing, what about cupcakes for your cutie?

The hottest new kid on the block is the La Jolla location of the famous cupcake bakery, Sprinkles. It opened January 13 and there’s still a line around the block!

Of course, you know that someone really loves you when they give you a scrumptious show stopper from Extraordinary Desserts.  Karen Krasne’s beautifully crafted dessert masterpieces are almost too pretty to eat but, don’t let that deter you because they taste even better than they look.The cupcake artists at Sprinkles are whipping up two limited edition flavors for Valentine’s Day: a chocolate chip-studded dark Belgian chocolate cake with raspberry frosting and a “Red HOT Velvet” red velvet cake with spicy cinnamon-cream cheese frosting. They can also put together a specially themed “XOX box” filled with a dozen cupcakes topped with XOX and sugar heart decorations in flavors like red velvet, chocolate marshmallow, dark chocolate and vanilla for $39. (Tip: Call ahead and place your order for pick up so you can skip the line!)

Extraordinary Desserts' Amor Chocolat

Her Valentines Dessert Specials, available at both the Balboa Parkand Little Italy locations, include the Amor Chocolat, a rich, dark chocolate cake moistened with ruby Port reduction and layered with creamy chocolate mousse and milk chocolate crème brulée; the Shangri-La, a Kirsch-moistened vanilla cake layered with white chocolate and guava mousses, fresh strawberries and whipped cream; the Chocolate Raspberry Concorde, a chocolate tart filled with salted chocolate chip mousse and surrounded with fresh raspberries; and the Fresh Berry Vanilla Crème Brulée Tart, a buttery white chocolate tart shell layered with vanilla bean crème brulée and fresh berries, and finished with whipped cream. (That’s the berry brulée at the top of the post.)

All are priced between $8.95 and $14.95 per slice. Pick them up or bring your sweetie in for a romantic dessert date to remember.

Chocolates, cupcakes and dessert decadence. A little sugar that’s guaranteed to make your Valentine swoon. What’s your favorite sweet treat in San Diego?

5 To Try This Weekend

1. The Navy is celebrating 100 years of naval aviation in a big way this weekend. On Saturday, February 12th, the Navy will showcase its “Parade of Flight” with more than 200 planes flying over Coronado and the Bay. It will be the largest naval flyover since WWII! Be sure to check out the Union-Tribune’s special section that gives viewers tips on best spots to view the flyover as well as a viewer’s guide to aircraft.

2. With museum month in full swing, the New Children’s Museum is featuring a fun KidFunk Family Festival on Saturday. The festival runs from 10 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. and will feature award-winning musical talent, dance crews, and a unique animal presentation by Wild Wes and the San Diego Zoo. It includes special appearances by Rhythm Child, Egg, and Super Galactic Beat Manipulators, culminating with an interactive Karaoke and DJ session.

3. It’s the year of the Rabbit, and you can celebrate at the 29th Annual San Diego Chinese New Year Food and Cultural Fair Saturday and Sunday. This free, family friendly event will feature lion and dragon dancers, martial artists, acrobats and musicians at the intersection of 3rd Avenue and J Street. No matter what zodiac you were born under, there will be plenty of fun for the whole family as they celebrate the most exciting Chinese holiday of the year.

4. This weekend in Balboa Park, Circus Vargas has set up its Big Top Tent. Arrive early for the free Preview Show, and join Jon Weiss as he invites kids of all ages into center ring to learn juggling, feather-balancing and hula-hooping. Circus Vargas unites skilled performers with clowns that actually make you laugh. They will be in Balboa Park from February 10-21.

5. Start your Valentine’s Day off early and take your sweetheart to see Jane Austen’s Emma A Musical Romantic Comedy currently playing at the Old Globe. Deliciously charming, this new romantic comedy from Tony Award-nominated composer Paul Gordon and directed by Tony Award nominee Jeff Calhoun brings Jane Austen’s classic story to musical life. Playing through February 27th.

H.R. 2267: Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-2267

Sponsor:	Rep. Barney Frank [D-MA4]show cosponsors (70)
Text:	Summary | Full Text
Status:	Introduced May 6, 2009 Referred to Committee View Committee Assignments Reported by Committee Jul 29, 2010 House Vote ... Senate Vote ... Signed by President ... This bill was considered in committee which has recommended it be considered by the House as a whole. Although it has been placed on a calendar of business, the order in which legislation is considered and voted on is determined by the majority party leadership. Keep in mind that sometimes the text of one bill is incorporated into another bill, and in those cases the original bill, as it would appear here, would seem to be abandoned. [Last Updated: Dec 24, 2010 5:50PM]
Last Action:	Nov 30, 2010: Placed on the Union Calendar, Calendar No. 398.
Related:	See the Related Legislation page for other bills related to this one and a list of subject terms that have been applied to this bill. Sometimes the text of one bill or resolution is incorporated into another, and in those cases the original bill or resolution, as it would appear here, would seem to be abandoned.

37 New Social Media Resources You May Have Missed

Zachary Sniderman – Sat Dec 4, 6:30 am ET

The holidays are coming, and there's nothing that'll quite get you in the spirit like a big ol' list of tools and resources from your friendly neighborhood Mashable HQ.

Our Social Media section provides tips for making your music video go viral, ways to empower your social giving this season, and the perils of digital snooping. Tech & Mobile features the top 10 gadgets Mashable readers want for the holidays, photo sharing alternatives to Flickr, and five of the best user experiences of 2010. Finally, for the business-savvy reader, check out six promising companies of 2010, essential steps in executing your social media strategy, or how to sell your expertise online.

Looking for even more social media resources? This guide appears every weekend, and you can check out all the lists-gone-by here any time.

 

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Social Media

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• We Hold These Tweets To Be Self-Evident [COMIC]
  If the U.S. Founding Fathers had Twitter at their disposal in 1776, there's no telling what sort of social media hijinks would have ensued.
• How To Make Your Music Video Go Viral: 10 Tips From Cee-Lo, OK Go & More
  We’ve talked with musicians, including Cee-Lo Green, Auto-Tune the News and OK Go, gathering together their top tips for making an eminently shareable vid.
• How Social Media Is Changing the Way Movies are Promoted
  From self-funded independent projects to big-name Hollywood blockbusters, the movie industry has embraced social media. Big time.
• HOW TO: Follow Mashable on Social Networks, E-mail & RSS
  Now that Mashable is even more connected across social media, we thought we'd let you know how to find us however works best for you.
• Facebook Co-Founder Launches Social Network for Social Good, Jumo [IMAGE]
  Facebook Co-founder Chris Hughes has launched his much-buzzed-about social network, Jumo.
• HootSuite Reaches 1 Million Users [INFOGRAPHIC]
  Social media dashboard HootSuite has reached an important milestone: 1 million registered users.
• 16 Handy iPhone Apps for Better Blogging
  Keep your blogging activities flexible and mobile with these great apps for iPhone.
• World Cup, Miley Cyrus and BP Are Yahoo’s Top Searches of 2010 [INFOGRAPHIC]
  Yahoo has released its annual "Year in Review" report, a dive into the top searches and search trends on the world's second largest search engine.
• The Perils of Digital Snooping
  You can minimize the damage both to your own conscience and to your relationship by following our three rules of digital snooping.
• 5 Online Community Killers to Avoid at All Costs
  Today’s online communities are beautiful to look at and easy to join, but the real trick is getting users to stick around. Be sure to stay away from these 5 pitfalls.
• Why Amazon Dropped WikiLeaks
  Amazon is insisting it didn't remove WikiLeaks because of political pressure -- or because of a recent series of DDoS attacks on the site.
• HOW TO: Cheat at Foursquare [COMIC]
  Just because you can no longer check in remotely doesn't mean you can't get crafty in your ruthless quest for (imaginary) world domination.
• 3 Ways to Empower Social Media Giving This Holiday Season
  Here's a look at three socially enabled giving platforms that allow donors to support their favorite non-profits in creative ways.

For more social media news and resources, you can follow Mashable's social media channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Local Deals Come to Facebook Places

Local Deals Come to Facebook Places

 

The rumors are apparently true — at an event today at Facebook headquarters, the social networking site revealed that it will, in fact, be launching a deals service for Facebook Places. Watch out, Foursquare.

Deals is a new application within Facebook’s iPhone app (which just got a refresh) that lets you find deals at nearby businesses.

There are four types of deals: Individual Deals (for discounts, free stuff or other rewards), Friend Deals (where you and a pal claim something together), Loyalty Deals (for the regulars) and Charity Deals (which allow you to donate to a cause).

The service is only available in the refreshed iPhone app, but Android users can access deals via touch.facebook.com (as they did when they wanted to use Places before the Android refresh).

So how does it work? Users can find deals by looking for the yellow icon when go to check in using Places (see below). Simply click on the deal to claim it, and then show it to the cashier to cash in. Deals claimed will be shared on your News Feed, which will allow your friends to reap the same benefits if they so choose.

The company that lets you take Facebook to the shops

Serial entrepreneur Aneace Haddad discusses his latest venture, Taggo with Peter Day

Continue reading the main story

Start-up Stories

• Cheo Ming Shen, Nuffnang
• Lyn Lee, Awfully Chocolate
• Tony Fernandes, Air Asia
• Richard Reed, Innocent Drinks

Filling in a restaurant promotion form after a meal out with friends inspired serial entrepreneur Aneace Haddad to launch Taggo - a service that simplifies the process of collecting loyalty rewards in shops and restaurants.

"One day when I was having a meal nearby, near my place, they had a membership form to fill out to become a member of that retailer's programme," he recalls.

"They only had two restaurants and I was thinking you wouldn't fill out that form…just to have another card that's only for that retailer."

Mr Haddad was annoyed at the prospect of having yet another loyalty card stuffed into his wallet. So he dreamt up a service he calls Taggo - short for tap and go.

Continue reading the main story

Taggo

• Turnover: Not disclosed
• Number of employees: 8
• HQ location: Singapore
• Year founded: 2009
• Ownership: Privately held

The idea he says is simple: take a plastic card with a unique identity number, one you use for everyday tasks such as contactless payments or paying for public transport. Next, register it with the online service. Then you can use your card to sign up as a fan on the Facebook pages of retailers or restaurants, and be in line to receive special offers and discounts.

"It's a substitute for coupons, it's a substitute for cards so the retailer doesn't have to issue his own loyalty card," he explains. "You just tap your transit card and on the screen the clerk sees whether or not you're a fan."

Soft launch

Taggo is currently undergoing what Mr Haddad calls "a soft launch", and he says Singapore is a good place to do this in: "Right now retailers are really going nuts about fan pages, about Facebook. I've met a surprising number of retailers here in Singapore that don't have web pages, websites, but they have Facebook fan pages…they're building fan pages faster than websites."

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

Right now retailers are really going nuts about fan pages”

Aneace HaddadFounder and CEO, Taggo

"There's a huge Facebook penetration in this part of Asia. These…tap and go cards, there are 9 million of them in Singapore," he explains.

The city state has other advantages too: "It's very, very small. You can get a lot done in a day. Very easy to get around town, go to various meetings."

Snags

Aneace Haddad hopes his service has the capacity to one day become global - but he rejects the suggestion that he is tying his fate too closely to a single online platform, Facebook.

"There's nothing preventing someone like Google from creating a fan page concept," he says. "They have business pages in an embryonic form…those could easily grow and become bigger business pages, which could integrate Taggo as well"

But if his plan is successful and there is huge take-up of the service, won't that erode the competitive advantages for retailers of having a loyalty scheme in the first place?

Aneace Haddad says not: "if a retailer is strong enough to issue a loyalty card to 80 percent of its customers and the customers say, 'wow, I really want that card in my wallet and it'll stay in my wallet all of the time', maybe the retailer should continue doing that. Most do not have that anymore."

Mr Haddad believes that his service will make it easier for many more retailers to experiment with a loyalty card scheme and find out if it will benefit them.

Taggo customers register themselves as fans of retailers on Facebook to receive discounts

Mr Haddad acknowledges that his product essentially capitalises on what is an already established relationship between the retailer and the customer to ensure that the customer walks into the store.

But he says that the best ideas are often those which provide a missing link. Nevertheless, he admits that such ideas are difficult to induce. "When you're looking for solutions you can't really build it. It just has to come in a flash."

Maturity

However, he is sceptical that he could have brought his idea to life as a younger man. He says, "I was a lot stiffer. I was too demanding and I wanted it my way…There's a lot of flexibility that comes over time."

He is dismissive of the notion that older entrepreneurs find it difficult to make the most of new industries and technologies to create successful business systems.

As a veteran of the electronic payments industry, he's found the network of contacts he has built through his previous jobs has proved invaluable.

"I see now it's the reputation I have in the industry because it's easy for me to get the meetings I want…I can get people involved in this…There's something about having a certain notoriety and experience and everything, just makes it tremendously easier to do this."

But ultimately, Mr Haddad believes the failure of many entrepreneurs is due to the absence of any self-check or scrutiny on their ideas. He says, "I notice the vast majority of people don't go through that…they'll launch stuff without going through: so what? who cares? why me?…and then after a few years they pull the plug."

His advice is: "If you're hard on yourself with those questions and you can find credible answers to them, you probably have something that's very valuable." All that's left is to "remove the barriers…and get out of the way so it can explode."

Facebook Deals: How It Works at Street Level

Facebook announced some cool new mobile tricks today, including the ability to offer special deals to Facebook users who participate in the Facebook Places location-based service.

I downloaded the Facebook mobile app from the Android Market soon after I got my phone, and until Facebook Places launched a few weeks ago I didn’t feel much need to use the app while I was out and about. With Deals, however, Facebook Places turns into something more than just "checking in." Facebook's new Deals program gives mobile users a "social" way of discovering--and taking advantage of--special bargains from Facebook's partner businesses.

How It Works

You’re walking around downtown. You stop walking (we hope) and open the Facebook app on your mobile phone. You can see at Facebook Places that several companies in the area are posting deals for Facebookers. For instance, one of Facebook's retail partners at the program's launch is the Gap, so if you were interested in getting 20 percent (or whatever the deal happens to be) off a pair of blue jeans, you could walk to the Gap store, check in there via Facebook Places, and--presto--you're eligible for the deal.

Or you might notice that a nearby restaurant is running a deal saying that if you check in with three of your friends you can get a free appetizer or the like. That's the example Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg cited at the announcement in Palo Alto today. He calls Deals "a way of unlocking new social experiences that have never existed before."

Another way to find out about a deal is just by seeing in your newsfeed the offers that your Facebook friends have posted at their Facebook pages.

Check out this Facebook Deals video to see how Facebook imagines the service working.

And if you want to try it out, take a look at the list of Facebook partners currently participating in the Deals program. You can do some Deals on the new Facebook Android app now, and on the iPhone app starting next week.

What May Be Coming

Concievably, Facebook Deals partner companies could push deal notifications to you based on your physical location. Here’s an example of how that would work: A department store knows from Facebook Places that you are near one of its stores. It also knows from Weather.com that it is raining. Believing that the chances you'll need a new umbrella are reasonably high, the store could push a deal notification to your phone saying '10 percent off umbrellas--today only'. For the retailer this is a valuable opportunity, because the likelihood of your taking it up on its offer is much higher than if you saw one of its ads in a newspaper or online.

Facebook says, however, that its partner companies will not be pushing deals at this stage of the program. Not yet, but they probably will, in some form, in the future. Zuckerberg says his company is not taking a cut of the profits from sales made as a result of deals offered on its platform.

Among analysts, the common thinking was that Facebook would like to extend its powerful platform onto mobile devices so that its advertising partners could target ads on mobile devices, based on location as well as on the personal information Facebook has already collected about users at its site. With Deals, though, Facebook appears to be taking a softer approach for now. Instead of flashing banner ads on your phone, it’s working with its partner companies to let Facebook users discover deals, socially. Again, Facebook and its partners might not always be so passive about their use of the knowledge of where you are.

I asked Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg today how his company would benefit from allowing its partners to offer location-based deals. Zuckerberg simply repeated that it was all about creating a brand-new kind of userexperience (mobile, social shopping) and that Facebook is not talking about the underlying business model at this point.

I did notice, however, that the Facebook executive giving the Deals portion of the presentation was Tim Kendall, the company's director of monetization.

What About Privacy?

As more and more Facebook partners begin leveraging Facebook's vast store of user data (now with real-time location data), some people may get a little nervous about privacy issues. When Facebook, or an app, starts showing us content based on who we are, who our friends are, and where we are right now, the result may be a bit creepy--depending on how far Facebook takes the concept.

Facebook's response is that in the Deals program--and in the mobile realm in general--the company is using no more of your data than it does already, and that everything is "opt-in." The fact is, however, that many users will not think twice about opting in if it means getting a free latte for checking in at Bill's Coffee House.

Personally I didn't have too much of a problem with Facebook being aware of my physical location in Places. But now, the company and a bunch of marketing partners are using that data to sell products. They are acting on the location data I'm giving, and that changes the privacy picture.