A new app called Karma lets you instantly send gifts to friends, even if you don’t know their physical address.

A service for “in-the-moment gifting,” Karma lets you send everything from a bottle of wine to a fuzzy teddy bear to friends via SMS, email, and Facebook. Once the recipient gets the message, she can specify which address she wants it shipped to.

The Karma app works as a virtual storefront of sorts. Karma has partnered with Hulu, Gund, MoMa and Spotify and offers gifts appropriate for people of all age groups. Once you select a gift you are taken a page to select an appropriate card to go along with it, and then enter in contact information for your recipient.

Gifts can be sent in the form of an email, a Facebook wall post, or an SMS.

While sending a real-word gift via text message may seem a bit odd, Karma CEO Lee Linden told Mashable that the majority of gifts being sent from the service are actually coming from SMS messages.

“The average response rate for an SMS gift is less than 60 seconds,” says Linden. “Email is four to five hours. On Facebook, it’s a day.”

Karma has built-in Facebook integration for giving to your friends on the service, and keeps up with important details in your Facebook friend’s lives for when gift-giving opportunities arise.

There’s a section within the app that lists birthdays of your friends, and also sections for celebrations and “tough days” that pays attention to the words being used on your friend’s walls and let you know when someone is being congratulated for something, or might need a pick-me-up.

A new jobs section lets you know when your friends pick up a new gig, and the Events section lists Facebook events you’re going to that you might want or need a gift for.

There are also provisions if the recipient doesn’t like the gift. If you decided to buy a Hulu Plus subscription, and the recipient wasn’t interested it, she could exchange it for a remote-controlled helicopter or a Netflix subscription on Karma’s site. If your friend isn’t interested in gifts at all, then she can also opt to give the value of the gift to charity as well.

Since your friend is the one inputting her address she can have a gift sent anywhere they want, and also to an address you might not know. For instance, a guy who’s only been on a few dates with a girl can send her a box of chocolates by just knowing her number. You could also send a credit for a ride around the city to a college friend who’s visiting New York City for the first time on Facebook by just commenting on his or her Wall.

Gifts can be tracked from the moment a message is sent to when the gift arrives on the recipient’s doorstep, so you can know where it is every step of the way. Karma says most gifts arrive within three days, and digital gifts are delivered within minutes.

Gift messages can also be re-sent from within the app if your friend seems to have not responded to your first offering, and can be cancelled if you decide you’d rather hand your friend a gift the old-fashioned way.

Karma is available now for iOS and Android.

Source

We’ve known now for quite some time that it was coming but for all you Droid X owners out there, the v4.5.621.MB810 update is now rolling out to the masses.  As noted in the change log, this release covers a lot of bug fixes:

• Prevents lockups or resets after the Over the Air (OTA) update.
• OTA update notice screen displays the correct estimated update time.
• Improved browser security with the Google Security Patch from Android 2.3.6.
• Fixed issue where the device may power ON without user interaction.
• Resolved possible device resets while playing music.
• Adjusted camera settings will be saved, even after the device is powered down.
• Reduced Out of Memory errors.
• WAV files can be played from Visual Voice Mail.
• Device is enabled with the Wireless Alerting System.
• Improved stability of Music Player reduces resets.
• Shortcuts to applications remain on the device even after applications are moved to the SD card.
• Improved connectivity with 3G Mobile Hotspot data connectivity.
• Addressed error that replicated thumbnails in message threads.
• Corrected errors where Yahoo! mail notifications were not displayed properly.
• Reduced duplicate message errors.
• Improved ability to access and receive Gmail when the Mobile Hotspot is turned on.
• Sorted contact groups.
• Device recognizes Multimedia ringtones after purchase.
• Button background lighting turns off while in the desktop cradle.

It’s not Ice Cream Sandwich sadly but it’s a massive update either way. Go ahead and check for software updates, it should be there. If not, sit tight it will be along shortly and don’t forget to drop by the Android Central Droid X forums and let us know how it’s working out for you when you get it.

Lets get to the meat of the issue — ads are not bad or evil. I’ve been known to wear a tinfoil hat on occasion, but even I recognize that advertisements are a great way for developers to offer apps for free, and make them accessible to everyone — not just those with a credit card, who are willing to pay (or able to pay in their country) for them from the Market. Developers deserve to make money, I get it. But we also deserve to know what info these ad networks are collecting. Let’s be honest, most folks don’t bother to read the permissions screen when they install an app. None of these ad networks are going to do anything illegal or inherently evil, so there’s no harm in knowing more about them, right? Here’s an easy way to know all of that.

Just install the app, run it and let it scan the applications you’ve installed on your phone. You get a handy list of things ad networks can do (including the horrible trick of putting ads in your notification bar), and how many of each you might have installed. A quick tap opens the tree, and you see the names of the culprits ad networks that are using each type of ad. Another tap and you get more information about how it all works and the apps that are using this type of placement or collection. From there, you can decide what to do. I love it when power is put back in the hands of the user, and knowing is the most important part. This is one I’ll recommend to everyone with an Android phone.

Storify for iPad. That’s a complete sentence. Storify is a noun, yes. It’s a company that makes an app. But it’s also a verb that company invented. To storify is to take a series of discrete moments and thread them into a story. It stand alone or be embedded on a blog. With the Storify app, you can draw in posts from all over the Web and storify them. Storifying preserves events as they unfolded live online. It’s changing the way news happens.

Storify for iPad. It’s an imperative. You, go download Storify for iPad and use it to storify. It’s free. The Web version has a good workflow, but the interface can be clunky. On the iPad, Storify is fully realized. Grab tweets, comments, photos and videos with your finger, drag them into your story, then publish to the Web. That’s the news. No, I mean, “That’s the future of The News.”

Storify is a news service in its own right. In November, it redesigned its homepage to feature stories created by its users, highlighting the news of the day as it hit the Web. The work of world-class news organizations and total amateurs stands side by side. Many Storify stories might include the same tweets. That gives it great insight into the social media moments that matter most. Storify is a tool for remixing the news.

But it’s also a storytelling platform for journalists’ own work. Storify has played pivotal roles in social media-driven news cycles since it launched to the public almost a year ago. It has catapulted the work of college students to the front page of the Washington Post site. It’s a Swiss Army knife for digital journalists, and that includes you.

We’re big Storify users at RWW, and we want more out of the tool. We’re still waiting on lots of things, like Google+ and Disqus integration. There are work-arounds, though, like posting screenshots as images or typing in text manually. It may not be the most perfect thing in the entire universe, but Storify sure is working on it.

If you’re a guitar player, then chances are you’re already making use of your Android device in some way to help you with your music. Be it as an instant guitar tuner, to downloading tabs or even recording quick little jam sessions here and there – now you can expand on that usage with the release of Guitar Pro Tab Player to the Android market. This a mobile version of the Guitar Pro tab editing program available for Android devices 2.2 and up, and it’s pretty feature packed:

• Supporting GP3/4/5 and GPX (Guitar Pro 6) formats,
• File import through web server and file browser,
• Integrated library with search, filter, and favorite,
• Multitrack playback with soundboard: volume, solo-mute, soundbanks,
• Metronome and visual countdown,
• 3 levels of zoom,
• Guitar or bass fretboard (for right- and left-handers), and virtual keyboard.

Now, you can view, hear, and learn guitar, bass, or drum scores wherever you go and even share your files with others if you wish. The app is available in the Android Market right now as a paid app, you’ll find the download past the break.

The app’s description showed screenshots from Nintendo’s popular Game Boy RPG, yet many who got hoodwinked into a download complained that the app crashed immediately after the title screen. Even if it hadn’t, though, purchasers may have been disappointed: Intrepid Ars commenter RobWilco did some sleuthing and discovered that the app, as designed, seems to be a simple conglomeration of Pokemon-related news feeds and YouTube videos, rather than the promised working game.

Those who downloaded the app during its short time on this Earth can request a refund through the Purchase History section of iTunes.