| Parents Rejoice: New Technologies Will End "Sexting," Driving While Texting & More Mobile carriers in the U.S. will soon have expanded Family Locator solutions in place that offer far more controls than simply tracking family members' whereabouts. Instead, these services will offer tools that allow parents to stop teens from texting while driving, stop "sexting" from occurring and stop kids from communicating with unwanted parties. Parents will also be able to read the content of text messages, preview mobile photos before being posted publicly on the Internet or sent to friends and will be able to specify what types of applications can be downloaded to kids' phones and when those apps can be used.
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Android Phones Track Your Location, Too A security researcher has discovered that smartphones running Google's Android operating system are tracking users' locations and storing that data in files on the phone. This news comes only days after the discovery of a similar file on Apple's iPhone, which also logs a complete history of users' travels by way of timestamped latitude and longitude coordinates. The iPhone tracking file was revealed by data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara this week, raising serious enough privacy concerns to attract the attention of U.S. senators.
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China Hacks Activist Platform: This Week in Online Tyranny Chinese Hackers Bring Down Change.org in Response to Ai Weiwei Campaign. Chinese government-sponsored hackers took down Change.org with a DDoS campaign after the site registered over 100,000 signatories on a petition in favor of the imprisoned Chinese artist. Ai Weiwei had been known for his role in the construction of the Beijing Olympic stadium and as China's leading digital activist and a pioneer in the use of blogging and Twitter in China. Love the future.
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Open Data Kit: Mobile Data Collection in Africa As we've mentioned before, Africa has made an asset of its liability. Its relative dearth of infrastructure has inspired a generation of tech thinkers to innovate its mobile technology. Yaw Anokwa is one such innovators. His project, Open Data Kit, "a free and open-source set of tools which helps organizations create mobile data collection solutions with smartphones and cloud infrastructure." In an interview with Geekwire, Anokwa explained the kit is already being used to do socio-economic and health surveys. The survey data is tied to GPS locations and assigned images. Additional projects include creating "decision support" for medical professional sand "building multimedia-rich nature mapping tools.."
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CourseSmart Brings Textbooks to Android The future of textbooks is digital and a growing part of the digital economy resides with Android. CourseSmart, one of the largest providers of digital learning material, released an Android application April 19 to make e-textbooks more ubiquitous in the market. CourseSmart for Android 1.0 brings access to 90% of all core higher education textbooks in use in colleges and universities to Android users. Users can search for topics within a single book or by collection, add and edit notes and can be read in portrait or landscape modes.
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Kindle Comes to Android Tablets Amazon announced an update to Kindle for Android today that adds features and support for tablets running Android 3.0 Honeycomb. The new tablet version offers a new layout for newspapers, magazines and is optimized to take advantage of the larger tablet form factor. It is a big step for Android tablets as the nascent Honeycomb application ecosystem becomes fleshed out by developers. Kindle is one of the most popular apps on both iOS and Android devices and Amazon's "buy once, read everywhere" strategy is one of the most unique programs in the e-publishing space.
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Librarians React to Amazon's New Lending Library: More Questions Than Celebrations At first glance, yesterday's news that Amazon is launching a Lending Library - an arrangement to make Kindle e-books available for libraries to loan - sounds like good news for libraries. But many librarians are taking the news in stride, glad to have more options for their patrons, but cautious - even skeptical - about the program's implementation and its impact. The stakes are incredibly high for public libraries right now. Federal, state, and local budgets are tight. Libraries are closing or cutting back on services. Alongside these fiscal trends are digital trends: the explosive growth in e-books, something that is radically changing the face of book publishing, book distribution, and yes, book lending. Clearly consumers are interested in reading e-books, as the latest sales figures from the Association of American Publishers demonstrate. But what isn't clear is how this interest in e-books will translate into libraries' ability to meet their patrons' demands. There are questions about licensing, DRM, fees, and formats, for example.
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OpenStreetMap Editor for ArcGIS Launches First Stable Update Since Launch Market-leading Geographic Information System company Esri today released the first stable new version of its ArcGIS Editor for Open Street Map since the eyebrow-raising (if still a little green) tool made a splash at launch last July. Map 2.0 geeks generally consider OpenStreetMap (OSM) one of the coolest things in the geo-world and all things Esri among the least cool. If people working at day jobs in government and industry start making substantial additions to OSM using their existing enterprise-scale tools, though, it could be a winning situation for everyone. The update to version 1.1 brings ArcGIS Editor for OSM out of beta with several bug fixes and improved memory resource utilization.
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Facts Should Be Free: SimpleGeo Puts 20 Million Places in the Public Domain If this week's Where 2.0 conference is proof of anything, it's that developers are excited about creating location aware mobile apps. One of the biggest barriers to creating a place-aware app, however, is getting the ball rolling - you need place data. Place and location, though hand-in-hand, are two different things and SimpleGeo, a geolocation data storage and platform service, announced this week that it has put data for more than 20 million places into the public domain to make it easier than ever for developers to create location-aware applications.
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A Month In, New York Times Paywall has 100K Subscribers Since instituting its metered paywall in late March, The New York Times has 100,000 paid subscribers to it website, according to a Times' article on its own earnings statement. The number does not include print subscribers, who get access to unlimited articles on the website, or promotional launch offers, according to a tweet from Times' senior VP of corporate communications, Robert Christie. The article states, "For the first time, the Times Company provided information on how digital subscriptions were faring. The company said that since it started limiting the number of articles readers could read on NYTimes.com for free, it has signed up more than 100,000 subscribers. While it said the program was still too young to judge a success, 'early indicators are encouraging.'"
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