| Evernote Updates Its Google Chrome Extension for Better Web Clipping The note-taking app Evernote has been on a tear lately, revamping all of its applications across the various platforms - iPhone, Android, and Web for example. Today, it's the turn of Evernote's Google Chrome Extension to get an upgrade in functionality. The Evernote Chrome Extension allows you to clip and save Web pages to your Evernote account, and the update includes a redesign of the extension's interface. This makes it easier to handle the data you typically will want to add to these notes - titles and tags for example.
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Microsoft Reveals More about Windows Phone "Mango" This morning, in New York, Microsoft held a VIP Preview event showcasing the next major release of its Windows Phone mobile operating system (OS) - the release known under its code name "Mango." The press conference, intended for media and analysts, comes on the heels of a string of updates about the next-gen version of Windows Phone, including features developers will appreciate, like multi-tasking and programmatic access to the phone's hardware, consumer-facing features like turn-by-turn navigation and built-in barcode scanning, as well as features for business users, like conversation views in email and mobile access to documents. In total, over 500 new features are due to arrive in Mango, Steve Ballmer announced earlier this week.
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Facebook Loses Traffic in Middle East Adoption of Facebook by citizens of the Middle East started increasing prior to the Arab Spring. But in the wake of the protests, that number spiked upward dramatically. This month, however, the region "has lost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of users in some key countries," according to Inside Facebook. Of the nineteen Middle Eastern countries they track, seven have declined over the last month, some precipitously.
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Yahoo Mail Redesign Leaves Beta, Promises Speed Boost and Social Integration Six months after announcing a redesign, the newest version of Yahoo Mail is ready to come out of beta today, promising more social integration, faster load times, better spam filtering, cross-device operability and better search. Yahoo announced the beta version in October 2010 and it is the first major update to the platform in about five years. The Associated Press reports that Yahoo Mail has 277 million users, down 1% from the same time last year. Hotmail is the global leader with 327 million users while Gmail has grown 24% (43 million users) over the last year to 220 million. Yahoo's announcement coincides with last week's iOS update to Yahoo Messenger as the company looks to reassert itself as an innovator and communications leader.
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Apple Reaches New Milestone: 500,000 iOS Apps (Infographic) Early this morning, Apple approved the 500,000th app. The number itself is startling. It's also indicative of just how far behind some of Apple's competitors really are. For example, Google, Apple's top competitor on apps, announced at this month's Google I/O conference it had reached 200,000 Android apps. And Nokia's Ovi Store is the only other app market to have cracked 50,000. Although the number of active iTunes App Store apps is currently around 400,000 due to removals and replacements, reaching half a million apps is a milestone Apple, its developers and fans, will want to celebrate. Now they can. Thanks to a combined effort from app search engine Chomp, app review site 148apps and game publisher Chillingo, a new infographic memorializes this moment, showing the app ecosystem breakdown today, its future growth projections and more.
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Opera for iPad is Here Over a year after its launch on the iPhone, Norway-based browser maker Opera Software has at last ported its Opera Mini mobile browser to the larger form factor of the Apple iPad. The new universal iOS application, Opera Mini 6, brings a full-featured Web browser to both tablet and phone, offering a customized start page, tabbed browsing, password saving, social sharing and more.
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The State of iPad Usability The latest report from web usability guru Jakob Nielsen is about iPad usability. It's the second such report from Nielsen Norman Group and it features in-depth analysis about how people are using iPads. As is usual with Nielsen reports, it also lustily lists all the design flaws that his users found - such as touchable areas that are too small, low discoverability and "swipe ambiguity." I've found some of Jakob Nielsen's past reports too easy to dismiss, due to generalizations about current trends and a lack of specifics when critiquing websites. But this report about iPad usability is a fine return to form for the Web veteran.
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Cheezburger CEO Planning WordPress-Style News 2.0 Software Once you've built an empire of funny cat pictures and other user-generated comedy ephemera, what do you do next? Ben Huh, CEO of the sprawling Cheezburger network of comedy websites, has begun discussing a side-project he's working on called The Moby Dick Project. The Project's aim is to rebuild online media in a format that's suited for a changed media world. "Why are we still consuming news like it's 1899?" Huh asks in a blog post this morning. "I want to rethink how we read breaking news," he told me by phone today. He's talking with a small group of well-known media innovators and sent us a first wireframe he's playing with. He's got some very interesting ideas.
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Sport Meets Online Gaming to Save Lives During Hurricanes One of the first victims of a hurricane (or a flood or a tornado or an earthquake) is the sense of control. The trauma of survivors often centers not on loss of life alone, or of property, but of a belief in the individual as an actor. In children it is particularly acute. Game company Area/Code believes gaming, something most kids are already familiar with, can help build up and preserve kids' sense of worth and consequence. They are not only designed a game to do so, "Battlefront," but with the help of the Knight Foundation, the United Way and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, they staged live competitive gaming with an online aspect to stress the power of kids to survive and overcome the threat of a disaster.
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Twitter Adds A New Feature, Another Blindside for Third Party Developers? Twitter has just announced that it will begin sending email notifications to users when they're retweeted by someone they follow or when someone favorites one of their tweets. Until now Twitter has given users the option to receive email notifications when they receive a direct message or when they get a new follower. Last week, Twitter also rolled out a new look to the latter notification, giving users more information about their new followers.
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