| Hotmail Offers Interactive Emails from LinkedIn, LivingSocial, Netflix & Posterous Whenever I'm checking my email, one of two things can happen. I get an email, click on a link, and 20 minutes later I'm not sure how I ended up on Facebook but yes, I would love to attend a dinner party next Thursday. If I'm truly task-focused, however, I'll at the very least end up with a screen full of so many new tabs that I forget which tab I'm on in the first place. Either way, email can set me off on a confusing and messy adventure and Microsoft has an answer I'd love to see become a standard. Today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Microsoft is announcing a new version type of interactive email that keeps you focused on getting through your email while still being able to look at pictures, watch videos, accept friend requests and more.
Continue reading »
 
Checking In Off the Couch: GetGlue Adds Sports Check-Ins, Foursquare Integration The social network GetGlue is rolling out its largest release of the year today, with a redesigned website and iPhone app. That redesign, particularly in the case of the website, will help make it easier for users to check-in to various entertainment events. GetGlue is also adding a new category of content - the most requested one according to founder and CEO Alex Iskold. Users will now be able to check in to sporting events. In addition, GetGlue is integrating with Foursquare, so that all these entertainment check-ins can be geo-located should users choose. This addition makes a lot of sense, because while a lot of the activities on GetGlue probably do happen at home - checking in to a book you're reading, for example, or to your favorite Tuesday night TV show - movies, concerts, and now sports are also events we actually attend, not just watch.
Continue reading »
Is Amazon's Cloud Locker Really an Innovation? Early today, Amazon launched a suite of music products that allow users to store their tracks online and them stream them over the Web or to any Android device courtesy of the Amazon MP3 mobile application. The launch has the tech world abuzz, not only because Amazon beat Apple and Google to the punch, both of whom are reportedly working on digital lockers of their own, but because Amazon hasn't even received the record labels' permission to host these tracks on its servers as of yet. But is Amazon's cloud-based music storage service really all that innovative? Some journalists and analysts are saying it's not. Do you agree?
Continue reading »
Evernote (Finally) Updates Its Web Interface Over the last few months, Evernote has rolled out new versions of its most popular apps, with redesigns to iPhone, Android, Windows, and Mac. And now it's finally time to turn to the Web version of Evernote, in what will be its first major redesign since Evernote launched. While there's been nothing wrong with the Evernote's Web interface per se, when you compare the web experience to native apps, the interface makes you happy that you have downloaded the desktop client or the mobile phone app. It's sort of dull and gray. The new interface has been revamped. It's brighter and it now has the recognizable three-panel interface. From left to right: your notebooks, your tags, your note list, and your single note view.
Continue reading »
UX Evolutions: Mobile Music We're living in an exciting era for media. The user experience of consuming (and producing) media is changing rapidly, as new devices take hold of the consumer market. Smartphones, tablets, Internet TVs, eReaders, and more. It isn't just new devices either. The content we're consuming is beginning to change too. For example, it's only natural that the type of television program you consume on a tablet device can - and increasingly will - be different to traditional television. Today we're starting a new series on ReadWriteWeb that will explore how the user experience (UX) of media is evolving. Over the coming weeks we'll look at television, movies, music, books, blogs, news, art - anything that is 'content' on the Web. In today's post, we're going to explore the new UX of music on smartphones.
Continue reading »
Amazon Cloud Player: Music From Your Hard Drive Becomes Streamable Update: Amazon has now launched the service described below, under the name Amazon Cloud Drive. Amazon is preparing a music locker service, a website where you'll be able to listen to music you've uploaded from your local collection (or otherwise proven you've bought) now streaming from any computer with a web browser. That according to a number of media reports, most recently by Ethan Smith at the Wall St. Journal, who reports that the service may be announced as early as tomorrow.
Continue reading »
Here's What Stripe, Stealth Payment Startup Backed by PayPal Founders, Will Do A large number of entrepreneurs and investors are betting that the Internet is going to disrupt financial services just like it's disrupted so many other industries. Stripe is one of those, it's a stealthy startup aimed to make online payments super simple. It's being built by three Irishmen in Silicon Valley and has reportedly amassed a few million dollars in funding before it's even launched, from some of the very top investors in technology including from Paypal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Michael Arrington got the scoop tonight, posting details on the funding of a company known about by a just few observers; Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon already followed the company on Twitter, for example, but has said before that he prefers to let other people report scoops first and then try to provide superior analysis later. This is a company we'll be hearing a whole lot about in the future. According to Arrington, Stripe has raised money from PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Google and YouTube backers Sequoia Capital, the super-hot Andreesen Horowitz and Ron Conway's fund SV Angel. (The $2m that TechCrunch reports was invested seems surprisingly small for a crowd like that.) What makes Stripe different? It's going to focus on data portability.
Continue reading »
Java Inventor Joins Other Founding Fathers at Google James Gosling, the man who founded programming language Java at Sun Microsystems, announced this morning on his blog that, "through some odd twists in the road over the past year...I find myself starting employment at Google today." If you haven't been following closely, the move is one that a non-fiction writer could only hope for to make reality sound as good as fiction. It comes in the midst of a lawsuit accusing Google of "knowingly, directly and repeatedly" infringing Oracle's Java-related intellectual property with its Android operating system. Read on for the untangling of the details.
Continue reading »
Twitter: Here's Who Won This Year's Shorty Awards for the Best Use of 140 Characters The third annual Shorty Awards are happening in New York City tonight and the event is a great way to learn about some of the most effective ways that people and companies are using Twitter. We've got a video player embedded below to watch the show and we've got one Twitter list of all the winners you can follow in one place, here: Shorty Awards 2011 Winners. We covered the nature and background of the Shorty Awards leading up to last year's event. Awards winners are selected through a combination of popular vote and an expert panel of judges. Thousands of people have been watching tonight's show live, you can join them below.
Continue reading »
Dot Obits: The Man Who Invented the Internet Well, maybe Paul Baran didn't invent the Internet exactly*, but his work on its forerunner, ARPANET, made it possible. Baran, 84, died yesterday at his home in Palo Alto, according to the New York Times. While working at the RAND Corporation in the early Sixties, Baran outlined a method for dissembling information into "message blocks" in order to move them through a network, reassembling them at the end point. This method has come to be known as "packet switching."
Continue reading »
|
No comments:
Post a Comment