Attendance for the conference was up significantly over last year and the prevailing tone was overwhelmingly optimistic, as eCommerce continues to assert its critical position in the world of consumer retail operations as a whole.  The obvious buzzword (or buzzphrase, if you will) was mobile commerce, and as the first developers of a mobile Volusion platform, we weren’t surprised one little bit.  Hit the jump to see a few pics of Brand Labs with all the party people…

Our fearless leaders, Kevin Harman and Dane Downer at the Stamps.com/Volusion mixer

Here we have Paul Goldman, CEO of Juiced Hybrids, Adelle Rodriguez from Volusion's marketing department with our perpetually smiling leader, Kevin

Finally, (clockwise from the left) there's our own Dane Downer with Andy Humphrey from EcoMowers.com, Mac Harman (no relation to our prez) from Balsam Hill, and (once again) Adelle Rodriguez from Volusion

Until June 28th, Mayors of any Starbucks location will receive discounts at all Starbucks locations.  It’s the first national discount utilizing the app, but almost certainly won’t be the last.

(via Mashable)

We were just thinking earlier today that there just aren’t enough ways to alert our friends and family to all of the truly exciting goings-on in our lives, and like magic, Google introduces Buzz.  Yet another avenue for our ceaseless, self-aggrandizing blatherings intended to completely break down centuries of spoken interpersonal communication until we all become nothing more than walking magazines focused on our own day to day lives.  We can’t wait until the day that we never actually have to engage in direct communication with another human being and neither can Google.  Enjoy!

Clearly Lauren and Brandon revel in the misfortune and embarrassment of others, because momsmsgs.com shares a format similar to textsfromlastnight.com, but this time, the target of their ceaseless ridicule is our poor, defenseless (and often socially clueless) elder population.  Of course it’s all in good fun, but you gotta believe that an empire built on this much bad karma is bound to come back and bite these fledgling entrepreneurs in the ass.  They can only hope that the targets of their first site are too blasted to be aware of it, and that the targets of their newest venture are too addled to do anything about it.  If not, Lauren and Brandon are likely to find themselves on the bad end of an octogenarian, drunk-texting, pitchfork-wielding mob, screaming for their blood.

… but until that day comes, congrats to both Lauren and Brandon!

Firefox has announced that despite the economy-crushing recession in 2008, their earnings for the year exceeded those of the previous year by 5 percent.   We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: There’s gold in them thar tubes!

(via ars technica)

Our friends at Google have just introduced a new service called Google Dashboard.  Using it you can find out just what information their superintelligent omninetwork has collected about you with the ultimate goal of enslaving you for their as yet unrevealed and certainly nefarious purposes (editor’s note: this may or may not be a gross mischaractariztion of our benevolent overlords).

Okay… so there’s a good chance that you either need to be an Internet professional or a complete and utter nerd in order to fully appreciate this, but Firefox 3.5 was released today. Granted, a good number of the features to get excited about have to do with open video and developer-related features that may not be all that sexy to most end users, but the increase in overall speed is something else. This latest release is twice as fast as Mozilla’s previous version and shorter load times are something we can all appreciate.

Here’s an interesting piece from 1994 on the crazy, science-fictiony future of a little thing called “The Internet”. Apparently, all of the cool kids are doing it.