| Weekly Wrap-up: Color's $41 Million Tech, Android Patent Disputes, 20 JavaScript Libraries for Data Viz and More... On Thursday we interviewed the much-talked-about CEO of Color, Bill Nguyen, and the story ended up being our top post of the week. Color is the location-based photo-sharing app that raised $41 million before it even launched. That price tag - along with the underwhelming first impression the app makes - left a number of people questioning the sanity of the VCs involved. But Nguyen's conversation with reporter Mike Melanson made a convincing argument that there may be more to Color than what meets the eye. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key trends that are shaping the Web - mobile, location, Internet of Things, real time - plus highlights from our six channels. Read on for more.
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Sudan Lauches a Cyber-Army Wrapped in the Koran "Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." -- George Santayana In a ringing blow to Iranians (one of the champions of online repression), the ruling party of Sudan has gone one step further and dressed its online dissident-crushing apparatus up in divine drag. Calling them "cyber-jihadists," they have promised to unleash them on anyone thinking of speaking their mind in the increasingly hermetic country.
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AudioVroom: Music Sharing for the Streaming Generation Nowadays, music discovery can be a magical, yet completely disconnected, experience. There are tools to find the most popular music from blogs, algorithms to suggest music according to characteristics and custom created lists and channels made by curators. Still, something integral is missing - your friends. Once upon a time - long before peer-to-peer file sharing services hit the Web - the way to discover music was by trading mix tapes with friends. Nowadays, you might burn a CD for a friend but, as our music collections increasingly move into the cloud, it's becoming harder and harder to share your musical tastes with your friends. AudioVroom wants to change this and bring your friends to the music discovery experience of apps like Pandora.
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Bing Steps Up Facebook, Twitter Integration Microsoft Bing, the number two search engine on the Web, announced this morning that it has begun including Tweets within news results and and a tighter Facebook integration in its search results. According to the Bing Team, the inclusion of social media in these search results will help users "make more informed decisions in search by surfacing the kind of information you can only get from your friends, often in real-time."
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Iran Cyber-Army Strikes Digital Certificate Authority Last Wednesday, Comodo Group, the digital certificate authority and internet security, got hacked. It issued issued nine fraudulent certificates for sites run by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Skype and Mozilla. It looks like the hack that got these certificates was run by the same Iranian cyber army that earlier hacked the Voice of America. In a blog post, Comodo explained that login information for an affiliate was obtained and used to break into the Comodo server and issue the certificates.
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Dot Obits: First Woman to Design Computer Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, one of the first women in the IT industry, has passed away at the age of 86. Bartik was on the team that programmed and de-bugged the first general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. She was one of the female mathematicians, known as "computers," recruited by the United States military during World War II to test ballistics. They soon moved into the electronics program.
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Google Realtime Search Manager Leaves to Build Foursquare as Platform Akshay Patil became a software engineer at Google almost seven years ago. Now the product manager for Google Realtime, the Google tool to search Tweets and other real-time updates from around the Web, Patil announced this morning that he's leaving Google to become the new Platform Evangelist for location-based social network Foursquare. That's a huge coup for Foursquare and a sign the startup will likely put a major new focus on working with outside companies and services to build on top of the set of check-ins and tips it's amassing about venues around the world, people who patronize them and their interests. The social software developer ecosystem could really use a strong show of support, after Twitter's recent moves have left many independent developers feeling burned.
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iPhone to Android: A Confession of Infidelity I'm approaching the 3-month mark with my first Android phone - Google's flagship device, the Nexus S. I can fully confirm that it has taken at least this long for me to really begin thinking of this device as my phone, as my primary device and the one that I turn to the most when I'm using a mobile. My iPhone, as those of you who have been following this series know, is only semi-functional these days, after a long, 30-minute dip in my backyard's pond. The fact it works at all is a testament to Apple's craftsmanship, I'd argue. Still, even three months into the Android experience, I feel the need to confess: I've been cheating on my Nexus S. And I've been cheating with the iPhone. Why? Because it's there? Or because the iPhone still has Android beat in several key areas?
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