| Rome2Rio: Travel Directions by Plane, Train & Automobile A quick little experiment for you if you haven't tried this before: Go to Google Maps and ask it for directions from San Francisco, CA to Beijing, China. Now, you wouldn't imagine any other way than to hop on a plane, right? Instead, Google figures you'd like to drive, takes you to the beach and then, somewhere around step 32, advises you to make the 3,879 kayak trip across the Pacific Ocean. While the cross-Pacific directions are a perennial joke, they're literally useless for travelers. Rome2Rio, a site built on top of the much-loved Google maps interface, offers up directions by plane, train and automobile rather than telling you to hoof it to the beach and get to paddling.
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Gates Foundation Distributes $10M to Build Tech Tools to Boost College Graduation Last fall, the Gates Foundation, along with the ed-tech non-profit EDUCAUSE announced its Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, a multi-year, multi-million dollar project to help support programs that boost college readiness and college completion. Today, the Next Generation Learning Challenges has named the 29 projects that will receive the first round of funding.
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It's Time to Hack the Internet of Things Pioneering Internet of Things startup, Pachube, is running a global hackathon starting on April 8, 2011 at 2pm U.K. time. Internet of Things (IoT) is a term for when real world objects and environments get connected to the Internet. The hackathon runs for 24 hours and will bring together over 100 developers working on IoT apps. The main hackathon event is in Pachube's home city of London, but there are also events in New York City, Tokyo, Zurich, Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Lancaster (U.K.). Pachube is encouraging "developers, designers, makers, mixers, mashers, tinkerers, philosopher-mechanics and sales engineers" worldwide to meet up and tinker with IoT technologies.
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There Are Now 155m Tweets Posted Per Day, Triple the Number a Year Ago Twitter is growing fast and now sees an average of 155 million messages posted to the network each day, the company said today. That's up more than 3X from the company's report of 50 million daily messages just one year ago. "I think we should expect continuous acceleration for years to come," predicts Alex Iskold, a smart Twitter observer and founder of fast-growing entertainment check-in service GetGlue. "We are, as a society, continuing to create staggering amounts of information and Twitter is a perfect information routing bus." GetGlue helped its users publish an average total of 10 Tweets every second during this year's Oscars, for example. What might an explosion of Tweets from many different sources mean for our lives and work? We asked some of the smartest people we know and their answers are below.
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Free Ai Weiwei: Chinese Web Users Call For His Return There's increasing concern in China and worldwide about the detention of leading Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei. Reports first surfaced on Sunday U.S. that Weiwei had been detained by China authorities, while at the Beijing Airport on his way to Hong Kong. Weiwei is a prolific Twitter user, but his account hasn't been updated since Sunday (it's also translated into english). CNN reported today that China's ruling Communist party "unleashed a blistering attack" on both Weiwei and the West for criticizing the apparent arrest. Many of China's own citizens are voicing their concern on China's leading Twitter-like service, Sina Weibo. To do this, users must creatively route around active censorship on Weibo.
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TweePLayer: Time-Shifted Tweets for Time-Shifted Television Some people watch television with a bowl of popcorn at their side, while others curl up with a blanket. Others still can't turn on the tube without their smartphone, laptop or tablet in their hands so they can Tweet and read others' Tweets as the action unfolds on the big screen. But what about those time-shifted viewers - those Netflix and DVR devotees - who watch their shows at a different time but still want to see all those Tweets? TweePLayer offers a way to "take part in great online conversations synced with videos of your favorite events hours or years later, just like you were chatting live."
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LexisNexis Introduces Semantic Search If you're old enough, you'll remember LexisNexis (especially the Nexis part) as a revelation - a way to search through tons of news articles, features, papers and more to research a topic or a person without having to wade through the endless green rows of "Readers' Guides." It has stayed relevant because of its focus - the Lexis part of the name refers to legal searches - and innovation. Its latest is a new semantic "brain" to power its search. According to the official announcement, "The next-generation semantic search technology identifies the meaning of multiple concepts within a single search query to help users zero in on core concepts faster and make fewer revisions to their search queries."
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Dislike Facebook's "Memorable Status Updates"? There's a Group for That Earlier this year, Facebook began testing a feature called "Memorable Stories," which showed users a random-seeming selection of old status updates in the site's sidebar. Within days, users began complaining that the feature showed status updates that they didn't want to be reminded of or, even worse, that deleted status updates were showing up. Today, All Facebook highlighted a new level of user dissatisfaction - a Facebook group protesting the feature all together, asking the company to either shut it down or give users more control.
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Retiree Cuts Off Armenia's Internet When first Egypt, then Libya, shut down their entire country's Internet, it was big news. These acts, along with various national cyber-attacks, reminded us how fragile our connection to the Web can be. But I don't think anyone anticipated that one retired lady with a garden trowel could shut down the Internet for a whole country. But that's exactly what happened to Armenia.
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Grooveshark Pulled From Android Market Over RIAA Letter Peer-to-peer music streaming app Grooveshark has had an-again off-again relationship with mobile providers. Last summer, the service hit iOS only to be pulled from the app store just days later. Today, Google booted the app from the Android Market in "a move that comes after some of the top music labels have accused the service of violating copyright law," according to CNET's Greg Sandoval.
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