| Cardcloud: Never Bring a Business Card Again How many times have you left the house only to find yourself caught, meeting all the right people, without a business card in sight? Suddenly, you're scratching down your email address and phone number on a scrap piece of paper and you never hear from them again. It's a problem we've seen approached in a couple different ways and today, we'll show you one more, with an app called Cardcloud that we think solves a basic problem the others don't.
Continue reading »
 
Researchers (and The Pirate Bay) Want to Know What Motivates People to File-Share If you head over to the file-sharing website The Pirate Bay today, you'll notice an important name change. The website has temporarily rebranded itself as "Research Bay" and is asking users to participate in a brief survey about the values of the file-sharing community. The research is being undertaken by the Cybernorms group at Sweden's Lund University. The sociologists are interested in how the Internet shapes norms - both social and legal, and this study looks more closely on how those norms play out vis-a-vis file-sharing. "With your help," reads the survey's introduction, "we hope to create a knowledge base that will influence new laws and law enforcement related to the Internet."
Continue reading »
Storm Brewing: Commercial Data Bill Of Rights Introduced Senators John Kerry, and John McCain introduced a bill to the Senate floor last week entitled "The Commercial Privacy Bill Of Rights" that would reform and codify how Internet user data could be used online. On the surface, this seems like the type of altruistic bill that falls in to the no-brainer area of Congressional legislation. Privacy, protection, trust, accountability. All the good political buzzwords apply. Yet, it is not that simple. Data is the lifeblood of the Web and the use of consumer data and the bill would allow the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce to have a significant hand in regulation of how data is collected and used by companies. Advertisers, innovators and consumer groups are concerned with the bill, not so much because of the wording of the legislation, but rather the amount of control it places in the hands of the FTC and whether or not that is necessary.
Continue reading »
Microsoft's Office 365 Hits Public Beta Microsoft has announced this morning that it's opening Office 365 to public beta. Office 365 includes updated versions of SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online, and Office Web Apps, all available as a subscription. Microsoft has also launched the Office 365 Marketplace today, giving customers a way to find third party apps and services that can be integrated with Office 365. The marketplace opens its doors with 100 apps and 400 services available, and Microsoft says that number will increase over time.
Continue reading »
LG May Bring Back MeeGo...in Your Car! The open-source, Linux-based MeeGo mobile operating system (OS) created from the merger of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo platforms may be headed for a comeback thanks to LG Electronics. Once the future of Nokia's high-end smartphones, MeeGo was abandoned by Nokia in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone in February of this year. Without Nokia's involvement, MeeGo's chances in the marketplace appeared dim. But now, according to a member of MeeGo's steering committee, the OS is seeing renewed interest from other handset makers, including new committee member LG.
Continue reading »
Google's Data Viz Winner Shows How Your Tax Dollars are Spent Just in time for tax day here in the U.S., Google's Data Viz Challenge, a five-week developer competition, ended and the Grand Prize winner announced. The winning entry is called simply "Where Did My Tax Dollars Go?" and was created by Anil Kandangath. The Google-sponsored contest asked developers to use data visualization techniques to demonstrate how our federal income tax dollars are being spent. Over 40 developers submitted entries that offered everything from pie charts to bar graphs and more in order to make this complex data more accessible and understandable by everyday taxpayers. Curious to see how your tax dollars are spent? Check out the winning visualization below.
Continue reading »
Convergence vs. Specialization: Which Will Win Out? One of the enduring themes of technology is convergence, when different products evolve to do similar tasks. The smartphone is the prime example of convergence in this era, bringing together voice and data (web) applications. Plus, in recent times, high quality photography and video. However, we've entered an age where we have multiple Internet-connected devices within our grasp. Many of these are specialist devices, such as the Kindle and Xbox. We'll see many more examples soon, as specialist household objects such as toasters and fridges get connected to the Internet. So, does that mean specialization will win out over convergence? That's what Kevin Kelly argues in his latest book What Technology Wants. But many technologists still believe in convergence.
Continue reading »
FBI Seizes Online Poker Sites On Friday, the FBI shut down three of the world's most popular online gambling sites, replacing their websites with an announcement that "This domain name has been seized by the FBI pursuant to an Arrest Warrant." Marking the largest crackdown since Congress banned online gambling in 2006, authorities unsealed indictments against executives from Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars, and Absolute Poker, accusing the companies of illegal gambling, money laundering and bank fraud.
Continue reading »
As Google Video Shuts Its Doors, Here's How to Save the Content Long before Google acquired YouTube, it had its own rival video service, aptly titled Google Video. True, Google Video never had the viral power of YouTube, but it was a place where you could upload video content that was longer than YouTube's 5 minute limit. And even though the site hasn't allowed uploads since 2009, there's still a lot of content there - some 2.8 million videos, according to Google Operating System. Google Video became a video search engine rather than a storage and sharing site, but now it's official: it's shutting down. Effective April 29, videos will no longer be available for playback. If you've uploaded files there, you have until May 13 to download your content.
Continue reading »
E-Book Sales Surpass Print: Is This a Win or a Loss for the Publishing Industry? When the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released its sales figures for the month of February, the headlines were easy to compose: e-books have surpassed print in all trade categories. E-books have become the format-of-choice, these figures suggest. In January, the AAP said that e-book sales were up 116% year-over-year, and for the month of February that growth accelerated even further. February 2011 sales were up 202.3% from the same time last year.
Continue reading »
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment