Turns out there is another reason for rejecting all those insidious game invitations from smartphone apps and their Facebook counterparts: the New York Times has revealed today that the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, are mining the data that your smartphone apps are generating, from location data, to contact lists, to phone logs and even the data embedded in images. Dubbed the “Mobile Surge” by the Brits, the intelligence community is giddy with glee over the trove of data served up by mobile apps.

Do not upgrade to the newest version of Facebook Messenger for iOS without reading this first! Because the newest version of Facebook Messenger for iPhone is worse than a disaster. It’s a Nightmare on Phone Street.

Pizza Hut has announced that the Xbox 360 Pizza Hut app brought in a million dollars in pizza business in just the last 8 months (since it launched), much of it new pizza business.

A hot item at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been the Internet toothbrush. Both the Kolibree and the Beam Brush bluetooth toothbrush are connected to the Internet, and report back on just how well you are brushing your teeth. We can only assume that the next new thing in Internet toothbrushes will be a mouthcam.

It’s kind of like the Clapper, only instead of clapping you use an app on your smartphone, and instead of it turning on and off your light, it turns on a chirp that lets you find whatever it is you’ve lost. Yes, it’s a new breed of tracking device that you affix to whatever you don’t want to lose – your keys, your wallet, even your cell phone itself (we’ll explain that in a moment). They even use crowd-sourcing so that other users can help you in the search for your lost item. The TrackR from Phone Halo is already available, with the Tile tracking device not far behind. With the TrackR tracking device and app already available, we’ll focus on that first.

We’ve all done it. Brought home the leftovers from that restaurant meal (portions are so big), only to throw them out two weeks later. Or perhaps you don’t like bringing home leftovers at all, but just hate to waste all that food. Or maybe you ordered a pizza and realize that you can’t possibly finish it yourself. Now a new app, Leftover Swap, allows you to share your leftover food with others nearby. The brainchild of Dan Newman and Bryan Summersett, and drawing inspiration from Tristram Stuart, Newman explains “Besides the 40% of food we waste, there is 16% of the American population without enough food to live a healthy lifestyle, which is mind boggling.”

With the news of Microsoft acquiring Nokia, there has been a resurgence in the news of the terms “feature phone” and “dumb phone” (both as contrasted to a “smartphone” – and why is “smartphone” one word, but not “featurephone” or “dumbphone”?) So, some of you may be wondering “just what is a feature phone? And how is it different from a dumb phone or a smartphone?” We explain.

Lyft, which launched last year, is a “ride-sharing” service that really looks a bit more like a pirate taxi service, but that’s cool with us, we’re not judging. In fact, the Lfyt ride-sharing service, with its pink mustaches and themed cars is about as cool a way to get from here to there as you can imagine. And with Lyft’s app-based dispatching process (and with municipalities clamping down on ehail apps for regular cabs), it’s far easier to catch a Lyft than a regular cab in many cities. Well, at least in the cities where Lyft is currently available (read on for a list of cities where you can ride the pink mustache). We also tell you how to sign up to be a Lyft driver.

RSS (which stands for either “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”, depending on with whom you are speaking) can be thought of as software running on a website that takes new content that is posted to the site, and makes either a summary of the content, or all of the content, accessible to another companion piece of software, known as an RSS reader. The RSS reader is what the end-user runs. The RSS software creates a “feed” (an RSS feed), and the RSS reader polls the feed every so often to see if there is new content to fetch. RSS feeds are accessible by URLs, just like a website, and in fact the majority of sites with RSS feeds have the feeds set-up to be at their main web address, with “/feed” appended at the end.

Hate Monsanto? Sick of how Koch Industries’ brothers David Koch and Charle Koch have their fingers in everything? Wish there were a way to know before you buy which things have their taint, or their genetically modified (GMO) ingredients? Now, with the Buycott app, you can! Scan barcodes right in the store, and Buycott will trace the product through layers of subsidiaries to show you who is really behind the brand.

Lots of people were really excited to learn about the “Watch ABC” ABC Player app, which lets you watch ABC broadcast shows – live streaming – on your iPhone or iPad, or a Windows 8 computer (no word on an ABC Player for Android yet). And it’s free! The first two markets, New York and Philadelphia, went live today. However, there is a catch. You must be a cable customer, and they enforce it by requiring you to log in with the username and password for your cable subscription.

There have been other smartphone mood apps created, but none that take it to the limit like the Emotion Sense app that has been released to the public, for free. Developed in part as a research tool, the Emotion Sense app, which has been likened to having a therapist in your pocket, not only senses your emotions, but then correlates and cross-references that input with how you interact with your phone throughout the day.

You may or may not have ever worried that the person with whom you were about to hook up (or the person with whom you just hooked up) was related to you. But in Iceland they take their incest (prevention) seriously. That’s because, being a fairly tiny island nation, lots of Icelanders are related to lots of other Icelanders. In fact, there is a massive database (the Íslendingabók, or Book of Icelanders) in which would-be lovers look up that very information. Of course, in the heat of the moment, running to the computer may be second only to “What do you mean you don’t have a condom?” in terms of killing the mood. Now Icelandic lovers can can stay right in bed (or the car, or the alley), and whip out their smartphones to look up that same information, using the new Íslendinga app. In fact, if they each have the app, all they have to do is have their phone “do the bump”

A New York court has ruled that Manhattan residents can legally use the e-Hail “hail a cab” app to which the private car-for-hire and livery industry had objected. One of the apps, called the “New York Taxi Cab Riders – NYC Taxi Free” app, from Mphony, is the companion app to the “NY Taxi Cab for Drivers and Service Providers – NYC Taxi for Drivers” app, which New York City taxi cab drivers can run on their iPhones or iPads, and which shows where fares wanting to hail a cab are located. However, recently NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission Commissioner David Yassky said that Uber would be the service that would participate in a year-long pilot program.

If you are an Android user and have either of the apps called Superclean or DroidCleaner (AKA DroidClean), you are advised to remove them immediately to avoid malware jumping to your PC. The app, which has been removed from the app store, infects the computer with a virus that will open files, gather photos and obtain contact information.