| Via SXSW: Infochimps Shows off New Site, 1000's of New API Calls Last night, the folks over at Infochimps, an online data marketplace - or the "Amazon of data," as they like to call it - were celebrating the launch of their new website and the thousands of new API calls it contains. These API calls are like plug-and-play bits of code developers can insert into their applications, so they can focus on other things like the overall design, the user interface and the features. After only a few minutes of looking through the types of dataset queries Infochimps has on hand, I was excited about the kinds of new applications they could enable. How about an app that finds everyone on Twitter with a particular keyword in their bio and then lets you follow them or add them to a Twitter list, for example? Or an app that helps you identify the most influential Twitter users? These were just two of the API calls I saw in action last night, but there are thousands more (and they're not all Twitter-related, of course). If you're developing a new data-dependant application, Infochimps is a valuable resource you should check out.
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7 Tech Companies That Raised Funding Today: Which Will Shape Our World? (Poll) Today we're looking at seven companies that announced investments raised over the past 24 hours. In the cutthroat world of startups and great ideas, which company will significantly affect our lives? On today's list we've got a site that makes it even easier to order in a pizza for dinner (as if we needed further prompting to make such a decision!), a site to help us find a job (for just an hour or a lifetime) and the company behind the super addictive Angry Birds app. We've got many more promising companies to consider. Tell us, readers, which of these companies will shape the world?
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Roll Your Own Foursquare: Ushahidi Launches Open-Source Location Service Until now, Ushahidi has been most known as a service for reporting location during times of crisis. From its use during the earthquake in Haiti to, most recently, the revolution in Egypt and Libya, the service has been used to help humanitarian workers quickly report location using SMS technology. Today, the company has taken a bit of a turn with the release of its open-source check-in service. Now, anyone with a bit of PHP knowledge and a server can create a Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places or check-in service of their own and keep their location data out of the hands of the public and corporate alike.
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Now We Can Read Alone, Together: Instapaper Adds Social Features Let's say you're about to get on an airplane. That means it's time for some pleasure reading, if you're lucky enough to be free from work obligations on a wifi-free flight. What you need to do is fire up Instapaper, the offline mobile reading application made for good times like this. Instapaper announced its 3.0 version tonight and has added a long list of features that will please and delight you. It was already a great way to read good articles without internet connectivity. Now it includes: an in-line browser that will make grabbing things to read offline really easy, qued social sharing so you can post links to share great articles automatically when you come back online, social discovery of articles your Twitter and Facebook friends have Liked on Instapaper and much more. It's a big update to a great app.
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New XML Standard for Super-Fast, Lightweight Applications Announced by W3C From embedded sensors to high-frequency stock trading to everyday mobile Web applications, the race is on for technologists to build the most efficient systems for quickly streaming large sets of data from one device to another. Sometimes the language that data is communicated in can come with high costs in terms of efficiency. Today the Web's most venerable standards body, the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C), announced official support for a new standardized data format for super-efficient transmission of data. Efficient XML Interchange, or EXI, is described as a very compact representation of information in XML (extensible markup language). EXI is so efficient that the W3C says it has been found to improve up to 100-fold the performance, network efficiency and power consumption of applications that use XML, including but not limited to consumer mobile apps. It is particularly useful on devices with low memory or low bandwidth.
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Goodreads Buys Recommendation Service Discovereads Book-sharing service Goodreads announced today that they have purchased the book recommendation engine Discovereads. According to Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler, the acquisition addresses a frequently-requested feature. "With their deep algorithmic book recommendation technology, we're going to be able plumb our database of 100 million book ratings from 4.6 million users to find general patterns of the kinds of books people read and to generate high-quality personalized recommendations."
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10 Smart Links You Missed on Twitter on Today
Fatting, Slurptime and Open Pit Twitter Mining: Essential names for common social media practices: http://bit.ly/fhxGJL via @ThoughtCatalog Cat people vs. dog people! A study of pet-oriented social networks on the Web: http://bit.ly/gLeSCj via @CLSTremix OMG she changed her status: The impact Facebook rituals can have on a romantic relationship: http://bit.ly/eorcYx via @bookforum My washing machine texts me when the whites are done: http://bit.ly/h9jj9c via @jeffdavisX Build apps not businesses: http://bit.ly/eriM4P @slavingia - More after the jump
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Libya Shuts Off Internet Again: This Week in Online Tyranny Libya shuts down the Internet again. Libya shut down the Internet for a brief period in mid-February. Then again on March 3, it shut it down completely and it has remained off. This has not had what we can presume is the desired end of this action, the end of the revolt. Nor has it kept information from getting out of the country. As we've mentioned elsewhere, a lot of the information we get is distributed by Libyan expatriates who are in contact with protesters inside the country.
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Block Sites From Your Google Search Results (No Extension Required) After a litany of complaints about the declining quality of its search, Google has made a number of changes over the last few weeks to combat the spam in search results. It tweaked its algorithm, for example, and it unveiled a Chrome extension that lets you manually block certain sites from showing up. That functionality will now be available without an extension (provided you're using versions Chrome 9, IE8 or Firefox 3.5 or higher) as Google is adding a new option to its search that will give you the ability to block domains from appearing in your future search results.
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LinkedIn Launches Social News Site for Professionals LinkedIn has been rolling out new features fairly regularly lately, as it strives to make the professional social network (and all its data) relevant and useful. Today, the company is unveiling another piece of its strategy to make LinkedIn a destination site for more than just job-seekers, with the launch of LinkedIn Today. LinkedIn Today is an industry newspaper, of sorts, available online and via LinkedIn's iPhone app. It offers headlines and links to the popular stories within certain industries and within your LinkedIn network. You'll be able to see what others in your profession are reading, as well as "save" articles to read later.
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