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Here They Come: The Android Tablet Invasion 11:20 PM	ReadWriteWeb
Here They Come: The Android Tablet Invasion If you're in the market for a tablet computer but the iPad just doesn't do it for you, then just wait for the fall, as a number of Android alternatives are ready to hit the market over the next several months and there's something for everyone. A collaborative Google spreadsheet has been making the rounds on Reddit this morning and offers a list of nearly 20 Android tablets ranging from cheap to expensive, locked-down to hackable, and all easily comparable. The tablet in the spotlight for several months now has been, of course, the Apple iPad, which starts at $499 and comes with a 9.7-inch screen, weighs 1.5 pounds and offers up to 10 hours of Wi-Fi Web surfing, video watching and music playing. While it seems that the iPad has certainly been a success, there are a number of features we've hoped to see from competitors. From more accessible pricing to a camera to something as simple as a USB port, the Android alternatives are quickly coming to market to fulfill our wishes. According to the collaborative comparison of Android tablets, which is constantly evolving as thousands of users add to it, there are Android tablets ranging from as little as $99 to as much as $550, if not more. There are tablets with cameras, tablets that can provide up to 36 hours of video, and tablets with as much as 11.2 inches of screen real estate. According to the document, the creators are considering anything with a screen larger than 5 inches that does not require a cellular contract a "tablet", although there seems to be some leeway, as evidenced by the presence of the Archos "palm-sized tablets", which looks like the Android equivalent of an iPod Touch. If you're looking to keep up to date on Android alternatives to the Apple iPad, this collaborative effort may be a good place to keep an eye on. As we've watched along this morning, more than 2,000 people have been viewing the spreadsheet at once and, as many note in Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How Push Notifications Will Change Twitter 9:56 PM	ReadWriteWeb
How Push Notifications Will Change Twitter Are you ready to get buzzed by Tweets? Twitter confirmed last week that it is experimenting with and will soon roll out push notifications through its official iPhone app. What does that mean? It depends on how exactly the company lets users manage and receive their notifications, but it's not to early to start thinking about how push could change the Twitter experience. We asked a number of experts in the field of User Experience design what they thought about Twitter push notifications and several of them predicted it will be a game-changer for mainstream users. Charlene McBride, a self-described "cranky UX designer" from Boston, says first what we're all probably thinking: "I think it could be an interesting way for users to prioritize certain tweets, but I also wonder what keeps it from becoming yet another firehose of status updates." Let's look past the risk of information overload for a moment, though, and assume that Twitter implements the feature well. What might that mean? Right: screenshot captured by Nick Starr. For me, getting replies and direct messages sent to me by push notification (I've been using Notifio) has been really nice. Twitter can be both synchronous (a real time exchange) and asynchronous (I'll see your posts when I get around to it) but the addition of push notifications brings the personal communication of replies and direct messages firmly into the synchronous experience, even when I'm not at my computer or looking at a mobile app. It really adds to the flow of using Twitter. The asynchronous part of Twitter is most suited to non-personal messages broadcast by the people I'm following; I'd like the messages intended for me personally right away, please. Twitter can be both synchronous (a real time exchange) and asynchronous (I'll see your posts when I get around to it) but the addition of push notifications brings the personal communication of replies and direct messages firmly into the synchronous experience. It really adds to the flow of using Twitter.It makes sense for me to have that option with regard to those personal messages; probably more sense than Twitter's original option to receive every message posted by some or all users you followed delivered to you by SMS. That original model quickly fell apart once you followed more than just a few close friends and family. As the way people use Twitter has taken shape in a way different from what its creators originally envisioned, a new balance between synchronous and asynchronous messaging is needed. That's my take on it, here's what some more UX pros have to say. Push as SMS Replacement Cindy Alvarez, author of the San Francisco-based blog The Experience is the Product, thinks push notifications could supplant SMS and win some new users to Twitter: The non-Twitter-users I know say, 'If you want a reply, you text or email [a recipient]; if you don't need a reply you post to Facebook, what is Twitter good for?' Bringing a more SMS-like experience to the desktop (where you don't incur $0.05 per text charges) might win over a different audience. Twitter and SMS coming together again, just like the product's creators originally envisioned? That could lead to some truly far-out use-cases, too. "[Push notifications] really start to blur the lines between what we traditionally think of as a Twitter client and SMS," says Dwayne King, User Experience Strategist at Portland, Oregon design firm Pinpoint Logic. "Not knowing for sure what options they'll open up for push, it could expand beyond the bounds of what something like SMS could do. Where SMS requires some sort of pre-existing relationship between the texters, Twitter and push via hash tags or geographic location opens up a new avenue for meet-ups, flash mobs and such." Bringing Celeb-Tracking Mainstream Users Back to the Good Old Days of Twitter The most compelling take on the User Experience implications of Twitter push notifications may come from Aviel Ginzburg, UX guy at Seattle-based Untitled Startup, makers of Twitter bulk-conversation analysis tool RowFeeder. Ginzburg thinks that the addition of push notification tools could help make mainstream users, who have been introduced to Twitter as a way to passively consume updates from celebrities, aware of the service's incredible potential as a communication tool. "Those of us who have been using Twitter since the days that it was largely (entirely) text messaging driven perceive Twitter much differently than mainstream users. "The way that the site has been restructured in the past several months including the new search, celebrity, and brand focus, categories, featured tweets, promotions, etc have drawn in the mainstream in such a way that they aren't perceiving Twitter in the way that the early adopters do - as a real-time communication platform..." -Aviel Ginzburg"Two days ago I was having coffee with a friend of mine, who has been on Twitter for a little over a year (tweets everyday, DMs, @replies people, and even owns an iphone w/Twitter for iPhone) and as my phone beeped over and over again, she asked me if something was wrong. I said no, I just get my DMs text messaged to my phone. Her response was, 'you can do that?!' "She has been using Twitter like people use Facebook, as a way to consume (mainly) and share content in a 'on your own time' fashion. When she uses Twitter, she really uses it, but in controlled bursts when she is physically engaging. "The way that the site has been restructured in the past several months including the new search, celebrity, and brand focus, categories, featured tweets, promotions, etc have drawn in the mainstream in such a way that they aren't perceiving Twitter in the way that the early adopters do - as a real-time communication platform that will one day replace text messaging, email, and even phone calls. Just look at the Twitter homepage... it's a text media consumption site. "With the announcement of push notifications, they're bring the messaging platform core value proposition back to the forefront, and pushing the mainstream, who joined Twitter for entirely different reasons, to experience Twitter in the same way us early adopters do -- as a real-time communication channel that you never disconnect from. The concern of course is: have these users really signed-up for entering a service where the are expected to be available and engaged at all times? "It may seem like a small and logical update (cut out the text messaging middle-man), but really, Twitter is going to be dramatically changing the way its mainstreams users experience and use Twitter." What do you think the implications of push notifications in Twitter's own mobile applications will be? Are you looking forward to it? Do you think it's something only power-users are really interested in? Do you think it will change peoples' SMS habits? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Weekly White Paper: Curbing Skyrocketing IT Energy Costs 9:08 PM	ReadWriteWeb
Weekly White Paper: Curbing Skyrocketing IT Energy Costs Switch on a server and you've just doubled its cost. According to Gartner, between 2007 and 2012, most U.S. enterprise datacenters will spend as much on power and cooling as on the hardware itself. Gartner predicts that energy costs for IT operations could also double by 2012 due to the volume of data that will flow through organizations and the expected increase in utilities. The answer? Consolidate your servers and optimize them as best as possible. Download White Paper PDF Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Hack of the Day: Stronger Wording by Script or Click 8:16 PM	ReadWriteWeb
Hack of the Day: Stronger Wording by Script or Click RWH Level: Beginner When you are writing Web applications it is easy to be terse, obtuse or just plain devoid of reasonable text that conveys what a user is expected to do. Worse, a support page or even the humble README can leave fellow developers wondering what you were thinking or drinking. As with any problem, the solution involves more software! With that in mind, it makes sense to take a look at some interesting approaches that will give you a leg up the next time you craft an epic INSTALL file. A Very Small Shell Script One interesting collection of shell scripts from @mattmight seeks to mimize so-called weasel words. If you are into command line options you'll enjoy this collection as you prepare your own bodies of text. For the more visually inclined, Yahoo Pipes provides methods to examine some of your favorite RSS feeds for words known to make you stop reading. In the following example, the regular RWW feed is drawn down in and filtered for some of those same weasel words. The result is a shorter list of articles that might make you less prone to curse at your screen. In this case, only a subset of the articles in the RSS feed are returned due to the filtering on specific weasel words. {"pipe_id":"ebf7bae50f6dde3130b9ffafc349e25a","_btype":"list"} This is a simple example but you could easily expand this for your own needs. Harsh? Yes. Effective? You bet. What are words and phrases that you'd consider weasel words? Are you using any scripts or techniques to avoid using them? Let us know in the comments below! Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
New Apps for Your Mobile Phone: September Edition 6:20 PM	ReadWriteWeb
New Apps for Your Mobile Phone: September Edition There are now some 250,000 mobile applications for Apple's iPhone and iPad, and over 70,000 for Android. How on earth do you find ones that are actually worth using? You could use a recommendation engine or website, an app that recommends apps or ask a friend. But every now and then, we like to round up a few of our favorites and share them with you. This latest edition of our favorite mobile apps includes some newer ones for you to try along with us, as well as some which have received notable updates. This month, we're focusing on apps that make your life easier. iPhone Apps LucyPhone: LucyPhone is free service designed to wait on hold for customer service and then call you back when the rep finally picks up. The iPhone app offers the same functionality as the Web service, allowing mobile users to search a company database or enter a toll-free number and monitor how long they've been on hold. Download from iTunes here. ScanBizCards & CardMunch: ScanBizCards digitizes business cards using the iPhone's camera. The app can recognize the text on the card, including the person's name, email address and phone number. It then imports it directly into your contacts. When the contact is saved, you also have the option of sending a follow-up email. The cards can be flipped through cover-flow style and are clickable, too, allowing you to tap the contact to add them to your LinkedIn connections list, for example. (For more on this another other digital business card solutions, check out this article from July). CardMunch does much of the same, but offers a free app download where ScanBizCards is $6.99. CardMunch uses credits (e.g. 40 credits = 40 cards, price= $10.00) and ScanBizCards offers in-app purchases for Web-based backup (1 year=$9.99). imo.im: Imo.in is a multi-protocol, Web-based IM service that supports AIM, Facebook, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, MySpace, Skype, and Yahoo. The app lets you maintain concurrent sessions, allowing you to be logged into imo.im with multiple computers, iPhone apps and Chrome extensions. The new iPhone app keeps you signed in, even when the app is closed, for up to 72 hours, while still letting you receive push notifications. It also provides a searchable interface to your chat history for when you're on the go. Download from iTunes here. Blancspot: Blancspot is another news reader application in the style of similar apps like Pulse and Flipboard that delivers the headlines along with visually compelling images and then allows you to share them with friends via Facebook and Twitter. The goal of the app is to boil down complex topics into easily digestible sections that maintain the essence of a story. It's great for browsing the latest headlines on the go, but with one fatal flaw: there's no "off" switch for the accompanying music. Download from iTunes here. iHound: Parents will like iHound's new "geofencing" feature in its iPhone application. The app can now send push notifications when kids arrive or leave school and/or other after-school activities. It also allows you to broadcast your status to others, integrates with Foursquare for check-ins and can push other types of notifications to your phone, like reviews of local restaurants when you arrive at your vacation destination or a shopping list when you arrive at the store. Download from iTunes here. iPhone/Android Apps SpringPad: This Evernote competitor, already available as a Web service and iPhone app, recently arrived on the Android, allowing you to easily save info you need to remember. With SpringPad, you can save notes, tasks, lists, scan barcodes, take photos and geolocate nearby businesses. The app automatically organizes and enhances all this "saved stuff" for you and syncs it with the Web service springpadit.com, for access when you return to your computer.  ProOnGo: This expense-tracking app lets you create expense reports by taking pictures of your receipts. Although not brand-new to iPhone, the Android version of the app was recently updated with a two-way sync feature between the servers and the device. Now Android users can email receipt images to ProOnGo's Receipt Reader, use custom categories for expenses and backup expenses when moving between devices.  Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
PARC Releases New Semantic Technology (in Form of an Ou... 5:02 PM	ReadWriteWeb
PARC Releases New Semantic Technology (in Form of an Outlook Plugin) The Palo Alto Research Center is releasing new semantic technology, based on Xerox PARC IP, in the form of an Outlook plugin called Meshin. At first glance, Meshin looks like the ugly stepsister to a similar Outlook tool called Xobni, as it also loads into an email sidebar window, displaying sections dedicated to recent conversations and a summary of attachments shared back and forth via email, among other things. But what makes Meshin different is the engine powering it underneath: a semantic technology that uses "natural language processing" to understand entities, how they connect and what they mean. Invites available! Click through for link. The engineers freely admit that Meshin's user interface (UI) is currently the Achilles' Heel of the app. It's nowhere near as polished and put together as competitor Xobni's, for example. But they'll fix that, they promise. "We're hiring a UI designer," they tell us. Focusing on the looks, though, is missing the big picture. Meshin is different from other email-based contact management systems including not only Xobni, but analysis engines like Gist, too. Where those companies hinge on the person - here's their title, where they work, their emails, attachments, their blog posts, their last Twitter update, etc. - Meshin actually analyzes the information found in the information streams it examines. It then extracts related conversations, related messages, related people and other semantically understood data. And it does so by looking beyond keywords. It knows what things mean. It knows if a word is referring to a person, place or thing. It can also surface related links and news from the Web for any given entity. Read More about Xobni and Gist. Already, the engine behind Meshin isn't limited to email messages alone. For example, if you subscribe to RSS feeds within Outlook, those are also understood as being a part of the relationship map with another person. If you subscribe to Twitter feeds within Outlook, again, those are analyzed, along with the other streams. Meshin arose from a Xerox-funded project inside PARC whose goal is to commercialize older PARC IP for a broader audience. The project has been in development for only a year, with a small core team and support from PARC researchers. The long-term goal for Meshin is to extend itself beyond Outlook, in order to connect other types of information streams together.  The researchers are contemplating where they should take the technology next - another email platform? An RSS reader? A standalone product? Should they open up Meshin APIs (application programming interfaces) for developers to use within their own applications and services? All these models are a possibility, but first the engineers wanted to just get the technology out there, in the hands of users. We're helping them with that by distributing invites to the private beta. For access, click here. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
7 Ways to Increase User Participation 4:50 PM	ReadWriteWeb
7 Ways to Increase User Participation Running a site doesn't only require Web development skills. Any site where the users can add content and communicate with each other requires a great deal of care and attention if it's going to be a success. Increasing user participation on your site is achievable if you aim for the old adage KISS, or keep it simple, stupid. Beyond that, there are a few things you can do to get more people to interact with your site. Here are seven tips to set you on that path. 1. Enable Social Logins I'd suggest losing registration altogether if you can. But if your site requires registration, best to make it as simple as possible. A quick click here, a quick click there, and hey presto - one registered user without the barrier of a signup form. Check out our guide to JanRain Engage and you'll be setting up social logins in no time. 2. Clearly Signpost the Forums Got a forum on your site? Good! Now make sure it's easy to find. Forums are not a great deal of use if nobody can find them. Put a link to the forums in the main navigation bar - don't bury it on a sub-page. 3. Show Avatars Everywhere I've always found forum software to be rather plain and boring. Avatars are shown when you view a post, but on the topic listing, not so much. Something like this seems much more appealing: This is a layout I developed for a site with built-in forum functionality. Displaying avatars at this level helps when differentiating between the topics in the list. 4. Highlight Recent Activity People are much more likely to participate in a site if they can quickly find what's new and updated across the site. Whether it's recent blog comments, replies in the forums, new members or site upgrades, some people will be interested to see what's going on. Let them find that information. 5. Talk To Them! If you're building a site for someone else, there may be limits to what you can do in this area. But if it's your site, or you're contributing to a site where it's acceptable for the developers to get involved, do so. Being approachable is a very good character trait for a developer to possess - it shows you care. 6. Run Member Polls If a lot of people have something to say, particularly about new or proposed features, it can be useful to distil this information into a member poll. Running a poll from time to time gives you a good insight into the general views of the community, while simultaneously sharing the same information with members. 7. Reward Top Contributors Do you have a few people who stand out as being helpful, resourceful or good at keeping the peace? Depending on the goals of your site, giving out small tokens of appreciation can be a big help. Be careful not to alienate the less frequent contributors though. Photo by JamieL.WilliamsPhotography Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Remote Work: Pitfalls and How to Avoid them 4:50 PM	ReadWriteWeb
Remote Work: Pitfalls and How to Avoid them One big theme to emerge out of our conversation last week about the future of the workplace was remote working. I thought it would be beneficial to start this week off by thinking about the disadvantages of remote work and the technologies and policies that may be able to mitigate some of those problems. Productivity remains a concern for managers unwilling to give their employees a chance, but according to telecommute advocacy groups like Undress for Success and The American Telecommuting Association, research shows those concerns are mostly unwarranted. However, there are some other problems. Here are some of the issues I've witnessed in organizations of all sizes, and some ideas about what to do to fix these issues. Please leave your own gripes and solutions in the comments, or e-mail klint@readwriteweb.com, and we'll highlight the best responses in a follow-up on Friday. Missing Out On "Hallway Meetings" Anti-meeting commentators, such as those from 37signals often point out how unproductive meetings are, and how little hallway conversations are usually where the most important conversations take place. This is probably true, but it creates a communication problem: those important conversations and decisions have to communicated to everyone who needs to know about them. This can be hard enough when everyone works in the same space. But when employees aren't physically present, keeping everyone in the loop can be even more difficult. Solution: This is what e-mail and intranets are for. Managers need to be dililgant about documenting and communicating decisions, and making sure that information is easily accessible to employees. Lack of Responsiveness During Work Hours One of the proposed advantages of teleworking is the ability to minimize interruptions from co-workers. However, sometimes co-workers have important needs and questions and not being able to get in touch with a remote working employee can damage everyone else's productivity. This is exacerbated by flex time, especially when flex time overlaps with telecommuting. Solution: Communicate virtual "office hours," and set standards for timeliness of responses. Instant messaing has proved to be a good medium for communication remote workers, but can be a distracting productivity killer. Setting "IM hours" could be a happy medium. Being diligent about entering useful information into the organization's intranet will reduce the necessity to be contacted directly. Using Q&A sites like MindQuilt could also help employees find answers to questions. Morale Jealousy can impact the morale of workers who can't or aren't allowed to work from home. Also, while managers can track the productivity of employees who work from home, co-workers might be less privy to that information and harbor doubts about their remote co-workers accomplishments. Solutions: Undress for Success recommends the following for dealing with telecommute-envy in the workplace: Employees need to understand why they were or were not chosen for telework. Employees should see telework as a benefit that is earned, not given. Standards of selection should be uniform. Photo by Richard Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Debate Around Password Security Overlooks Universal Logins 4:34 AM	ReadWriteWeb
Debate Around Password Security Overlooks Universal Logins Must include at least one number. Must be longer than six characters. Cannot have more than four sequential characters from your previous seven passwords. The rules for password creation vary wildly from site to site, an effort to protect users from those who would hack their identities. These protective measures don't go very far, according to the New York Times, because hackers can get ahold of passwords with software that remotely tracks keystrokes, or by tricking users into typing them in. The story touches on a range of issues around the problem, but neglects to mention the obvious: the march toward a centralized login for multiple sites. A universal login could solve a lot of the issues around password security, from keylogging to the problem of users having their passwords discovered after writing them down. It would also solve the problem of password-overload. Managing logins for all the Web sites that require registration is a pain, and any frequent Web user who says differently is either lying or has a photographic memory. Browsers have taken some of the pain away by remembering passwords for us, but clear your browser's history and suddenly you have to answer secret questions and email your username to yourself for umpteen different sites. A handy chart to help you create secure passwords, from Microsoft. One or more options for a universal login is inevitable and progress is well underway. More and more sites are supporting the easy-to-use Facebook Connect, which lets users register for a site with their Facebook profile instead of creating a site-specific username and password. As of last year, there were more than nine million websites using OpenID, the openly-developed standard that users can use to log in across multiple sites. Standards like OpenID carry their own security problems (and other problems - see The Troubles With OpenID 2.0), the obvious being that a successful hacker can gain access to all the sites and services you use at once. But the convenience of a universal login is irresistible, especially for the myriad sites where there's no danger if your password is hacked, such as news sites. Users who try it won't want to go back - which is why it's important to talk about the security issues around these new protocols for users and the sites that implement them. How do you manage your logins? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Journo Writes 1,000+ Word Story on Twitter After Media ... 2:32 AM	ReadWriteWeb
Journo Writes 1,000+ Word Story on Twitter After Media Missed Major Breaking News There were no reporters present in Laurel, Miss. when a jury handed down a $131 million verdict against Ford after an Explorer rolled over, killing a young man who was on track to play baseball for the New York Mets. Hours after the verdict, there was no coverage of a case that involved a high profile victim, a major corporation, and the possibility that more than four million Ford Explorers are dangerously unstable. Adam Penenberg heard about the verdict immediately from the defense lawyer. Hours later, he was amazed to see there had been no major media coverage at all. So he turned to Twitter. Firing off more than 50 tweets in two hours, Penenberg related the entire story of the fatal accident, the case and the verdict. The result reads like an entry from Simple English Wikipedia, interspersed with tweets pleading reporters to pick up the story. "Miss. jury awards $131 million in damages to family of Brian Cole, killed in Ford Explorer rollover accident. No news media there," he wrote. Then, "C'mon reporters. Am I only one who thinks $131 MILLION verdict against FORD in a product liability suit is news??" "C'mon reporters. Am I only one who thinks $131 MILLION verdict against FORD in a product liability suit is news??" -Adam Penenberg Penenberg is a contributing writer for the magazine Fast Company who wrote a book about the dangers of SUVs. He knew about the verdict immediately from the lawyer in the Ford case, but had no venue for breaking the news where people would see it - other than Twitter, where he has more than 2,800 followers. The story eventually emerged in the major news media. But Penenberg's tweetstream was longer than many of the stories. He even corrected an Associated Press story in a tweet. Penenberg had an advantage over other reporters covering the case because he has written a book about the subject. A journalist who gets a complex, multi-million dollar unlawful death suit dropped in her lap is going to produce less robust coverage than one who already knows the history and the players. That combination of better coverage, faster, is the exception rather than the rule. Every media outlet strives for both. But more often than not, the quality of an article is inversely related to the amount of time it took to create. The Internet has made it possible to break news faster than ever, and Twitter epitomizes this. Typing 140 characters is faster than TV and much faster than blogging - especially if you can do it from your phone. Penenberg said the experiment taught him how efficient Twitter is for breaking news, and he plans to use it from now on. What do you think - do you like your breaking news live-blogged from Twitter? Or do you think Twitter has potential for dumbing down the news by upping the emphasis on speed over quality? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Cartoon: Happy Labor Day! Sep 05 2010 19:22:25	ReadWriteWeb
Cartoon: Happy Labor Day! Heading outside this Labor Day weekend? (Or, as we spell it in Canada, "Labour Dauy"?) Well, enjoy - provided you aren't being hit by New Zealand earthquakes (hi, Richard!), Eastern Seaboard hurricanes, Russian forest fires, or the global outbreak of Duke Nukem fever. Of course, in most of the world - including ReadWriteWeb's headquarters in Wellington, New Zealand - it isn't labor day at all. But please don't let that stop you. Break out the barbecue, put a few burgers (beef, tofu or unicorn, depending on your tastes) on the grill, have some friends over, and relax. And if you happen to sneak a peek at the Twitter app your smartphone, or slip inside to check up on your newsfeeds, or check in somewhere on FourSquare or Gowalla, so much the better. Maybe this has been the season of the digital fast... but for a lot of us, it's also a time to connect with friends and family. Consider this permission to do that however you want this weekend: over blogs or beers; HootSuite or horseshoes; Facebook or Frisbees. More Noise to Signal. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Using a Virtual Personal Assistant for Your Startup Sep 05 2010 18:02:17	ReadWriteWeb
Using a Virtual Personal Assistant for Your Startup ReadWriteWeb Co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick recently extolled the virtues of Amazon's Mechanical Turk for "rocking conference blogging." He's not the only person who's seeing some real benefits from outsourcing small tasks to the service, as I've noticed a number of people talk about the ways in which they use - or could envision using - Mechanical Turk to help them. Ewan McIntosh, for example, wonders if teachers could utilize the service to outsource some of the "larger scale time suckers" in education -- entering attendance records, generating letters to parents, and so on. Lindsey Harper recently wrote about her experiences using Mechanical Turk to validate her startup idea. Noting that friends and family are unlikely to be objective when assessing whether or not your idea is viable, she spent $28 on the Amazon service in order to poll 200 people on her concept. Her survey asked whether or not they'd use the service, example of how they might use it. In addition to asking for general feedback on the idea, she also captured gender and age demographics, so she could have a better idea of who her market might be. "The information I got back for my $27.50 was INVALUABLE," she writes. "I found from that 1 survey, how to basically build my product for launch. What features I had to have based on how users would use the service. I also realized I could basically cut my current feature set in 1/2 because what I thought people would want, wasn't even mentioned." Rob Walling had a guest post on Jason Cohen's blog last week that goes into more details about some of the other ways startups can use Mechanical Turk and other virtual personal assistants. The post is an excerpt from Walling's new book Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup. As Walling notes, "The value proposition of a VA deals with how you monetize your time. If you monetize it at $50/hour and you can pay a VA $6/hour to handle administrative tasks, this frees up time for you to create real value in your business by developing new features or expanding marketing efforts. Performing tasks you could pay someone else $6 to accomplish is a foolish use of an entrepreneur's time." Echoing Harper's use of Mechanical Turk, Walling argues that virtual assistants can be useful for startups to develop proof of concept. But they can also be utilized following launch to handle small administrative tasks. Walling offers a lot of great tips on how to find and evaluate virtual assistants, noting that "My first piece of advice is to avoid spending too much time worrying about screening your VA before you hire them. In the end, how well they work out depends entirely on how well they accomplish their tasks." Hiring someone will help you judge their efficiency and reliability, and Walling suggests these steps for the first task you assign: Back everything upProvide detailed instructions. Even better, provide screenshots. Timebox your requests, but assume that the virtual assistant will not be as fast as you are.Be clear with the timeline you establish for the work. If the first virtual assistant you hire doesn't work out, find another one. But don't give up on the whole process after one go, says Walling, as it takes time as an entrepreneur to find how to best utilize this sort of service. Have you utilized a virtual personal assistant for your startup? How so? And what have your experiences been? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Check Out the Companies That Make ReadWriteWeb Possible Sep 05 2010 17:48:27	ReadWriteWeb
Check Out the Companies That Make ReadWriteWeb Possible Our readers know ReadWriteWeb as the blog that's ahead of the technology curve. Our sponsors know us as that, too. Once a week we introduce our sponsors to our readers and let them know a little more about who they are and what they do. You can say thanks to the companies that make ReadWriteWeb happen by tweeting them (see the link below each sponsor) or following them using our Twitter list. Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? Our readers are smart, tech-savvy decision makers; 40% have a graduate degree or PhD, and over 45% play a key role in information technology purchasing decisions. More than 1 million people on Twitter follow us to stay abreast of the latest Web technology trends from around the globe. To find out more about our sponsor packages, visit our advertising page or email our COO. Skip to info about: Medill School of Journalism: Digital journalism programs | MindTouch: Strategic Documentation and Enterprise Collaboration Platforms | Mashery: API management services | Tableau : Data visualization | Conduit: Customized components | Alcatel-Lucent: Application developer platform | TransFS: Comparison shopping for credit card processing | Toopia: Our iPhone app developer Medill School of Journalism The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University offers programs that combine the enduring skills and values of journalism with new techniques and knowledge that are essential to thrive in a digital world. You might have a passion for creating finely crafted prose, or for telling stories using visual tools. Maybe you are invigorated by the possibilities of interactive publishing, or by videography for the small screen. Maybe you are an experienced professional looking to renew and retool your multimedia skills. You can find your niche in Medill's graduate journalism program. Thank the Medill School of Journalism on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. MindTouch MindTouch assembles your organization's genius into strategic content: MindTouch is built on the belief that enterprise software must be scalable, agile and extensible. Our product, MindTouch 2010, transforms the way organizations author, discover and curate strategic content to achieve measurable results with customers, partners and colleagues. Our open source project, MindTouch Core, is used by over 18 million people and is supported by one of world's most active communities. Founded in 2005, MindTouch is headquartered in San Diego, California and is privately held. Many of the world's most respected brands rely on MindTouch. Our more than 1,000 customers include NASA, SAIC, Booz Allen, Microsoft, Cisco, Washington Post, Viacom, the New York Times, AXA, Timberland and HCA. Thank MindTouch on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Mashery Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business. You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com. Thank Mashery on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Tableau Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the web in interesting and compelling graphs. Download Tableau Public and in minutes, you can create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog in minutes. Anyone can do it. You don't need to be a programmer or hire one - no language to learn, no plug-ins, no API. Your blog or website will stand out with colorful, interactive data visualizations. Bloggers using Tableau Public are averaging 3 times more reader comments. And, once on the web, anyone can interact with your graph and the data. They can re-embed your work, download the data, or create their own visualizations. Check out our gallery to see some of the cool graphs bloggers have created. Or learn how in our 5 minute video. Thank Tableau on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
6 SaaS Metrics You Should Track Sep 05 2010 16:40:26	ReadWriteWeb
6 SaaS Metrics You Should Track As you work to develop your product - before and after launch, it's important that you use more than just "gut feelings" to ascertain what's working and what's not. Along those lines, last week, Ryan Carson, co-founder of Carsonified offered a list of six key metrics for your web app and how to track them. It's a great list - with definitions, calculation methods, examples, and even a link to a Google spreadsheet (see below for link) that you can use to input your own data. 1. Churn Definition: Churn is the % of customers that cancel each month. Calculation: number_cancellations_this_month / total_number_paying_customers As Carson notes, churn will vary depending on the kind of app you offer. If your app is something that's crucial to others' businesses, such as an invoicing app, then your churn will likely be lower than an entertainment app, something that may be the first to be canceled when budgets are tight. Using Churn, you can calculate the Average Customer Lifetime - the average number of months that a customer stays with you before canceling. The calcuation is 100 / churn_percentage. 2. CMRR Definition: CMRR is "Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue." Calculation: (total_number_paying_accounts - number_cancelled_paying_accounts_this_month) * monthly_price Carson suggests you aim for a monthly growth of around 5% ater Churn in your CMRR. You need to be sure your CMRR keeps pace with your Churn, otherwise you will start losing money. 3. Cash Definition: Money in the bank. Calculation: cash_at_end_of_last_month + (CMRR - total_monthly_costs) Likely negative for the first several months as you work towards profitability, Carson says that at Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
No Crackdown but Questions in Europe About Data Protect... Sep 05 2010 06:32:24	ReadWriteWeb
No Crackdown but Questions in Europe About Data Protection and the Cloud German authorities have recently expressed skepticism about cloud computing and the potential it has for breaking data protection laws. According to the Information Law Group, there is no imminent danger of a European crackdown but legal experts are advising international companies to address the potential concerns in their planning and operations. The controversy stems from Dr. Thilo Weichert, head of the data protection commission in the northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Weichert is calling for the abolition of the Safe Harbor framework and doubts the ability of companies to protect the rights of Europeans, who enjoy some of the strongest personal privacy laws in the world. According to the Information Law Group, the Safe Harbor Framework was "developed jointly by the European Commission and the US Department of Commerce, under which American companies can publicly certify compliance with a standard set of Safe Harbor Privacy Principles approved by the European Commission and enforced by American regulators, predominantly the Federal Trade Commission." The concerns about data privacy are also felt across Europe. Most of the tension arise from how personal data is stored in the Untied States, where privacy laws are less comprehensive. European law is fairly meticulous on the matter of data privacy. There are a number of ways that a customer needs to be notified about how their information is being processed. The belief is that on many occasions, customers are not informed at all when using SaaS services and cloud computing services. Still, there have been no formal complaints issued against cloud computing providers. The concerns from Germany do come at a time when Europe is beginning to review data protection laws that have been on the books for the past 15 years. Comments have been submitted to the European Commission, which has decided to push back any ruling until mid-2011 due to the varying approaches European countries have been taking about data privacy enforcement. According to the Information Law Group, the commission also want to examine how best to apply the general principles of the law in an "increasingly global, networked, and distributed computing environment." The law group advises companies to make sure they are compliant by "handling European employee data in centralized enterprise resource management systems or outsourced applications." Outsourced applications could be any variety of services. But due to the general tone in Europe right now, companies need to make sure cloud computing providers can prove they are compliant. This can be difficult at times as providers are sometimes hesitant about disclosing locations or sub-contractors. If they can't, then it's time to start looking at other options. Further, the Information Law Group says it's important that customers check to see if United States vendors, including cloud service providers, "are Safe Harbor certified, or alternatively use EU-approved standard contract clauses." This issue shows again why transparency and standardized policies will be increasingly important to develop in the cloud computing market. European authorities have a reputation for strict data protection requirements. That's not going to change. It's a just a question what effect the law will have on the technology itself as privacy takes center stage. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
StarCraft For Startups Sep 04 2010 23:50:24	ReadWriteWeb
StarCraft For Startups I recently had an urge to pick up an MMORPG again, but after checking on the profile for my favorite Everquest 2 character - clocking in at over 138 days played - it's probably best I not devote myself to the life of hardcore raiding at particular juncture. That being said, as a self-described gamer, I'm pretty sympathetic to any argument made that playing MMOs makes you a better person. And perhaps Koichi feels the same way, making the strong case on his blog that "Startups Should Only Hire Good StarCraft Players." His (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) list includes: Good StarCraft Players Are Obsessed with ImprovingGood StarCraft Players Can Wear a Lot of HatsGood StarCraft Players Know How To Micro (Use Resources Efficiently)Good StarCraft Players Make Quick, Good DecisionsGood StarCraft Players Don't Forget To Scout (And Don't Obsess Over Scouting)Good StarCraft Players Know When To Say GG ("Good Game") and QuitGood StarCraft Players Have A High APM (Actions Per Minute)Good StarCraft Players Do Something Besides Work The argument that you can hone a variety of skills via MMOs isn't new (See the Guild CIO for a long list that guild leadership teaches, including conflict resolution, talent recruitment and retention, and strategic planning and vision.) And I'm not sure StarCraft holds a monopoly on startup skill-building. (I'd love to write a comparison between StarCraft and Angry Birds for entrepreneurs, but I can imagine the outraged Letters to the Editor in response.) Koichi's post was inspired in part by an announcement for StartupCraft, a StarCraft II Tournament for tech startups to be held October 2 in San Francisco. There'll be 2v2 and 4v4 brackets. A $50 donation is recommended per team, 100% of which will be donated to Child's Play. The tournament will be broadcast live via Justin.tv, who is hosting the tournament in its San Francisco office. 14 companies have already registered their teams. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, 4 Sept. 2010 Sep 04 2010 19:54:26	ReadWriteWeb
ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, 4 Sept. 2010 We're always on the lookout for upcoming Web tech events from around world. Know of something taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or email us. You can import individual events in the Events Guide into Google Calendar using the link beside each entry, or download the entire thing as an iCal file (which is importable into Google Calendar, Outlook, Windows Live Calendar, etc.) or even view it as a world map. 13 September 2010: Moffett Field, California Singularity University Grand Challenges Unveiling This summer, 80 students from 35 nations were challenged to apply innovations in exponentially advancing technologies to solve some of the world's "grand challenges" with a focus on food, water, energy, upcycle, and space industries. On Sept. 13 at 9:30 a.m. Pacific, Singularity University co-founders Dr. Ray Kurzweil, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, and faculty head Dr. Dan Barry will unveil for the first time multiple solutions in each problem space, each aiming to impact a billion people within ten years. A Q&A session will follow the briefing. For more information, visit http://briefing.singularityu.org Singularity University is an interdisciplinary university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity's grand challenges. Visit them at www.singularityu.org. 13 - 14 September 2010: San Francisco APPNATION APPNATION is an ambitious and bold new thought leadership conference and exposition focusing exclusively on the burgeoning consumer applications revolution and global app economy. The inaugural APPNATION event is scheduled for September 13-14, 2010 at the Moscone Convention Center in downtown San Francisco and will feature speakers and exhibitors from leading companies from across the app economy including Google, Fox, Zynga, Microsoft, The North Face, AT&T, GetJar, Mediabrands, Major League Baseball, General Electric, The Wall Street Journal, AKQA, Smule, eBuddy, Distimo, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Symbian, PepsiCo, JP Morgan Chase, Ogilvy, Lima Sky and dozens of others. Developers: Win big cash prizes in the "Pimp My App" contest! Learn more at www.appnationconference.com. ReadWriteWeb readers get 25% off full conference registration by using code MHFC25! 13 - 14 September 2010: Sydney, Australia Open Source Software Pacific-Asia Conference OSSPAC is focused on helping enterprises of all sizes - businesses and government - learn how open source software can be used to reduce costs and increase efficiency in a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective way. Even though it provides plenty of technical sessions, the main audience for OSSPAC is IT managers, project leads, and executive management who are looking at leveraging open source in their organizations. We're offering over 30 sessions on topics ranging from Cloud Computing to the Economics of Open Source. For more information, please visit www.osspac.com. 13 - 15 September 2010: Las Vegas, Nevada Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit - North America For the sixth consecutive year, HCTS-NA will bring together industry leaders, including C-level and other senior executives from hosting and colocation service providers, independent software vendors and SaaS (software-as-a-service) providers, investors and investment bankers, as well as an increasing number of enterprise customers. 16 - 17 September 2010: Boston Security Forum Forum 2010 As the global economy recovers in 2010, Security & Risk professionals must continue to balance tactical and technical responsibilities with the long-term strategic objectives of the business. To achieve this goal, you must aspire to transform your security organization from a reactive silo of technical security expertise to a proactive information risk management team. You must also adopt the same objectives and measures of success as the business. This year's Security Forum Forum 2010 will focus on: 1) evaluating the maturity and effectiveness of the security organization; 2) laying out a road map for architectural optimization and innovation; and 3) ensuring that the right skills, incentives, and metrics are in place for the long-term success of the security program. Key questions that this forum will answer: How do you measure the maturity and the effectiveness of the security and risk management practice and build a road map for the future? How do you build a data security architecture to protect information no matter who has it and where it rests? How can you apply enterprise risk management disciplines to information security? How do you embed security throughout the network, not just on the perimeter? Register here. 21 September 2010: Chicago New Marketing Experience - Chicago Imagine a world where you can take your One Big Idea and tap over 100 other participating conference attendees and experts and each of their One Big Ideas. All of this in a structured, fast-paced and highly interactive one-day program under the direction of Chris Brogan, Justin Levy and the team from New Marketing Labs. New Marketing Experience is that world. Through six key discussion sessions this program will help you analyze and draw the best of what you need form these Big Ideas. On Sept. 21, the New Marketing Labs team will be invading Chicago to hold our New Marketing Experience event. For more information, visit us at: http://nmlevents.com. Use source code "RWW50" for a 50% off discount. 21 September 2010: Waltham, Massachusetts EntreTech Forum The September EntreTech Forum presents Computing: Coder-Jammed? Helping non-technical early-stage CEOs and founders make sense of the software development process. We will bring together local software developers and the professionals who manage them to distill and provide a lay-person's view into the jargon-riddled word of software development. The panel discussion will deliver a general overview of the software development process, will provide a perspective on how software developers view the world and what motivates them, and then will dive into specific decision components. For more information, visit www.entretechforum.org or follow us on Twitter: @entretech 22 September 2010: Washington, D.C. 2010 Location Intelligence Conference The 2010 Location Intelligence Conference will focus entirely on geospatial technology for cloud computing, aka LI GeoCloud, and will be held on Sept. 22 in downtown Washington, D.C., at the Newseum's Knight Conference Center. Now in its seventh year, the Location Intelligence conference provides a forum to discuss how enterprise computing solutions can leverage location technology. And on the horizon for location technology is the potential for hosting applications using a cloud computing solution. LI GeoCloud will present sessions on SaaS business models and applications. Keynoters include senior executives from Pitney Bowes Business Insight, Google and Salesforce.com. The conference will be held in a single track executive forum and includes presentations from private industry as well as those involved in supporting the federal government's cloud computing strategy. Register here. 22 - 23 September 2010: Singapore Social Media World Forum Asia Social Media World Forum Asia is back for 2010. The event will be taking place at the larger venue - The Suntec Conference Centre - before the F1 Singapore night race. Two days of interactive and engaging conference featuring leading key figure keynotes, brand case studies, topical Q&A and debates, exhibition hall, workshops and networking. Speakers include: Blake Chandlee, VP & Commercial Director, EMEA, Facebook Nicki Kenyon, Vice President, Digital Marketing APMEA, MasterCard Reynold D'Silva, Global Brand Marketing Manager, Unilever Pooja Arora, Brand Manager, P&G Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific Director, 360 Digital Influence, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Lito S. German, Marketing Director, BMW Group Asia Ranjeet-Shandu Singh, Digital Project Manager, Ogilvy One Singapore Derek Yeo, Head of Marketing, Tiger Airways 23 September, 2010: San Francisco, California Think Mobile Think Mobile, produced by Mediabistro, SocialTimes, and AllFacebook, is a one-day conference that explores the broadening mobile ecosystem, marketing opportunities, and the innovation that drives the industry. Mobile business leaders will discuss monetizing content, apps, advertising, and more, as well as best practices for developing and monetizing location services, targeted content, and augmented reality. Speakers include Starbucks CIO Stephen GIllett, Heart Magazines Digital Media Executive Director Kimberly Lau, Microsoft Sr. Product Manager Anand Iyer, Evernote CEO Phil Libin, Nielsen Global SVP of Mobile Media & Marketing Kanishka Agarwal, and more. Save 15% with discount code TMRWW. 24 September, 2010: San Francisco Smartphone Games Summit The Smartphone Games Summit is a single day conference produced by Charles Hudson and mediabistro.com, focused on the emerging smartphone games space. As new developments emerge such as the iPhone Game Center, is it game over for a number of gaming companies, or does it open an even larger opportunity? How do newer technologies like the iPad change the game? The conference will bring together leading developers, investors, and executives from around the globe to share their collective wisdom on what's working today and where this exciting industry is heading. The Smartphone Games Summit will touch on a number of key trends, including international trends in smartphone games, engaging smartphone game design, lessons from leaders, mobile social games, keys to successful monetization, and building and executing a successful distribution strategy. Save 15% with discount code SPRWW. 25 September 2010: Seattle, Washington StartupDay 2010 Come learn from successful entrepreneurs - founders of companies like LinkedIn, Posterous, SlideShare, Twilio, Cozi, Blue Nile and more at StartupDay 2010 on Sept. 25 in Seattle, Washington. Learn what's important to do to create a tech business from scratch from people who've done it. Meet one-on-one with advisors like attorneys, angel investors, experienced startup founders and more. Learn how to pick the right idea, build your team, fund the business, build your product, bring it to market and make a profit. Get more details at http://www.seattle20.com/startupday. 29 - 30 September 2010: New York City Location-Based Marketing Summit Location-Based Marketing Summit is the leading event for Fortune 1000 companies seeking to maximize marketing, commerce and business strategies using location-based services. Attendees receive focused, practical and valuable industry insight that can be immediately utilized in developing a location-based strategy. We give you an inside look at the location based marketing activities of major brands. Hear from companies who've made the journey and learn from their experiments and activities. Location-Based Marketing Summit helps you cut through the hype and separate buzz from success. Speakers include VaynerMedia, New Jersey Nets, Tasti D-lite, Deep Focus, Adweek, Where.com, Yelp, SimpleGeo, Geodelic, and more. Use our special ReadWriteWeb promo code RWWVIP to save an extra $100 off registration. 30 September - 1 October 2010: Lake Tahoe, Nevada Tahoe Tech Talk Tahoe Tech Talk is not just about assembling an outstanding lineup of speakers (though we've done that, including Digg founder Kevin Rose, Twitter adviser/investor Chris Sacca, and former Facebook strategist Dave Morin). It's about creating an opportunity for true discussion. Each speaker will return to the stage for a massive interactive session, taking questions from the audience about the technology sphere in 2010 and beyond. Conference registration includes a complimentary night's stay at Harrah's Lake Tahoe Resort and Casino - all for just $399! Space is extremely limited, so reserve your spot today! For more details, visit http://tahoetechtalkconf.com. 2 October 2010: Portland, Oregon CyborgCamp CyborgCamp is a conversation about the future of technology, and how humans fit in. Attendees will discuss topics such as social media, design, code, inventions, Web 2.0, Twitter, the future of communication, cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology and philosophy. There will be additional speakers as well as unconference sessions that deal with the future of entertainment, business, social media and the relationship between humans and computers. Twitter: @cyborgcamp. Register here. 2 - 3 October 2010: Seattle InfoCamp Seattle 2010 InfoCamp is an unconference for the information community. It features an egalitarian, community-driven format in which the agenda is created during the event - so anyone can sign up to lead a session! Join us at InfoCamp Seattle 2010 for an exciting weekend of talking and learning about: user experience information architecture user-centered design interaction design library & information science online search information management informatics taxonomy content strategy anything relating to the intersection of information, people and/or technology! As always, InfoCamp will feature fantastic speakers, rich discussions, and an agenda that you help create. And, of course, plenty of coffee! This year, the venue is just steps away from transit, lodging, and some of the city's best restaurants and bars. We'll convene in the Pigott Building on Seattle University's campus in the exciting Capitol Hill/First Hill area, only a mile from downtown. For more information, check out http://infocampseattle2010.eventbrite.com. 5 October 2010: New York City FinovateFall FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology from established leaders and hot young companies. The Fall event is the original and largest Finovate and features a single day packed with our special blend of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) and intimate networking time with top executives from the innovative demoing companies. FinovateFall is a unique chance to see the future of finance and banking before your competition and find the edge you need in today's market. Early bird registration rates are available. 6 - 7 October 2010: Boston Inbound Marketing Summit The Inbound Marketing Summit is where the online marketing community gathers to solve today's marketing and business communications challenges. This event features the brightest minds in the business, including world-renowned authors and practitioners, as well as leaders from some of the companies already using the new tools and strategies. This fast-paced and information-packed event is your check-up on your existing business communications strategies, and your prescription for the coming months. On October 6 and 7 join Chris Brogan, Justin Levy and the entire New Marketing Labs team along with hundreds of marketers like yourself and 60-plus speakers and sponsors at Gillette Stadium for two days of fast-paced, highly interactive actionable content. For more information, visit us at: http://inboundmarketingsummit.com. Use source code "RWW50" for a 50% off discount. 7 - 8 October 2010: Washington, D.C. Business Process And Application Delivery Forum 2010 As an Application Development & Delivery or Business Process professional, your efforts not only serve the business but also empower your business to succeed despite rapid change. But every day brings faster-changing business dynamics. Business Process And Application Delivery Forum 2010 will arm you with the knowledge, insight, and practices you need to meet demanding expectations from your CEOs, COOs, CxOs, agency heads, and directors and deliver the kind of breakthrough and sustainable business value you know your organization must achieve. Application Development & Delivery professionals will learn to: Transform delivery organizations. See how organizations apply Lean and Agile to rethink how they align with and deliver against current and anticipated business strategies and demands. Drive innovation. Learn how to improve delivery flow and drive software innovation to bring greater business differentiation and higher customer and constituent satisfaction. Thrive in a dynamic business and technology world. Identify new practices and technologies that organizations use to design, deliver, and measure breakthrough and sustainable business value. Business Process professionals will learn to: Drive business process management into the organization. See how organizations embrace business process management (BPM) to deliver sustainable business value. Empower employees to make change. Learn what skills, disciplines, and technologies organizations utilize to accelerate innovation and change. Differentiate customer and constituent service experiences. Discover how organizations put the customer first to design and deliver breakthrough customer service and support processes. Register here. 7 - 8 October 2010: Washington, D.C. Content & Collaboration Forum 2010 Today, the people in your organization have unprecedented expectations for driving better, faster business outcomes using content and collaboration technologies. Harnessing the trends that underlie those expectations in order to drive real business outcomes -- like revenue growth, reduced operating expense, and improved return on assets -- requires IT to assume a new leadership position. On top of building engaging Web experiences to drive revenue and reduce service costs, Content & Collaboration (CC) Professionals must optimize portal, search, collaboration, and eDiscovery strategies that enhance employee productivity while mitigating risks. CC professionals require a new set of skills to address the culture, process, and technology changes amid this groundswell of business technology expectations. To capitalize on these changes, CC professionals at the Content & Collaboration Forum 2010 will learn to: Engage customers across emerging channels. Learn how empowered employees can better serve customers using social, cloud, mobile, and video technologies. Innovate by harnessing the power of collaboration. See how leading organizations are using organizational models, tool sets, and new skills to accelerate innovation with collaboration platforms and tools like social networks. Accelerate your strategy while balancing risk and return. Learn to optimize processes and tools like enterprise content management, eDiscovery, search, and intranet portals to mitigate risks and maximize information discovery, use, and re-use. Register here. 13 - 16 October 2010: Seoul, Korea The International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality The International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (COEX, Seoul, Korea) is the annual meeting of academic and corporate researchers and developers who are advancing the fields of Mixed and Augmented Reality. Presentations will showcase the latest breakthroughs in signal processing, computer vision, computer graphics (3D), user interfaces, human factors, wearable computing, mobile computing, displays, and all types of sensors for detecting context. Posters and demonstrations foster first hand discussions with developers and researchers. Workshops on October 13 provide an open and flexible environment suitable for multi-disciplinary information and knowledge sharing. Integrated with the Science & Technology Program, the Arts, Media and Humanities Program covers the creative advancements in the application of Mixed and Augmented Reality. 14 October 2010: Palo Alto Silicon Valley VC & Angel Event FundingPost has hosted 170+ sold-out venture events in 19 cities over the past eight years. At our next Silicon Valley event, the panel of investors will focus on Early-Stage Venture Investing - how to meet investors, pitch them, and what it really takes to get them to write you a check - especially in this economy! We will be discussing trends in early-stage investing, hot sectors, sectors that these VCs look at, things that are most important to them when they are considering an investment, the best and worst things an entrepreneur can do to get their attention, additional advice for entrepreneurs, and, of course, the best ways to reach these and other Investors. There will be plenty of time for networking with the investor panelists, both before the panel & afterwards at the cocktail party. As an additional benefit, entrepreneur 1/4 page summaries will be given to the investor speakers and attendees. All of the Investors will get your company description and contact info! Register today, as this event will sell-out! Additionally, there will be an optional Pitching Workshop Lunch from 10:45am-1pm. To register, or for location and speaker information, click here. 14 October 2010: Palo Alto Silicon Valley VC & Angel Event FundingPost has hosted 170-plus sold-out venture events in 19 cities over the past eight years. At our next Silicon Valley event, the panel of investors will focus on Early-Stage Venture Investing - how to meet investors, pitch them, and what it really takes to get them to write you a check - Especially in this economy! We will be discussing trends in Early-Stage Investing, hot sectors, sectors that these VCs look at, things that are most important to them when they are considering an Investment, the best and worst things an entrepreneur can do to get their attention, additional advice for entrepreneurs, and, of course, the best ways to reach these and other Investors. There will be plenty of time for networking with the Investor panelists, both before the panel & afterwards at the cocktail party. 14 - 15 October 2010: St. Louis Strange Loop The Strange Loop developer conference brings together developers working on the leading edge of applied computer science. This year's conference features tracks covering emerging languages, alternative database technologies (aka "nosql" stores), machine learning, large scale web applications, semantic web, and mobile applications. Keynote speakers include programming language guru Guy Steele (Oracle), Javascript expert Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), machine learning expert Hilary Mason (bit.ly), and grid computing expert Billy Newport (IBM). Other speakers include experts from Flightcaster, Geloearning, eBay, Opscode, 10gen, Square, Twitter, Google, and more. Register here. 18 October 2010: Washington D.C. Digital East 2010 DE10 will feature over 50 leading industry speakers addressing best practices on topics including Social Media, Online Advertising, E-commerce, Cloud Computing, Web Analytics, Search, Email and more. When registering, use the code RWW50m for 20% off. 25 - 27 October 2010: Beijing The China Mega-Forum for Entrepreneurship & Innovation China Entrepreneurs presents The China Mega-Forum for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. Gathering more than 1000 professionals over the course of three days, this forum will place attendees at the heart of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in China. Joined by more than 400 elite high growth ventures, 200 prominent investment firms, and 60 premier-level speakers, attendees will be immersed into a full schedule of high-level content and unparalleled networking. Highlights include: High-level Panel Sessions on important topics encompassing China's Entrepreneurial Ecosystem The Morning Market, giving firms the opportunity to showcase their businesses Over 20 unique entrepreneurship workshops Gala Dinner and Award Ceremony for the CE Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Awards Over 45 investor presentations and one-on-one meetings with VC's, PE's and Angel Investors For further information, visit www.chinamegaforum.com. 26 - 27 October 2010: San Francisco PayPal X Innovate 2010 Developer Conference The only developer conference dedicated to payments, the PayPal X Innovate 2010 Developer Conference invites developers to explore new ways to integrate payments into web pages, applications, and products using PayPal's open, global APIs. Developers get the chance to code live with PayPal engineers; attend hands-on technical sessions; and network with 2000 peers. Register by September 15th and save $100. Register now. Participate in the PayPal X Developer Challenge: The PayPal X Developer Challenge is offering a $100,000 grand prize for the most innovative application that integrates the PayPal X Platform. The Challenge also includes X Awards, additional prizes of $10,000 each, in addition to the grand prize in specified categories like mobile, cross-border payments, and integration with Yahoo technologies or eBay. Learn more and submit ideas at x.com. 28 - 29 October 2010: Chicago Consumer Forum 2010 More than 10 years ago, just a few industries scrambled to cope with new Web-based, consumer-empowering tools like comparison shopping engines and direct banks. Now it's Twitter, YouTube, and foursquare. These tools have put more power in the hands of individuals than ever before. Whether you are running an online-only firm or one business unit of a global firm, Forrester's Consumer Forum 2010 will provide specific answers to the critical issues of consumer change and empowerment that are confronting all consumer-facing companies today. The time to unleash your employees and transform your company is now, and this event will showcase ideas, best practices, and case studies to help you do it. As an exciting addition to this year's Consumer Forum, we'll be featuring content and ideas from Forrester's new book, Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, slated for release just weeks before the event. Key questions this forum will answer: How has the rise of empowered consumers changed customer relationships with B2C firms? What kinds of leaders do you need at your firm that can help unleash employees to solve customer problems? Which firms have best tapped into the creativity of employees to serve empowered consumers? How are consumers using their mobile devices for product research and decisions? What is the role of social media in engaging customers across channels? What impact will pervasive video and connectivity have on customers? What new opportunities exist for firms to connect with empowered consumers? How do firms create metrics and incentives that measure and promote employee empowerment? What new organizational models best empower employees to serve customers? Register here. 8 - 11 November 2010: Las Vegas PubCon Las Vegas PubCon, the premier search and social media conference, features the industry's biggest names and key players shaping the future of the Web. On November 8-11, 2010 PubCon Las Vegas will be held at the Las Vegas Convention Center. PubCon holds cutting edge panel sessions exploring tracks dedicated to search, social media and affiliate marketing, an intensive professional search and social media training program, and some of the world's top keynote speakers. PubCon Las Vegas will also hold a one day two-track slate of intensive educational training programs led by some of the industry's most respected search professionals. For more information visit pubcon.com. 9 - 10 November, 2010: Chicago Forrester's Sourcing & Vendor Management Forum Unprecedented changes are under way in how business identifies, sources, and manages the technologies that drive innovation, growth, and competitive advantage. SVM pros must embrace a new set of skills and commit to getting ahead of technology and market innovations to ensure that their organizations achieve business value from these changes. This Forum will arm you with the knowledge, insight, and practices that you need to: Empower the business. Learn how to empower employees and embrace self-provisioned technologies like SaaS and social media. Drive innovation. Explore how to take your firm to the next level of innovation through next-generation vendor governance models like multisourcing. Sustain competitive advantage. See how leading organizations continue to drive increased value from their suppliers through new service delivery models. For additional details please see: http://www.forrester.com/sourcingforum 16 November 2010: Dallas New Marketing Experience - Dallas Imagine a world where you can take your One Big Idea and tap over 100 other participating conference attendees and experts and each of their One Big Ideas. All of this in a structured, fast-paced and highly interactive one-day program under the direction of Chris Brogan, Justin Levy and the team from New Marketing Labs. New Marketing Experience is that world. Through six key discussion sessions this program will help you analyze and draw the best of what you need form these Big Ideas. On Nov. 16, the New Marketing Labs team will be invading Dallas to hold our New Marketing Experience event. For more information, visit us at: http://nmlevents.com. Use source code "RWW50" for a 50% off discount. 17-18 November 2010: Lausanne & Geneva, Switzerland Cloud and ICT 2.0 Summit The European Tech Tour Association is launching its newest vertical event with its inaugural Cloud & ICT 2.0 Summit, the Catalyst of the Cloud Computing Industry in Europe. Its focus is on celebrating entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and on raising global awareness for the top 25+ European start-up companies in the cloud computing field that are making their mark in the industry. The Cloud ICT & 2.0 Summit is interested in European Cloud Computing companies with the potential to become global leaders in their market. The deadline for company applications is September 3, 2010. Register here now. 17 - 18 November 2010: Raleigh Internet Summit 2010 Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Weekly Wrap-up: New CEO For Digg, Sue Me Paul Allen, Ap... Sep 04 2010 12:20:25	ReadWriteWeb
Weekly Wrap-up: New CEO For Digg, Sue Me Paul Allen, Apple's Fall Event, And More... For the second week in a row, Digg topped our most-read-stories list. Also this week we launched a brand new channel - ReadWriteHack - and continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010: We learned how to use the Internet of Things to hack Nike+ to do automatic Foursquare check-ins; augmented reality helped tennis fans "see through walls"; and Google Docs got real-time collaborative highlighting. Read on for more. Top Stories of the Week Digg: Amazon Manager Will Take the Helm, Try to Save Site From Tides of History Digg User Rebellion Continues: Reddit Now Rules the Front Page Cartoon: So Sue Me Live Blog: Apple's Fall Event (New iPods, iOS 4.1, iTunes 10, Apple TV) 5 Ways Tech Startups Can Disrupt the Education System More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook using the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes. Real-Time Web Google Docs Gets a Taste of Wave with Collaborative Highlighting More Real-Time Web coverage Internet of Things How to Hack Nike+ for Automatic Foursquare Check-ins Can Smartphones Replace Credit Cards? More Internet of Things coverage Augmented Reality IBM Helps Tennis Fans "See Through Walls" with Augmented Reality Augmented Reality Coming to DC Bus Stops Today (Photo) More Augmented Reality coverage Mobile Web Texting: It's Not Just for Teenagers Anymore Twitter's New iPad App Shines, but Isn't Perfect More Mobile Web coverage ReadWriteStart ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is a resource for startups and entrepreneurs. 5 Ways Tech Startups Can Disrupt the Education System Never Mind the Valley: Here's Paris Developing Your Business By Marketing Your API ReadWriteCloud ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. How Facebook Scales with Open Source The Big Data Explosion and the Demand for the Statistical Tools to Analyze It What Cloud Providers Can Learn From Google Buzz and its Downward Slide ReadWriteEnterprise ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to enterprise 2.0 and using social software inside organizations. 5 Plugins for Outlook Users with Gmail Envy Top 10 Most Important Features for Enterprise Smartphone Management Solutions What Do You Think the Future of the Workplace Will Look Like? ReadWriteBiz ReadWriteBiz is a resource and guide for small to medium businesses. Get Quick Answers to Your Small Biz Questions on Focus.com 4 Must-Attend Small Biz Tech Conferences in September Get Pro SEO Insight For Dirt Cheap With the New SEOMoz ReadWriteHack ReadWriteHack is a resource and guide for developers. CSS Tip: Class or ID? 5 Great YQL One-Liners Hack of the Day: Use PHP's List Function to Quickly Transform Arrays to Variables Enjoy your weekend everyone! Subscribe to the Weekly Wrap-up You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrap-up by RSS or by email below. RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form: Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Java - It's not Dead, Folks - It's Doing Just Fine Sep 04 2010 02:22:23	ReadWriteWeb
Java - It's not Dead, Folks - It's Doing Just Fine Java gets a bad rap. It's considered old-school. People say that young developers prefer Ruby-on-Rails and other Web-based hot stuff. True - but these are not bad times for Java at all. James Governor of RedMonk wrote a post that provides several good reasons why Java is really doing quite well. Elance shows the current demand for people with Google App Engine skills is greater than those knowledgeable about Amazon Web Services. Audrey Watters of ReadWriteCloud saw the news and posted on the topic of IT Jobs as the question for our weekly poll. The reason why Google App Engine is doing so well? It's all about the enterprise. VMware's Spring Platform is based upon SpringSource, which has become the dominant platform for launching Java-based apps. It now integrates with Google App Engine, a primary reason for the growing success of the platform. Governor makes some points that are worth noting: NoSQL is one of the hottest trends in tech right now. Many of the technologies built on the platform are written in Java. It was born on the Web but will eventually move to the enterprise. MapReduce? It's what Google and Yahoo! use to get fast responses over large data sets. It is built on Java. Hadoop is based on MapReduce. It has its own ecosystem developing around the technology. And then there's this from Governor: Of course we're also seeing innovation from the new hotness - thus Erlang underpins CouchDB and RIAK. But Java is certainly core to the innovation. Lets look at RabbitMQ for example - which though written in Erlang was acquired by SpringSource as a messaging engine to underpin a Java-based programming model. Governor goes on to provide a number of other examples to make his point. And we have to agree. Java is not dead. it still has plenty of room for innovation. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
China's Baidu Refocuses on Mobile and Apps Sep 03 2010 23:10:20	ReadWriteWeb
China's Baidu Refocuses on Mobile and Apps Baidu is the most-visited website in China and has captured 70% of search revenue in that country. Alexa's Top 500 Global Sites list puts it at number 6. But with virtually no penetration outside Asia, can it really be considered a global company at all, or just an awfully big one? Until it reaches beyond its shores in an appreciable and sustained fashion, it probably won't be considered a global player of consequence. But its latest move may do just that. It is refocusing a great deal of its enormous resources into the mobile and app markets. At the annual Baidu developers conference yesterday, CFO Jennifer Li reiterated the company's dedication to the mobile space. The 10-year-old company started focusing on mobile last year with the development of a texting language and mobile mapping. At that point it also established a dedicated mobile department. As for apps, last night its Box Computing Open Platform went live. The BCOP allows users to run apps, including games, videos and e-books, through the Baidu website using any platform. A lot of our coverage of China focuses on Google's issues there. Among those issues are the lack of stability: what can a company or developer expect, day to day? With China's shifting censorship regime, it is hard to anticipate what might be disallowed. Mobile apps are dependent on the robustness of their developer community. Will non-Chinese developers be willing to put time and money into developing on Baidu's platform? Can Chinese developers develop on Baidu for Western users compellingly enough to attract them? Or will the future of China's global influence be on the Internet of Things, leaving Baidu a strictly Chinese concern? This isn't a rhetorical question. We sent it to a couple of our friends with first-hand knowledge of the Chinese web industry. But if you've got knowledge of your own, share it why not? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
IBM at the US Open - Analyzing Every Volley, Serve and ... Sep 03 2010 22:42:21	ReadWriteWeb
IBM at the US Open - Analyzing Every Volley, Serve and Overhead Smash One quote from an IBM executive stands out in the post that Chris Cameron wrote today about IBM's augmented reality app for the U.S. Open. Rick Singer, IBM's Vice President of Sports Technology Partnerships said it all comes down tthe information generated with every tennis stroke, volley and serve: "This is all about data. It's about how you take data, aggregate it and make it simpler to use," says Singer. "This is like having your best friend with you that knows everything about the Open right by your side because you can take all of that data and you can make better decisions." IBM is using the U.S. Open to demonstrate its commitment to cloud computing. For example, according to eWeek, IBM implemented its analytics platform to use real-time and historical information to deploy services to "media organizations, tournament officials, the public, tennis players on different platforms such as broadcast, the Web, mobile devices and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. At the U.S. Open, IBM has deployed sensors to the radar guns, the umpire chairs and throughout the tennis grounds to collect data that can be analyzed and visualized. It has partnered with the U.S. Tennis Association to provide its PointStream technology, which pull intelligence from the data around scores and match statistics. It is supposed to then present that information in real-time. According to MediaPost, online viewers may also use IBM's Momentum Meter to see which player has a statistical edge. That provides a range of different possibilities for viewers. They can watch the matches on television and get stats from their smartphone, iPad or laptop. Images can be seen visually, which makes sense as following charts and graphs can be a bit cumbersome. Analytics provide a different viewing experience for people watching the U.S. Open. The experience also provides a view of what we can expect as more "TV" plays venture online. For example, Google TV will be offering its own ways to analyze data to provide contextual information. What we are seeing really is the start of a technology match that will last far longer than the last smash and volley at the U.S. Open. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Oregon Tribes Make Huge Rural Broadband Investment Sep 03 2010 22:01:35	ReadWriteWeb
Oregon Tribes Make Huge Rural Broadband Investment The Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon have made a commitment to broadband for its largely rural population. Taking advantage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's broadband funding, the Tribes will spend $5.4 million in extending broadband infrastructure throughout the reservation and making it affordable for tribal users. Warm Springs has always been a forward-thinking community. A decade ago it started a business incubator and venture capital firm, welcoming and even buying tech companies, including GIS companies. To further its drive for independence, it needs its people, and client companies, to be able to connect with each other and the world at large. Led by the newly-formed Warm Springs Telecommunications Company, the project, a half-and-half grant and loan package, will blanket the 1,000-square mile reservation with a network that combines fiber and wireless; 1,800 people, 18 businesses and 22 institutions users, including tribal government and schools, health care facilities, police and fire will benefit. For a long time the Warm Springs tribal corporation was Central Oregon's number one business in terms of revenue; it remains an important economic engine of the area, though its distance from population areas still make unemployment a chronic problem. As Robert White noted in his book "Tribal Assets," Indian tribal polities that create wealth also push out into the surrounding areas, adding to the economic health of their area. Those who don't produce often act as a vacuum, absorbing state and local money. If Warm Springs' historical business acumen is any indication, the benefits of the broadband project will not stop at borders of the rez. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Tumblr's Improved Attribution is Good News for Publishers Sep 03 2010 21:30:42	ReadWriteWeb
Tumblr's Improved Attribution is Good News for Publishers Tumblr is quickly becoming one of the Web's most popular and unique platforms on which to share and discover interesting content of all media. According to Tumblr, over 5.3 million posts are made each day by the service's over 7.5 million users. Posts are passed on over and over through Tumblr's "reblog" feature, but at such a high volume it's easy to lose track of where content originated. Tumblr hopes to solve this dilemma with some new attribution functionality launched earlier today. Whenever someone reblogs a post on Tumblr, text is generated automatically that produces a "via" link to the user it came from. As users reblog other reblogged posts, an ugly daisy-chain of these links clogs up the caption area, causing most users to simply delete it, breaking the chain of attribution. Now, Tumblr has made is easy for users to add attribution metadata to posts just as they would tags and other information. This is great for users who want to credit where they found an interesting photo, quote or article, but this feature is a huge benefit to publishers. As we mentioned earlier this summer, many popular publishers - including Newsweek, Huffington Post and The New Yorker - have flocked to Tumblr to share content in a new way. With this new attribution feature, they can rest assured that their content will be properly attributed as it is shared throughout the community. This kind of publisher-friendly feature is likely a direct result of Tumblr's latest talent grab, Mark Coatney, formerly an editor at Newsweek. Coatney's new position is to serve as a liaison between Tumblr and media publications who want to leverage the platform, so it's likely Tumblr will continue to add features that will make publishers happy. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Strategy Roundtable: Find High Velocity Channels Sep 03 2010 21:16:47	ReadWriteWeb
Strategy Roundtable: Find High Velocity Channels First up at this week's Strategy Roundtable was Cheryl Yeoh presenting CityPockets, an online destination, and an app for managing daily deals across a wide range of sites. The daily deal and group buying market has really heated up, with numerous sites offering variations on the basic value proposition. But for Cheryl, the problem is that she needs critical mass. I asked her not to assume that investors will be investing in this business idea, at least not until she can acquire some level of validation, which means tens, if not hundreds of thousands of customers, and several partnerships with daily deal sites. Venture capitalists today don't exactly practice venture capital. Investors are investing in proven concepts - they call those "momentum investments." As a result, the expectation is that you have to figure out a way to get to some level of momentum on your own (by bootstrapping) or with small doses of angel money - "drip financing" so to speak. To be successful, you need to understand this basic philosophy, and work within its constraints. Gnosis India Next Anuj Mishra with Gnosis India presented an idea of doing highly technical workshops (CAD, Robotics) for students all around India, including rural India. I asked Anuj who would be teaching these workshops, and who would be paying for them. In today's India, people with high-end engineering skills are in high demand. They make a lot of money, and nothing in Anuj's business model convinced me that these people have any interest or incentive to go around teaching, especially in rural India. I asked him to abandon this idea and find a better one. Solution for E-commerce Vendors Last up was Manish Jha pitching his inventory management, fulfillment and customer service solution for e-commerce vendors, with which he has already built a $500,000 a year business. Manish wants to explore how to get to $2 to $3 million in a couple of years. I advised him to strike OEM partnerships with the e-commerce shopping cart vendors like Volusion, BigCommerce, etc. Such OEM deals may cost him 50% of his product revenue, but would be the fastest way to reach a large number of customers, nonetheless. I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here. In addition, we also have a Deal Radar series in which we profile entrepreneurs who have successfully reached $1M in revenue. Many investors monitor this series as a source of fundable businesses that have achieved a certain level of validation, and we encourage you to pitch [following these instructions] to be featured in the series as well. Some recently featured companies include Appssavvy, MobileIron, Mashery, Clickfree, BullionVault, 3dcart, BrightEdge, FootzyRolls, LendingClub, Blacksocks, Merkle. The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here. Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon. Photo by wax115 Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
IBM Helps Tennis Fans "See Through Walls" with Augmente... Sep 03 2010 20:16:27	ReadWriteWeb
IBM Helps Tennis Fans "See Through Walls" with Augmented Reality It may come as a surprise to some but augmented reality and the wide world of sports go way back. Glowing hockey pucks and yellow first-down lines on the football field are just a few of the early examples, but today AR is a part of every-day sports broadcasts. More recently, however, AR has begun to make its way into the live sports experience, and an app recently developed by IBM for the U.S. Open Tennis Championships is an excellent example of this transition. The app is only available on the iPhone and features functionality one would expect for a major sports event. Scores, news, videos, schedules, tweets, maps, etc. - the traditional sports fare is present and accounted for. This year, however, IBM has upped the ante by incorporating augmented reality into the app to let users "see through walls," as they describe it. By holding the phone up and looking around with the camera, users can view information about the tournament - including live scores, food menus, transportation, first-aid and restroom locations - in real-time AR perspective. Fans of augmented reality may not be blown away by this implementation, but the exposure for the technology from the tournament and from IBM is significant. Rick Singer, IBM's Vice President of Sports Technology Partnerships, was interviewed recently (see embedded video below) by Fox Business's Brian Sullivan who asked, "What's in it for IBM?" Singer notes that IBM can show to its clients that the company is on the cutting edge and experimenting with new technologies, but he also very succinctly summed up why AR is important. "This is all about data. It's about how you take data, aggregate it and make it simpler to use," says Singer. "This is like having your best friend with you that knows everything about the Open right by your side because you can take all of that data and you can make better decisions." Making better decisions with more useful aggregation and presentation of data. Now that's a great slogan for augmented reality! Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM Fits Into the New World o... Sep 03 2010 19:48:28	ReadWriteWeb
How Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM Fits Into the New World of Messaging Platforms Salesorce.com acquired Jigsaw earlier this year. This past week, Salesforce.com unveiled the integration. The service integrates Chatter, the Salesforce.com microblogging platform. When a contact is updated through Jigsaw, the subscriber gets an update in their Chatter feed. Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is an example of how microblogging services are becoming message platforms for crowdsourcing tools. Microblogging tools are serving as social middleware technologies that surface information from enterprise applications. It reminds us of services such as Socialtext Connect, which launched in June. The Socialtext service uses the Twitter Annotation spec to connect legacy apps by surfacing events that appear in an activity stream. Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM also shows how combining services changes the ways applications update people. In the process, the UX transforms as new filtering is required and different systems for updating. Contacts or companies are identified in the Chatter feed as opposed to traditional methods such as an email about an update. Spreadsheets are traded for business intelligence tools to some degree as the contact data is packaged with an analytics platform. We are more interested in how Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM serves as an example of how microblogging is emerging as a platform for surfacing events. But in this case, we also have questions about how the contacts are developed in the first place. Anyone can add contacts to Jigsaw. That's the power of the crowdsource model. But in some respects, privacy can be compromised. Salesforce.com maintains that contacts are contacted when they are added to the Jigsaw platform. They may opt out by going into Jigsaw and removing themselves from the database. Contacts are also notified once a year about their inclusion in Jigsaw. We wonder if that is enough and what other measures should be put in place when contacts are added to a service like Jigsaw. Salesforce.com does not notify contacts via Twitter or through other services. That would seem like a respectful measure to take but perhaps that is where things will go as we get deeper into the ways crowdsourcing is used for developing contact networks. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Facebook Adds News Search Sep 03 2010 19:48:28	ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Adds News Search Facebook has begun surfacing widely "liked" news stories from independent media organizations in its basic search bar today, it appears. First reported by watchdog blog AllFacebook, the change is something that seems likely to be understood as a challenge to Google. It's early days for the feature, but something to watch for sure. Search for a phrase that's appearing in the news in the main Facebook search box and you'll see off-site links to news stories. "It's an interesting extension of what they did before in terms of off-site links," Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand told us by phone today. "It's not clear how exactly these stories are being chosen and it clearly needs more work. It could work like Google's Social Search, displaying items shared by your friends, but this remains something to watch and see rather than 'oh the revolution is here.'" Above: News search in action, asterisks mine. Earlier this year, Facebook put up a blog post urging people to "Like" the pages of major news organizations, so that they would receive stories posted by those media outlets in their Facebook Newsfeeds . Yesterday the company began experimenting with a new method of subscribing to updates from high priority friends, family and other people. Clearly when you put together 500 million people, their friend connections, their "like" affinities (on and off-site) - then there are a whole lot of permutations that can be analyzed and surfaced in various contexts. Facebook search and subscription are likely to be very interesting for some time. This particular search feature may be of limited impact, though. Presumably the vast majority of searches that go on in that search box are for peoples' names - not topics in the news. Perhaps that will change, as Facebook tries to extend itself. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
YouTube Loses in German Court: Held Liable for Copyrigh... Sep 03 2010 18:56:28	ReadWriteWeb
YouTube Loses in German Court: Held Liable for Copyrighted Videos According to a German court in Hamburg, Google's YouTube can be held liable for damages when it hosts copyrighted videos without the copyright holder's permission. This case centered around three music videos by classical crossover soprano Sarah Brightman, but this ruling will likely have far-reaching consequences for YouTube's operations in Germany. YouTube will now have to block access to these videos and disclose how often its users accessed these streams. YouTube will also have to pay damages based on the number of plays. Google plans to appeal the ruling. The German court ruled that simply asking users whether they have the legal rights to the material they are about to upload does not relieve the company of its legal obligations. "The court concluded that YouTube was treating content uploaded by its users as its own. That leads to a more strenuous duty to check out the content. The court came to the conclusion YouTube did not fulfill this." The complaint against YouTube was originally filed in October 2009. At that time, Google argued that it "works closely with many thousands of copyright holders worldwide to make sure that they can manage their rights on our video platform. Our state-of-the-art Content ID tools go beyond what the law recommends by empowering rights holders to block, authorize or monetize their videos on YouTube in a way that is simple and straightforward." In this case, though, it seems as if Google's Content ID tools failed. In their complaint, the plaintiffs argued that they repeatedly asked YouTube to take the videos in question down but never received a reply from YouTube. In an interview with German news agency dpa, a spokesperson for the court today noted that "the court concluded that YouTube was treating content uploaded by its users as its own. That leads to a more strenuous duty to check out the content. The court came to the conclusion YouTube did not fulfill this." Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Tracking the Buzz in Google Reader During VMworld Sep 03 2010 18:56:28	ReadWriteWeb
Tracking the Buzz in Google Reader During VMworld The API team over at Google Buzz have been buzzing to say the least. If you recall the long lost Twitter feature known as Track whose disappearance spawned numerous impassioned pleased for return you'll appreciate the latest from Google Buzz. Last week the Google Buzz API team updated their blog to announce the general availability for Track as well detailed error messages. This means that you can get started with Track right now in Google Reader. Some examples: Here is the XML returned for the VMworld example To illustrate this, I decided to add the "vmworld" example for my trip to VMworld 2010 and discovered a host of references that I can peruse in Google Reader. As you might expect, you'll get the statistics as well: Also, as you might expect with a conference the size of VMworld... I'm already behind! What are some of your favorite Google Buzz queries that you've added to Google Reader? Let us know in the comments below! Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Hack of the Day: Use PHP's List Function to Quickly Tra... Sep 03 2010 18:04:26	ReadWriteWeb
Hack of the Day: Use PHP's List Function to Quickly Transform Arrays to Variables This one's a classic case of "easy when you know how." How many times have you grabbed a comma-separated string, exploded it into an array, and assigned each item in the array to its own variable? If it's a small array, it may not be too much of a problem. But it quickly gets tiring to type out all those array assignments if you have a lot of them to do. Fear not, there's a better way... The Slow Way The Nice Way See the difference? Much better! Photo by Book Glutton Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Augmented Reality Coming to DC Bus Stops Today (Photo) Sep 03 2010 17:34:26	ReadWriteWeb
Augmented Reality Coming to DC Bus Stops Today (Photo) Gov 2.0 advocates have printed a run of QR (2D barcode) stickers they will stick at bus stops all over Washington DC today, allowing mobile phone users to quickly get up-to-the moment bus progress reports, post traffic status updates, and more. This augmentation of the physical world with real-time data from the ether strikes me as accessible and useful. The project was one of many ideas discussed at DCWeek this June and is being implemented by the Research and Development group in Office of the CTO, DC Government (on Twitter: OCTOLabs). O'Reilly's Gov 2.0 correspondent Alex Howard shared a link to this photo on Twitter this morning. Smart phone users will use QR reading apps to snap a picture of the codes, then their phones will be shown relevant real-time information corresponding to the bus stop they are at. (That makes more sense to me than NYC's new QR codes on the back of garbage trucks, but hey - they point is, these things are growing more mainstream in the US.) Update: The team behind these QR codes has updated us to let us know that the stickers are ready but won't actually be distributed for a few more days. Here in my home town of Portland, Oregon, the ability to check "time-to-arrival" for buses by phone is much appreciated. Augmenting that kind of data with a richer experience, launched by QR code, sounds great. Santiago, Chile added similar QR codes to 4,000 of its bus stops this Summer. "See" also this audio interview earlier this week with Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) in the District of Columbia. Below: US interest in QR Codes, as expressed by Google search queries. Google Trends info via UK QR news blog 2d Code. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Shazam for iPhone Now Makes Identifying Music Even Easier Sep 03 2010 17:34:26	ReadWriteWeb
Shazam for iPhone Now Makes Identifying Music Even Easier The music identification app Shazam was one of the first must-have apps for the iPhone. Today, the company released one of the biggest updates in the app's history. Shazam for iPhone and iPod touch now sports an updated interface and support for fast-app switching in iOS4. The app now also features a new focus on music discovery outside of tagging. The new "Shazam Charts" highlight the most often tagged songs from 20 countries. Most importantly, though, the app now features an option that starts the music tagging feature immediately after opening the app without the need to click a single button. Today's upgrades are available for the free version of Shazam (limited to 5 tags per month) and the paid version (Shazam Encore). The (Product) RED version will get these upgrades soon. According to Shazam's CEO Andrew Fisher, the service now has 20 million users on the iOS platform (up from 15 million in October). As usual, it is hard to pinpoint how many of these are active users, but there can be little doubt that Shazam is one of the iPhone app ecosystem's biggest success stories. Earlier this year, Fisher told TechRadar.com that Shazam was identifying about 2 million songs per day and that it was selling roughly 160,000 tracks daily. Now, with a significantly larger user base, chances are that these numbers are even higher. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Can Smartphones Replace Credit Cards? Sep 03 2010 17:08:25	ReadWriteWeb
Can Smartphones Replace Credit Cards? While the Bank of America has partnered up with Visa to begin testing out mobile payments later this month, analyst firm Forrester says one big question remains - are consumers ready to ditch their plastic? According to Forrester analyst Emmet Higdon, the test is less one of the technology involved, but the user interface and whether or not "consumers' current love affair with smartphones is enough to change card payment behaviors that date back more than 50 years." The mobile-payments trial run involves equipping a group of users' phones with near field communications (NFC) technology, which currently does not come installed, but we expect to see as a pre-installed feature in the near future. To make any headway, writes Higdon, "banks need to convince customers that using a mobile wallet can be as simple and convenient as swiping a plastic card". Beyond that, companies would also need to ensure security and privacy, "as well as competitive issues regarding control of the mobile wallet application itself - before any broad consumer rollout could be contemplated." Perhaps, though, mobile payments aren't entirely about the transaction itself, but the whole experience. Online payment systems could make it much simpler to transfer funds and to put limits on spending, features that might not be available for credit or debit cards. There's also the issue of security. A recent episode of NPR's On The Media discussed mobile payment systems and related how they can actually be more, not less, secure than cash. For workers in South Africa, the story went, everyone would get paid on the same day and often, returning home from work could be a scary time, as the chances of getting mugged were higher. Therefore, getting paid virtually rather than physically, was actually safer. Another possibility is that NFC could replace plastic in locations where completing credit card transactions become difficult, though mobile credit card solutions are becoming increasingly common. According to Higdon, nearly 50% of iPhone users are interested in mobile payments. Are you one of them? And if so, why, because we can't imagine that the debit card in your pocket is taking up too much room. What is the value added by mobile payments? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Startup Employee Metrics: Looking Beyond Work Hours Sep 03 2010 16:41:20	ReadWriteWeb
Startup Employee Metrics: Looking Beyond Work Hours Montreal-based entrepreneur and blogger Ben Yoskovitz knows a thing or two about hiring employees at startups. Yoskovitz formerly founded his own company, Standout Jobs - a tool designed to improve hiring and recruiting techniques for small businesses on the Web. Needless to say, the hiring and performance tracking of employees at the SMB level is a topic of interest for Yoskovitz. One of the items he recently wrote about is whether startups should hire workaholics expected to work 80+ hours each week, and some interesting arguments against this doctrine emerged. "You have to hire people who are passionate about the business. If they're not passionate, they'll fail you. If they are passionate but lazy they'll fail you." - Ben YoskovitzThe startup ecosystem has long accepted the "all day, every day" methodology toward building a company, especially at the early stages. When you think you have a great idea you don't want to stop working on it, and young entrepreneurs will work during every spare moment to hasten the progress of their idea. That's great, and many successful entrepreneurs have done just that, but should that translate to your employees once you begin expanding? Yoskovitz argues that a startup shouldn't be hiring and measuring their employees based on the number of hours they work. The only thing "hours worked" is a good indicator of is just that - how much time they put into whatever it is they were doing, he says. "I'm not even sure it's a great measurement of passion (which is an essential quality you need to look for in startup employees.) It could just be that the guy is slow, so he works more hours," writes Yoskovitz. "We need to think about other measurable indicators of an employee's quality and value. In a post about hiring workaholics at startups, Yoskovitz reiterates this point, stating that passion and work ethic are far more valuable than simply the number of hours the person is willing to commit. "You have to hire people who are passionate about the business. If they're not passionate, they'll fail you. If they are passionate but lazy they'll fail you," he says. "They need to have a strong work ethic, a sense of responsibility (to you, their peers & the business) and they need to be passionate." Startups are a unique beast. They are not normal jobs. Anyone applying to work at a startup knows that they will not clock-in and out at the same time each day. That said, it would also behoove startups to look beyond a person's time commitment when evaluating potential and current employees. Just remember that 5 hours of concentrated hard work always trumps 20 hours of lazy work devoid of passion. How many hours a day do you think employees should be working at a startup? Or do you agree in Yoskovitz's "hours, schmours" argument? What are the best new ways to gauge your employees work performance? Let us know in the comments below! Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How to Hack Nike+ for Automatic Foursquare Check-ins Sep 03 2010 16:02:25	ReadWriteWeb
How to Hack Nike+ for Automatic Foursquare Check-ins Have you ever wanted to walk into a building and be automatically checked into Foursquare, without any action on your part? That's the promise of an intriguing DIY project from electronic engineering hobbyist, Casey Halverson. He has come up with a low-cost solution that involves a Nike+ sensor, a $25 breakout board and a Web service called Stumble.to that watches for electronic devices, then automatically checks you into your favorite places via Foursquare and other location-based social networking services. Every so often, we like to feature a "weekend project" here on ReadWriteWeb. These generally consist of the kind of things you'll want to try out and play with when you have some free time, like over the weekend! None of our projects to date have been quite this involved, but it's a holiday weekend here in the U.S. - and doesn't building an automatic Foursquare check-in system beat eating hot dogs at a cookout? We think so. If you have a few hours this weekend, you can build this automatic Foursquare check-in system yourself, with very little upfront investment. If the idea sounds appealing, but you're not sure if you have the skills needed to make this happen, don't worry - the hardware may soon be available for purchase alongside re-modded sensors that dangle on your keychain. Materials To get started, you'll need the following materials: A Nike+ sensor: If you don't already have a Nike+ sensor, you can pick one up by locating the nearest store that sells Nike gear using the company website. Sensors are sold either with a pair of running shoes or along with the Nike+ sportsband. (If you don't have a sensor on hand, you can still do this. Stumble.to's service can register Wi-Fi clients via MAC addresses, too.) A USB+iPod Serial Adapter: This $25 breakout board (available here from Sparkfun Electronics) sends and receives commands to the receiver and listens for individual foot pods. Your local electronics hobbyist shop may carry something similar. A computer Accounts Obviously, you'll need a Foursquare account. (Twitter check-ins and Fire Eagle are also supported.) Secondly, you need to register an account with Stumble.to and obtain an API key. Software Python PySerial The shoe-agent Python script (direct download): This is the script that connects the Nike+ sensor to the Stumble.to software. Just Do It! Once you have all the components in place, here's how to get started: Install Python and PySerial Plug in the serial adapter. Obtain your API key from Stumble.to Edit the shoe-agent script with your API key information and specify the serial port your USB adapter appears as. That's it! Halverson is working on a more detailed how-to guide, so stay tuned to his blog for an update on that, if you need further details. (Update: Here it is!) Garage Project to Become Commercial Success? Although the above guide is meant for electronic hobbyists who want to have a little fun with Foursquare and hardware sensors, this DIY "garage project" may end up leading to commercial success for those invovled. Halverson says he's thinking now about how he could build a different type of sensor, like one that hangs on your keychain, for example, instead one that sits in your shoe or pocket. The new sensor could be thinner and lighter or maybe have an on and off switch that would register your check-ins automatically when on while still allowing an easy way to go off the grid when needed. The Stumble.to Web service created by Eric Butler and Ian Gallagher has incredible potential as well. Although it only works with Foursquare, Fire Eagle and Twitter for the moment, additional services like Facebook Places, Gowalla and other check in-based social networks can and will be added in the future. Stumble.to essentially works as a middleman between hardware devices and location-based networks. It works with sensors, but also with Wi-Fi clients like laptops and smartphones that register their MAC addresses with the service. Bringing Check-Ins to Non-Smartphone Users with Low-Cost Sensors In reality, this project isn't all that different from the system created by mobile check-in service Shopkick, but with cross-platform appeal. Shopkick, now available as a mobile application for smartphones, offers deals to users who check in at popular retail establishments like Best Buy and Macy's. However, it forces the venue to install the company's proprietary hardware to verify that the check-ins come from people who are actually in the store. It also requires a smartphone. Using low-cost components at the venue level and short-range sensors like the one from Nike+ offers the same benefits but without excluding users who prefer using other location-based services... or even those who don't own smartphones! A sensor combined with an online account at Facebook, Foursquare or another site could engage feature phone users who want to participate in this hot, new check-in game, but can't install mobile applications on their phone. For the end user, the experience could be simple: it would only be a matter of registering an account with Stumble.to and associating their preferred services with their keychain sensor. Afterwards, they could continue to enjoy the features of location-based apps, like the discounts, mobile coupons, tips, reviews and other rewards, without having to actually having to perform a manual check-in on their phone. Another interesting side note: Stumble.to has a "check out" feature too, meaning it can calculate the time you spend at a venue. Although no location-based service tracks this metric today, it could be implemented in future iterations to discourage the so-called drive-by check-ins (those where the user checks in as they pass a venue, often while driving, in order to get the points or rewards in a given location-based game like Foursquare). A service could perhaps dole out more points or better rewards to those who actually stayed put for awhile instead of those who were just cruising by. What Do You Think? Whether you geek out on the DIY project or want to wait for a commercially available system, you can see there are clear advantages to automated, hardware-based check-in services. Whether or not companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and others will actually want users to skip using their apps in favor of automation is another matter entirely, though. Some smaller services may be dependent on in-app ads for example, or links posted by their users that drive traffic to company homepages. Automation would have an effect on how the services could be effectively monetized, and that's something they will need to consider thoughtfully before embracing a system like this. But that's just them. We think it's awesome - what about you? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Readers on the Workplace of the Future: Telecommuting, ... Sep 03 2010 14:56:19	ReadWriteWeb
Readers on the Workplace of the Future: Telecommuting, Swarming and "the FunPlace" On Monday we asked you about the workplace of the future - today, it's time to take a look at your comments. The biggest theme was remote work - several of you expect the workplace to be increasingly virtualized. Others suggested a few problems with this idea. "Swarming," as Gartner called it, was also seen as important - for better or worse. And could the workplace start to be more of a "FunPlace"? CitizenSpace in San Francisco. Is this what the future of the workplace looks like? Remote Control The first commenter, Martin, kicked it off by saying "People will just work from home. Homes will be built with cabinets, or people will buy wooden modeules and install them in their gardens. Commuting, and paying rents for office space just does not scale." Many people echoed that sentiment. One reader suggested companies could give "work from home" bonuses to employees. And although there are many jobs that just can't done from home - like road construction, emergency room staff and delivery - there's obviously a huge interest in telecommuting. According to telework web site Undress for Success 40% of workers have jobs that can be done from home (it's not clear if that's just in the US or if it's both the US and Japan). Of course, there are a few problems with this idea. Jackie Thorpe Ewing commented: I don't believe all workers will work from home. Some folks just cannot function that way. They need the routine of getting somewhere and doing something specific. Those folks are necessary to the future work place. If everyone works remotely, where is the synergy, where is the idea bouncing. Humans need the contact to liberate ideas. Video conference, Skype - they cannot replace human interaction. While many of the tasks can certainly be done remotely, I believe there will always be a need for face-to-face communication on some level. I think that's a pretty common sentiment - one that has enabled the rise of co-working spaces such as Citizen Space in San Francisco and NedSpace in Portland. These sorts of spaces are popular among freelancers and startups - are there many people working for large organizations utilizing these types of spaces? Another draw back pointed out by one commenter: Everyone seems so convinced telecommuting will be the predominant mode of working. I can tell you as a manager, I just don't trust the productivity levels for when people work from home, and I know our CEO agrees with that. So, yes, cost-wise and time-wise, it is inefficient for society, productivity-wise, it's not. So I don't think the percentage of telecommuting increases from here. Has anyone seen stats on it over the past couple of decades? It would be interesting to see if it has plateaued. Looking at the stats on Undress for Success, it appears that the rates of telecommuting have been going up, with growth having slowed down between 2006-2008 - but they don't have more recent data up. Personally, I think results based compensation will also become more common as organizations try to squeeze as much ROI out of employees as possible and replace full time, salaried employees with contractors. On the other hand, I think people have been predicting this since at least 1984 when the first edition of The Way of the Ronin was released (and I wouldn't be surprised is Alvin Toffler or Peter Drucker were talking it even earlier). Drone Swarms Autom Tagsa wrote us by e-mail to say: As the recession ensues, work force headcount becomes a critical factor in ensuring healthy bottom lines. What we may see evident in the immediate is a temporary deconstruction of traditional work roles and profiles, wherein the "leaner team" is composed of workers each wearing multiple hats and becoming quite adept at performing tasks outside of their core competencies partly as a result of 'swarmed' initiatives (per Gartner) and spontaneous, autonomous work habits. The long-term impact of this trend may yield a more knowledgeable workforce constantly aggregating and fine tuning skills as a function of the need to truly multitask efficiently. Insects are specialists, so I'm not sure if the "swarm" metaphor applies well. On the one hand, more generalist work sounds appealing. On the other, it sounds like an extraordinary amount of additional pressure for each employee. Someone at BarCamp Portland 2009 suggested that business process outsourcing could be taken to its logical extreme: literally outsourcing entire companies. Teams of employees would work together juggling projects for multiple companies. On Brighter Note Jeff Walters shared a more optimistic view of swarming, suggesting that the practice will transform workplaces into FunPlaces as workers use social media to connect and engage in work that's more meaningful to them: Example: A team working on how to improve the total experience for casino guests will come together in the casino to train, work, observe and then create a solution. They'll complete part of the solution elsewhere, of course, working from the team leader's shared "FunPlace" or home. Example 2: A team working on a new distance learning app for university level studies will go to schools of students not yet in universities (high schools in the US), plus homes and communities where prospective students can be gathered to experience new forms of online education (a.k.a. = "games") that are engaging, effective and that simulate working in "FunPlaces." Example 3: A team working on a new city development project will "camp" at the development site over the course of several days or weeks to live/design/architect the ideal 24x7 architecture and solution for a mixed use development (living, retail, "FunSpace," and entertainment). Coming together physically will be for "fun" and physical/social connections or "workers" will find new gigs only a click away. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Apple's Ping Overrun with Spam Sep 03 2010 14:04:24	ReadWriteWeb
Apple's Ping Overrun with Spam Only 24 hours after the launch of Apple's new social network, Ping, the service has been overrun by spammers. The fraudsters have created iTunes profiles and are posting links to a number of online scams, including ones that promises "free iPhones" or "free iPads" in exchange for filling out online surveys. For the most part, these suspicious links are being posted in the comments sections of the most popular artists on Ping, like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, U2 and others, all of whom are among the recommended accounts linked to from the Ping homepage. As security expert Chester Wisniewski points out, Apple doesn't require a credit card or any other positive identification in order to establish an account on Ping, which itself is a part of newly launched iTunes 10. Doing so wouldn't be advisable, either, as it would lock out a lot of "credit card-less" kids, teens and young adults from using iTunes. There's actually quite a bit of free content available from the iTunes Store, from apps to music to video, allowing parents to feel comfortable in letting their children manage their own iTunes accounts without close supervision. Given those lax sign-up requirements, however, it's somewhat surprising that Apple didn't build in a good spam filtration system into its social network, too. The types of links being posted now are what any halfway decent blog commenting system like Disqus or Echo would pick up automatically, or at least flag for review, especially since the posts contain links. Although not mentioned by Wisniewski, we think the lack of attention to this security detail should have new Ping users concerned, or at least wary. If Ping's spam filter (assuming one even exits) doesn't block links to obvious online scams, how can we be sure it's blocking links of a more nefarious nature - like those to sites containing viruses, trojans or other phishing scams? Where's the Spam Filter? What's odd is that Apple is managing other aspects of the Ping network's security. User profile pictures have to be approved before becoming visible; we've yet to see blatantly offensive comments or posts, which seems to indicative some sort of filter; and, as the Apple-watching blog MacRumors notes, there is a "report activity" mechanism in place. Clicking the "report" link on any spammer's comment brings up a dialog box of choices such as "offensive comments," "inappropriate photo or video" and "spam." But typically a report mechanism would be used to deal with the items the spam filter missed, not as the first line of attack. Due to the rampant nature of the spam - we've yet to see an artist profile not affected by this problem - that means that either Ping's spam filter needs major improvement or the report mechanism is the only spam filter Apple has. We would ask Apple for comment on this, but they never return our calls. (Working in Apple PR must be a great, right?) So we'll just leave you with this warning instead: You can't get a free iPhone from filling out an online survey, OK? Don't click those links. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Cloud Calculators: A Sign of Slick Marketing in the Cloud Sep 03 2010 08:08:24	ReadWriteWeb
Cloud Calculators: A Sign of Slick Marketing in the Cloud As the cloud computing market gets more crowded, a number of Web-based calculators are popping up to lure customers. These online calculators deserve their fair share of scrutiny. For the most part, they are there for the vendor to tell their own story in a way that shows the benefits of their service. Huge savings and incredible returns are pretty much what you are given when you pop in your numbers, requirements and company information. In the end, what you get is barely insightful. What the vendor gets is far more. At their best, these cloud computing calculators provide a thumbnail view of the market. At their worst, they are slick tools for generating sales leads. Here are three that we looked at. None of these calculators should ever be used to decide how to use cloud computing services. There are just too many factors to consider when making such a decision. It's a complex undertaking for any established company. It's why cloud management companies do so well. They provide a full gamut of services to help companies decide what should be in the cloud and what should not. Astadia Astadia developed a cloud calculator based on the data it collected from the integrations it did for its customers. Its main purpose is to show the return on the Google, Amazon Web Services and Force.com platforms. The calculator is heavily biased. SearchCloudComputing.com observes that the actual calculator itself was built on the Force.com platform. Astadia develops marketing and sales apps. Much of the apps it develops are created on Force.com. Google Calculator This one stinks. The Google Cloud Calculator is hardly a calculator at all. It's an advertisement and a lead generator. The calculator asks for your company name and then the number of employees. Input two employees and the calculator says you will save about $31,000. Put in 15 employees and you will also save about $31,000. So, either Google is inflating the numbers for a two employee company or is vastly underestimating the savings for a 15-person company. Google does not have to promote itself in this manner. Google Apps is an excellent service, it can stand on its own. Cost comparisons are fine but to call it a calculator is a bit far fetched. Windows Azure The Windows Azure cloud calculator is better than the Google calculator advertisement. It still requires a high dose of skepticism, especially considering that it was built by a marketing firm. Before you launch the calculator, they issue a disclaimer. That at least removes a bit of the marketing gleam. The calculator asks a series of questions. SearchCloudComputing.com makes the point that the calculator is no doubt collecting hordes of marketing information. Again, its more of a marketing ploy than anything else. Still, Micrsoft at least tries to show some integrity: "You should not view the results of this report as a substitute for engaging with a third party expert to independently evaluate you or your company's specific computing needs. The analysis report you will receive is for informational purposes only," it reads. It also assumes a rough estimate of $20,000 per year to manage a server on-premise, and about $4,000 for the Azure equivalent." There are plenty of other cloud calculators. Rackspace has one as does Amazon Web Services. Our advice is to treat these calculators like you would any marketing information. They are simply tidbits of information that should provide nothing else but a snapshot of the market. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Never Mind the Valley: Here's Paris Sep 03 2010 07:01:18	ReadWriteWeb
Never Mind the Valley: Here's Paris If you're capable of seeing past the old stones of Paris and the picturesque rural villages, you'll realize that France is every bit as technologically advanced as any other Western country - more so in some areas. Not only does the country have a higher percentage of homes with high-speed Internet than the U.S. (plus it's faster and costs half as much), it ranks first in the world for number of blogs per Internet user, and has a formidable market of Internet consumers who spent €5.5 billion online in the first quarter of this year. When I came to Paris in 2006, I had a well-developed idea for a startup and nothing else. It's now been about three years since I joined the fray as an entrepreneur and tech blogger. In that time, I've discovered that the startup scene is infused with passion, energy and a strong spirit of collaboration. Pamela Poole is a blogger, translator and tech writer, and founder of Francophilia.com, a social startup for Francophiles. Originally from California, she now lives in Paris, where her involvement in the vibrant startup scene keeps her from spending too much time in the bakeries. There's a thriving geek culture in Paris, and no lack of software development expertise, thanks to superior universities that produce superior engineers. The startup scene is relatively young, however, which is partly due to some pretty fundamental cultural barriers. But these barriers are showing some wear and tear. Want to start up in France? While foreign entrepreneurs wait for the Startup Visa to become a reality so they can go launch their startups in the US, France has quietly had a similar program in place for some time. The French government has translated the JEI program into English as the Young Entrepreneurs Initiative, an annual competition run by the French Embassy to the US. The name is a bit misleading - you don't actually have to be young, but your project does. YEI is essentially the same as the JEI program, and winners of the competition can come to France and enjoy the same benefits as startups with JEI status. So what are you waiting for? There are numerous events and organizations in Paris that exist solely to foster entrepreneurship and tech innovation, many of which get partial financial support from local, regional and national government. France is not a socialist country, but it's a socialized country, and the French get a lot in return for the taxes they pay. The Big Players Silicon Sentier is perhaps the best-known player in the Paris startup scene. It's essentially an ecosystem whose mission is the care and feeding of innovation. Among other activities and programs, Silicon Sentier runs La Cantine, a coworking center, hip geek hangout and bustling hub for Paris tech events and activities: barcamps, workshops, competitions, launch parties, press conferences - you name it. Cap Digital and System@tic are among a number of tech clusters in Paris. The boards of these organizations include large companies, local and regional government representatives, universities/public research labs and SMEs. Through them, entrepreneurs can hook up with R&D resources in universities and companies, and get access to a robust support network that provides opportunities for visibility, growth and financing. Fing, another major player, is "an idea accelerator, a think tank and a resource for innovators." Fing may be a think tank, but it fosters startup success in very concrete ways. Startups can submit their projects to Fing, which provides support to over 200 projects a year through events, programs, and access to a large network of resources. LeWeb, Europe's largest (and the world's second largest) Internet conference is held in Paris every December. It was created and is run by French entrepreneur Loïc Lemeur (Seesmic), and it includes a competition for European startups. Yes, it happens in Paris, but it's held in English because it's an international conference. LeWeb is a world-class tech conference, and the speakers on the program are always the crème de la crème of the startup world. Incubators, Accelerators, Competitions We have those too. Some, like Seedcamp, Startup Weekend, barcamps and the OpenCoffee Club are imports from other countries. Others are homegrown, like SeedNetworking, the brainchild of some alumni of HEC (one of France's best business schools) and Ecole des Mines (one of the excellent engineering schools), who tweaked the speed-networking concept to get entrepreneurs who need developers and developers who need projects in the same room for some fast and furious face time. The major engineering and business universities have incubators for students and alumni, though some of them are less Internet oriented than others, and there are a few unaffiliated incubators as well, like Paris Pionnières, which receives both public and private funding and supports women-owned startups, and the incubators of Paris Développement, which is funded by the city of Paris and the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Big names like Microsoft BizSpark and Sun Startup Essentials have a presence here, of course, and The Funded recently launched their Founder Institute in Paris as well. One thing we are missing here in Paris is longer-term intensive accelerators of the Y Combinator variety, but they exist in the U.K., so it shouldn't be long till they hop across the Channel. The Funding The funding landscape is complex from a foreigner's point of view because the government is very often involved somehow. There are public entities that seem to be frequently renamed or merged, as well as semi-private and private organizations, and their activities are all very intertwined with each other. And it's acronym hell. But the bottom line is that there is money for startups, and a lot of it comes from those taxpayer Euros I mentioned earlier. In fact, about three fourths of startup money comes from public funds. One obstacle startups have traditionally faced here is that public and private funding is largely skewed towards projects that involve an R&D/new technology component. French investors are more risk averse than their American counterparts, and the possibility of a patent is reassuring to them. And, until recently, business angels have been relatively few and far between. This is in part because the government historically filled the seed-funding void, and that is where people tended to turn. But angels are getting more structured, more active, and there more of them. Plus there's been another important new development: Several highly successful French Internet entrepreneurs-turned-investors, who are considerably less skittish than your traditional French investor, are taking matters into their own hands (Meet France's New and Awesome Super Angels). The chart below shows the general funding options available to French startups. Startups can access public funding in a number of ways. A rite of passage for many is to go through OSEO, which will analyze and validate a project. OSEO validation in turn makes early-stage startups eligible for a variety of support services and funding options. OSEO can be involved during very early stage activities, such as business plan creation and feasibility studies. It also provides support and guidance well beyond that phase. A startup can be designated a Jeune Entreprise Innovante (Innovative Young Enterprise). The JEI program was created in 2004 and is managed by the Ministry of Research. Having JEI status is pretty much a golden ticket to financing, and JEI startups also get tax breaks and other benefits. To qualify, your project has to have an R&D element. There is also the Concours national d'aide à la création d'entreprises de technologies innovantes (National competition to help create innovative technology companies). Winners of this contest can be awarded up to €450,000 for R&D. Private individuals who want a tax break can put money into special investment funds (Fonds commun de placement dans l'innovation) that are meant to be invested in innovative companies. These are managed by various wealth management entities (Conseils en gestion de patrimoine indépendents, or CGPI). The condition for receiving the tax break on these investments is that 60% of the money must go to early-stage, innovative companies, and it must be invested within two years of receipt by the CGPI. OSEO can designate a startup as an Entreprise innovante au titre des FCPI, which makes it eligible for this kind of investment. This designation is similar to JEI but has a broader view of "innovative" and is less strict about the R&D element. Pôle emploi is the government agency that provides unemployment compensation, but it also helps those recipients who are creating a small business or startup by providing extended compensation and breaks on the social charges (retirement, medical, disability, etc.) that businesses normally pay to the government. Réseau Entreprendre Paris, a network of business owners, and France Initiative, a network of local organizations, are examples of the many semi-private organizations that support startups. They themselves receive both public and private funding, which they use in turn to provide financial support to startups through incubators and other established channels. I've focused on some options for early-stage startups here, and haven't discussed VC funding or the many organizations here that help French startups expand internationally. For a comprehensive guide (in French) to starting up in France, I highly recommend Accompagnement des startups high-tech en France [PDF], and for an overview of the funding cycle, Exemple de cycle de financement de startup en France [PDF]; both are by Olivier Ezratty. Next page: The Jeunes Pousses Photo by Konstantinos Dafalias The Startups RWW's Never Mind the Valley series: You may think you've never heard of any French startups, but it's possible that you're using apps you don't even realize are French. If they've picked a name English speakers can pronounce and translated their sites into English, they blend right in. Take Netvibes, the pioneer in the personalized dashboard space, which has been written about a number of times here on ReadWriteWeb. They're going strong, and constantly adapting their platform to users' changing needs for information and social media aggregation. And there's DailyMotion, which is eating into YouTube's market share and had a 70% jump in US traffic in 2009. There are plenty of successful startups in France that cleverly capitalized on the fact that startups in other countries didn't localize for the French market. The model of Sarenza is similar to that of Zappos, and it dominates the European market for footwear online. There are also original models that are either being copied or stealthily moving into English-speaking markets, like Vente-Privée and PriceMinister. PriceMinister, a site for C2C/B2C sales of new and used goods (at a fixed price) is the top e-commerce platform in France (recently surpassing eBay.fr and Amazon.fr). It has infiltrated the U.K., and I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. were on its radar, where it'll surely give eBay.com some healthy - and much needed - competition. Vente-Privée is a retail site selling designer products at invitation-only online sales. One of the top e-commerce sites in France, it has expanded into other European countries and its model has given rise to some me-toos in other countries. The French have their share of exemplary startups in the enterprise space as well, including BlueKiwi, an enterprise social platform, and Exalead, which offers powerful and easily integrated search tools to help businesses and institutions get the most out of their information assets. Exalead's true entrepreneurial colors still show, thanks to its internal project incubator, Exalabs. (Exalead was just acquired by the technology giant, Dassault Systems.) These are some French startups that have made it to the big time. But what about the little guys? All those struggling, bootstrapping, Ramen-eating founders? As a matter of fact, Paris is crawling with them. Some are clearly aiming no further than the French market, but a number of them are out of the gate in at least French and English with a view to conquering the Web. Just like anywhere else, French startups run the gamut from basic Web apps that focus on a specific niche need, to ambitious and powerful platforms that are likely to give the current leaders a run for their money. Here's a list of just a few of our jeunes pousses (sprouts). (E= in English) English Attack: Edutainment site that teaches English using Internet content that real people actually use: music, video, gaming, and more. (E) GameCreds: Impressive social universe for gamers. (E) Kontest: Ready-made solution for creating and managing a variety of interactive contests to provide user communities memorable experiences on Facebook and the iPhone. (E soon!) Meetings: Nice collaborative app that manages all activities related to meetings: communications, attachments, agendas, action items, scheduling, etc. MonArbre-MaTribu: Crowd-sourced reforestation project, very nicely done. One Euro plants a tree. (France only, for now.) Pearltrees: A bookmarking site with a new approach to organization of content that resembles mind mapping. (Covered previously on RWW.) (E) Plyce: Feature-rich location-based social network. They appear to be of the opinion that badges and mayorships are so last week. (Gotta like that thinking.) (E) Regioneo: You know all those cute little French open-air markets where small producers sell their amazing artisanal food products? This site lets you order directly from the producers. (France only, unfortunately). Synthesio: Web app that provides extensive data from multiple sources for companies that want to track buzz and reputation, and identify trends and influencers. (E and more) TellMeWhere: A real-time urban guide powered by user recommendations on everything from bars to barbers across the globe. Web and mobile. (Covered previously on RWW.) (E) Yoocasa: A private online space, developed in collaboration with child psychologists, where families interact in real time through photo slideshows, video chats, interactive games, and more. (E) Ulule: Beautifully designed crowdfunding platform for projects that are artsy or for the betterment of society. (E) Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Open Thread: How Do You Stream Internet Content to Your... Sep 03 2010 03:24:22	ReadWriteWeb
Open Thread: How Do You Stream Internet Content to Your TV? One of Apple's announcements yesterday was a completely redesigned Apple TV. It's competing in a crowded and still confusing field of products that stream video from the Internet to your TV. Boxee and Roku are two smaller companies trying to crack it; and Google TV was unveiled in May. The ultimate goal of all of these products is to make Web-to-TV very easy for consumers, but the market is still searching for the right formula. We'd like to poll the ReadWriteWeb community on this topic. Let us know how you currently get online video (and other media content) onto your TV. Also, which of the emerging products do you think has the best chance to be the consumer offering of choice? The key points of the new Apple TV are: a much lower price (now $99, compared to $229 for the first generation product), streamlined form (80% smaller), streaming functionality, no more local storage, Netflix and YouTube access, and 99c TV show rentals. Other ways to access Web content on your TV include: modern Internet-connected TVs; online gaming devices like Sony PlayStation 3 and X-Box 360; P2P software; Set-top boxes like TiVo (specifically, its Premiere offering released in March); streaming software for computers, such as playon; wireless USB display adapter sets; special cables to hook a computer up to a TV. Of course, there's still the matter of accessing good content. All of the online TV players have been busy doing deals with TV and movie distributors, a process which is far from being worked through. Meanwhile, many consumers have used P2P services like BitTorrent to get such content for free. The video below from the Google TV announcement shows the (potential) benefits of streaming Web content to your TV: I myself use a combination of Sony Playstation 3 and the P2P client Vuze in order to stream the occasional TV show and movie to my TV. Although it converts online video to a PS3 compatible format, it's still not a completely satisfactory solution. Sometimes the sound doesn't work, or the video is choppy, and so on. So I'm looking forward to purchasing one of the upcoming devices from Apple, Boxee, Roku or Google. Do you stream content from the Internet into your TV? If so, tell everyone how you do it in the comments below. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Google Announces Wave In A Box Sep 03 2010 02:50:28	ReadWriteWeb
Google Announces Wave In A Box Google Wave is far from dead, and developers, early adopters and enterprises will be glad to hear it. Today Google announced it will expand on the code it has already open sourced, building Wave into a functional application that will allow users to run wave servers, host their own waves and build bigger and better applications with the real-time collaboration technology. "Since the beginning, it has been our vision that the Google Wave protocols could support a new generation of communication and collaboration tools," engineer Alex North wrote on the Google Wave developer blog. Google had big plans for Wave - it was supposed to replace email and the killer app among Google Apps, but the company basically gave up on the project earlier this month (see Google Wave Is Dead). It still seems possible for the technology to do big things. But it sounds like Google plans to move on after the application is released. The future of the open source project will be defined by developers' contributions, North wrote. Wave In A Box will not have the "full functionality" of the Gmail-integrated Web app, but it will feature threaded conversations and support importing data from wave.google.com. The release of Wave as an application could be a big deal for developers, especially at businesses that want to take advantage of Wave for real-time collaboration and discussion (see our post, 5 Services That Leverage Google Wave). Wave was always intended for people to run on their own machines, but this release will make the process much easier. Developers and enterprise users that have been eyeing Wave will be more likely to take the technology into their own hands and build things like feature-rich Web forums, productivity tools and apps to facilitate collaborative projects. Google did not specify a timeline for the release of the new code, but it has said that wave.google.com will be available at least through the end of the year. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Top 10 Twitter Apps: Why Mobile Use Is Rocketing on Twi... Sep 03 2010 01:34:17	ReadWriteWeb
Top 10 Twitter Apps: Why Mobile Use Is Rocketing on Twitter As far as Web services go, Twitter is pretty easy to use. Fill out a brief profile, follow some people and go, right? Well apparently not. Developers at the company have been fretting over the fact that some people still think Twitter is "too hard" to use. But the solution has proved easy. By simply releasing mobile apps named "Twitter," the company has seen a boost in new users. Twitter announced today that the number of total mobile users has jumped 62% since mid-April, thanks to the release of Twitter for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. These apps existed before - Twitter for iPhone is just a rebranded version of the third-party client Tweetie - but they weren't recruiting new users. "We did iPhone user tests and confirmed that even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called 'Twitter.' This kept them from using Twitter at all," CEO Evan Williams wrote in a blog post titled "The Evolving Ecosystem" today. Now 16% of new users sign up via mobile, versus 5% before the name changes. Almost half of all active users "make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience," according to Twitter. Despite the mobile push and recent speculation that Twitter's clients have killed its Web site, 78% of users still access Twitter at least once a month via the Web. Twitter.com and Twitter's mobile Web site are the top ways users access Twitter, followed by SMS and the official iPhone and BlackBerry clients. TwitPic, the photo-uploading service, and Google Friend Connect, the widget that lets websites feature content from social networks, are also in the top ten ways users access Twitter. Surprisingly, Twitter for Android was not. The rest of the 300,000 registered Twitter applications have much fewer users, Twitter said. But Williams is encouraged by the growth and variety of apps in Twitter's ecosystem. "These new services help people get the most out of Twitter, contributing to user growth and new business opportunities," he wrote. Twitter said it now has more than 145 million registered users, although the number of active users is lower. How do you access Twitter? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How to Get a Job at a Startup After College Graduation Sep 03 2010 01:34:17	ReadWriteWeb
How to Get a Job at a Startup After College Graduation College hiring is projected to rebound in time for the Class of 2011 to feel its effects, according to a new survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). Employers who took part in NACE's survey say they're anticipating hiring 13.5% more new college grades from the Class of 2011 than they did from the Class of 2010. And in general, just under 48% of those responding said they plan to increase their hiring, while 40% say they expect to maintain the hiring levels. Good news for those stepping into the job market after graduation this spring. We've written before about the things to ask yourself as to whether or not a job at a startup is right for you. But if you think your post-graduate plans involve life with a startup, then there are a number of things you can do, while still in school, to prep. Preparing Now for the Post-Graduate Job Hunt The first, of course, may be to look for an internship. While the traditional notion of internship conjures images of corporate drudgery (in my head, at least), YouTern is one organization that works to place college students with entrepreneurial-driven companies. (See our ReadWriteWeb write-up here.) Not only are internships important skill-, network-, and resume-building experiences, it's a great way to get a taste for the startup life - something quite different than other post-college jobs. If you're sure the startup world is right for you, then Jason Shen and Derek Flanzraich, both recent college graduates working at startups (Shen works for isocket and Flanzraich for Clicker) have written a great set of tips on how to land a startup job out of college. Here are a few of their tips: Know Your Industry Inside and Out: Do your research. Domain experience matters.Focus - Only Target a Few Startups: You want to find the startup that matches your skills, your knowledge (see above), but also your workstyle and your vision.Get Good at Specific Stuff: As Shen and Flanzraich write, startups "need people who can make an immediate impact on their 'bottom line', whether that's users, revenue, traffic, or something else." You need to bring a strong skill-set, but also a diverse skill-set. Prove Your Worth: As with any job hunt nowadays, you want to make sure your online presence demonstrates a portfolio of projects and blog posts.Get a Referral - Or Become a Friendly Face: Startups rarely have "openings," and even when they do, a reference makes a big difference. Don't know anyone who can recommend you? Shen and Flanzraich suggest volunteering. "Startups love free labor."Send in a Killer, Personalized and Memorable App: "Do something something different," they suggest. "Do something memorable. Something that proves your enthusiasm and dedication to the company."Be Yourself Sure, it's Fall and college students are just beginning to return to campus. But it's never too early to start preparing for graduation - and the job search - in the spring. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Get Pro SEO Insight For Dirt Cheap With the New SEOMoz Sep 03 2010 01:16:23	ReadWriteWeb
Get Pro SEO Insight For Dirt Cheap With the New SEOMoz SEOMoz, a site we've covered before as a top-notch resource for search engine optimization tips, recently relaunched their site and opened their campaign-based Web app as a public beta. The company is also hoping to drive new sign-ups for its Pro account, which is being offered at a discounted rate of $79 per month (normally $99), at least until midnight Pacific Time on Friday, September 3, 2010. The SEOMoz Web app, which manages crawl diagnostics, on-page optimization, and keyword tracking, is now available to all Pro users. Other features like XML sitemaps and integration with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics are on the horizon, according to SEOMoz Community Manager Jen Sable Lopez. Although the site's UI was already pretty snazzy, SEOMoz.org is also sporting an brand new design from head to footer. SEOMoz is used by big names like Ebay, Best Buy, The New York Times, Facebook and Yahoo!, among others. In addition to their paid Pro account, they offer an extensive library of free SEO resources, including The Beginner's Guide to SEO and one of the most highly-acclaimed SEO blogs on the planet. Interested in taking SEOMoz Pro for a spin? You can still sign-up at the discounted rate until midnight Pacific Time on Friday September 3. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Weekly Case Study: Yes Virginia, You Can Cool Your Data... Sep 03 2010 00:34:16	ReadWriteWeb
Weekly Case Study: Yes Virginia, You Can Cool Your Datacenter The Virginia Community College system had a problem. The IT department had run out of ways to cool its data center. They explored going through the expense of transforming the building where the servers were housed or moving to a new building all together. Virtualization helped sort things out. They discovered servers that were soaking up power but were doing next to nothing. The results came far faster than expected. The cost savings were almost immediate. Download the Case Study Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Location Sep 03 2010 00:06:16	ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Location Facebook's goal for its new Places feature may be even more ambitious than we realized. Facebook wants to be the central platform for location data across all Web services, a company spokesman said today at a New York Times developer conference. The statement reinforces the image of a world where the majority of the population is catalogued in Facebook's growing database. The long-term vision for Facebook Places is starting to take shape: Facebook wants to dominate the location-based Web. Facebook demonstrated that it wants your profile to be your identity on the Internet with Facebook Connect (see Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login). Basically, it now wants you to add location to that identity. Covering the basics Places is restricted to basic location-confirmed check-ins - who is where, when - shunning mayorships and badges and leaving any sort of advertising up to third-party developers. This minimalist functionality leaves out some of the fun out of checking in, but it makes sense if Facebook's plan is simply to place its 500 million users on a dynamic map. And Facebook hopes that soon, any app developer who comes up with a new location-based service will turn first to Facebook's massive trove of data. Early projections The full manifestation of Facebook Places is still five to ten years out. The feature is available to all users in the U.S., but not everyone is using it. For one thing, Places requires users to check in from a GPS-enabled device, but less than a third of Americans have smartphones, according to Nielson. That's changing rapidly - Nielson estimates that half of Americans will own a smartphone by the end of 2011. Trusting Facebook with location data And all this is contingent on people sharing their location information with Facebook, of course. That's no guarantee given the company's history of privacy slip-ups (see The Facebook Privacy Debate: What You Need to Know). But whether people use the service will depend on how much utility they get from it, as it did when Facebook introduced the News Feed feature. Users initially rejected the change, it now drives much of the activity on the site because it's useful and fun. Users, developers and advertisers should all be excited for the possibilites for location-based services, from social shopping and rewards programs to real-time travel guides. The question is whether Facebook can persuade its users to trust it with their location data. Users might prefer to give their location data directly to individual applications, or another company might rise up to collect this data. What do you think? Are you ready to trust Facebook to handle your real-time location for the apps of the future? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Phases of App Maturity: Roadmapping Your Startup's Mobi... Sep 02 2010 23:04:26	ReadWriteWeb
Phases of App Maturity: Roadmapping Your Startup's Mobile Strategy Back in August, after the release of the company's Android app, I spoke with GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold about how his startup prepared itself for making the move to mobile. The app first launched on the Web, and thus the company's developers were most familiar with languages native to the Web. In order to transition to mobile, Iskold and GetGlue employed the services of Appcelerator's Titanium - a tool that simplifies native mobile app development for developers. Today I had the chance to chat with Appcelerator's Scott Schwarzhoff about how young companies can plan ahead for their development strategy by anticipating the three phases of app maturity. "You can have a lot of things pop up in the form of new APIs, new capabilities and new platforms. You need to stay ahead of the curve." - Scott SchwarzhoffIn the last year, the venture-backed Mountain View-based company has quickly grown to support over 64,000 developers and thousands of mobile apps across several platforms. The company's flagship offering, Titanium, allows developers familiar with Web languages to quickly piece together mobile applications with native platform functionality. Companies of all sizes, from startups like GetGlue to large corporations like eBay and NBC, have built consumer and enterprise level applications using the service. As Schwarzhoff points out, every company needs to plan ahead for mobile development. "It's important to have a really well thought-out development plan across all platforms that can sustain in the long term," Schwarzhoff told ReadWriteWeb. "You can have a lot of things pop up in the form of new APIs, new capabilities and new platforms. You need to stay ahead of the curve." One of the best ways company looking to expand into mobility can roadmap their products is to understand what Appcelerator calls the "application maturity model," which consists of three distinct phases. The Information Phase - The first step for many companies, says Schwarzhoff, is to dip their toes into the mobile sector with basic read-only apps that provide one-way information to the user. It's in this phase that many first timers build familiarity with the platform, its capabilities and possible business models. The Participatory Phase - In this second phase, apps begin to allow for two-way communication, pushing and pulling information between the device and the cloud. Companies begin to realize the potential of the platform and its native functions, like location, photos and social networking. The Business Operations Phase - In the third phase, a company finally begins to use their apps as a new way to drive revenue and loyalty from their customers. It's not just a side project, says Schwarzhoff, now it's a critical part of the the overall strategy. Schwarzhoff adds that companies don't just pass through these phases with their apps, but with platforms as well. As companies enter the mobile scene on one device, like the iPad, they then get increasing curious about other form-factors. Whatever your startup does, or intends to do, mobility should play an important role in the overall business strategy. Planning your mobile roadmap early and understanding the phases of app maturity will go a long way to help this facet of your business grow quickly and smoothly. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Facebook Testing Subscriptions to Other People; This Wi... Sep 02 2010 22:22:27	ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Testing Subscriptions to Other People; This Will Change How We Use Facebook Facebook has confirmed that it is testing a new feature that will allow any user to subscribe to notifications of another user's activities through the same interface that new comments and accepted friend requests appear in now. The feature was first reported on by the watch-dog blog AllFacebook. This feature is going to be a big deal. It will facilitate greater interaction between a user and people of interest by placing updates about those peoples' activities in the highest-priority place in the Facebook interface, the inbox with the strongest signal-to-noise ratio by far. AllFacebook correctly points out that there may be some amount of backlash among users who are not happy to have observation of their activities made all the faster and easier. That was peoples' objection to the creation of the original Newsfeed, though, and that is now the central part of the Facebook experience. It's fascinating that making already accessible information so much more easy to access can make such a big impact on the user experience, but anyone who has experienced the power of web page updates being centralized in an RSS reader knows that this type of technology really is powerful. Subscription to notifications will help users track the activities of their closest friends and family, and possibly of people they have a work-related interest in, far more effectively than ever before. This is the type of change that a better implementation of Facebook Groups could accomplish as well. Imagine if it was it easier to put friends in groups, to access updates from that group in isolation with fewer clicks and to publish certain updates in a way that was only visible to particular groups with less friction than there is today. Facebook has de-emphasized groups for a long time, though, and this experiment makes it clear that one single high-priority pipeline for selected updates is more important to the company than the contextual integrity of communication within groups. Subscription to notifications will help users track the activities of their closest friends and family, and possibly of people they have a work-related interest in, far more effectively than ever before. The feature may also make users feel more comfortable adding a greater number of friends than they would otherwise, because they know that they won't miss the activities of the most important people in their online lives. That will be good for both users and for Facebook. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Greenpeace Demands Facebook "Unfriend Dirty Coal" For I... Sep 02 2010 22:10:28	ReadWriteWeb
Greenpeace Demands Facebook "Unfriend Dirty Coal" For Its New Oregon Data Center While Facebook might have won praise from locals with its construction of a data center in Prineville, Oregon, it has sparked the ire of the environmental activists at Greenpeace. Yesterday, Greenpeace posted on its blog a letter from its director to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which the environmental organization took the social networking company to task for the energy consumption and the energy source for the new Prineville data center. The facility will be powered by "dirty coal-fired electricity from PacificCorp, which runs an electricity mix that is disproportionately powered by coal, the largest source of global warming pollution," and as Facebook has announced that the data center will be double the size initially planned, Greenpeace objects to this doubling of the demand for "dirty coal energy." According to Greenpeace, at current growth rates data centers and telecommunication networks will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatts hours of electricity in 2020 - more than triple their current consumption and more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined. Greenpeace says that over 500,000 people have joined the organization's initiative calling for Facebook to "unfriend coal." Responding in the comments to the Greenpeace blog post, a Barry Schnitt, Director of Policy Communications for Facebook, touted the energy efficiency of the new data center, pointing out that while the industry average for Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ranges from 1.6 to 2 that the Prineville data center will have a PUE of 1.15. And Facebook. Schnitt suggested that there "just isn't a perfect solution yet" to the energy problems associated with data centers, noting the percentage of coal energy tapped by Greenpeace's own data center in Virginia. Greenpeace responded on its blog today, agreeing that arguing that companies like Facebook are far from powerless to make a difference in the way in which energy consumption and sources operate. WIth being such massive consumers of energy, Greenpeace contends, Facebook can demand cleaner energy from its supplier. And Greenpeace pointed to the efforts by other Internet companies, namely Google and Yahoo in developing more energy efficient data centers. While the tit-for-tat responses between Facebook and Greenpeace continue, it's perhaps no coincidence then that Google updated its research blog yesterday with a post about the work the company is doing to develop "energy proportional data centers." Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Check Out This Awesome RSS Reader for Windows Phone 7 Sep 02 2010 21:44:16	ReadWriteWeb
Check Out This Awesome RSS Reader for Windows Phone 7 Windows Phone 7 will be available in time for the Holiday Season, Microsoft says, and today the company unveiled a beautiful new RSS reading app built by an award winning team of Microsoft 2010 interns. Called Headliner, the app adheres to the design standards of the rest of the OS (delightfully attractive, for Microsoft) and includes most of the features that mobile RSS users will want. See the demo video below and marvel at the slick UI, the clean display of feed items and the social media integration. Then tell us what you think it's still missing. I can only think of one or two things, really. It's got a River of News view (most recent articles from all subscriptions), Google Reader sync, share via Twitter (some Facebook action would be nice), recommended feeds, a mysterious feature called "reset subscriptions." What's missing? Instapaper or ReadItLater integration would be nice. Personalized feed recommendations, too. More than anything else, though? A mobile feed reader needs a quality sorting system. Google Reader has Sort By Magic, you can use the Postrank browser extension on the desktop and my new favorite mobile solution is My6Sense. When you're on the go, you want the option of seeing just the most high-quality stuff. Scanning and pecking works great when reading feeds on the desktop, you can process a full river of news no problem that way, but mobile needs to bring you the best content from your subscriptions on a platter. That said, Headliner looks pretty nice to me. I hope Microsoft bundles it with the OS so that millions more people can be exposed to a quality feed reading experience. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Egypt's Got Facebook Cops: This Week in Online Tyranny Sep 02 2010 20:44:25	ReadWriteWeb
Egypt's Got Facebook Cops: This Week in Online Tyranny Egypt has created a special security department to monitor Facebook. Allegedly, the "main task of this group is to monitor Facebook content like groups, pages and chat and to publish reports countering online criticism of current Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak or his son Gamal." But it's extremely unlikely that the secret police powering it will not collect user information, as well as seek out and punish those who use the social network for free speech and political reasons. Egypt's relationship to Facebook is extensive. Very popular for several years prior, on April 6, 2008, students and others used it to stage a protest against the Egyptian government's precipitous raising of bread prices. This protest gave birth to the the April 6 Movement. But the protest was brutally put down and the leadership of April 6, whose goal is an open discussion of issues of importance to their country, have been harassed ever since. India adds Google, others to censorship efforts. Censorship efforts grow like mold. Earlier efforts against Blackberry by Saudia Arabia and the United Arab Emirates grew to infect India. India's efforts to force Blackberry to decrypt user information has now expanded to include, well, everyone. India is demanding that "all companies that provide encrypted communications...install servers in the country to make it easier for the government to obtain users' data." Web and social media companies have not been brave in general, and Blackberry has already started to yield. Attorney sues crowdsourced rating site. A Florida attorney filed a complaint alleging that a rating site for lawyers "defamed him and other lawyers by misrepresenting public information and using 'punitive, coercive and manipulative practices' against attorneys who try to correct their listings." MLRC is a great blog to keep track of lawsuits filed against bloggers and the users of other social media in the U.S. Chinese scientist and blogger attacked. Fang Zhouzi, scientist, blogger and anti-fraud campaigner was attacked by two men after a television interview in a tea house near his apartment. Politicians and bosses in China, like Egypt, often uses thugs to prosecute violence against opponents. Jordan adjusts its Internet censorship law. The anti-free speech law that Jordan implemented last month has been ameliorated somewhat. Prosecutor's offices do not have unlimited discretion on whom to prosecute and the defamation elements have been limited. But you can still be sent to forced labor for blogging. And "immoral" content is still illegal. (That means "any" content is illegal if the wrong person decides he doesn't like you.) Israeli and Palestinian chauvinists duel on Wikipedia. Right-wing Israeli groups are teaching courses on how to edit Wikipedia entries to give them a Zionist slant and now Palestinian journalists are doing the same in reverse. Nothing like a true believer to put you off your lunch, is there? Imprisoned Iranian blogger receives press award. Kouhyar Goudarzi, one of 17 prisoners on a hunger strike to protest horrifying conditions in Tehran's Evin prison, has been awarded this year's Aubuchon Freedom of the Press Award by the National Press Club. Activist gets parole revoked for Facebook. Rod Coronado, who served time in prison for arson after burning down research facilities at the Michigan State University, and who has been arrested several times since, has had his parole revoked. One of the violations was "associating" with a proscribed type of person, an environmental activist who had expressed approval of illegal actions for protest. Coronado accepted a Facebook friend request from Greenpeace co-founder Mike Roselle. The other probation violation was accessing a computer outside his home. The conditions come from two different convictions. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Don't Track Me: Anti-Google Video Plays on Times Square Sep 02 2010 19:48:27	ReadWriteWeb
Don't Track Me: Anti-Google Video Plays on Times Square Twice an hour, an animated version of Google CEO Eric Schmidt can currently be seen giving away free ice cream to little kids in return for their private information on a 540 square foot screen hovering over New York's Times Square. The cartoon was produced by a "Inside Google," a project of the non-partisan Consumer Watchdog group, that wants to draw attention to what it perceives as Google CEO Eric Schmidt's "lack of regard for our online privacy." Eric Schmidt is "Out of Control" The reason for this? According to "Inside Google," Eric Schmidt is "out of control. When questioned about privacy, he has said, 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Recently, he suggested children could change their names when they got older if they wanted to escape what was embarrassing and public in their online lives.'" Do Not Track Me List The project advocates the creation of a "Do Not Track Me" list, similar to the National Do Not Call Registry that allows users to prevent telemarketers from calling their phones. Inside Google is being supported by the Rose Foundation. It's worth noting that Google already allows consumers to opt out of personalized advertising and Google Analytics tracking. What do You Think? We can't help but think that the extreme caricature of Schmidt takes away from the overall message of the video. We're also not sure that the majority of people walking around on Times Square actually know who Schmidt is. What do you think? Are you worried about Google knowing too much about you? Do you think this video is an effective means of alerting people to the potential privacy issues online? Or is Google being singled out unfairly and the video should really feature Mark Zuckerberg? Tip of the hat to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land for alerting us to this video. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
One Week Later, Digg VP Talks v4 Launch, Backlash & Future Sep 02 2010 19:20:26	ReadWriteWeb
One Week Later, Digg VP Talks v4 Launch, Backlash & Future The Internet was in flames last week as popular social news curation site Digg.com launched the latest iteration of its platform, unleashing a groundswell of outrage and protest from a majority of the site's loyal users. A week later, Digg has begun to respond to its passionate community, making rapid changes and bug fixes as its exhausted back-end infrastructure struggles to keep up. Today I spoke with Digg's VP of Product Keval Desai about the launch, the company's reaction to the negativity from its community and how it intends to move forward into the future. "We recognize that the launch was not as smooth as we would have hoped," Desai told ReadWriteWeb. Perhaps that is a bit of an understatement. "We had a game plan and clearly it did not go smoothly. In hindsight, there are several things that could have been done better." - Keval DesaiStumbling Off the Starting Blocks For last Wednesday's relaunch, Digg migrated all of its traffic over to an entirely new back-end infrastructure built from the ground up over the course of 18 months. The new system had been tested in beta for almost two months, but the preparations the site conducted for the public release apparently fell short of what was needed to handle last week's traffic surge. "Hindsight is 20/20. We made a calculated decision to test the site in beta and then launch," Desai says. "We had a game plan and clearly it did not go smoothly. In hindsight, there are several things that could have been done better." A few of those "several things" include a slower roll-out and a better explanation of the site's rationale, admits Desai. With many Internet sites, he explains, features are more continually released to the public, not all at once as was the case with Digg 4. Part of the reason for rewriting the back-end of the site was to allow for easier and more frequent product iterations - a practice Digg intends to implement in the future. Turning Negative into Positive As for the backlash from frustrated Digg users, Desai says the company is thankful for their passion. "It's better than having no reaction," he says. "They have a right to say what they want to say, and for us it's all good feedback. We would rather not have users be frustrated, that was not a goal of ours, but we are reacting to those frustrations and making changes where they make sense while keeping our broader mission in mind." Going Forward That "broader mission," Desai says, includes continuing to grow the platform to provide for publishers, both large and small, as well as its users that make the site what it is. Since launching v4, Digg has seen traffic at equal or higher numbers each day, and the My News section has helped send registration numbers through the roof. But as Desai admits, "it is still early going," and if Digg wants to continue to leverage its recent growth, it will need to more carefully and more stably iterate its product in the future. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Sock It To Me With Socat Sep 02 2010 18:04:32	ReadWriteWeb
Sock It To Me With Socat We've all been there. You want to isolate an issue with a server running on a port but want something quick and easy to verify if it is a host firewall problem or something else. Perhaps you are dealing with someone on the other end of the network that says it is a firewall problem. How you prove otherwise? Luckily, there is socat. While there are other network Swiss army knives out there such as Ncat and Netcat, you might find socat worth a try. Socat is available for most Linux and BSD distributions and there are binaries available for Windows. Sock It To Me In this example, we have a service running on a high port (6000) on a machine "tom" and we want to prove that the firewall rule is indeed allowing traffic from the outside world from another machine "jerry". In this very simple example, we are logged into tom and start by confirming that socat is installed on tom. Here we simply install the socat package via yum on tom. Next, we'll make sure that the firewall rules on tom are correct. Finally, we issue the socat one liner to listen on the port we want to test for the firewall allowing incoming traffic on port 6000 and we save our results on tom to /tmp. Now that we have a service listening on tom it's time to login to jerry and telnet to the tom on the specified port. We'll simply type in "Hello world" and then escape from our telnet session. At this point we can review the file on tom:/tmp to see if our testing was fruitful. Success! Now, time to tell the other end that the problem isn't with the firewall on your end! There a huge number of socat one liners out there and the socat documentation is detailed. You can imagine the possibilities if in this example both tom and jerry both have access to socat. Again, this is a very simple example but the power of socat is how quickly and easily you can verify and solve problems. Of course, socat use cases don't end there and you can quickly find socat being an indispensable tool for getting things done. If you already know and love socat, what are some of your favorite one liners? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Skype Doubles Down with 10-Person Video Chat Sep 02 2010 18:04:32	ReadWriteWeb
Skype Doubles Down with 10-Person Video Chat Skype announced today that the latest beta version of Skype 5.0 would up the ante in terms of group video chat, as well as introduce a more stable and sleeker experience for its Windows users. When the company first introduced group chat in May, it limited the number of participants to five, but now it has doubled that number to 10. This limitation was one of the primary things we focused on when we looked at the new feature, which we immediately compared to free, Web-based services like Tiny Chat. As we noted then, Tiny Chat offered more than double the number of live video/audio streams, with 12 users per room, but now Skype barely lags behind. The Skype blog offers words of warning on how to use Skype's video chat feature with your friends and family: Note that everyone in a group video call now needs to be running this version, so if your friends, family or colleagues are using Beta 1, they'll have to upgrade before you can include them in group video calls. In addition to the increased video chat features, the second beta of Skype 5.0 brings a "refreshed user interface" along with a Skype Home "where you can follow your contacts' mood messages, set your profile picture and mood message, receive account notifications and learn more about using Skype." While the company says it has fixed some stability issues, it notes that this is still a beta version so some bugs are to be expected. The second beta version of Skype 5.0 is available for download now. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Texting: It's Not Just for Teenagers Anymore Sep 02 2010 17:52:24	ReadWriteWeb
Texting: It's Not Just for Teenagers Anymore Lately, the discussion about texting has mostly focused on teenagers, who now often send hundreds of text messages per day. While voice calling is still the primary use of cell phones for adults, almost three quarters of all adults in the U.S. now send and receive text messages. According to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the average adult texter sends and receives 10 messages per day, but a minority (4%) now sends more than 200 messages every day. About 50% of all adults who use text messaging send between 1 and 10 messages, 25% send between 11 and 50 messages a day, 10% send between 50 and 200 messages. How does this compare to teenagers? According to an earlier Pew report, a smaller percentage of teenagers uses text messages (54%) than adults, but those that do use it tend to use it far more often than adults. About half of all teens in the U.S. send 50 or more text messages a day and one in three sends more than 100 messages a day. The number of adults who use text messaging has gone up steadily over the last few years. While 65% of adults in the U.S. were sending and receiving text messages in 2009, this number is now up to 72%. A lot of Texting is About Location Sharing When adults use text messaging, they mostly do so to say hello and chat (34%) and to report where they are and where someone else is (24%). Given how important location is for a lot of these usage patterns, we would think that there has to be a big market for location services (like EchoEcho) that make private location sharing between cell phones easy. More Statistics about Adult Cell Phone Usage 82% of adults in the U.S. own a cell phone (83% of all men, 81% of all women) women make slightly fewer calls with their cell phones than men 65% of adults say they have ever slept with their cell phone on or right next to their bed (and 90% of younger adults - who probably also use their phones as alarm clocks - say they have done so) 42% feel irritated when a call or text interrupts them 57% of adults with cell phones say that they have received unwanted or spam text messages (what exactly constitutes an "unwanted" text message isn't clear in Pew's question, however) Logo used courtesy of Flickr user Dan Zen. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Tablet Computers Will Thrive Because They Are Shareable Sep 02 2010 17:52:24	ReadWriteWeb
Tablet Computers Will Thrive Because They Are Shareable "...a tablet is, crucially, a more shareable computer. A laptop, with its fragile hinge-ware and space-gobbling keyboard, is just not comfy to share. A tablet is easier to bring to the caf�, easier to hand across the table or along the sofa, easier to seize in the heat of the moment, easier to hold up in triumph, easier to set aside when you need to meet someone's eyes. How big a market is that? Anyone who says they know is lying." -Google's Tim Bray, co-creator of XML and now Android Developer Advocate, discussing the new Samsung Galaxy Tab, and tablet computers in general. The Galaxy Tab has a 7" screen (almost 30% smaller than the iPad screen) and runs Android 2.2 (Froyo). That was certainly our experience from the beginning with the iPad. Sarah Perez noted when her arrived that it was Easter weekend and took it to a holiday gathering. You can read about the eye-opening experience she had in her post iPad: The First Real Family Computer. I just handed my visiting niece our iPad as soon as she woke up. Her four year-old sister greeted me on my last trip to her house with a shout of "Hi Uncle Marshall! Did you bring that iPad??" Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
5 Plugins for Outlook Users with Gmail Envy Sep 02 2010 17:40:25	ReadWriteWeb
5 Plugins for Outlook Users with Gmail Envy The announcement of Google's Gmail Priority Inbox likely made more than a few enterprise knowledge workers stuck with Microsoft Outlook and drowning in e-mail quite envious of Gmail. That is, if they weren't envious already. Marshall also took a look at a few plugins and services that are turning e-mail into a platform, including the incredible Rapportive. Lucky for Outlook users, there are actually several plugins to extend Outlook's functionality and ease that Gmail envy. E-mail addons have been heating up for a while now. Here are five plugins you should check out, whether you have Gmail envy or not. ClearContext If you're looking for something similar to Priority Inbox, give ClearContext a shot. ClearContext analyzes your e-mail and searches for patterns of behavior. It then prioritizes incoming e-mail and can offer suggestions on where to file particular e-mails. It's not perfect - I wouldn't rely on it to never miss important e-mails - but it can help cut through the clutter. It's designed to work well with the Getting Things Done workflow and uses folders as "projects" and enables you to create tasks easily from any e-mail. Xobni If you're more focused on search instead of filing, Xobni, which we've covered several times offers a powerful search functionality. And if you're suffering from Rapportive envy, Xobni also brings social network profiles right into your inbox. And for those really interested in "e-mail as a platform" Xobni has a development platform for both Outlook and Gmail. Outlook Social Connector If you just want a plugin that brings social networking into Outlook, Microsoft has its own free plugin that does just that. Lookeen On the other hand, if you're only interested in search and don't want the social networking features, Xobni competitor Lookeen is worth a look. Baydin Baydin has its own quirky search ideas, which we've covered here. Its flagship "unsearch" product is still forthcoming. In the meantime, some might find its Boomberang tool useful: you can specify a time you want an e-mail to be sent to you. (Baydin also has a Gmail version is beta.) How Do You Deal with E-Mail Overload in Outlook Do you use any plugins to manage the e-mail firehose in Outlook? Or do you have any special strategies for coping with your mail? Let us know! Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
10 Things You Need to Know About Apple's New Social Net... Sep 02 2010 17:12:26	ReadWriteWeb
10 Things You Need to Know About Apple's New Social Network, Ping Ping, Apple's new social network, is the standout feature in iTunes 10, the most recent update to Apple's music management application. Within Ping, you can find and follow your favorite bands and your friends as well as recommend or leave notes about the music you listen to. Ping adds a new layer to iTunes - a social layer focused on discovery, not only of new tracks you'll want to buy (as is the obvious goal), but it also lets you discover news from artists you care about, including concert updates, photos, videos and more. After spending some time with the social network, we rounded up what we believe are the ten most important things you need to know about Ping, as well as some of the possibly misunderstood features. Is Ping for you? Read on to find out. 1. It's Not a Standalone Website or Mobile Application Ping is only a feature within iTunes, in both the desktop application for Mac and PC and the mobile application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The only thing you'll find at www.ping.com (besides a lot of new traffic from confused people looking for music news) are golf clubs and golf bags. That's not Apple's Ping. 2. You Don't Have to Use It If the idea of yet another social network makes your skin crawl, have no fear - you can still update to iTunes 10 without being forced into the glamorous world of social sharing. Ping, available as an option on the left-side of iTunes, is turned off by default. If you want in, you have to push the big button that reads: "Turn on Ping." 3. Your Profile Information is Public Although Ping offers different levels of privacy (more on that in #5) , your actual Ping profile information (name, hometown, gender, photo, etc.) is considered public information, at least according to the disclosure within iTunes. If you're in "Private" mode, your name and picture will appear next to any comments or reviews you post. That's not a major concern for most people, but it will be for some who aren't interested in establishing a public persona on the Internet. It doesn't appear that your gender, hometown or "About Me" information is disclosed anywhere when you're in "Private" mode, but we would still recommend caution before using it for crass or offensive commentary. You never know how public it could become in a future version of Ping. 4. You Can Hide Your Embarrassing Music Choices from Your Profile and Still Use Ping Some people may avoid Ping because they're afraid of revealing to the world their secret obsession with '80's hair metal or Broadway show tunes, perhaps. But even if you decide to list yourself publicly on Ping, your "Music I Like" (music you like, rate, review or purchase) can be hidden from view. During setup, just click the 3rd bullet point "Don't display music that I like on my profile." (Side note: Ping has mysteriously added Peter Frampton to my likes even though I've never bought, streamed or rated his music - I swear! I first assumed it was a bug, but then realized that Ping is tying in with the shared library on another computer in the house which is used by someone else, but often under my username, so we can share our purchases. Uh-oh!). 5. You Can Be Anti-Social and Still Use Ping The privacy settings in Ping are incredibly simple: you're either public or private. If you choose to be "Public," you can allow others to follow you without approval, the same as Twitter, or you can manually review and approve friend requests, the same as Facebook. If you're "Private," no one can follow you. However, your name and photo will appear for some actions, such as when you comment or write reviews. 6. You're Going to Hate Ping's Recommendations Ping is no Genius - that is, it doesn't tap into your own personal "genius" recommendations from iTunes when it suggests artists you should follow. Instead, Ping surfaces the most popular artists and bands instead. At launch time this includes artists like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, U2 and Linkin Park. Not tying in iTunes' "Genius" feature with Ping is a huge miss on Apple's part. We hope they fix that soon. 7. Your Profile URL is Long and Weird Want to invite a friend to check out your profile on Ping? Good luck with that. You can't simply give them a username or expect them to type in an easy to remember URL. Instead, a typical Ping profile URL (accessed by right-clicking on your name on your profile page), is a long, unwieldy Web address like http://c.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZConnections.woa/wa/viewProfile?userId=12345678. Better invite them via email instead (see #8). 8. Finding and Inviting Friends is Harder Than It Should Be There is a search feature for locating people using Ping, but there's a delay between adding a new account to Ping and it being available within the search index. What that means is if your friend just signed up with Ping, you may not be able to locate him or her by doing a search right away. (At least, that was our experience.) As noted above, you can invite people to join Ping via email, a hugely outdated method of building a social network friend list. Ping also currently suggests you should "connect with Facebook," which is an error. Apple pulled Facebook support from Ping at the last minute due to "onerous terms that we could not agree to," according CEO Steve Jobs. Too bad Apple forgot to re-write the text suggesting Facebook Connect as an option. Oops! 9. Ping Doesn't Know About Your In-Library Ratings Although for years you may have rated your music collection using iTunes' stars, Ping isn't aware of this activity nor does it allow you to import it into your profile. Instead, you "like" (click the thumbs up button) or "post" (add a note) using the new buttons that appear in iTunes to make your likes and dislikes known to your followers, assuming you have any. 10. Ping is Music-Only, For Now At launch, Ping only works with music, not podcasts, videos or apps. You can only access the options to "like" and "post" when you're in the Music section of iTunes - you can't recommend any other types of media. That's incredibly sad, we think, especially given how the App Store alone now hosts some 250,000+ mobile applications. We would love to know which ones our friends are using, not to mention what shows and movies they like or what podcasts they recommend. If Ping takes off, there's a good chance these media types will be "likeable" in a future version of Ping...well, at least we hope that's the case. Conclusion: Ping is Only OK See also: Ping: First Look at the iTunes Social Network For now, Ping is only OK - and that's being generous. It's like seeing a project that's still being built. That's not to say that a social network within iTunes doesn't have potential. As Jobs noted on stage, iTunes has 160 million users. That's nothing to sniff at. But given that Ping doesn't allow you to import your Facebook friends, doesn't recommend artists you actually like and doesn't extend beyond music, it's somewhat of a non-starter for now. Fun to poke around in, sure, but not incredibly useful just yet. Don't give up on Ping, though - the features it needs to be successful aren't beyond Apple's grasp. If updated, it could easily become the place to find and discover music and hopefully, more. It's not there today, but it's worth watching. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Google and AOL Renew Search Agreement for Another 5 Years Sep 02 2010 17:01:22	ReadWriteWeb
Google and AOL Renew Search Agreement for Another 5 Years Google and AOL just announced that they have renewed their global search alliance for another five years. Google will continue to power search on all of AOLs properties. For the most part, the new agreement just reinforces the existing contract, but the two companies also plan to expand their current alliance to cover mobile search and AOLs videos will now be syndicated on YouTube. According to the latest data from Web analytics firm comScore, AOL currently accounts for 2.3% of the search market in the U.S. In his statement about today's announcement, Google's CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt notes that "It's particularly exciting to see our relationship expand into video and mobile. These areas are now at the heart of users' online experiences and at the core of both of our businesses." As AOL is currently renewing its focus on mobile apps, it only makes sense for this renewed search agreement to specifically cover this area, too. While the two companies did not disclose any financial details of the new deal, AOL's CEO Tim Armstrong told Bloomberg earlier today that "this deal is a lot of revenue and a lot of potential profits for AOL." The new agreement between AOL and Google comes shortly after Microsoft and Yahoo finalized the transition from Yahoo's search engine to Microsoft's Bing. Based on comScore's data, Google and AOL currently command about 68.1% of the search market in the U.S. and the combined market share of Microsoft and Yahoo is about 28.1%. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Reddit to Mainstream Media: We Ain't "Small" [Infographic] Sep 02 2010 16:28:25	ReadWriteWeb
Reddit to Mainstream Media: We Ain't "Small" [Infographic] Social news and bookmark site Reddit has been working lately to battle against its stereotyping as the less-significant, red-headed stepchild to Digg. After Digg-founder Kevin Rose revealed Digg's July traffic numbers on his blog, Reddit administrator and programmer KeyserSosa publicly requested that the "entire mainstream media" quit with the diminutive adjectives already, as Reddit looks to have more traffic, not less, than Digg. In July, Reddit claimed that experts were "misunderestimating" its traffic and it didn't know why. According to Reddit programmer Mike Shiraldi, a number of third-party Web traffic measurement services were grossly underestimating its traffic. According to its own numbers from Google Analytics, Reddit saw "more than 8,000,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days and 400,000,000 pageviews" when we wrote about their traffic measurement issues in July. In his blog post, Kevin Rose revealed that Digg had "200+ Million page views in July" - a number that seems to contradict what Reddit sees as persistent attempts by the mainstream media to minimize its impact and relevance in comparison to other social bookmarking sites like Digg. As one user notes in the comments, Reddit has only 1/20th of the staff, but the numbers seem to show that it has at least 40% more traffic. See a full-size version of the image here. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Hack of the Day: Speeding Up WordPress on a VPS Sep 02 2010 16:01:21	ReadWriteWeb
Hack of the Day: Speeding Up WordPress on a VPS One of the most common suggestions to bloggers who use shared hosting is that they will be much better off with a VPS or a dedicated server. I agree in principle; however, this doesn't mean the server will run smoothly without a bit of tweaking. I'm currently in the process of moving several WordPress blogs from a dedicated server to a VPS. After moving five or six blogs, I noticed the server was slowing to a crawl, with high load after just a week of uptime. None of the blogs are particularly busy. What would solve this problem? WP-SuperCache A quick way (no pun intended) to speed up WordPress is to install WP-SuperCache. This is the first thing I tried, but I didn't notice much of an improvement. Server Security Security configuration changes may help if the slowness is caused by people exploiting weaknesses on your server. But this didn't help either. php-apc The trick that worked for me was to install php-apc. Assuming you've got access to the command line and it's a Linux box, installation is simply a case of issuing the following command: sudo apt-get install php-apc This may vary depending on your Linux distro. Result Installing php-apc has reduced the server load from a peak of 30 or 40 right down to a peak of 0.5, and the server has been happily running for a few days without any major problems. Photo by Mykl Roventine: Out & About Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Google Chrome Turns 2 with Version 6 Release Sep 02 2010 15:20:32	ReadWriteWeb
Google Chrome Turns 2 with Version 6 Release Google is celebrating the second anniversary of its Google Chrome browser with the release of new stable and beta versions that have a cleaner and simpler user interface and increased speed and performance. As the Google Chrome Blog points out, Chrome 6 is years beyond where most imagined browser technology would be when Chrome was first introduced just two years ago. The Google Chrome Blog takes a retrospective look at how much browsers have changed over the past two years, remarking that when Chrome was first introduced in August of 2008, "JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn't yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project." In addition to some cosmetic changes, the new version of Chrome brings form autofill features, making it so you don't have to type in again and again that ridiculously long email address you now regret choosing. It also brings extension and autofill synchronization, meaning that your autofill data will remain the same from desktop to laptop to netbook. Among the myriad features, the user interface seems to have an impact in the browser market. The soon-to-be-released Internet Explorer 9 looks like it stole a page from Chrome, adopting the clean and simple design that lets the browser step out of the way. Chrome's design manages to portray what we find most appealing about Chrome (which replaced Firefox as the default browser months ago now) - its lightweight operation. Just as it steps out of the way of the page, in terms of design, the browser manages to step out of the way of other programs, managing to run well (even on a netbook) without hogging all of the processing power. If you haven't yet, we highly recommend giving Chrome a spin. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Twitter's New iPad App Shines, but Isn't Perfect Sep 02 2010 15:06:24	ReadWriteWeb
Twitter's New iPad App Shines, but Isn't Perfect Twitter has just launched its first official iPad application, and the reviews so far have been glowing. The new app offers a few notable features, such as panes for interacting with content within a stream, media which displays inline without slowing you down and gesture support for common Twitter actions. What stands out the most about this new application is not a summary of its features, however. It's how the app fits into this growing trend that positions the iPad as the go-to device for consuming streams. With its touchscreen interface, the Apple tablet is ideal for both viewing and interacting with flows of information - not just tweets, but also Facebook status updates, news, RSS feeds, photos and more. Twitter for iPad: The Good With the official Twitter for iPad application, the process for interacting with Twitter's fast-updating stream of content has been addressed through the use of panes. You tap on tweets to open a pane on the right where you can see the posted video or photo, or, as is often the case on Twitter, the Web page being linked to via someone's status update. There, within this new pane, the content loads. But the pane can also be pushed off slightly to the side with a swiping motion so that you can continue to browse through the stream of tweets on the left. By the time the content loads on the right (Twitter's blog post puts it well: "let's be honest, video is great but sometimes it can take some time to load"), you're ready to skim the news, watch the video, etc. and then you can move on to the tweet you've already queued up to take its place. Initially, you'll have to figure out how this particular interaction works, but after a minute or two, it will be swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe and you'll quickly become addicted to the flow. Twitter for iPad: The Bad The other interactions, unfortunately - like the pinch to view author details or using two fingers to pull down on a tweet and see the entire conversation thread - are slightly less intuitive. Maybe more than slightly, to be honest. There's a learning curve. For example, you first have to learn how to "properly" tap a tweet. Tap on the tweet itself and you see the right-side pane and its associated content (like the photo, video, news item or even a stream of the hashtag mentioned). Tap accidentally on an @mention within the tweet, however, and you'll end up seeing that person's profile information instead, displayed below the tweet in the right-side pane, and not the associated content. This can get a bit confusing for the new user, and it can easily slow you down too, because you have to focus on where to tap. The two-finger pull-down has to be done slowly or it flips up like a window shade whose cord you just yanked and let go. The pinch a tweet - well, let's be honest here - someone is going to have to release a YouTube instruction video for that gesture. (Oh, thank you.) In other words, Twitter for iPad is not perfect. (And no, it didn't just "kill" all the other Twitter applications, the Twitter website, or anything else). It's a good enough app, but it may not be for you. Beyond the Twitter App: Stream Consumption is the New iPad Trend But these days, there are plenty of other applications to choose from. We've previously been fans of Twitterific for iPad, but it wasn't exactly ground-breaking in its design. However, other startups, including Pulse, Flipboard, Entertainment Weekly's Must List, ABC News, Reeder and even some interactive iPad magazines like Wired, certainly are. Wired and EW's Must List each present new visions for magazine content on the iPad, both in long form and short. Pulse and Reeder are gorgeous, interactive news readers, and while ABC News may be a bit hokey for you, with its Google Earth-esque spinning globe interface, it's definitely doing something different. Whether its interface ends up winning or losing in the long run is almost besides the point - the point is that new interfaces are possible now, thanks to the iPad. At the top of the heap today, though, is Flipboard, a social news reading application we recently called "one of the best iPad apps available." In reality, that's selling it a bit short. It's one of the best apps available, period, iPad or not. In comparison with Twitter for iPad, the app clearly excels. There's no learning curve - the entire process is 100% intuitive. And any app that isn't needs to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate whether its special "tweaks" really work. Twitter for iPad, despite its many innovations, involves several minutes of practice to get it right. You couldn't hand it over to Grandma without a how-to class either. And that's not Grandma's fault - she readily mastered using iPad's built-in photo gallery application despite never owning or using a computer. We would argue that good design makes new interactions simple and intuitive - you don't think, don't don't have to practice and you certainly don't have to watch a video to figure out how you "pinch a tweet." You just swipe, tap, pinch, swipe, and all somewhat mindlessly. Twitter for iPad is a good start and is sure to be a hit among early adopters, and there's no arguing it showcases some innovative ideas, but it's not a home run just yet. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Ping: First Look at the iTunes Social Network Sep 02 2010 11:44:23	ReadWriteWeb
Ping: First Look at the iTunes Social Network Part of the new iTunes 10 software, announced and launched yesterday, is a significant new social networking feature for iTunes called Ping. It allows you to comment on music, 'like' it a la Facebook, or rate it. Ping is also very similar to Twitter, in that you can 'follow' people and music stars. All of this happens inside of the iTunes application, either on your computer, iPhone or iPod Touch. We took the new feature for a spin and came away intrigued, despite some initial flaws. We do however wonder at the overly commercial focus of Ping. Is this really about social networking, or mostly for Apple and artists to sell more music? How to Get Ping To access Ping, you first need to download iTunes 10 onto your computer. You'll need to also download 300+ MB worth of iPhone Software Update, to get it on your iPhone or iPod Touch. On the computer, once you've downloaded iTunes 10 click the iTunes Store link in the sidebar. You'll see a "Get Started" link in the top right of that page (also 'Ping' appears as a menu option in the sidebar). You'll need to turn on the Ping feature and agree to Apple's privacy policy. After that, create a profile. Note that you may encounter issues with uploading a profile photo and connecting to Facebook. If you wait for about 10 minutes, eventually your photo will upload. However Facebook Connect appears to be broken at this stage. We assume these are technical teething issues. Once you have your profile set up, you're invited to follow other people and also stars like Lady Gaga and U2. This is very similar to how Twitter works, except that it's all happening inside of iTunes (on your computer or on your iPhone or iPod Touch). Social Networking, or Prodding You to The Cash Register? Ping isn't entirely intuitive. It took some head scratching to figure out that to actually post content, you need to be in the iTunes Store. You can't create new content from within Ping itself, although you can comment on what others have added. To add new content to your Ping stream, go to the iTunes Store and either comment on an album, 'like' it or give it a star rating. The fact that you need to be inside the iTunes Store to create new content or like something, seems a rather cynical move to encourage people to buy more music. Why not let users search inside Ping for a song or album? Or, even better, let them right-click and comment, like or rate music from within the iTunes player? Follow The Stars To track - and optionally comment on - what others are doing, click on the Recent Activity feed in Ping. Ping places more focus on feature accounts than Twitter, inviting you to "set your inner groupie free by following your favorite artists on Ping." The service comes pre-loaded with accounts for some leading pop, rock and other music acts. These accounts don't offer much more than what the stars can already do on Facebook and Twitter. The main difference is that it's within an application where people can buy the music. I'll Follow You (If You Share My Music Tastes) Overall, I can see Ping being useful for following friends who have similar tastes in music to me. In those cases, if they 'like' a new album then it's a great recommendation - and yes, I'm more likely to buy it. Also the ability to see which concerts they plan to go to is a useful feature. See also: 10 Things You Need to Know About PingHowever, Ping is probably not going to be very useful for following friends who don't share my music tastes. That could be most of them. You may be a mate of mine on Facebook, but if you listen to electronica then sorry I'm not very interested in the content you're liking (you probably feel the same way about the alternative music I tend to favor). Have you tested out Ping yet? Let us know your verdict in the comments! Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Windows Phone 7 Ships; Phones Coming Before the Holidays Sep 02 2010 05:56:27	ReadWriteWeb
Windows Phone 7 Ships; Phones Coming Before the Holidays Microsoft's new mobile OS has shipped to handset makers and will be appearing on phones in time for the holiday season, the company announced today. The stage is set for Microsoft to either rock the mobile world with a mainstream alternative to the iPhone and Android platforms, rebounding after a string of failures a la Bing, or flop in its attempt to catch up after "missing a cycle." The long-awaited update to Windows Mobile is expected to show up on devices from Dell, HTC, Samsung and LG, so there is the possibility that an exciting handset like the Dell Lightning could rekindle interest in Microsoft's mobile offerings. Windows Phone 7 is designed around tasks with programs pushing information to the home screen. This "hubs" design may lessen the need for third-party apps. But Microsoft is still hoping apps can be evangelists for Phone 7, offering developers tools and an emulator last month for free. Microsoft says the tools have been downloaded more than 300,000 times. The OS has gotten mixed reviews, including a scathing critique from InfoWorld's Galen Gruman, who called it "a tepid knockoff of a 2007-era iPhone" and claimed it was "a platform no carrier, device maker, developer or user should bother with." Other reviewers praised the OS for its zoomy user interface, integration with Microsoft Office, voice search and other features. Microsoft has been agonizing over the development of the Phone 7 OS, throwing money at the launch, carefully studying how people use their phones and engineering down to the most minute details. For example, Windows Phone 7 will feature eight keypad tones, so that a user will hear slightly different clicks when typing instead of the same tone repeatedly as is the case with the iPhone. A Windows Phone 7 preview by InfoWeek in July. Whether the attention to detail pays off will be decided in a few months by consumers in the general public - who largely pay little attention to the OS pedigree of a phone, and can therefore be trusted to evaluate Windows Phone 7 without being biased by Microsoft's track record. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Verizon: A High Profile VMware Service Provider with Ex... Sep 02 2010 05:12:16	ReadWriteWeb
Verizon: A High Profile VMware Service Provider with Extra Importance Service providers are a lynchpin in VMware's strategy to extend its virtualization technology into the cloud. If the strategy works, VMware could become the leader in providing hybrid cloud infrastructures. It's a test for VMware's new foray into the cloud. And it has its risks. VMware is looking to provide an end-to-end platform that extends from the enterprise data center to the public cloud environments managed by the service providers. How the technology performs will come to define VMware's position in the vast network of service providers that work with the majority of enterprise customers. Verizon is one of the companies that has opted to begin using VMware vCloud Director. This has to be VMware's highest profile partner. But in cloud computing, it is not well known. But Verizon is making a play into cloud computing. It calls its platform Computing-as-a- Service (CaaS). Its latest enhancement to its CaaS platform is built on VMware vCloud Datacenter. It uses VMware's cloud infrastructure technology including VMware vSphere, the new VMware vCloud Director and VMware vShield security solutions. Verizon is using the VMware technology to provide customers with both performance and security that can be audited. Verizon is banking that VMware will help enhance its security features such as layer 2 isolation and LDAP integration. Verizon will launch the service initially with the Intercontinental Hotel Group. It's a wordlwide field trial and a test to determine how the VMware platform will perform in the demanding and dynamic world of the hotel business. The service providers are critical to VMware's success. Verizon will be a test to see how well the new VMware technology performs in a demanding environment. Verizon is offering a sophsiticated service. The goal is to extend its service with VMware across the enterprise and public clouds. If they can do that it will help show how VMware can help service providers provide hybrid cloud environments for its customers. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Billboard Magazine, Est. 1894, Tries to Boost Its Digit... Sep 02 2010 02:48:17	ReadWriteWeb
Billboard Magazine, Est. 1894, Tries to Boost Its Digital Cred Billboard is best known for charts that rank the most popular music and musicians, which the weekly industry magazine started publishing in 1913 as a list of the most popular sheet music. Since then, topping the Billboard Hot 100 has become a coveted milestone for musicians, but the Billboard brand has lost some of its critical cache in recent decades, just as record companies saw their influence decline with the rise of the Internet. But it's clear Billboard knows it will lose relevance fast unless it can establish itself as an authority on music and the digital frontier. Billboard Magazine recently published a cover story on the best ten music startups of 2010, and the company, which includes Billboard Magazine, Billboard Events and Billboard.com, is hosting its first "Music App Awards" at something called "Billboard's Mobile Entertainment Live!: The Music App Summit." Both lists, and the company's careful emphasis on Billboard.com as an entity separate and edgier than its print product, seem like a play at securing Billboard's reputation as the arbiter of what's important in music today. Billboard's Hot 100 and other lists are still coveted symbols for artists and labels. But the company has challengers on all sides from the iTunes and Last.fm charts as well as digital review sites like Pitchfork Media and Hype Machine. At least one company is challenging Billboard's authority with a list it calls the Ultimate Chart that factors in more modern metrics such as ringtone sales and how many times a song is streamed. (Although this list proved less than earth shattering - see our coverage, Is Ultimate Chart Overhyped?) Billboard is ultimately a trade publication aimed at industry insiders - many of whom are groping for an authority on what's popular after the record sales-driven revenue apocalypse. So it's crucial for it to have an accurate read on what's popular and therefore monetizable, and it's not unthinkable that it might succeed. Billboard has innovated with its charts over the years and the company says single sales and online streaming are now factored into its rankings along with radio airplay and album sales. Billboard.com even tracks the top 40 "digital songs" as measured by paid downloads across genres. But this chart is arguably already losing relevance as more artists release their music digitally online for free. What do you think - can the 116-year old, mainstream company get its groove back in a time when most of the trends in music are in the direction of digital and underground? Are efforts like the Music App Awards smart - or doomed? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
World Economic Forum Honors 31 Startups as "Technology ... Sep 02 2010 02:06:17	ReadWriteWeb
World Economic Forum Honors 31 Startups as "Technology Pioneers" As I argued earlier this week, words like "disruptive," "innovative," and "transformational" can lose their punch when applied to every new company, every new product, every new feature. But there are undoubtedly plenty of areas in which innovation and transformation are not just happening and warranted, but absolutely crucial. It is with that in mind that each year the World Economic Forum selects a group of startups to honor as Technology Pioneers. The WEF announced the recipients of the 2011 award today - 31 companies selected from over 300 nominations from 13 different countries. Technology is clearly empowering people in all walks of society by giving them more information, more options, a bigger voice in the world around them and more control over their own health and their impact on the environment. - World Economic Forum The startups selected are rated in terms of innovation, impact, growth, proof of concept, and leadership. Over 450 companies have been honored since the award began in 2000, and past winners include Twitter and crisis mapping platform Ushahidi. In announcing today's winners, the World Economic Forum lauds the ways in which Internet technologies, particularly social networking, have shifted power and knowledge. "Technology is clearly empowering people in all walks of society by giving them more information, more options, a bigger voice in the world around them and more control over their own health and their impact on the environment. Technological advances that allow an unprecedented level of collaboration and cooperation in real time mean that acting on that information has never been easier." Many of the startups address energy, environmental and health issues. But 13 of the 31 startups honored today fall into the categories of "information technologies and new media." They are: Aster Data: Big data analyticsAtlassian: Collaboration toolsFoursquare: Location-based social networkingGetJar: An independent marketplace for appsKnewton: Adaptive learningLayar: Augmented realityNetQuin Mobile: Mobile securityOpenDNS: Global DNS serviceReputationDefender: Control of personal informationScribd: PublishingSecondMarket: Financial marketplaceSpotify: Digital musicVortex Engineering: Solar ATMs An international non-profit, the World Economic Forum's motto is "entrepreneurship in the global public interest." Kudos to the companies honored today for doing just that. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
4 Must-Attend Small Biz Tech Conferences in September Sep 02 2010 01:26:25	ReadWriteWeb
4 Must-Attend Small Biz Tech Conferences in September Remember when you couldn't figure out where July went? Well, now it's September. Summer is indeed coming to a close, but to help soften the blow, ReadWriteWeb has compiled a list of four essential technology conferences for small business owners and professionals coming up this month. These events are US-only, but if you know of any international events worth checking out, please leave a note in the comments. New York Times Small Business Summit ed by American Express Open, the New York Times Small Business Summit promises to "explore the next steps of social media marketing and how best to navigate a new economic and legislative landscape." Speakers include reknowned social media guru Shiv Singh of PepsiCo, Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, Polyvore CEO and former Googler Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, and David Liu, CEO of wedding media mini-empire The Knot, Inc, among others. The keynote speaker will be Robin Chase, CEO of ZipCar. With a speaker list like that and session titles like "How Innovation Drives Business in Challenging Times" and "Leveraging the Digital Space to Grow Your Business" this conference is sure to be loaded with valuable insight. When: September 23, 2010 Where: The Hilton New York [MAP] Cost: $99 Register Here BizTechDay BizTechDay is bicoastal gathering of entreprenuers, business leaders, journalists and government representatives with the goal of providing "an intensive one-day experience where entrepreneurs meet to inspire and be inspired by each other." The conference, which will take place in both Seattle and New York City this month (with a third date in San Francisco next month), will feature Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Cops Not Sure How to Use Twitter, Study Shows Sep 02 2010 00:36:17	ReadWriteWeb
Cops Not Sure How to Use Twitter, Study Shows A study of 1,089 official and unofficial law enforcement Twitter accounts shows about 21 percent don't tweet, nine percent tweet personal opinions about crime or criminal justice, and three percent have tweeted in a way that could be interpreted as racist or sexist. Furthermore, the vast majority of agencies did not include legal disclaimers or refer to a social media policy on their Twitter accounts. The official Twitter page for the Portland Police Bureau, @PortlandPolice. The study covered accounts in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, and concluded that there is no consensus for how police should conduct themselves on Twitter. It was conducted by the Canadian Association of Police on Social Media, a group of police, academics and citizens that advocates the use of social media by police (check out this guest post by co-founder Laura Madison, The Dark Figure Of Social Media: What Can Twitter Teach Criminologists?). "The lack of legal disclaimers (e.g. "The opinions expressed here do not reflect those of my employer" or "This account is not monitored 24/7; please do not use it to report crimes") and social media policy (which may include disclaimers as well as purpose and other information) is of concern," the study's authors conclude. A disclaimer seems especially wise for police accounts given that a recent Red Cross report showed half of social media users believe emergency responders are monitoring social media (see our coverage: 74% of Social Media Users Expect Cries for Help to Be Answered Within an Hour). Just one account had a link to a social media policy from Twitter - The New Scotland Yard, Metropolitan Police in London, @metpoliceuk. The policy tells users to expect updates on the latest news stories from New Scotland Yard, alerts about items posted to Flickr and YouTube and "in the event of a major incident," information from the agency's website. It also explains who is behind the account, when it is monitored and even its followback policy. However, the account has yet to tweet. Alarmingly, the study also found that 15 police accounts tweeted sensitive legal information, such as clues that could identify suspects of victims of crimes. That's less than one percent, but police officers should know not to publicly broadcast information that could compromise ongoing investigations, inaccurately implicate someone who has not been proven guilty of a crime, or lead an at-large criminal to a victim. Police tweeted mostly about missing persons, wanted suspects, traffic and safety, arrests and other on-duty activity. But agencies and officers seemed to have no strategy for Twitter use, the study concludes. CAPSM recommends that police agencies use Twitter more and experiment with third-party and mobile applications. It also recommends that agencies clarify the way they plan to use Twitter and train their officers accordingly. The group also encourages police agencies to use Twitter to preempt brand hijacking via fake accounts, such as this one in Portland: "That more police are using Twitter to connect with their communities is encouraging. However, they should take care not to use it only because it is popular or because the neighboring agency signed on. Instead, they must recognize it in the context of public communication at large: who uses it, how they use it, and where it can fit into various types of police operations," the study concludes. UPDATE: CAPSM contacted us to say that its main takeaway was that police are "doing quite well and learning a few things" and "the numbers supporting the quality of tweets are very encouraging. It means that more and more citizens are getting important real time safety news delivered right to them." There are agencies on Twitter who are using the medium effectively to communicate with the community and enhance their policing - the Portland Police Bureau, referenced above, is a good example - and we didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, our takeaway was that the wide variation in the ways police use Twitter, the fact that some are not using it at all, the absence of clearly denoted social media policies, and the instances of misuse added up to an uncertainty about using the medium - which CAPSM's recommendations for a "best practices" approach would likely remedy. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Intel and the Cloud - Federated, Automated and Intelligent Sep 02 2010 00:34:17	ReadWriteWeb
Intel and the Cloud - Federated, Automated and Intelligent Is a cloud utopia possible? The idea being that someday everything will be elastic. Services scale up and down based on usage. You would never have to worry about updating an application on your laptop. Security would be taken care of and devices would be smart enough to know what data to process and what should be rendered in the cloud. Sure. We are already seeing some of these scenarios unfold. But it's not common. In reality, the builder has a big job ahead. Intel is here at VMWorld with a message about how this plays out. In their view, it comes down to three factors. The cloud and correlating devices should be federated, automated and client-aware. Federated Cloud A federated cloud means an open cloud. It's a cloud that can be connected. Virtual machines work in the enterprise as well as they work in the data center. Communications, data, and services can move easily within and across cloud computing infrastructures. Identity is seamless. Interoperability is without question. Automated Cloud An automated cloud means cloud computing services and resources can be specified, located, and securely provisioned with very little or zero human interaction. This is a data center with intelligence. It does not have to be as manually operated as it is today. It allocates resources and is optimized in terms of its utilization and power efficiency. Client-Aware This represents one of the most significant challenges and in many ways represents the emergence of the intelligent network. In this scenario, the device and the cloud are optimized to work with each other. The client-aware chip technology know when to process on the device or in the cloud. In today's world we do see some level of data intelligence but for the most part the service provider looks for the lowest common denominator. That's why it is often difficult to use services on a handheld device because they were written for a PC, not a mobile phone. The trick is to know the device attributes that include location, policies, and connectivity. Security is taken care of in this scenario as the device and the cloud are synchronized to meet policy requirements. Developer Challenges A developer always has to choose a platform. Once the platform is chosen, the developer then has to consider what different versions are required for the various devices on the market. This is increasingly complex as the types and total number of devices continue to multiply. A client-aware scenario could mitigate the issue. Further is the issue about when to use the cloud and when to use a device for processing. For example, should a video be rendered on the device or in the cloud? It all depends. But client-aware technology could help bring a level of data intelligence that would mitigate the issue. It would be capable of determining if the video should be rendered in the cloud or on the device. Is this all far off into the future? Intel says the disruption in the enterprise market is helping advance innovation. As the impetus for moving to the cloud increases, so should the advancements in these various scenarios. We may never reach a utopia but at least we may find some ways to make it a bit easier for the builder trying to optimize the relationship between the cloud and the devices people use. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Weekly Poll: What's in Store for Cloud-Related IT Jobs? Sep 02 2010 00:04:24	ReadWriteWeb
Weekly Poll: What's in Store for Cloud-Related IT Jobs? There's a lot of talk about the ways in which cloud computing will impact the IT job market - changing demands for the numbers and the skills of employees. As James Urquhart notes in an article in CNET today, there have been a number of interesting signs lately pointing to the health of the cloud-related job market: 181 jobs advertised at Amazon Web Services last week, for example, and 175 at Rackspace. But it may be the recent release of Elance's quarterly employment report that has raised the most eyebrows. The report looks at IT job listings overall, examining the demand for certain skills. And notably, it's Google App Engine that has shown the largest growth over the last quarter, increasing demand tenfold and surpassing Amazon Web Service as the the most sought after cloud skill. Cloud Ave's Krishnan Subramanian has an excellent analysis on why this might be, noting that the recent partnership between Google and VMWare might explain the jump in demand. Does the increase in employment opportunities for those with Google App Engine experience mark a shift in the sorts of IT jobs we'll see in the future? The future of cloud-oriented IT jobs will require these skills:survey software Photo credits: Flickr user Brenda Gottsabend Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
FashionStake Opens Its Virtual Showroom Sep 01 2010 23:40:23	ReadWriteWeb
FashionStake Opens Its Virtual Showroom Five months after we first wrote about FashionStake's decision to crowd-source the rag trade, the site is out of beta and wide open. Has it succeeded in its goal to "democratize fashion"? Not yet. That's a tall order in an extremely hierarchical industry. But it is exciting the fashion crew. And now that it's not so hush-hush, we can mention some of the 30 designers involved. They include Lauren Merkin, Nicholas K, Lewis Cho, Alice Ritter, AIRA and Yotam Solomon. The old screenshot from the site showing Phillip Lim, Alexander Wang, Donna Karan and Jeffrey Montero was clearly no indicator of who would be involved. It makes more sense, I suppose, that more adventurous, less high-profile brands would find the undertaking more worth the risk. The site, led by Harvard Business School alumni Daniel Gulati and designer Vivian Weng, brings designers and consumers together. Financially, an investment in a designer can earn a user discounted pre-orders, store credit and perks such as Fashion Week tickets. Critically, viewers may browse collections, vote them up or down and suggest ideas for new garments or lines and praise or criticize designer directions. The hope is that lovers (and customers) of fashion will cherish the personal investment in a designer's collection and career. If there is a punk streak in the fashion industry (philosophically, not aesthetically) this is part of that movement: Away from gatekeepers, away from enforcers, snobs and ghouls; forward into the breach, taking chances, leveling, engaging. Democratizing fashion, maybe. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
I Really Hope Curated.by Launches Soon Sep 01 2010 22:40:17	ReadWriteWeb
I Really Hope Curated.by Launches Soon Curated.by is a new Twitter curation tool that makes it easy to gather and share collections of messages on any topic. The service is slowly letting more and more people create accounts, and I really hope it will launch soon so I can make public use of it. It's quite simple: create a collection and drag Tweets into it, or use the service's new Chrome Extension to curate Tweets right from Twitter webpages. Then share your collections, embed them on a web page and subscribe to the collections of other users. Founder Bastian Lehmann, for example, curated a really good collection of Tweets about today's Apple event that I would have embedded below if the service had launched yet. Other interesting examples of collections saved for posterity include All YC DemoDay Startups as seen by @davemcclure and Tweets about the Chevy Volt. Curation is a beautiful thing and something that's still too hard to do online. Curated.by is likely to make a nice addition to any content curator's toolset. (See also Curated.info, a very cool blog subscription bundle sharing service.) The service still has some rough edges, and these sorts of tools tend to require more investment than most users are willing to make, but I'm personally very excited for it to finally launch. "Soon," Lehmann says. Click to enlarge. _bundleWidget({ bundle_id:387, title:'Apple September Event', subtitle:'curated.by/bastian', scrolling:true, update:true, shell:true, auto_width:false, per_page:20, font_size:'11px', border_color:'666666', heading_text_color:'ffffff', heading_bg_color:'666666', link_color:'666666', text_color:'333333', content_bg_color:'ffffff', content_divider_color:'cccccc', width:300, height:450 }); Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
3 Trends in Idea Management Sep 01 2010 22:31:19	ReadWriteWeb
3 Trends in Idea Management Idea management software seeks two "holy grails" of enterprise collaboration technology: 1) innovation and 2) the breaking down of silos. Enterprise idea management has been around for over 10 years, but according to Mark Turrell, co-founder of pioneering idea management company Imaginatik and current CEO of Orcasci, there's been an "explosion of interest" in the field in the past 18 months. Here are a few of the trends in the area that we've noticed. SharePoint Integration Stand alone enterprise idea managment platforms are increasingly integrating with Microsoft Sharepoint. Imaginatik recently added Sharepoint integration to its flagship Idea Central product. Spigit (our coverage) and Kindling, newer players with big name customers, have both announced SharePoint integration in the past 12 months as well. Kindling actually took it a step further with Outlook integration. Since Sharepoint is the most popular enterprise collaboration platform, it makes sense for vendors to focus on Sharepoint. Vendors Baking In Idea management Meanwhile, other enterprise collaboration vendors are baking idea management into other products. MangoSping has an idea management solution (previous coverage) and Jive added an ideation module to its offerings in March. Newsgator is fusing both trends by adding Ideas to its Social Sites for SharePoint offering. Bringing ideation into existing collaboration tools - whether it's SharePoint, Jive or something else entirely - is a logical strategy for enterprises hoping to encourage not just innovation but collaboration on ideas. Customer Facing Tools Being Turned Inwards Many times departments and business unit managers want to gather ideas from staff but don't want to deal with complex solutions or wait for the IT department to purchase and deploy a solution. Other times, they find that the systems like Spigit are too complex. "Most employees don't three hours a day to spend in these systems," says UserVoice (see our previous coverage) CEO Richard White. UserVoice started as a customer-facing web application, but White says the company has been getting more inquiries from enterprises wanting to use it for internal purposes. Deloitte is now offering a Deloitte Innovation Academy service that combines some of its own tools, UserVoice, and education to provide all in one innovation solution to enterprise customers. Don't be surprised to see Salesforce.com customers turn the Salesforce.com Ideas platform, used by companies like Starbucks and Dell to solicit consumer feedback, inward for more ideas. Are You Using Idea Managment Software? Are you using idea management software in your organization? Which software? Has it been successful in fostering innovation, or has it been an unnecessary distraction? Have you seen any trends we didn't mention? Photo by Bart Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Hack of the Day: commandlinefu - Linux Command Heaven Sep 01 2010 21:46:27	ReadWriteWeb
Hack of the Day: commandlinefu - Linux Command Heaven Today is a slight departure from the usual Hack of the Day, as we recommend a site that's bursting with Linux goodness. Bumper Link of the Day, if you will. If you're an avid user of the Linux command line, this one's for you. A growing collection of handy hints, commandlinefu, makes light work of tricky commands. You can quickly find the top commands or simply browse through the list. There are thousands, so it may take a while. Naturally, there's a search facility ("grep the archive"), so you should be able to isolate the bits you need. For instance, here's a search of, um, grep itself. Check out commandlinefu - let us know your favourite commands. Photo by Stephen Woods Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Twitter Hands Sports Columnist His Ass Sep 01 2010 21:15:13	ReadWriteWeb
Twitter Hands Sports Columnist His Ass Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise decided to do an experiment. It's analogous to the kind of "experiment" a kid might do in dropping a glass of milk to see if it will fall. He knowingly Tweeted false information to see if other media would copy it. Gasp! They did. In its ceaseless pursuit of poetic justice, the Washington Post suspended Wise in turn. He Tweeted "Roethlisberger will get five games, I'm told," talking about the NFL quarterback, who was suspended for six games. Sure enough, some in the media did RT it, though very few and those who did mostly credited him. So, you know, dumb. He admitted as much. Grand-standing about the unreliability of Twitter transmission or of journalism is about as daring as taking a stand against shotgunning kittens. But Twitter is as huge among sports figures as it is anathema to sports organizations. So perhaps the power of the tool in his context seemed to justify the attention he devoted to it. Still, it begs the question, are social media tools so much different than any other media? Maybe yea, maybe nay. But every new way of speaking to our friends, peers and fans requires some sussing out. This is a painful step in that process. What does it teach us? Being a tool in one medium is not unlike being a tool in another. Companies don't like it when you make them look like tools. Credibility is no less valuable in one medium than another. What do you think about how we use social media tools in terms of our day jobs? Is the world of sports, of entertainment, of media, different than others in quality or quantity? Does the ethics of social media go through a color shift depending on where it's used or by whom it's used? By the way, are we sure Roethlisberger's charges of "sexual misconduct" are not maybe more important than the credulous media's relationship with Twitter? I get my coffee money from it if not my wages and I'm still pretty sure (alleged) rape (the police declined to arrest him) trumps Twitter. Maybe Wise should have stayed on point. After all, we media boobs may buy into another reporter's (alleged) credibility, but apparently the NFL believes one of its multi-millionaires (allegedly) attacking a 20-year-old girl is worthy of a suspension, instead of impalement. Well, it's not like he took steroids, right? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
TechStars Comes to the Big Apple Sep 01 2010 20:34:25	ReadWriteWeb
TechStars Comes to the Big Apple In what's bound to be a boost for an already thriving tech startup scene, the Boulder-based incubator TechStars announced today that it is opening a program in a new location, New York City. This will be the fourth city into which the program has expanded, joining Boulder, Seattle, and Boston. TechStars is accepting applications now for the NYC Class of 2011. The deadline for applying is November 21, and the inaugural program will kick off in New York in mid-January of next year. TechStars provides participants in the 3 month program up to $18,000 in seed funding ($6000 per team member), office space, and mentoring. And the list of mentors for the New York program is impressive, including Foursquare's Dennis Crowley, Founder Collective's Chris Dixon, GetGlue's Alex Iskold, First Round Capital's Charlie O'Donnell, and Union Square Venture's Fred Wilson, to name just a few. TechStars takes a 6% equity stake in each startup and has demonstrated a solid track record for those who've participated in the incubator program. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Apple Hides Prop 8 Tweets from Lady Gaga Promo Page for... Sep 01 2010 20:14:29	ReadWriteWeb
Apple Hides Prop 8 Tweets from Lady Gaga Promo Page for Ping (Screenshots) The new iTunes social network Ping will let you connect directly with your favorite artists, but Apple's promotional image for the new feature conveniently omits a string of Tweets from Lady Gaga's timeline in which she protests anti-gay marriage legislation Proposition 8. It's a little thing, but given the controversies Apple has faced around app store censorship, and the direct-to-audience promise of both Twitter (and presumably Ping), it certainly seems notable. Apparently the company wanted to have its cake and eat it too when it came to one of the world's most famous, and outspoken, musical artists. Full coverage of today's Apple news.Surely we'll get the real deal on Ping itself, right? Lady Gaga with all her sex, politics and sensationalism - in addition to her musical thoughts? Dear Gaga, please don't break the new iTunes. It has retina display! Thanks to the always observant Kevin Marks for pointing this out on Twitter. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Did Steve Jobs Accidentally Confirm Cameras for Next Ge... Sep 01 2010 20:02:31	ReadWriteWeb
Did Steve Jobs Accidentally Confirm Cameras for Next Gen iPads? There was a flurry of activity today at the YBCA Theater in San Francisco as Apple unveiled a whole slew of new products and services to the public. With all of that information to remember, it's no surprise that Steve Jobs may have let something slip out that he perhaps wasn't intending to say. While discussing the latest version of the iOS software, Jobs said something that may hint that cameras will be coming to the iPad. So what was it that he said? One of the tent poles of Jobs' keynote today focused on the iOS software and upgrades being made on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Next week, owners of these devices will be treated to some new features, including the ability to upload HD video over WiFi, TV show rentals, multiplayer Game Center and various bug fixes for hardware issues. But the most interesting new feature is the inclusion of high dynamic range (HDR) functionality into the iPhone's (and the new iPod Touch's) camera. HDR photography is a practice by which three photos at varying exposures are blended together into one image. By picking the best parts of each photo, the picture becomes much richer as detail in shadows and light are more visible. Here's an example from a photo I took and ran through an HDR app on my iPhone. It's a cool feature, but what does that have to do with the iPad getting a camera? When Jobs went over some of the features of iOS 4.2 - the iteration in which the iPad would get all of the 4.0 and 4.1 goodness - he said the iPad would have all of the new features the iPhone is getting from 4.1, including HDR photography. As far as the rest of the world knows, the iPad doesn't have a camera, so one could assume that either the iPad is getting a camera, or Jobs just misspoke when he rattled off the list of the features the iPad would be getting. The later is possible, but why wouldn't Apple put a camera on the iPad. When the iPad was first dissected, a placeholder frame for mounting a camera was found built into the design of the current model. A forward-facing camera on the iPad certainly makes sense (for things like FaceTime), and with all the extra room, they could make the quality of the camera match that of the iPhone's outward facing camera. And hey, why not slap another on the outside to take photographs in beautiful HDR for viewing on that big lovely screen Apple loves to talk about? Apple seems to be in love with cameras these days, anyhow. The iPod Touch now has a two-camera system just like the iPhone - a push by Apple to get more people using FaceTime. Why not get people FaceTiming on their iPads too? Rumors of a smaller 7-inch iPad have been circulating as well, and what better time than November to launch that when iOS 4.2 is released? What do you think? Did Jobs let one slip? Or was it a mental error as he rattled of features? Let us know what you think in the comments below! Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Report Examines Where the Top VC Firms Are Investing Sep 01 2010 19:38:23	ReadWriteWeb
Report Examines Where the Top VC Firms Are Investing Last week, we looked at one of the latest reports from the investment research firm CB Insights, tracking the top venture capital firms across the U.S. in terms of their deal activity. According to that report, over the past year the top 30 firms participated in 663 unique deals (almost a quarter of all deals) with amounting to almost $9 billion in investment. CB Insights has broken down these deals further to examine the trends in terms of deal flow by sector, and no surprise, investment in Internet technologies led the pack, comprising 36% of the deals and 26% of the dollars the top VC firms invested. (Healthcare was the number 2 sector for both the deal numbers and deal size.) Within the Internet sector, there are numerous sub-industries where VCs invested - monitoring, security, web development, video. But despite this diversity, four of these sub-industries dominated, accounting for 40% of the funding from VC firms: social; advertising, sales and marketing; e-commerce; and gaming. Social, advertising, and gaming were the top three sub-industries in terms of deal flow as well. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Apple Event Announcements Rundown: iOS 4.1, New iPods, ... Sep 01 2010 18:52:32	ReadWriteWeb
Apple Event Announcements Rundown: iOS 4.1, New iPods, iTunes 10, Ping and Apple TV It was a busy day at the YBCA Theater in San Francisco today as Apple unveiled a slew of new products and services to its crowd, and to those watching live on the Web. We saw upgrades to the iOS software for all iOS devices (even the iPad), a new line-up of iPods for the holiday season, iTunes 10 with its social network Ping and of course, the new $99 Apple TV. Here's a run down of everything that happened in one handy-dandy list in case you missed it! Retail Store Update Apple has opened three new stores internationally in Paris, London and Shangai. They now have 300 stores in 10 countries, with their 11th, Spain, coming soon. Apple has single days where over 1 million people visit their stores, and more than 50% of their customers are buying their first Mac. iOS 4.1 and 4.2 120 million iOS devices have been sold since the first iPhone launched. 230,000 new activations occur each day. 6.5 billions apps have been downloaded from the AppStore, which now hosts 250,000 apps. 10% of those apps are iPad apps. 200 apps are added tot he store each second. iOS 4.1 - The next iOS iteration will be available next week for iPhones and iPod touches and features bug fixes for issues associated with the proximity sensor, Bluetooth and iPhone 3G. iOS 4.1 also features high dynamic range (HDR) photographs within the camera app, which takes three photos at varying exposures and blends them together to make rich photographs. Game Center will finally be lauching with the 4.1 release. It allows game enthusiasts to network with friends, get matched up for multiplayer games, see leaderboards and get push invitations to play online. Mike Capps from Epic Games (makers of Gears of War) demoed a new game, "Project Sword," which features Game Center functionality. iOS 4.2 Sneek Peak - Apple also provided a first-look at iOS 4.2, which will bring all the functionality of iOS 4.1 to the iPad. Folders, multitasking, and other familiar features will hit the bigger screen in November. Also, 4.2 will allow for wireless printing to networked printers on the iPad. New iPods Apple has sold 275 million iPods to date. A new iPod Shuffle is a "best of both worlds" approach, which combines buttons and voice controls in a new small design. It will be in 5 colors, will get 15 hours of battery life and will hold 2GB of music for just $49. New iPod Nanos have eliminated to the click-wheel and gone touch screen with a square-shaped miniature iOS device. It also features a clip on the back like the shuffle, and the screen can be rotated with a pinch-and-twist motion. It has the same colors as the shuffle, plus granite and red versions. $149 for 8GB, and $179 for 16GB. The iPod Touch, the #1 portable game player, is now thinner and gets all the hardware upgrades from the iPhone 4, including the Retina Display, the A4 chip, the gyroscope. Also, it features forward and front-facing cameras, and can now run FaceTime for chatting with iPod and iPhone owners. $229, $299 and $399 are the prices for 8, 32 and 64 GB models. All of the new iPods are available next week, and can be reordered starting today. iTunes 10 and Ping A new iTunes is available today and features a new logo (finally) and Apple's foray into social networking with Ping, a place to discover music and follow friends and artists. A new Hybrid View lets you view album artwork when browsing your library in list view. It only activates when you have more than 5 songs in an album as to not waste space. Ping, the iTunes social network, will feature a stream of activity and customized Top 10 lists based on your friends' music tastes. It can be accessed on-the-go from iPhones and iPod Touches. One More Thing Hobby: New Apple TV - $99 Apple unveiled a $99 Apple TV that is a fourth the size of the original and features a dark black design. It has no local storage and streams all of it's content from the Internet and your local machines. It has HDMI, ethernet, 802.11n WiFi and a remote. Users can stream music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, radio stations, photos and more with the device. Users can now rent first-run HD movies for $4.99, and HD TV shows for $.99 from FOX and ABC. Jobs thinks more networks will "see the light" soon. It also supports Netflix, YouTube, Flickr and Apple's MobileMe. It will retail for just $99, and is available in roughly 4 weeks. Wow! That sure was a lot from Apple. Those new iPods look pretty slick, especially the new square Nanos that look like a watch-face (some one please make a watch strap accessory!). Ping and iTunes 10 should be fun to play around with, and I don't know about the rest of you but that $99 Apple TV looks very enticing. Oh yeah, and iOS 4.1 looks cool too - the HDR photos is sure to excite the photo bugs out there. Let us know what you think in the comments below! Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Facebook Credits: Coming to a Target Near You Sep 01 2010 18:40:32	ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Credits: Coming to a Target Near You Facebook Credits is continuing its march from the virtual into the real world today, with the introduction of Facebook Credits gift cards at Target stores nationwide. The move follows a number of recent steps by Facebook to redefine its Credits, from getting rid of its virtual gift shop to handing out free Credits to grease the wheel a bit. Now, Facebook Credits will be something you can buy your kids for Christmas. Starting this Sunday, Facebook will be getting into the real, instead of virtual, gift giving business with gift cards available for purchase at all of Target's 1,750 stores and on Target.com. The cards will come in $15, $25 and $50 denominations and the timing is perfect, of course, for the upcoming holiday season. "We think (the cards) will be incredibly popular as a holiday gift," Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook, told USA Today. Right now, Credits can be used on more than 150 games and applications and already 200 million people play free social games on Facebook each month. The next step, we expect, might be for Facebook to begin offering an app market of its own, as we've seen with numerous other major platforms and companies. We also have to wonder when Facebook Credits will make the switchover into purchasing not virtual but real-world goods, such as tickets to events. Now that we have a Facebook gift card, how long can it be until we see a Facebook credit card? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Microsoft Celebrates IE6 Decline, IE8 Growth Sep 01 2010 16:56:31	ReadWriteWeb
Microsoft Celebrates IE6 Decline, IE8 Growth These days, even Microsoft is awaiting the demise of its nearly decade-old Internet Explorer 6. Today, the company looked at August's browser usage numbers according to Net Applications and announced that "Internet Explorer 6 is at or below 5% in many developed markets", calling the drop "overall goodness". At the same time, the company is celebrating its continued dominance in the browser market, calling IE8 "the fastest growing browser worldwide." As Net Applications is reporting that IE6 share is now at its lowest point ever, I thought it would be a good time to address how we think about the aging browser.� As we have�said in the past, one of our main missions is to get people off IE6 as fast as humanly possible.� And while IE6 was a great browser for its time, we all need the web to move forward.� First, this is good for developers who we want to be able to write thesame markup�across their sites. It's good for consumers who should have the�protections�afforded by a modern browser. Finally, it's good for the web, particularly as we�look ahead�to IE9 and begin to see what's possible.� According to Net Applications' August numbers, Internet Explorer 8 grew by just over 1% to account for 32% of the browser market worldwide and it's growth was nearly three times that of Google Chrome. As we noted when looking at similar numbers last February, Net Applications doesn't always agree with other browser stat sites, such as StatCounter, which shows IE8 dropping by 1% over the past month and IE6 actually increasing its share by 1%. Perhaps the most interesting statistic to note from Net Applications, however, is one involving IE6 and China. There, the browser we all love to hate continues to hold 46% of the market (just over 50% if you include various editions of IE6), which the company says is "significantly skewing global share". Overall, however, Net Applications finds that IE6 has declined by 1%, bringing its share to just under 17% worldwide. Of course, all of this may change when Microsoft releases the beta of its latest browser, IE9, which looks to bring the company into the future with a clean-cut, slimmed down design and a number of advanced features. What do you think - what will the browser market look like when Microsoft brings out the latest? Will Chrome continue its climb? And will IE9 take over the top spot from IE8? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Justin.tv Launches Mobile Broadcasting App, Competes on... Sep 01 2010 16:36:28	ReadWriteWeb
Justin.tv Launches Mobile Broadcasting App, Competes on Video Quality Justin.tv is finally breaking into the mobile broadcasting business with today's release of its first Android application and with an iPhone version soon to follow. The company admits that it's not the first to do mobile broadcasting - competitors like UStream and Qik have been around for some time - but it's the first company do it at this quality. According to CEO Michael Seibel, Justin.tv wanted to wait until the hardware on smartphones would be able to support their vision for what a mobile broadcasting experience should be like. And now, thanks to modern smartphones, features like support for hardware encoding, high quality cameras, sufficient CPUs and more, Justin.tv says it has been able to develop the best live streaming mobile application yet. How Justin.tv Does High-Quality Mobile Broadcasting The major drawback to mobile broadcasting is having to deal with network connectivity issues. Mobile users in an area of poor network coverage or who are moving in between areas of good coverage and bad, have typically faced video quality issues like stuttering, stops and starts. But with Justin.tv's mobile applications, both on Android and the soon-to-launch iPhone version, connectivity issues have been addressed through the use of smooth streaming and adaptive bitrate technologies. What this means is that the mobile app can ping the phone to determine how much upload bandwidth you currently have available and then make adjustments to the quality of the encoded video on the fly, adaptively reducing or increasing the bitrate of your stream as the network coverage gets better or worse. Although the app can't record high-quality video when cell towers simply aren't providing your device with a good signal, the app can seamlessly make adjustments for varying coverage. In addition, it can perform hand-off from Wi-Fi to 3G and vice versa without dropping the connection. The app also takes advantage of hardware developments like hardware encoding, a feature common on many of today's smartphones. Your phone doesn't have to offer hardware encoding (a separate chip that handles video) in order for you use to app, it makes the experience better if you do. Given the talk of all the hardware and mobile advancements that have made the Justin.tv application finally possible, you may think that it's limited only to select devices or those running the latest version of the Android operating system, for example. But the company says that's not actually the case. The Android app runs on over 95% of the devices in the marketplace today. Justin.tv itself tested the app internally on ten different phones then ran a beta program where it was tested on a number of other handsets, too. When asked what phones it wouldn't work on, Seibel wasn't sure. Maybe the G1?, he wondered. We suppose we'll find out today as the app is released to the official market. Other Features: Social Networking, Unlimited Storage, Chat In addition to focusing on video quality, Justin.tv also strived to make an app that mainstream mobile users could embrace, even if they had never heard of the company. All registration and social networking integration setup, including direct broadcasting via links to Facebook and Twitter, is configured within the app itself. You never have to visit the company website. Other features introduced today include built-in chatting and unlimited video storage, at no additional cost. The app itself isn't monetized yet - it's free, has no ads and it may remain that way for good. The company says it's focused only on the product for now. The links created by the app drive traffic to the Justin.tv website which is already successfully monetized, so there may never be a need to charge for the app or insert ads within it, we're told. Of course, a lot of companies claim their apps are "the best" at what they do, so Justin.tv released this comparison video that positions their Android app head-to-head with its competitors. Will it perform as well for you? There's only one way to find out. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Live Blog: Apple's Fall Event (New iPods, iOS 4.1, iTun... Sep 01 2010 16:36:28	ReadWriteWeb
Live Blog: Apple's Fall Event (New iPods, iOS 4.1, iTunes 10, Apple TV) Apple is holding its annual Fall event today. Historically, these events have always focused on the iPod line. While we definitely expect to see a revamped iPod lineup, the rumor mill also points towards a new Apple TV and a major update for iTunes. A number of pundits also expect Apple to release iOS4 for the iPad today. To find out what really happens, check out our live blog below. The event is scheduled to start at 10am PT/1pm ET. Live Streaming For the first time in years, Apple plans to provide a live video stream of today's event. By default, this stream will only be available to Mac, iPod and iPad users. There are some workaround for this for Windows users, however, and we also expect to see numerous rogue streams on sites like USTREAM and Justin.tv. Live Blog 9:42 AM:The live video stream will be available here. 9:55 AM: Audience is settling in. Eric Clapton playing in the background. 10:00 AM: Steve Jobs takes the stage.Perfectly on time. 10:01 AM: Steve points out that Woz is in the audience. His "old partner in crime." 10:03 AM: Update on Apple retail. New stores in Paris, London and China. There are now 300 Apple stores. On some days, more than a million people visit Apple's stores on a single day. Apple teaches 80,000 one-on-one classes in its stores per week. iOS Update 10:05 AM: iOS update: Apple has shipped 120 million iOS devices. Apple activates 230,000 new iOS devices per day. Steve Jobs notes that some of Apple's competitors seem to count upgrades as well. 10:06 AM: 200 apps per second being downloaded from App Store. 10:07 AM: iOS 4.1 Coming today (iPhone and iPod): bugs fixed: proximity sensor, bluetooth, iPhone 3G speed. New features: High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos, HD uploads over WiFi, TV show rentals, Game Center. 10:11 AM: Game Center: play games with friends online. Showing how it works in Angry Bird. 10:09 AM: shows off HDR photos - very standard implementation of HDR with three different exposures. Coming next week. 10:12 AM: Epic on stage to demo new game: Project Sword. Role-playing game (looks great on the iPhone). Uses Game Center. Show how easy it is to find other players (friends and strangers) to play with. Going to be available in time for the holiday season. 10:15 AM: Sneak Peek at iOS 4.2: Update for iPad 10:17 AM: Air Play: stream audio, video and more over WiFi. New feature: wireless feature and something called Air Play ("we will talk about this later"). Demo of printing: iPad will get an option to print - print queue will be in the multitasking bar at the bottom. 10:18 AM: Demo of iOS 4.2 on iPad. Steve shows off multitasking, folders, etc. Everything looks just like iOS 4 for the iPhone. Release date for iOS 4.2: November for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. iPod Update 10:20 AM: 275 million iPod's sold to date. 10:21 AM: "We have gone wild." All-new designs for all models. Shuffle: "It's been a really big hit." Recaps history of the Shuffle. People missed the buttons on the last generation shuffle. New Shuffle: buttons, voice over and playlists. Also includes Genius mixes. Will come in five different colors. Will sell for $49. 10:24 AM: iPod nano: "How do we make this better. The iPod nano has been super popular. We want to make it smaller and better. The nano is now a really tiny iPod touch. Space for four icons. Comes with FM radio, volume buttons and 24 hour battery life. "One of our board members plans to use this as a wrist watch. 10:26 AM: Demo of new iPad nano. 10:30 AM: New nano will come in 8 different colors, including a Product RED edition. Price: $149 for 8GB and $179 for 16GB 10:30 AM: iPod Touch update: "It's an iPhone without a contract." Also: most popular game player in the world. Now Apple's most popular iPod. Over a 1.5 billion games and entertainment devices have been downloaded to the iPod touch. 10:32 AM: New iPod touch won't get the iPhone 4 look. Instead: thinner, Retina display ("the best display in the world"), A4 chip, 3-axis gyro, iOS 4.1, front-facing camera. Support for FaceTime (also between iPhone and iPod touches). Also: rear camera with HD video, 40 hours of music playback. Pricing: 8GB for $229, 32GB for $299 and 64GB for $399. Available next week. Pre-order starts today. 10:37 AM: Showing new ads. iTunes Update 10:38 AM: "People have downloaded over 11.7 billion songs from iTunes." 100 million movies, 35 million books, 450 million TV episodes. "It's clearly the #1 digital media store in the world. 10:39 AM: iTunes 10 New logo 10:39 AM: New feature: hybrid view - instead of long list with the same album title, you can now choose to see cover in the list view instead. Discovery: "How do you find out about new stuff?" "What are my friends listening to? What concerts do my friends go to?" Find out what your friends are listening to and downloading. With status updates, too. Ping: a new social network all about music. Right in iTunes. 10:42 AM: Custom Top 10 chart based on what your friends and the people you follow are downloading from iTunes. "Just for you." Shows Lady Gaga's Ping page. You can follow her, Twitter-style. If you want to, you can also allow anybody to follow you. "It's super easy to use. Most of us will live in our feeds and all the music from people we follow will be delivered to us." 10:44 AM: Strong privacy controls: choose who can follow you, follow and be followed. "You can be as private or as public as you want." Available immediately. 10:46 AM: Demo time. Jobs shows how ping works. 10:48 AM: Posts to Ping can include text, video, audio. Shows profile pages. Looks a lot like Facebook. 10:49 AM: Ping will be available on the iPhone and iPod touch. Will show up right in the iTunes store on iOS (but not the iPad yet, apparently). 10:50 AM: iTunes 10 will be available later today. One More Thing 10:51 AM: "We've got one more thing. Actually - it's one more hobby." "We have sold a lot of them, but it has never been a huge hit." But the people who have them tend to love them. 10:51 AM: "What do Apple TV users want? Hollywood movies and TV shows ("they don't want amateur hour" - a little swipe at YouTube), lower prices for content. Consumers don't want a computer in the living room. Don't want to manage storage. 10:53 AM: People don't want to manage storage. Want a silent, cool and small device. 10:53 AM: 2nd generation AppleTV. Extremely small. One-fourth of the size of the original. Black. Built-in power supply, 802.11n wifi, Ethernet, HDMI. 10:56 AM: No more downloads. All HD (when available). Prices: First run HD movies for $4.99 the day the DVD comes out. $0.99 cent TV show rentals. Only ABC and Fox for now. Jobs hopes others will get on board soon. Netflix support. YouTube streaming. 10:58 AM: New UI - includes ratings from Rotten Tomatoes for movies. 11:00 AM: Jobs shows demo of Netflix (instant queue, etc.), photo slideshows, movie rentals. 11:03 AM: Apple TV demo continues with TV rentals (Jobs apparently like 'Glee'). The user interface looks very slick. 11:04 AM: "This is by far the easiest implementation of Netflix to use." (a swipe at Roku) 11:05 AM: With Air Play, you can stream movies from iOS devices to Apple TV. Seamlessly switch back and forth between iPad and Apple TV. See photos from your iPhone on your Apple TV. No apps, though. 11:08 AM: Pricing: "$200-$300 price range was a bit too high" New lower price: $99. 11:08 AM: Available in about four weeks. 11:10 AM: Recap of today's announcements. 11:11 AM: Obligatory music performance at the end of the event: Coldplay's Chris Martin ("I have no new products to reveal.") 11:14 AM: And while Chris Martin plays "Yellow," that pretty much wraps it up for today's event. Thanks for reading everybody! Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Skyfire Submits Flash Video Enabled Browser to App Store Sep 01 2010 16:14:41	ReadWriteWeb
Skyfire Submits Flash Video Enabled Browser to App Store Steve Jobs doesn't like Flash. He says it has poor security, kills your battery and performs poorly on mobile devices. For those reasons and more, Apple doesn't allow Flash applications or video to run on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Today, Skyfire will try to break through Apple's Flash blockade with the submission of its mobile browser, which transcodes Flash into HTML5 in real time, to the App Store. And according to its creators, Apple is going to accept it. According to an email from the company, "this submission is the tech industry's first test of whether Jobs' 'thoughts on Flash' ban is actually political rather than technical" and it will be approved for several reasons. The company maintains that the app has been developed with "significant oversight and feedback from Apple" and that "it adheres to every guideline put forth by Apple regarding HTML5 video playback for iOS". The process of transcoding Flash to HTML5, the company contends, will allow Apple users to "play millions of Flash videos on Apple devices without the technical problems for which Jobs banned flash." This isn't the first time we've expected to see Flash on the iPhone, but aside from a hack for jailbroken phones and a program that uses your home computer as a proxy server, Flash has remained off-limits for Apple's mobile users. Skyfire operates similarly to Opera Mini for the iPhone, basing its Web-browsing capabilities off of a Webkit browser core shared with Safari and using cloud-computing to transcode Flash into HTML5 in real time. Flash video is translated every three seconds, with video data being compressed by up to 75%. Skyfire also avoids the concerns raised in Steve Jobs' recent essay regarding Flash on mobile devices. By optimizing Flash for iPhones and network conditions in the Cloud, Skyfire improves performance and maximizes battery life while playing video. The browser also avoids alternate runtime environments and other security vulnerabilities. Opera may have already broken the non-native browser barrier, but we'll have to wait and see if Skyfire can use this sort of end-around to bring Flash video to Apple's mobile devices while thumbing their nose at Jobs all the while. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
5 Great YQL One-Liners Sep 01 2010 16:01:17	ReadWriteWeb
5 Great YQL One-Liners If you haven't played with YQL before, put down that Hot Pocket and head over the Yahoo Developer Network. At the YQL console you'll find a collection of resources to quickly attack problems with cut- and-paste simplicity instead of having to digest several pages of API documentation. You'll also find examples with source code for putting your queries to work. Below are five great YQL one-liners to get you thinking about the possibilities. YQL One-Liners Note: For the following examples simply follow the link and select the "TEST" button to review results. We all love Techmeme. Techmeme also loves their tips. Sometimes you just want to know who Techmeme thanks for those "tip @techmeme" tweets. With YQL you can use a simple query to see who Techmeme thanks. Of course, you might want priority access to tips before they make it to Techmeme. Here's another very simple query to isolate Twitter users sending "tip @techmeme" tweets. There is more to life than Techmeme. In fact, there is also Hackernews. However, sometimes you just want to know if an article is worthy of your time. With this simple query you can limit your reading to high-scoring Hackernews articles There are a lot of ways to find out the location information of a given IP address. YQL provides a resource for geolocation by IP address as well. With this simple query you can find the city, state, and country associated with 8.8.8.8 Last but not least, YQL is there for you after you step away from your computing haven. Now you can keep track of those memorable times at the pub when you spill something on someone. The last few examples are made possible by Community Open Data Tables for YQL. Hopefully, if this was your fist time seeing YQL it won't be your last! If you were already familiar with YQL, what are your five favorite examples? Let us know in the comments below. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
WebOS 2.0 Pushed to Developers Sep 01 2010 15:16:18	ReadWriteWeb
WebOS 2.0 Pushed to Developers It looks like HP's investment in Palm is starting to pay off. Today, Palm's mobile operating system has been updated to a new version: webOS 2.0. The refreshed OS, now released to the Palm developer community via a beta version of the webOS 2.0 SDK (software development kit), includes a number of updates and new features - features that already have some claiming that webOS rivals should "be worried." Version 2 features, now available to developers in Palm's Early Access Program, introduces support for HTML5, an improved multi-tasking interface through use of "stacks" - a feature for stacking related screens like a deck of cards, plus more advanced universal search capabilities, support for JavaScript services and a new set of APIs (developer tools) for Palm's "Synergy," the popular webOS feature which automatically pulls contact data from social networks like Facebook and webmail services into your phone for use with contacts, calendar and messaging programs. What's New in webOS 2.0 The release of webOS 2.0 represents the biggest update yet, notes the page on Palm's Developer Center detailing the new features. And, by the looks of it, the list does include several compelling upgrades: Stacks The new Stacks feature extends Palm's "card" metaphor that allows users to interact with screens as if they were individual cards. To close an app, for example, you just drag the card off the screen and "poof!" the program is closed. With Stacks, webOS 2.0 will automatically group related cards in an effort to reduce clutter and to allow for quickly switching between tasks. Users can also manually create stacks via drag-and-drop to manage them outside of operating system control. Developers don't have to do anything special to use Stacks - new cards resulting from user actions within an app will be automatically grouped with the app's main card. Just Type Just Type is the new name for webOS's Universal Search feature which allows users to search for things both on the device and the Web. One of the new enhancements to this feature is something called "Quick Actions." This lets users perform routine tasks like updating their Facebook status, setting reminders, adding items to a shopping list, start an email and other common tasks. Also new is an ability for developers to expand their app's capabilities by hooking into Just Type either through indexing of data stored on the device or through the creation of their own custom Quick Actions. Exhibition Exhibition is a screensaver-like program that runs when the phone is docked. It can display slideshows, a clock, stock updates, news, or sports tickers but can also be customized through apps created by developers. Synergy APIs Synergy is remembered as the feature which merged Facebook contacts into the Palm Pre's address book, but it also supports Google, Microsoft Exchange, LinkedIn and Yahoo. Contacts are pulled into the phone's address book to show things like birthdays, work and personal calendars side-by-side, IM and text messages combined into a single conversation and more. In webOS 2.0, Synergy APIs are being made available to developers for use with connectors for contacts, calendar and Messaging and later for other webOS data types too. For example, developers can use the connectors to connect a chat or IM app with the webOS Messaging app, access contacts stored on a social network or online community into the Contacts app, or access other calendars or online events within the built-in Calendar app. Under-the-Hood: HTML 5, JavaScript, PDK Plug-ins Other advances in under-the-hood technologies include support for HTML5 features like enhanced canvas, Web storage, geolocation and application cache. Also new is built -in support for the Node.js runtime environment and PDK Plug-ins, which allow developers to build games and other immersive apps in C/C++. This latter feature is currently in beta, but with webOS 2.0 the beta period will end and developers can begin to distribute apps that use these plug-ins. Does HP Have a Shot with webOS? Before Google's Android emerged as the iPhone rival it is today, many saw Palm's WebOS as a possible contender to take the iPhone down a notch from its dominant position among smartphones. Wall St. Journal's Walt Mossberg even called the Pre "a powerful competitor" to the iPhone when it launched as well as a "beautiful, innovative and versatile hand-held computer." He wasn't alone in this sentiment. The idea of the Pre as an upstart "iPhone killer" soon lost its appeal, though, when the webOS-powered phone and its smaller sibling the Pixi, simply didn't sell. It was said that the lackluster sales may have had more to do with the hardware used, the carrier or the lack of developer buy-in, and not the OS itself, however. But HP, desperately needing to re-enter the mobile game, clearly thought webOS still had potential, and not just for mobile, but for tablet computing as well. In July, HP registered the trademark "PalmPad" and, earlier this month, confirmed its plans to ship a webOS-based tablet early next year. For the most part, the tech community's initial reaction was positive, upon hearing the acquisition news this April, with most hoping that HP could be the company to breathe new life into the dying, but delightful, webOS platform. What remains to be seen, however, is whether or not tablet computing will actually take hold as a new trend in computing, regardless of the operating system powering the device, or if the iPad is simply another example of Apple releasing a product (like its iPod) that dominates a market. Android, although now outpacing iPhone shipments in many markets, most notably the U.S., has yet to emerge as the OS of choice on any iPad rival. There are many Android tablets in the works and some for sale in limited markets, but no major releases as of yet. It's far too soon to say if an Android tablet will overtake the iPad or vice versa. In fact, it's just as possible that HP's "PalmPad" could be the real iPad competitor, for that matter. That's what HP is hoping for, of course. But it is notable that HP, a personal computing powerhouse in this industry, has embraced a new operating system that's not Microsoft Windows. If marketed well, priced appropriately and - most importantly - if HP's brand name clout can attract developer attention, it's fair to say the "PalmPad" has a real shot. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Moving Tales: Do Animated eBooks Have a Future? Sep 01 2010 12:40:16	ReadWriteWeb
Moving Tales: Do Animated eBooks Have a Future? Recently we've been exploring how the book industry is adjusting to electronic books. There are pros and cons to eBooks, but regardless the industry is moving to digital formats fast - even to the point of the Oxford English Dictionary considering not publishing another print edition. Some book publishers aren't just adjusting to eBooks, they're embracing them with open arms. Moving Tales is one such publisher. It recently released a book as an iPad app, called The Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross. Moving Tales, as the name implies, is a producer of animated books. It's a mix of movies and books, but does it work? Moving Tales aims to "bring stories to life," through multimedia features such as 3D animation, music, voice overs, sound effects, alternate views and animation of text "using the iPad's accelerometer." The company also makes use of features native to a tablet-like device, such as page swipe or tap for page turning and what it describes as "extras to ensure no two viewings [are] alike." The Pedlar Lady is a book about "the journey of a poor pedlar woman who, guided by the shifting line between the real and the unreal, discovers a surprising and wonderful treasure." It costs $4.99 in the App Store. The story is told almost as if it's an animated film, with voice over and sound affects optionally accompanying the animation. The words are also present of course, allowing you to read the text sans sound if you prefer. Novelty, or The Future of eBooks? The overall effect of The Pedlar is akin to a graphic novel, in that the animation is a core part of the experience. With traditional works of fiction, the reader uses her imagination to bring the text to 'life.' And that's much of the fun, as anyone who has seen a movie version of a novel before reading the novel will attest. If you see the movie first, when you read the book you then have a set picture in your mind about what the characters look and act like. Whereas if you read the book first, you fill in those details in your own mind - even adding bits of yourself or people you know to the fleshed out characters in your head. Reading this iPad book took some of that internal magic away from me, but arguably added enough magic of its own to compensate. So is this the future of eBooks? My answer is that it's one future. There are certain works of fiction that would lend themselves well to animation and sound effects: childrens books, poetry books where the poet wants to augment their words with the help of animation, books with strong imagery where animation would enhance the experience (the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, for example). Many other books will be best left to the reader's visual imagination, or are simply too wordy or complex to convert into an animated story. This form of eBook also is very insular, in that it has no social features and no links to external Web content. This perhaps says more about what Apple allows an iPad application to easily do. Still, it's worth noting that eBooks are capable of a much more expansive experience than what Moving Tales presents. The Pedlar Lady is an impressive eBook though, visually stunning and stylishly delivered. What are your thoughts on animated eBooks? Also let us know in the comments if you've come across similar eBooks - on the iPad, PC, or other devices. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Acquisition Aims to Change History for Mobile Apps & Data Sep 01 2010 09:22:16	ReadWriteWeb
Acquisition Aims to Change History for Mobile Apps & Data Mobile App Compiler OpenPlug Joins Alcatel-Lucent Maybe you love mobile apps - or maybe you build them yourself. Either way, it's big news that international mobile infrastructure conglomerate Alcatel-Lucent has acquired cross-platform mobile app development tool and compiler OpenPlug. Alcatel-Lucent, a company with a nearly $6 billion market cap, will soon begin offering OpenPlug's Adobe Flex application development tool that compiles apps into native code. It will be offered both direct to developers (freemium) and to telephony service providers around the world interested in exposing their technology to build a developer community. Telephony could be just the beginning as well, as Alcatel has DVRs and other connected devices in its long-term sights. As part of a platform play, this acquisition is like a seed; densely packed with promise, aiming to power the reinvigoration of the world's telephone companies. It may or may not work. Enabling apps to drive consumer demand for data is the strategy. The Big Picture on Mobile Apps When you hear "mobile apps" don't just think about you and your friends downloading a few apps to your iPhone or Android. Leading mobile tech blog MSearchGroove cites leading mobile analyst Chetan Sharma's estimate there were over 7 billion mobile app downloads in 2009, 37% of which were in Asia. That number is expected to grow to almost 50 billion by 2012. Revenue is forecast to increase from $4.1 billion in 2009 to $17.5 billion by 2012. Mobile apps aren't just about you poking an app store on your phone, either. Sharma was cited by Gigaom last month, reporting that more non-human internet-connected devices came online with AT&T and Verizon last quarter than did new human mobile subscribers. Your kitchen refrigerator's analytics service? There will be apps for that. Maybe they'll even be written in native code across multiple platforms for devices from different providers. OpenPlug is an eight-year old company that originally focused on enabling application developers to build apps for feature phones. Today it offers an Adobe Flex app authoring tool that compiles to native code in iOS, Android, Symbian, leading feature phone operating systems and other platforms. App platforms are big today, but they are expected to be even bigger in the future. If telephony service providers begin offering easy tools for publishing cross-platform native mobile apps, that could set fire to the mobile app world all the more. The Strategic Fit Alcatel-Lucent is a major telephony infrastructure provider headquartered in Paris, but consisting of a number of big technology players including the historic Bell Telephone Laboratories. What does the company do? They sell pipes, essentially, to telephone service providers. This Summer, for example, AT&T customers were experiencing slow upload speeds on their brand new iPhones and AT&T said it was the fault of Alcatel-Lucent technology. Alcatel-Lucent sells a wide variety of middleware technologies to almost every major telephone service provider you could name and many you probably couldn't. Alcatel serves telephone companies. And telephone companies know that the times are changing. The days of "Ring, ring, operator? Please connect me to Grandma Ginnie" are over. Billions of mobile phone devices are now in the pockets of people all around the world - more people have access to mobile phones than have access to clean drinking water - and value-added applications are a prime selling point and likely source of bandwidth-driven revenue generation in the future. Enter the company's API strategy. Alcatel is now investing substantial resources into what it calls "application enablement." It acquired the web's leading directory and tracking service for APIs, Programmable Web. (Pick an API on ProgrammableWeb, Alcatel says, and imagine an interface built in OpenPlug to compile apps written against it, to any mobile platform.) It is doing outreach to developers all around the world. It is telling its telephone service provider customers that they should purchase its support for exposing new technical capabilities to outside developers through APIs. What a Mobile App Authoring Platform Means Alcatel-Lucent says its customers have identified not just the big-picture telephony service capabilities like voice, quality of service, analytics, telepresence, user identity and user activity streams (hello, that's a lot of capabilities aka development platform hooks) but in fact "hundreds" of data and service types it could expose to 3rd party developers to build apps on top of. ("Hundreds?" I asked the company, "If there are hundreds, I want to see that list.") Got that? The explosion of mobile devices around the world has corresponded with a shift in the telephony economy, such that phone service providers now seek to expose the many different characteristics of their pipes (really just very reliable data) to a splintered ecosystem of tiny, independent software developers. That's intended to offer customers upsold multi-media, self-publishing based, long-tail, real-time communications capabilities (for consumer, enterprise, education, medical markets etc.) that would probably have been unimaginable when these phone company giants were founded, usually just decades ago. (Eg. "I want to enable companies to build a service that lets their customers see the online activities of multiple co-workers, speaking together in real-time, from different locations, on a device they carry casually in their pockets.") But there is enough variety in the mobile market that killer apps have got to be cross-platform. "We've seen a lot of RFPs from carriers asking for a cross-platform development solution," Laura Merling, vice president of Alcatel-Lucent's global developer strategy, told us. "As a service provider, tell me how you solve that problem, they say. One way to do this will be to license a tool to carriers to offer to their developer community." Opening up the ability for a much larger number of developers to author applications that can run natively across multiple mobile device platforms, accessing new communications capabilities from telephony service providers? That sounds like a logical reason for a company like Alcatel-Lucent to buy a company like OpenPlug - and reason for even end users to take note of what it could mean for the future of their experiences with their phones. Disclosure: Alcatel-Lucent happens to be a sponsor of ReadWriteWeb and the author of this post was commissioned to write the forward to the company's new book about application enablement ("The Shift: The Evolving Market, Players and Business Models in a 2.0 World") but honestly, show us any acquisition in service of a telephony middleware provider shifting to adopt a major mobile API strategy and we're going to cover that with great interest no matter what company is involved. We love that kind of stuff. Also, the book is a great read, if you're a nerd who likes original ethnographic research about the different customer requirements for telephony APIs across various market segments. I mean a really good read. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
What Cloud Providers Can Learn From Google Buzz and its... Sep 01 2010 07:42:21	ReadWriteWeb
What Cloud Providers Can Learn From Google Buzz and its Downward Slide They say that the worst part of a dying relationship has nothing to do with love or hate. It's the indifference that can be excruciating. When the other party does not care. That may be the sad lesson we are seeing with Google Buzz. Services that are soaring in popularity will get oodles of attention for every feature that is added. Services that are fading get almost no buzz at all. Google Apps, GMail and Google Maps garner excitement for new features. We write about them here on the pages of ReadWriteWeb as do other blogs and news organizations. Google Buzz is getting no attention at all. No one cares when it launches a new feature for developers. Google Buzz Track is a case in point. Last week, Google Buzz introduced Track in a blog post by Ivaylo Popov of the Google Buzz team. Track is offered through the Google Buzz API. It provides a way for developers to add a search feature that gives the user the ability to find Google Buzz updates on a particular topic such as coffee or tea. The updates come in real-time. It uses Pubsubhubbub. The post goes on to explain the feature and its use. You can give it a test run in Google Reader to see how it works: For example, if you'd like to receive all the new public Google Buzz posts about coffee or tea, simply open Google Reader, click "Add a subscription," and paste in the following URL: https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/track?q=coffee+OR+tea This seems kind of interesting but nothing truly super fantastic. But the interest in Google Buzz is so low that not one major technology blog or news organization picked up the story. That says a lot about the degree of interest in Google Buzz, a service that had one of the rockiest starts of any app we have seen in the past year. Google launched as part of GMail to get more users. It auto-followed people based on who users most often communicated with in Gmail. It ended up revealing all kinds of private information such as email and chat habits. Google desperately wanted Google Buzz to match the deep swell in popularity that Twitter had enjoyed. It did not work. Instead, it lead to distrust. Can cloud developers learn something from Google Buzz? It seems so. Google tried to engineer interest in Google Buzz. It did not beta test the service. It made trade offs that created major privacy issues. Google Buzz became a symbol of what can happen when a service crosses the line. Google wanted success too bad. It tried to leverage GMail like Microsoft used its operating system to garner interest in its online services. That practice haunted Microsoft. And the practices Google used to launch Google Buzz is now coming back to haunt as well. Cloud providers walk a thin line. The goal is to develop a great service that excites developers. But it's also important to make it compelling. Users hang in the balance. Cross that line and you will see the results. The issues may not appear immediately but over time the results will be clear. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Is A More Insidious Industry-Written Net Neutrality Pro... Sep 01 2010 03:28:16	ReadWriteWeb
Is A More Insidious Industry-Written Net Neutrality Proposal On The Way? A an industry group made of dozens of high-profile technology companies including Apple, Microsoft and Nokia, announced "significant progress" on its recommendations on how the Internet should be regulated. It will be interesting to see in what ways how the recommendations from the Information Technology Industry Council will differ from the "policy framework" put forth by Verizon and Google last month that reaffirmed basic principles of an indiscriminate wireline Internet but made an exception for wireless. ITIC is working on terms it says will "reflect a broad representation of providers and stakeholders" in the debate over net neutrality that broke out in May after a court case challenged the government's authority over Internet service providers. The Federal Communications Commission is considering a regulatory change that will determine whether providers can prioritize data sent over the Internet. Weighted toward a neutral Internet Based on the ITIC's member list, we're expecting its proposal to be more - ahem - in the corporate interest than the one put forth by Google and Verizon, which at least called for enforceable neutrality rules. But there are a few companies in the group that could push the recommendations the other way. ITIC includes cell phone handset makers Nokia and Research in Motion, which have an interest in a less-regulated wireless Internet, and Cisco Systems, which is likely to vote the same way due to its stake in networks that support wireless connections for objects and devices. Both companies signed a letter last year saying formal net neutrality regulations punish innovators, kill jobs and are generally more trouble than they're worth. The group also includes Apple, which has an established fondness for restricted channels. Another member is Microsoft, which last year told the FCC that broadband access providers should be able to offer tiered services, as long as the market is competitive. "The adoption of unnecessary or insufficiently tailored regulations, such as a prohibition on all types of discrimination, could have 'the unintended consequence of limiting innovation and investment going forward,'" Microsoft wrote in a filing, citing the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The group also includes infrastructure owners Qualcomm, Intel and Ericsson. Skype, eBay may push things the other way But there are a few more populist companies in the group. eBay has supported legislation in the past that would prohibit network operators from "replacing the robust open Internet with 'Pay to Play' private networks that will force out and discriminate against content and service providers that refuse to pay new tolls." Another member, Skype, has been called "one of the loudest voices for net neutrality from within the high-tech industry," advocating for rules that ensure users can get access to whatever content and services they want on the Web, unfettered. Lobbyists for ITIC started developing their own recommendations after talks between the FCC and the industry stalled and Google and Verizon released their proposal. What do you think? Will ITIC's recommendations end up being better for users than Google/Verizon's recommendations - or worse? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Why Only Mac Users Can Watch Apple's Event Tomorrow Sep 01 2010 01:28:24	ReadWriteWeb
Why Only Mac Users Can Watch Apple's Event Tomorrow You can watch a live stream of Apple's fall event tomorrow, the company has announced - but only if you're using an Apple device. Apple will broadcast the event using its internally-developed HTTP Live Streaming Protocol, which requires either a Mac running Safari on Mac OS X version 10.6, an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or higher or an iPad. It's not because Apple only wants its fans watching, however. "QuickTime X, a major leap forward that advances modern media and Internet standards" -Apple Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Get Quick Answers to Your Small Biz Questions on Focus.com Sep 01 2010 01:14:17	ReadWriteWeb
Get Quick Answers to Your Small Biz Questions on Focus.com Need to know which Web-based project management platform is the best? Looking for CRM software advice? SEO tips? Still deciding whether to start a small business in the first place? Sure, you could head over to your favorite search engine and spend the rest of the day digging up an answer. But if you need insight faster than that, one reliable option is Focus.com, a rapidly-growing site for SMBs that offers free how-to's, reports and real-time Q&A with over 5,000 industry experts. In addition to a wide range of white papers, tech buying guides and research briefs, Focus.com includes a very useful Q&A forum. It's a little like Quora for small businesses, but with designated experts in a variety of fields. In addition to asking or replying to a question, you can opt to "Follow" it and receive follow-up emails each time somebody else chimes in on the thread. Like other Q&A products, individual comments can be voted up or down. In our test run, we responded to an inquiry about project management software and threw in a follow-up question. Before long, really good responses started rolling in. Since the site is members-only (sign-up is free) and relies heavily on established experts, the conversations tend to be on-topic and rather insightful. The site's design is clean and intuitive, with nine main sections broken down by discipline, as well as one general "Small Business" landing page. Each section contains the latest guides and briefs, along side the most recent responses to questions in that section. The use of user avatars and down-to-the-minute timestamps give the recent activity stream a social, real-time feel. Focus.com boasts a recent 260% quarterly increase in its membership, with a total of over 750,000 members. The site, which is free to use, makes money from advertising from eight of the largest tech companies in the world. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
10Questions Uses Video, Sharing to Grill Midterm Electi... Sep 01 2010 00:34:25	ReadWriteWeb
10Questions Uses Video, Sharing to Grill Midterm Election Candidates The 2010 U.S. midterm elections are coming up. On November 2, 36 of the 100 Senate seats, 26 of the 50 gubernatorial and all of the House seats will be contested. As they did for the 2008 presidential elections, the Personal Democracy Forum is working with YouTube to ask voters to post videos of 10 Questions they have for the candidates in a race, or submit text versions. 10Questions is focusing on what they consider the 46 most competitive of these races. For each of them, viewers can, via their website or an embeddable widget, anyone can upload videos of their questions, view those of other users and vote on whose questions should be asked. View uploading and voting widgets with videos after the jump. How It Works On September 21st the top 10 questions for each race will be given to the candidates involved and they will have two weeks to upload their answers to YouTube. Viewers will then vote on whether those candidates have actually answered the questions, or if their responses were just circumlocutions, legerdemain, spin and talking points. This time, 10Questions is going out with a host of media partners, from the Miami Herald to WNYC to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In addition to their site and widget, they are reaching out via Twitter and Facebook. I asked Daniel Teweles, VP of Business Development and Marketing at the Personal Democracy Forum to address the possibility that the system might be gamed by groups of users. "Votes are limited to one per Google Account, and the the top ten questions will have their votes audited to further guard against ballot box stuffing. On the answer side of things, it is certainly possible for people to rate the candidates rather than their responses when they vote on the answers. This is an experiment, and that phase is directed at creating a feedback loop that rewards substance over soundbites, which is a major difference between 10Questions and the pre-existing debate structure." People in Glass Houses Conversation is something that's grown up with the social web, though it is never as perfect, or as imperfect, as its partisans and detractors insist. Teweles's group isn't alone in the attempt to create mechanisms intended to "(reward) substance over soundbites." Another example is Glass House Conversations, an online version of the Philip Johnson Glass House salon that focuses more on design and architecture. "Each Monday, a host posts a provocation. People have only five days to respond . . . After comments have closed a "Final Word" is chosen from the replies." Have you participated in a purpose-made online conversation series? What do you like about it? What needs to happen for this sort of conversation to reach its full potential? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Google Launches Blog Finder for Any Topic Sep 01 2010 00:16:15	ReadWriteWeb
Google Launches Blog Finder for Any Topic Google has quietly launched a new feature: search for blogs on any topic. The company announced the new type of search in a weekly round-up of search updates last week, and respected SEO blogger Bill Slawski argues that the launch may be related to a new Google patent. This has the potential to be a wildly useful service. How many of you have had professional or personal reasons to seek a list of the top blogs on a new topic? I know I, and many people I talk to, find themselves in such need frequently. How do you access the new search? How well does it work? Read on. How to Search Google for Blogs by Topic The Google Blogsearch service has for a long time surfaced a small number of blogs related to any search query, above the list of results from a search of blog posts, or entries. This new search is different, though, and surfaces different results. Do a search on the general web search interface, google.com. Then, click on the "more" link in the left-hand sidebar if "blogs" doesn't already appear as an option. Once you're looking at blogs from this perspective, then a new option will appear in the sidebar: search for posts or blog home pages related to your query. I searched for ceramics blogs, semantic web blogs, cloud blogs, social media blogs and more. All those searches brought up pages and pages of clearly topical sources. I imagine that different searches may have different degrees of success, but this is Google - so it ought to work well. How Good Are the Search Results? The search results in this new search by blog feature look pretty good to me. The ranking of those results, however, seems questionable. The more closely tied the title of the blog is to your search query, the higher the blog shows up in search results. That's not the best indicator of quality or authority. That said, in as much as I know about the topics I searched for, the top blogs in those fields definitely peppered the search results, to greater or lesser degrees. What would I do with these search results? To be honest, I'd ask our fabulous staff developer (whom you may not steal from us) to whip up some scripts that pulled down the first 300 search results (or more) from any query I searched for, grab the RSS feeds from those sites using another script and autodiscovery, turn the feeds into an OPML file, upload them to Postrank, sort them by degrees of reader engagement, then chop off the top number from that list as suits your needs. Your mileage may vary, of course. I'd likely then use some other processes to make sure I wasn't missing too many obvious sites or including too many false positives. (And then I'd do some other stuff with it too.) Now that the sun has set of the Technorati blog directory, and no one has done as good a job in its place as it once did, it's great to see a new option at all. The fact that full-text search is the method employed here, along with some patented analysis of the sites, is great. The patent that Slawski points to, (Indexing and retrieval of blogs, filed September 2005), "describes how it may create a 'hybrid document' about a blog out of information from both XML feeds, blog posts, and pages linked to from those feeds and posts such as profile pages," he writes. That great. Add some ranking, some OPML export, and then we're really talking. Long live blog search! Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
VMware Makes Its Move Up the Stack - Microsoft in its S... Sep 01 2010 00:14:25	ReadWriteWeb
VMware Makes Its Move Up the Stack - Microsoft in its Sights VMware is moving up the stack with an ambitious plan to offer an IT services environment that connects the end points between the data center and the cloud. It's a strategy that we see emerging with other vendors in the space. Virtual computing has passed the inflection point. Virtual machines are now beginning to outnumber physical servers. Without a doubt, the future of the data center is virtual. The effects are numerous. The enterprise is witnessing a totally new app infrastructure. If you are a leader in enterprise IT you have to take into consideration the rapid acceptance of technologies such as Ruby on Rails and lightweight Web services that provide the capability to offer a Web-oriented architecture. That's what gives VMware the apparent confidence to offer up an agenda as ambitious as it did today at VMworld. From ZDnet: The company launched its VMware vFabric, which is a cloud app platform that combines its Spring Java development framework and data management, app servers and load balancing. The product is targeted at heterogeneous IT shops. VMware announced six new vCloud products. The headliner here is the vCloud Director, which is designed to model and deliver IT infrastructure services. The idea here is to create virtual data centers and computing pools. There were other security products such as vShield and vShield Edge as well as vCloud Datacenter Services, interoperable clouds. Desktop virtualization was also a key theme. VMware pitched a vision where legacy desktops would be shed for more cloud delivery. The key theme was a "cloud experience for the enterprise." The big pitch here was VMware View 4.5. Desktop virtualization was a key theme on both the Citrix and VMware earnings conference calls. VMware also said that its ThinApp 4.6 is now available. VMware ThinApp is designed to deploy Microsoft Windows 7 virtual desktop environments. The company also outlined its consulting services and partnerships with the likes of Hewlett-Packard to create private clouds. Verizon will also include VMware's applications in its computing as a service lineup. VMware is challenging Microsoft with a stack that moves enterprise from client-based apps to a virtualized and multi-tenant world. To do that you need simple app integration, a cloud infrastructure and security. In this respect, what interests us is the acquisition of TriCipher, which VMware announced today. TriCipher provides OpenID services with MyOneLogin. In March, we wrote about how OpenID will transform the enterprise ecosystem. The acquisition proves how this is playing out. The acquisition fits into VMware's Spring platform, which it touted as an on-ramp for IT to launch apps. The apps on Spring leverage the pooled resources that come with a virtual infrastructure. They can migrate from there to a cloud infrastructure. User name and passwords do not provide adequate security for apps in this kind of environment. MyOneLogin helps fill that gap. Services like MyOneLogin provide infrastructure for security authentication markup language ( SAML) integration and single-sign on with multi-factor authentication. It positions VMware as an identity provider. With TriCipher, VMware can become a hub that keeps track of updates, new protocols and the other issues that come with keeping up to date with federated identity technicalities. With the services in place, VMware can host third-party apps much like Google Apps Marketplace, which also supports OpenID. On that kind of platform an enterprise customer can also become a service provider. It serves as a platform for adopting SaaS technologies, fast becoming a fixture in the enterprise. Customers, be they employees or others, will be ready to buy without concerns about registering new user names and passwords. As we said in a previous post, it's like a club: You join once. That's it. SpringSource is proving to be an important acquisition. Without it, VMware would not be in the position to make this identity play. SpringSource opened up the opportunity to partner with Google and Salesforce.com. It also ties into the news about VMware's development of cloud platforms that are being offered through a network of third-party service providers. The service providers will adopt VMware technology. The same VMware virtual machines that run in the enterprise data center will also run on the platforms of third-party service providers. It represents what VMware calls its VFabric, a set of integrated application services that include a lightweight application server, global data management, cloud-ready messaging, dynamic load balancing and application performance management. According to VMware, "The result is a complete cloud application platform that ensures performance and portability across heterogeneous cloud environments." An OpenID infrastructure makes this kind of network a reality. VMware now can offer federated identity across a network that may be internal or extend into the cloud. The TriCipher acquisition also points to VMware's new push to provide security services. It is now offering its own systems to prevent the infection of virtual machines. This is a new area of concern that we should hear more about as apps scale on virtual platforms such as what VMware is now providing. VMware is extending its capabilities. Virtual machines are becoming a dominant part of the enterprise landscape. It is a logical time for VMware to be as ambitious as it is - even though it does have a few definite blind spots. The VMware hypervisor can not be extended to different cloud platforms such as OpenStack and other competing providers. Citrix Systems, which today made its own acquisition, has an opening to extend Xen for companies seeking to use an open-cloud infrastructure. The difference for customers will come down to trust. And of course there's the price factor. VMware has brought its prices down and has even started offering models that are based on the usage of virtual machines, a concept borrowed from the world of the cloud. We'll see how this ambitious plan turns out. But if you were Microsoft, would you be worried? Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Crowdsourcing National Challenges With the New Challeng... Aug 31 2010 22:10:17	ReadWriteWeb
Crowdsourcing National Challenges With the New Challenge.gov Next month, the federal government will launch a new .gov website with a big idea behind it and high hopes that there will be big ideas generated within it. Challenge.gov is the latest effort in the evolution of collaborative innovation in open government. Should the approach succeed, challenges and contests have the potential to leverage the collective expertise of citizens, just as apps contests have been used to drive innovation in D.C. and beyond. Guest author Alexander B. Howard (@digiphile) is the Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O'Reilly Media, where he reports on technology, open government and online civics. He'll be reporting live from the upcoming Gov2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., on September 7-8. In August, senior government officials and private sector enjoyed a preview of Challenge.gov at the Newseum at the second annual Fedscoop forum on reducing the cost of government. Challenge.gov is already live to federal employees for exploration and contribution. The next step for the site, where the Americans are invited to share, vote and contribute ideas, is likely to happen this September, potentially as soon as next week at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, when federal CIO Vivek Kundra and U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra speak about closing the innovation gap. In the interview below, Bev Godwin and Brandon Kessler explain what Challenge.gov is and what it might do. Godwin is director of new media and citizen engagement at U.S. General Services Administration. Kessler is the founder of ChallengePost, the platform that Challenge.gov is built upon. ChallengePost is also the foundation for First Lady Michelle Obama's Apps For Healthy Kids contest site. As Kessler points out, that contest now has over 40,000 supporters and around 100 apps that Kessler estimated are worth over $5 million dollars, in exchange for $60k in prizes. Aggregating challenges at Challenge.gov could generate online activity, like eBay did for auctions or YouTube for video, said Kessler. Does building Challenge.gov make sense? "It goes to the question of how visible [networks like these] are," said Dr. Jeffrey Davis, director of space life sciences at NASA. "The more networked they are, the more visibility there is. It's important to have platforms interconnected." Another issue is whether people are aware of challenges or contest, or can find them through search. "Finding challenges is very difficult, said Dean Halstead, collaborative visualization architect for government at Microsoft Federal. If you search for 'health challenge,' you don't find much on Twitter or Google. Regardless of how much you centralize, the word won't get out. You need multiple mechanisms. Challenge.gov is just the first of many steps." What are Challenges Useful For? Crowdsourcing has been receiving high-level attention in D.C. in recent years as case studies in the private sector accumulate. A recent Senate hearing featured testimony on the potential of crowdsourcing and other technical innovation, like transparency and data mining to reduce fraud. "The power of crowdsourcing a solution should never be underestimated," said Michael Donovan, chief technologist for strategic capabilities at HP Enterprise Services. "If people can start to see solutions, then a community can help and be part of the solution. It's not government or companies doing something to you - you're part of the solution that contributed to that end result. At the end of the day, you feel ownership." Next page: "How do you put a value on something that's being invented?" There are some challenges with challenges, however, in how they are architected, implemented and managed. "How do you put a value on something that's being invented?" asked Godwin, pointing to the "L Prize" competition to invent a better lightbulb sponsored by the Department of Energy. As she observed, to date only DARPA, NASA and the Department of Energy have been cleared to run challenges, although other agencies will follow. That ability was made substantially easier thanks to a memo issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this year that provided "Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes to Promote Open Government." [PDF] To make a challenge work, "You need to go back to portfolio mapping," said Davis. "You need to fit the challenge to a category." Davis suggested analyzing whether a challenge was something that fit internal expertise. If not, then expose that to the public, and build consortia. "If you do that process first, you can analyze problems first," he said. Whether contests can improve government performance (or not) has come under criticism from members of Congress and a public concerned about the use of taxpayer funds. When asked about results by Godwin, Davis noted that even if government agencies leverage internal resources, there will always be gaps in the portfolio. "The speed and relative costs of the challenges are effective," he said. "TopCoder was open for 10 days. Most are open for 60 days. Those are fast results, certainly more so that standard procurement for a given problem." After portfolio mapping, said Davis, the "hardest part is getting acceptance of the tool. We did pilot projects and now have results that are the best source of internal education we might have." The kind of output a given challenge requires also matters. When it comes to data analysis - using, for instance, Data.gov or data catalogs - apps are more common, said Kessler. For experiences and ideas, video are more common, like the Social Security open government contest. "Challenges could be used to replace certain kinds of procurement," said Kessler, pointing to logo or website design, naming an initiative or even a certain space station module. Being specific about what the crowdsourcer is asking is also important, as NYU professor Clay Shirky's talk on redefining politics at PDF 2010 highlighted. His analysis of how Change.gov could have used crowdsourcing more effectively by categorizing submissions is of particular relevance. Can Contests and Crowds Lead to Better Policy? After some of these contests close the next questions will often not be driven by legal or technological challenges. Instead, the results will have to be used to drive acquisition, civic empowerment or even more data-driven policy. "How can we challenge the public not just to drive awareness but drive action?" asked Halstead, pointing to the Apps For Climate Change a Canadian government contest. "Inside Microsoft, we have 'Think Week,' where we propose and think about different problems, solutions and how to solve them, which we submit to the community at large," said Halstead. Halstead also noted that Microsoft has been working with Republicans in the House on AmericaSpeakingOut.com, which was built on the TownHall platform. To date, said Halstead, over 500,000 people have given feedback on how they think the country could be improved. In other words, trying to crowdsource feedback for contests, challenges and policy is an experiment that's being carried out on both sides of the aisle. The framers of the United States constitution built republican ideals of representative government into the nation's laws - its operating system, as Carl Malamud has put it - for good reason. What even Jefferson and Hamilton never anticipated was the possibility of real-time online platforms that allow engaged citizens to submit and vote upon ideas. Whether such systems bring better government in the 21st Century may be the greatest challenge that the launch of Challenge.gov will answer. Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »

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