| Google Map Maker Comes to U.S. Google is opening up its Google Map Maker to U.S. users as of today, allowing anyone to submit updates, revisions and additional information to the company's online mapping service. The tool was originally designed for users in other countries without access to the mapping resources we have stateside. Says Google, prior to the launch of Map Maker, only 15% of the world's population had detailed access to online maps of their neighborhoods, but now, citizen cartographers in 183 countries and regions have created maps of the places they live. Today, 30% of users people worldwide have access to online maps, thanks to Map Maker. Given the extensive mapping services available here in the U.S., why would Google open up this tool here? Google is crowdsourcing corrections and additions, the company says, by allowing its users to add more detail about the places they know best. But there may be more to it than that.
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Fwix Aims to be the Google of the Place-Based Web The rise of the mobile web and the integration of our online and offline experiences point towards one big opportunity in particular: for the world's information to be organized by place. Hyperlocal news service Fwix today announces a new service that allows any other application developer to pull the names, locations and web content about places in 8 countries around the world. The data is free and comes with an offer to share access to Fwix's ad revenue, which includes ads from partners Comcast and AT&T.
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Facebook Launches New Safety and Security Tools Today, Facebook announced the launch of several new tools aimed at making the social network a safer and more secure experience for everyone involved. Some of the tools, like the redesigned Family Safety Center and social reporting buttons, are designed to combat the ongoing issue of cyberbullying, which primarily affects the younger Facebook population. Meanwhile, other new tools will be helpful to everyone, like the option to enable an advanced security feature called Two Factor Authentication and the improvements to HTTPS. All of the new features are available now, says Facebook.
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Here's What You Can Build With Kinect: Custom Statues, Training Simulations, Noise Ink & More Microsoft's motion sensing technology for Xbox, Kinect, has experienced rapid take-up and interest. Last week Microsoft announced a non-commercial Kinect software development kit for Windows, given widespread interest in using the technology outside of the Xbox. But an open source community had already sprung up in November, to enable non-gaming Kinect projects. OpenKinect is working on "free, open source libraries that will enable the Kinect to be used with Windows, Linux, and Mac." Below we check out some of the latest projects developed using Kinect.
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Fiery Social Music Startup JamLegend Mysteriously Announces Closure JamLegend, a site where people challenge each other to music-playing duels, announced this evening on its blog that it will close its service at the end of this month. No clear reason for the closure was provided. JamLegend launched in 2008 and built up a registered userbase of 2 million people, the company said tonight. Many of those users were fiercely loyal, some even posted stories and poems about their discovery of the service - before the announcement of the site's closure!
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Moleskine Brings Your Favorite Notebook to the iPad Moleskine, the traditional maker of high-end notepads, released an iPad app last week that brings its distinctive, black and historically famous notebook to the realm of digital applications.
Basically, it is a note-taking application that is customizable and can be used with a stylus. Like physical Moleskines, writing interfaces come in plain (no lines), lined or squared; you can also change the color themes and add pictures. Tied to this is the ability to use Facebook and Twitter from the app and geotag all your posts.
The app that Moleskine has come up with fits in with how they think of themselves - the professional note-taker's notepad. Yet, the execution leaves a touch to be desired.
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Why People Do & Don't Use Location Apps (Survey) Connecting with people, finding places liked by friends and tracking personal travel habits over time were listed as the primary reasons people who use location based social networks like Facebook Places, Foursquare and Google Latitude do so in a survey published by Portland, Oregon digital marketing firm White Horse. The firm surveyed 437 smartphone owners and found that discounts and gaming were not seen as significant motivators for the use of location services. (Lost in Geolocation: Why Consumers Haven't Bought it and How Marketers Can Fix It) 56% of smartphone owners surveyed said they knew about these services and 39% of respondents said they used them. Facebook Places was the clear leader among users (42%) with Latitude (27%) and Foursquare (25%) tied somewhere behind. The biggest barriers to use among non-users? Privacy concerns and lack of clear benefit. Graphs below.
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Privacy & the Power Meter App Platform: 5 Recommended Policies Someday soon your home power meter will likely be tracking your electricity consumption very closely, graphing it over time, recommending the best time to run your utilities and more. Cities laced with Smart Grids, giant spiderwebs of wires connecting Smart Meters in our homes. We'll get cost savings, rational planning, reduced environmental impact - maybe even a big app ecosystem built on top of our data. But what about privacy? The European Union's Working Party on Data Protection has issued five recommended requirements for the protection of personal privacy in a time of Smart Meters in the home (PDF). Below is what the group says needs to happen in order to gain the benefits of Smart Metering data while minimizing the risk and cost to personal privacy. What do you think?
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AppCircus Makes Its Way to the West Coast Later this month, APPNATION, the self-described "show me the money conference," and AppCircus, the "global traveling showcase of innovative apps," will land in San Francisco after stopping in a number of other cities across the globe. If you're an app developer, entrepreneur or otherwise, there's still time to enter your app into AppCircus and the list of past winners might convince you that, despite the late hour, there's still time to put together an application.
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Foursquare Takes a Crack at Color With Shared Photos Foursquare, the location-based check-in app, has added a feature after an internal weekend hackathon that will bring some context to your historical check-ins. Now, when users look back at their check-ins, they won't see only their pictures, but also pictures taken by friends who were also checked in at the event? Sound familiar? Color offers a similar experience to its users, but Foursquare should have an easier time convincing its users to take pictures than Color could have convincing Foursquare users to become Color users too.
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