| Is Android Really Open? Skyhook's Battle With Google Challenges That Claim Imagine you have a date set up with one of the prettiest girls in school. You may not be the most popular kid in the halls, but she seems to like you and going out with her will be a big boost to your reputation. Along comes the captain of the football team. He tells the girl that she cannot go out with you or her, or any of her friends, will never be able to date a football player ever again. In the sociological mess that is high school, that would be absolutely devastating. Essentially, that is what Google is doing to location service provider Skyhook. And Skyhook is fighting back. In court.
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BlackBerry PlayBook: A Work in Progress I've had the BlackBerry PlayBook for nearly two weeks now. Although we don't typically review gadgets and hardware here at ReadWriteWeb, RIM was able to send us a review unit. Below are some initial impressions and thoughts, but for a more detailed review, you should head to the gadget blog of your choice, if you haven't done so already. The PlayBook is, in a word, serviceable. It is not a nightmare, but it's not incredible, either. However, it shows potential. It's surprisingly heavy for its small, 7-inch size. It needs apps, badly. It needs core apps, including email, calendaring and contacts at the very least, because webmail doesn't seem work properly. It needs to be less buggy, in general. But the PlayBook is rapidly improving. Although in the short term, it's an unfinished product, perhaps undeserving of a full review, and possibly even undeserving of your money as of yet - that situation is changing quickly. How quickly? RIM is currently promising PlayBook updates as often as every two weeks.
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In the Name of Engagement: Facebook Auto-Suggests Friends in Status Updates & Comments Facebook is always looking for small ways to increase user engagement. After all, us Facebook users are unbelievably fickle creatures. For example, out of users that enter more than three characters into the status update box, 17% decide not to post anything at all. Only 54% who attempt to upload a photo successfully do so in one fell swoop. So, anything Facebook can do to keep us engaged and interacting, it will. Today, it made a tiny little change that could do just that - it began auto-suggesting your friends for inclusion in comments and status messages when it detected a name.
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GroupMe Buys Sensobi: Elastic Groups on the Horizon? You know a company is all grown up and ready to take on the world when it makes its first acquisition. Well, fine, maybe raising $10.6 million last January counts too, but today leading group messaging app GroupMe announced that it had acquired small application developer Sensobi for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will bring Sensobi's co-founders onto the GroupMe team and likely include incorporating Sensobi's contact ranking and alert technologies into GroupMe, which hints at some interesting potential for the group messaging app.
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Lost Sounds Orchestra: How the Web Has Allowed Us to Resurrect Ancient Music The Lost Sounds Orchestra is a music ensemble that exists to play only music that has been long lost from the collective memory of our cultures. It seems like a contradiction in terms. But the LSO is an outgrowth of the ASTRA Project, a group which has developed a computer modelling system that allows researchers to generate the sounds that ancient instruments made. So if an archaeologist finds a battered ancient instrument, ASTRA can figure out how it sounded and Lost Sounds can make it sing again. We spoke with Domenico Vicinanza about the confluence of Web-based computing, archaeology and modern performance. Vicinanza is the ASTRA Project Coordinator and the Lost Sounds Orchestra Technical Coordinator. He also works as a Project Support Officer at DANTE, the organization building and operating GEANT, the pan-European research and education network backbone. Within ASTRA and LSO, Vicinanza leads the team of researchers reconstructing ancient instruments and acts as liaison with archaeologists, musicians and engineers.
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Mozilla Takes a Stand Against Department of Homeland Security Sometimes you have to take a stand, even if that means standing against the United States Department of Homeland Security. That is what Mozilla is doing concerning the MafiaaFire extension to Firefox. MafiaaFire redirects traffic from seized domains to other domains. According to Mozilla legal blogger Harvey Anderson MafiaaFire "seized domain names allegedly were used to stream content protected by copyrights of professional sports franchises and other media concerns." The domains in question alleged acts of piracy have little to do with Firefox itself and MafiaaFire just redirects from those seized sites. Mozilla is not going to disable the extension just because DHS wants them to. It wants legal justification.
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Take Evernote, Add a Hi-Liter And You Have Scrible A new webpage annotation service launched this week name Scrible that aims to make the online research, note taking and organization easier and more intuitive. Scrible is a toolbar that Web users can install on their bookmark bar that gives a variety of options to annotation of the Internet. It can highlight text, take notes, bold, underline and italicize text on a Web page and then save the page with the notations to a personal library. As far as the ability to manipulate words on a page and save those notes, the Web has not seen anything quite like Scrible.
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Iran the Worst Tyranny: This Week in Online Tyranny Iran Officially Worst Online Oppressor. A new report from Freedom House has ranked Iran as the world's worst abuser of online rights. "Freedom on the Net 2011" determined that the five worst countries for online freedom - based on obstacles to access, limits on content and violations of user rights - are Iran, followed by Burma, China, Cuba and Tunisia. (The last entry is certainly changed somewhat by the uprising earlier this year.)
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This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions. That's a potent idea and if implemented properly could future-proof a part of the web from authoritarian crack-downs, disruptions by disasters and more. It could also establish a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular. It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.
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Using Windows Phone 7: Differences for Mac & PC Users As a part of an experiment to really understand the value and the shortcomings of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform, I recently made the HTC HD7 my primary device. The only exception to this is when I travel, when a mobile hotspot (such as is provided by my Nexus S) is a necessity. I don't know that this experiment can last much longer, however, because today's Windows Phone is simply not powerful enough for my day-to-day needs. When the "Mango" update (due this fall) is released, that may change. In the meantime, I spent a little time playing around with the desktop software side of the Windows Phone experience, which is notably different depending on whether you're a Mac or PC person. Different, however, doesn't necessarily mean better or worse, I've found.
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