| Sulia Joins Forces with Twitter to Give Publishers More Relevant Twitter Streams Sulia a startup dedicated to helping people find relevant content and users on Twitter, has just announced that it is working with Twitter in order to deliver "premium streams" of Twitter content. Distribution partners so far include Flipboard, The Washington Post, TweetDeck, and the Wall Street Journal. Despite all the recent hoopla about the Twitter ecosystem becoming unfriendly to third party developers and startups, as Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson points out Sulia may be just "the kind of partner Twitter doesn't want to kill." That's because Sulia offers an important service built on top of Twitter that seems to be beneficial to all parties involved - users, publishers, and Twitter.
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Beyond Textbooks: Chegg Adds Course Selection and Homework Help Chegg, the largest online textbook rental company, is unveiling two new services today to help expand its reach into the university student market. Describing it as an effort to personalize its offerings, Chegg will now offer homework help as well as course scheduling information to its customers. These new features aren't a surprise. They follow Chegg's acquisitions last year of CourseRank and Cramster. The former offers course scheduling and review information, and the latter offers homework help. The services these companies offered have now been integrated into Chegg so that its textbook rental customers can easily take advantage of them.
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Help Track the Death of the Night Sky GLOBE at Night is aggregating public measurements of the night sky (or lack thereof) from March 22 through April 6 in the Northern Hemisphere and March 24 through April 6 in the Southern. This is the sixth year the group has used you all to map the encroaching light pollution in the world. Using a web app that is provided online, participants are asked to attempt to identify certain constellations and, if they can, rate them against magnitude charts. The project tracks the increasing problem of disappearing darkness, which can interrupt the cycles of plant and animal life, eventually to a fatal degree.
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Pen-based Apps? HTC's Scribe Technology Will Open to Third-Party Development Even if you're only casually following the developments in the tablet ecosystem, you've probably heard a little something about the HTC Flyer. It's the tablet that works with a pen. Not a stylus, mind you, but a pen. "A stylus is just a dead stick," HTC PR guy Keith Nowak told me during a briefing today. A stylus is used for navigation, he explained, but you don't need the pen to navigate the Flyer. In fact, you don't use it to navigate at all. You draw. You write. You scribble. Well, only if you want to, that is. The pen is an optional accessory. The new pen has a pressure-sensitive tip and can be used with the tablet's built-in apps like Sketchbook and Notes, both of which offer the ability to draw directly on the tablet's screen using pen-based input. But the really exciting thing about the pen? The technology, which HTC calls Scribe, will be opened up to third-party development.
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Are We in a Bubble? That was the question I got asked the most during my time in Austin and San Francisco this month. Perhaps it's become the new ice-breaker at networking events. But also people are genuinely curious and unsure about whether the tech scene has entered another bubble. My answer to that perennial question over the years has never been focused on money and the valuation of companies. That's the way most commenters have addressed it over the past couple of months. Rather, I look at the state of product innovation in startups and big Internet companies. Are we still seeing innovation in web products and across market segments? For the most part, I think the answer to that is yes. Based on the current state of innovation, I'd argue that we are NOT in a tech bubble at this time. We're seeing a lot of innovation in mobile, especially. Also with evolving trends like Internet of Things and tablets. The 'social media' market is one where we are seeing copycat products and 'me too' features, so that market has perhaps jumped the shark. But overall, I'd argue that we're not in a bubble.
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World Bank to Launch Web-Based Platform for Urban Development The World Bank has announced the launch of a Web-based urban development platform for July 1. In conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Institute for Urban Research, the Urbanization Knowledge Platform will link policy makers, academics, the Bank and other groups struggling to address the rapid increase in the size and importance of cities around the world.
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18 Million WordPress Blogs Land on the iPad Over the last year, blogging platform WordPress has nearly doubled in size growing from 10.5 million blogs last March to 18 million today. With more than 10% of the Web powered by Wordpress - according to founding developer Matt Mullenweg - it has become increasingly important for the company to support more interfaces and today it has done just that with iPad-optimized themes. The company announced today that an iPad-optimized view would be immediately available, bringing "swiping, rotation, and many other features of the iPad" to all 18 million blogs on WordPress.com.
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One Extension to Rule Them All: Kynetx Opens Cross-Browser App Store Here an app store, there an app store, everywhere an app store. 2011 is quickly becoming a year of app stores, with each browser offering its own marketplace of Web apps. What's a multi-browser user to do in this world? Kynetx, a cross-browser platform for browser extensions and apps, wants to give both developers and users a one-stop shop for apps that don't discriminate according to what browser you use for what task. The company has launched an app store of its own for something it's calling "browser apps."
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How 50 Billion Connected Devices Could Transform Brand Marketing & Everyday Life Web-connected devices, not just mobile phones and 3G tablets but everything from home electronics to consumer packaged goods instrumented to transmit data to the Web, have become a part of every major speech here at the wireless industry's giant conference in Orlando, CTIA. "All devices that can benefit from connectivity will be connected," Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson, said in a keynote, predicting that the world's nearly 5 billion mobile phone subscribers today will be surpassed by 50 billion connected non-phone devices in 10 years. Some people think that may be a conservative estimate of the possible impact of what's called The Internet of Things. Chetan Sharma is one of the most respected analysts in the wireless industry; his original research is cited everywhere from the world's biggest business and technical publications to the CTIA leadership's opening adress at this, the wireless industry's leading conference. I sat down with Sharma today and listened to him describe what he thinks a future of ubiquitious connectivity will look like.
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CTIA: PayPal Talks Future of Mobile Commerce Fabio Sisinni of PayPal's Mobile team was at this week's CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Florida to talk about the company's vision for mobile commerce. Paypal's usage on mobile phones has soared over the past few years, and the company is now processing around $6 million in mobile transactions per day. It's on track to produce a total payment volume of $2 billion in 2011 on mobile, Sisinni says, a figure that's up from just $24 million in 2008. Along the way, PayPal has been experimenting with different types of technology, including everything from barcode scanning to NFC (near field communication).
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