NEW YORK TIMES — Beginning Thursday, latte addicts who visit Starbucks outlets can get more than just a caffeine fix. They will also be rewarded on Foursquare with a barista badge. Location-based mobile services like Foursquare are at the cutting edge of a transformation in the way offline businesses and their customers interact, by breaking down the barriers between the physical and the virtual...

CNET NEWS — It was apparently one step short of a cattle stampede when low-cost airline JetBlue used its Twitter account to announce that as part of its 10th anniversary celebration it would be giving out about a thousand free round-trip tickets at three undisclosed locations in Manhattan on Wednesday. "One of the things we knew was that people were just going to follow us," JetBlue public relations representative Morgan Johnston told CNET, relating anecdotes about one woman who claimed she sprinted in heels from midtown to the Financial District (one of the giveaway spots), people chasing the JetBlue team in taxis as they left one location to head to the next, entire offices clearing out when they heard that one of the ticket giveaways was nearby, and a cab driver who left his passenger behind in order to get out and claim a ticket. "It was like the Pied Piper of Hamlin." CNET caught up with Johnston, whose team orchestrated the stunt...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — In the frozen void of space, a now derelict mining vessel has had a communications failure. Unfortunately, for engineer Isaac Clarke, the USG Ishimura isn’t quite so derelict after all, as its inhabitants are now the skittering, the lumbering, and the grotesque horrors that hail from the deepest corners of the galaxy. This, of course, is the basic premise behind the sci-fi, survival horror game, Dead Space from Electronic Arts’ studio, Visceral Games. As a popular title among the horror genre, the folks over at Visceral are looking to make the next one even better, as they work to spark up some buzz for their next deep space adventure...

MASHABLE — The Facebook platform game FarmVille now supports the Facebook Credits virtual currency. The popular online game uses two units of in-game currency: Farm Cash and Farm Coins. Previously, you could buy them with a credit card or PayPal. Now the game offers Facebook Credits as an option. Facebook Credits are the number-one option, actually. They’re the default payment choice, featured at the top of the list pictured here...

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW — Social media are all the rage in marketing, but should they be? Sure, Facebook is growing fast -- it had more than 350 million accounts late last year, 50 million of which were added in the fall alone. But how much do businesses really influence consumers when they launch pages on the site to attract "fans" and to pepper them with messages and offers? To begin to answer that question, we did the obvious: We set up one company’s Facebook page and measured the effect on customer behavior. Our partner in this experiment was Dessert Gallery (DG), a popular Houston-based bakery and café chain...