In just its second year, the Small Business Saturday initiative managed to pull 103 million customers through the doors of small business establishments. This Thanksgiving weekend frenzy surpassed the projected number of 89 million and showed that the bourgeoning “shop local” movement is gaining traction in a real, measurable way. What’s most interesting about the push to shop local is how much of its success hinges on social media marketing; this is particularly interesting considering the two industries developed almost directly alongside each other, at least in terms of sophistication and popularity. Read More

Google announced that Android app downloads have passed the 10 billion mark in a short time. Thanks to Android users around the world, Android Market exceeded 10 billion app downloads—with a growth rate of one billion app downloads per month.

Apple just passed 10 billion app downloads in January. But thanks to the fast growth of the sale of Android phones, Google’s app downloads are growing fast. The first billion installs took 20 months, the second billion installs took another 5 months, and the third billion took only 2 months. The next billion took only about 7 months.

With these numbers, Android is already the world’s most widely-used operating system. To celebrate this milestone, Google partnered with some of the Android developers who contributed to this milestone to make a bunch of great Android apps available at an amazing price. Starting today for the next 10 days, we’ll have a new set of awesome apps available each day for only 10 cents each.

TIOBE Software has released its programming community index for December 2011. The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

According to TIOBE, the most popular programming languages right now are Java, C, C++, C# and Objective-C.

The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.

Engadget reports Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao robot has already received a few upgrades from both the company itself and other developers: features like a 1.6GHz Atom processor and dual HD cameras that promise to allow for better face and object recognition even in poor lighting conditions. What’s more, while robot’s outward appearance hasn’t changed much, it has also received a number of software upgrades, including Nuance voice recognition, an improved walking algorithm, and a number of other measures to cut down on unwanted collisions.

Interested developers will finally be able to get their hands on a bot of their own quite soon. To do so, they’ll have to sign up and quality for the just-launched Nao developer program, which costs €3,600 (or roughly $4,800) and will initially be limited to just 200 participants. That hefty price does naturally include the robot itself, along with a complete software suite, and “privileged access” to Aldebaran Robotics’ source code.

The holidays are more than just eggnog and present-opening. This season can give entrepreneurs the opportunity to do great things with their business. Here are some business strategies that will help make your holiday season not only joyous, but lucrative, too:
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