| Color CEO: The Tech Justifies the $41 Million Last night, an app called Color hit the app stores for both iOS and Android. It made a big splash for a number of reasons, not the least of which being its $41 million prelaunch funding. It has all-star founders who have an impressive track record. It launched days after, instead of before, uber tech conference SXSW. It can be a terrible experience for first-time users and it can appear absolutely useless to those outside of a densely packed, techie mecca like San Francisco or New York. Let's put all that aside for a moment, however, and look at how Color works, what it does, and why it could redefine mobile, location, and online social interaction. We took some time to talk with Color CEO Bill Nguyen this afternoon and asked him about the tech behind the most talked about app this side of SXSW and here's what he had to say.
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Iran Tracks Tor Users: This Week in Online Tyranny Iran can now track Tor users. Tor users in Iran more than doubled to 2,800 after the 2009 presidential election. Tor, the onion-routing tool that allows users to visit the Internet without betraying what sites they are using, is now traceable by the Iranian security forces. UPI quoted Andrew Lehman, Tor's executive director, as saying the number of Tor users in Iran doubled, to 2,800 after the last election there and the protests that resulted. The Iranians have employed "deep packet inspection" to follow Web traffic that would not normally be visible. Tor has known it was vulnerable to this type of software but had not yet developed armor against it.
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RIM Confirms, BlackBerry PlayBook Will Run Android Apps In talking with one mobile developer recently, we spoke of all the platforms their app was available on, but one was missing - RIM. BlackBerry, they explained, was simply a pain to develop for. Today, the company behind the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and new QNX-based BlackBerry smartphones confirmed that it would support Google Android apps on these devices moving forward.
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Google, Others Launch Social Crisis Platform for Missing Persons In partnership with Google, Bearstech and European Consulting Services, France's Red Helmets Foundation has launched a global missing persons search engine, Missing.net. The goal is to provide an instant platform for those involved in a natural or humanitarian crisis and their family, friends and coworkers, to find each other. Until now, Google's Crisis Response team provided Person Search sites on an ad hoc basis, including sites for the earthquake in Haiti and New Zealand, and the latest in Japan. Red Helmets hopes to make its comprehensive site an enduring, permanent global feature of rescue response.
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Facebook Questions Goes Where Quora Can't When Facebook first launched its Questions feature last summer, we predicted that things were "about to change dramatically on the world's largest social network." The launch turned out to be a bit of a false start, however, and the feature never took off. Today, Facebook announced that It has launched a revamped version its Questions product, making it even easier to quickly gather "the wisdom of friends," rather than the wisdom of the masses.
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Long Live Marginalia! ReadSocial Brings Annotations to Digital Literature A rather grim story in The New York Times last month posited that our move to digital literature would spell the end of marginalia, the notes and comments that we scribble in the margins of printed books. How would we know what snarky comments Mark Twain left in the margins of his library had he only read books on his Kindle? I'm not sure that the future of marginalia is quite so dim. Nor do the folks at ReadSocial, who are working on an API that would, as the name suggests, help open up our digital annotations to others and help make e-reading social. ReadSocial's API aims to provide a social layer that works on top of and across reading systems. In other words, it means that passages from books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and so on can be excerpted, annotated, and pushed to our social networks. The API would serve to free content and discussions from being siloed in a single platform
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Rights Watchdog Says Mobile Web Would Have Changed Nazi Germany How important is Twitter in the political revolutions sweeping the Middle East? That was the topic of discussion on stage at the CTIA mobile and wireless convention today in Orlando, Florida and two very different, very strong opinions were voiced. "I don't think anyone in their right mind would say that sending a tweet is the equivalent of activism," said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, "but it's another tool people can use." Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world's most respected human rights organizations, framed things very differently though. He said on stage (above) that mobile technology in general would make it impossible today for something like Nazi Germany to unfold again the way it did historically.
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