Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The Apple-Samsung patent infringement lawsuit is heating up: Samsung’s lawyers have filed a motion for Apple to provide them with a sample of the next generation iPhone and iPad.

Since Apple keeps very tight wraps around all its upcoming products, it’s highly unlikely that the company will comply with this request, at least without a fight. However, recently Samsung was ordered by a judge to give Apple samples of its yet unreleased tablets and smartphones, including the Galaxy S2 and the Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Add to that the fact that Samsung has also filed a countersuit against Apple citing several patent infringements, and suddenly Samsung’s claims don’t seem that far-fetched.

Nilay Patel examined Samsung’s request and he found some subtle differences between the two requests: Samsung products that Apple requested to see were publicly announced, while Samsung wants to see Apple’s products which are unannounced and – if you disregard the rumor mill – officially do not exist.

Either way, if the motion is successful, only Samsung’s lawyers – not even Samsung itself – would see Apple’s products, and the chances of any info leaking out into the public are very slim.

The full text of Samsung’s filing is available here.

Image courtesy of Flickr, boedker.

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

From our coverage on Mashable, you’ve probably learned a fair share about Foursquare for business. There are more than 9 million people on Foursquare, and there are 250,000 businesses that have claimed venues and use the location-based service as part of their overall marketing program. Foursquare is a free platform for merchants to use to engage and incentivize customers, but only if done right. Here’s what not to do as you embark on your Foursquare marketing endeavors.

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1. Creating a Complicated Special

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There’s no fun in trying to unlock a special that is nearly impossible to unlock. Try to keep it simple. The purpose of Foursquare’s merchant platform is to bridge the gap between customers and merchants, and a high barrier to entry could easily turn users off. There are seven kinds of specials to choose from, depending on whether you’re targeting new customers, encouraging people to come back multiple times or wanting to reward the mayor (your most loyal Foursquare customer).

Foursquare enables businesses to activate a special only on certain days or during certain times, or they can reward people for every nth checkin, regardless of what time or day it happens. “Receive a free cupcake on your fifth checkin” or “10% off your bill on Tuesdays” are good examples of simple rewards.

Specials can provide discounts, a few bucks off or a free item. If you’re worried about margins, you can offer a special that doesn’t affect your bottom line — maybe users will get to shop during special hours at your shop. Alternatively, you can post videos of your most active Foursquare users on your Facebook and Twitter pages. Eric Friedman, Foursquare’s director of business development, says the best kind of specials are those that make people feel special and provide them with something they couldn’t get as a regular consumer.

Also, remember to set an end-date for your campaign if it’s a limited-time offer and use the fine print if there are exclusions to your special.

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2. Not Training Staff

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You never want someone to redeem a special and show it to your staff, only to be looked at with googly eyes. Be sure your team is prepared and can recognize a Foursquare special and offer the redemption. Once you create a special, Foursquare provides flyers for you to print — one for employees, and one for customers — to build awareness for the product and make sure everyone is on the same page.

If you add a new special or change your current one, be sure to alert the team so they can answer any Foursquare-related questions.

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3. Not Using Foursquare’s Dashboard

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The Foursquare dashboard is full of useful information. Merchants can see what times people are checking in, in addition to details on the gender and age breakdown of those users. Businesses can use this information to craft a special to lure people to their venues during slow periods.

Only about 25% of Foursquare users send checkins to Twitter or Facebook, so logging in to the dashboard allows you to see who your most frequent and most recent Foursquare checkins are. This is helpful for businesses and gives them an inside look at their customers, while also proving contact information — such as their Twitter handles — if a user provided it when signing up. The Twitter handle can be used for one-on-one outreach, which will make your customers feel special and appreciated (and hopefully not creeped out).

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4. Giving Away Too Much Product Via Specials

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Just like on Groupon, there is a point at which your margins could be affected in such a way that you could be losing money. If you’re a cupcake shop, you might not to be able to afford giving away a free cupcake with each checkin. That’s fine, just get more creative and offer a more exclusive special. Perhaps you can do a loyalty special so that people get a reward — a free cupcake — on every third or fourth visit. That way, they’re incentivized to come back, so you’re encouraging and rewarding loyalty with delayed gratification.

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5. Not Advertising That You’re a Foursquare Merchant

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People might not be inclined to check in if they don’t know there’s a reward, so be sure to put the window clings (which Foursquare sends you when you create a special) on display. Setting up a special also guarantees that your business is shown in the “specials nearby” tab when people open the Foursquare app in the vicinity of your business.

The bottom line is that there are nearly 10 million people on Foursquare. Some might be more inclined to try your business — and keep coming back — if they know there’s an incentive on Foursquare. Therefore, not publicizing your special can be a huge missed opportunity.

What are some small business Foursquare marketing mistakes you’ve seen? Let us know in the comments.

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This design concept might be more sight gag than real product, but it’s clever nonetheless. Bringing new meaning to the phase “you snooze, you lose,” when you place this unforgiving clock across the room from your bed, if you don’t get up when the alarm sounds, it’s going to cost you.

Might we suggest at first being easy on yourself, placing a lower-denomination bill into this sleeper’s trap before you start punishing yourself too much. From the looks of these pics, that shredder does a thorough job of destroying currency or whatever else you’d like to place in it. And look at that — the designer has placed not one, but what looks like a stack of $100 bills into the clock’s hungry maw.

Careful, though — in the U.S., willfully destroying U.S. currency is a federal crime:

“..Whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, Federal Reserve Bank, or Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such item(s) unfit to be reissued, shall be fined not more than $100 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.”

Adding a bit of jail time to the penalty of losing your $100 (and perhaps paying another $100 fine) might just make you get out of bed in the morning, sleepyhead.

Via AcidCow

The media tries to report on the world economy or the national economy, or even the economy in Detroit or LA. This is easy to talk about, statistically driven and apparently important to everyone.

Alas, this has virtually nothing to do with your day, your job and your approach to the market. That’s because geography isn’t as important as it used to be, but more than that, it has to do with the fact that you don’t sell to everyone, and the economy is unevenly distributed.

If the unemployment rate in your industry doesn’t match the national numbers, the national numbers don’t matter so much.

At the largest Lexus dealer in New Jersey, they’re sold out of many models, with a waiting list. In some towns in Missouri, the unemployment rate is twice what it is in your town. In the tech industry, the rate you can charge for developing killer social apps on a tablet is high and going up.

Economics used to be stuck in town. Now, as markets and industries transcend location, useful economic stats describe the state of the people you’re working with and selling to.

If your segment is stuck, it might make sense to stick it out. It also might be worth thinking about the cost of moving to a different economy.

Online influence is the golden fleece for politicians. Control of the digital world is becoming just as important as control of the offline world.

This week we saw former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announce his presidential bid online, a breakdown of online Klout for presidential candidates, Twitter’s CEO announced as part of a White House telecommunication advisory council, and an official White House rapid response Twitter feed.

This weekly series picks out the week’s top stories in the intersection of digital technology and politics.

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Tim Pawlenty Announces Presidential Bid on YouTube

Tim Pawlenty announced he was running for president last Sunday in a video posted to YouTube. Oddly enough, the video actually pre-empted Pawlenty’s formal announcement planned for the following day, reported the New York Times.

Pawlenty calls out President Obama for giving fancy speeches rather than fixing problems and claims that he, and not Obama, has the courage to tackle tough issues. Using YouTube may also help give Pawlenty’s image some color.

Which Presidential Candidate Has the Most Klout?

Every 2012 presidential candidate has so far embraced social media … but has social media embraced them? Lee + dela decided to take a look at the group’s online influence according to their Klout scores. Klout is an online metric that measures the reach, power and general influence of any Twitter account. Though it’s far from a definitive standard, the scores give a good impression of how the candidates stack up. Obama leads with with a score of 88. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is second-highest with 79; Newt Gingrich is at 74; and Pawlenty is the lowest with 66.

Twitter CEO Named to Obama’s Advisory Committee

Seems like Obama really likes Silicon Valley. In a White House statement released Thursday, Obama named Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, along with Scott Charney, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group, McAfee President David G. DeWalt and three others, as potential appointees to his National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. The group oversees the availability and reliability of telecom services in the U.S.

White House Launches Rapid Response Twitter Feed

The White House launched a Twitter feed aimed at finding and deflecting negative online commentary. The account is listed under Jesse Lee (@jesseclee44) according to Online Social Media. Lee is the White House’s new Director of Progressive Media & Online Response. The account was set up as a way of “helping coordinate rapid response to unfavorable stories and fostering and improving relations with the progressive online community,” according to Huffington Post.

The fact that the account is under Lee’s name rather than an official-sounding government title hints that the role will be more about personal outreach than top-down story squashing. Although Lee only has a little more than 1,800 follows at time of writing, the account is verified and is likely to grow with use.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, Pgiam

Google just made it a lot easier to quickly look up flight information. Now you can type “flights from a city to another city in the Google search window, and it’ll quickly display a summary of flight information right there on the results page.

Could it get any easier? We tested this new feature that was announced Friday on Google’s Inside Search blog, and it works beautifully, especially if you’re talking about major cities.

For instance, type “flight LA SF”, and you’ll get a long list of flights when you click on the resulting drop-down list:

Or you can simply type “flights LA” and Google will helpfully show you each flight to Los Angeles from all airports, including numerous airlines and flight durations. Find out what flights originate from your local airport by typing “flights from your airport here“.

It works in 10 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Turkish and Catalan.

It’s not quite so easy if your destination is not served by a nonstop flight. For example, we tried entering “flights from Milwaukee to Tahiti” and got nothing but the usual list of travel sites.

Smaller towns with tiny airports aren’t particularly well served, either. Type “flights from Topeka” and again you’ll see those usual travel sites. But city dwellers will almost always get results when they type the word “flight” and the name of a city.

There are a lot of trick searches you can do on Google that have been around for a while. A favorite of ours is to do quick conversions of currency, weights and measures using the power of Google. For example, type “300 gbp in usd” (which stands for 300 Great Britain pounds in U.S. dollars) and you’ll immediately see the answer: $494.19. The key word there is “in”. It’s especially handy with metric conversion. Try this one: “250 km in miles.”

Thanks, Google. This is yet another life-enhancing improvement added to your search repertoire.

Graphic courtesy Googlylessons.com

Rajat Paharia is the founder and chief product officer at Bunchball. You can follow him on Twitter @Bunchball and read his blog.

Gamification, or the use of game mechanics in non-gaming contexts, has quickly made its way into the lexicon of the marketing and tech world. Companies in every industry imaginable are trying to tap into this powerful new strategy for influencing and motivating their customers, employees and fans.

Blindly slapping badges and points on your site isn’t going to work. Like any technology or methodology, there’s a right and wrong way to implement gamification.

Here are three key strategies for creating a gaming solution that has lasting value and truly engages consumers and site visitors.

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1. What Is Your Core Experience?

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What is the core experience that you’re trying to gamify? Understanding this dictates everything else you’re going to do, so it’s crucial to set this foundation correctly and understand both the experience and your users. Here are just a few of the many core experience types:

• A content and community site for fans of a TV show or musical artist: Your users are fans who have a passionate interest in something and want to indulge and share that passion.
• An expense-reporting application: Your users are employees who are dealing with a necessary evil in order to get paid.
• An ecommerce website: Your users are customers who are looking for a trusted vendor, a good deal and quality information that can help them make an informed purchase decision.
• Complex media creation software: Your users are people who are probably using 10% of the available functionality of the software and need a compelling reason to move up the mastery curve.

What’s your core experience is?

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2. Know Your Business

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Now that you know what your core experience is, you need to have a point of view about what’s good. Typically, this flows naturally from answering the question, “How does my business make money?”

Sometimes this is pretty straightforward. We make money from online advertising, so more pageviews = more money. Therefore, pageviews are good. Other times, it’s less straightforward.

If you were going to gamify an email client, what’s good? Responding quickly? Having an empty inbox? Dealing with high priority items first? It’s not always an easy question to answer, but you need to have a point view, because a) You want your gamification program to generate value, and b) You need to be tracking and rewarding the right behaviors. Here are some examples:

• Passionate interest sites are typically ad and sponsorship driven, so content consumption and content sharing is good.
• Some applications are a pain to use but are necessary for business. Getting employees to use them in a timely manner is good.
• Quality information sites thrive on user-generated content. So, content creation and content moderation is good.
• Mastery curve applications are powerful but also very complex. Users typically would like to learn more about how they work, but don’t have the time or inclination to go through dry tutorials and training. (Think Microsoft Word or Adobe Illustrator.) For a user to get the full value out of the application, and be willing to pay for upgrades once the next version comes around, the application developer needs the end user to understand the capabilities of the software, and develop fluency in using them.

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3. Know Your User

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At the end of the day, whenever we engage with anything, we’re always asking, either consciously or unconsciously, “What’s in it for me?” Your core experience provides value to the user in some manner:

• Passionate interest sites satisfy my desire to know more about a topic.
• Necessary but complicated applications accomplish business goals.
• Quality information sites help me make informed decisions.
• Mastery curve applications help me work better.

If your core experience doesn’t provide value, then you’re in trouble. The next challenge, however, is trying to influence and motivate behavior around that core value. What is meaningful value? The answer depends on your users, the context, the community of people participating, and the core experience.

Let’s take a stab at our example sites and see what kind of meaningful value we can provide. To make things clearer, I’ve provided fictional illustrative examples below. Note that meaningful value doesn’t need to mean dollars.

• Passionate interest: A Kanye West fan site rewards me with status (“Top 10 Fans”), unlocking exclusive access to content (music, wallpapers, ringtones) and early access to concert tickets for sharing music with friends on Facebook and Twitter.
• Difficult but necessary app: Employees earn points for filling out expense reports, with the number of points earned being proportional to how much time has elapsed since the first expense on the report. If it’s within one to two days, the user gets 100 points, three to four days, 50 points, five to six days, 25 points, etc. Employees are heavily incented to fill out expense reports quickly. They can redeem points for chances to win paid time off, gift certificates and other dollar value goods.
• Quality information: JoesBikes.com rewards me with status and reputation (5-star reviewer) as well as more powerful moderation abilities (edit anyone else’s review) for writing good quality product reviews.
• Mastery curve: Microsoft’s Ribbon Hero 2 rewards me with unlocking an entertaining story and a feeling of mastery for going through the tutorial content embedded within (this one is real).

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Conclusion

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Following these three key strategies will put you on the road to implementing a compelling gamification solution. You’ll be asking all the right questions, so that when it comes time to start designing and implementing, you’ll have a solid foundation of understanding on which to build a solution that drives meaningful value for your business and for your users.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, yurok