| Comcast to Test Live TV Online Comcast is looking to try to beat the online video sites at their own game. According to the Wall Street Journal, the cable provider is testing how to deliver live television over Internet protocol to better enable itself to do battle with the likes of iTunes, Hulu, Amazon and Netflix in a trial run at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall. When giants walk, all others be wary. The goal of Comcast is to bring live television to any device that can access the Internet. The test will be available to MIT students to be able to watch video on any device this fall. Is this what consumers have been waiting for? Who better to do it than a cable company with a giant infrastructure and content distribtion broadcast rights?
Continue reading »
 
Project Slice Launches to Keep Track of All Your Electronic Receipts A new service launches today that can help consumers keep track of all their purchases online from any retailer that provides an electronic receipt. Project Slice provides a free application embedded into the new upgrade to Yahoo Mail call "All My Purchases" that will aggregate all electronic receipts, record purchase history over time track shipments. The goal is to bring all of the disparate receipts from digital or physical goods that consumers aggregate into one simple location. This may not seem like much of an innovation at first glance but the ability to handle all kinds of data coming from different sources is a difficult technological challenge. Project Slice is announcing $9.4 million in Series A funding from some prominent sources, including Google chairman Eric Schmidt's venture arm, Innovation Endeavors, along with DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mike Maples' FloodGate, Michael Birch and Rich Thompson.
Continue reading »
Mobile Phones Document Rape as Weapon in Libya Using rape as a weapon in war and other violent conflicts is unfortunately nothing new. Ivory Coast recently experienced an epidemic of it during a conflict for the contested presidency there. But in Libya, the proliferation of mobile tech has resulted in a surprising amount of direct video evidence of this revolting practice, evidence which may result in the punishment of those responsible. According to Libyan rebels, the troops of the country's nominal leader, Moammar Qaddafi, have been using rape on civilians. This isn't an accident, they say, but a policy, at times directly enforced by officers of the Libyan army. According to the Sunday Times' Marie Colvin, there is evidence for this assertion: mobile phone video, taken by the criminal soldiers and officers themselves.
Continue reading »
LinkedIn Labs Launches "This is Your Life" Visualization LinkedIn showed off a new addition to its Lab site today called the LinkedIn Connection Timeline. It's a very fun way to remember people you used to work with throughout the years - and see where they are now. Built internally by LinkedIn's Gordon Koo, the visualization does a good job illustrating the tip of the iceberg of what structured, social data can provide when accessed programmatically. And it's fun. It brings to mind the app Memolane and makes me wish someone would build something like this for Twitter or Facebook. Take the list of people I'm connected to there and show me when on a timeline I connected with the ones I have interacted with the most. Play me a song that my Last.fm profile says I used to listen to a lot, don't listen to anymore and that has a high-emotion rhythm to it and you've got a mashup that could bring lots of people near tears. (You just know that Facebook will offer something like this someday.) Always more emotionally reserved, LinkedIn at least offers a fun retrospective of past co-workers.
Continue reading »
Is Google Planning an E-Book Rental Service? There are some conflicting stories coming out the BookExpo America today about Google's plans for Google Books: one story speculating that Google may be planning an e-book rental service and another speculating that Google may be closing its e-bookstore. The shuttering of the e-bookstore was something that Melville House Publishing wrote about today, contending that publishers are finding it difficult to get started in the bookstore and that Google has pulled its developers from the project. When ReadWriteWeb asked Google to comment, the company responded, "We refuse to comment on rumor and speculation," pointing to a blog post from Monday touting some of the successes from the first 6 months of the Google Books program: three million free Google eBooks and 250 independent booksellers selling them, for example. But more interesting - although difficult to say if more plausible - is the possibility of an e-book rental service.
Continue reading »
U.S. Army Turns to Social Media to Recruit I wouldn't call the American military "early adopters" but I'm not surprised that they have turned to social media for recruiting, as the New York Times reports. Back in 2006, when I spoke at a State Department-sponsored conference on social media and democracy, the only group of governmental participants open to social media, and already using it, were the military. They were subscribing to RSS feeds, including search feeds, reading and commenting on blogs and participating on forums. So there is precedence for reaching out on social media sites.
Continue reading »
Acquisition Fallout? Skype Ends Partnership with Open Source Asterisk Platform Although Steve Ballmer insisted that Microsoft would continue to support Skype on non-Microsoft platforms when it acquired the VOIP company earlier this month, it looks as though that may not necessarily be the case. And the first casualty seems to be Skype's integration with Asterisk, an open source telephony platform. Digium, the open source project's maintainer, has informed its users that Skype for Asterisk will no longer be available for sale or activation after July 26. According to the notification, Skype has opted not to renew the agreement that allows Digium to utilize Skype's proprietary software in order to turn the open source Asterisk into a native Skype client.
Continue reading »
Spotify Rumored to be Partnering With Facebook Rumors have emerged that Facebook is partnering with streaming music company Spotify to integrate the service into the Facebook platform in Europe. According to Forbes, Spotify will have an icon to the left of the Facebook news feed with photos and events. Clicking on the icon will download the Spotify desktop client and allow users to listen to music with their Facebook friends, a source told Forbes. The service will only be available to Facebook users in locations where Spotify has a presence meaning only the major countries in Europe at this time.
Continue reading »
Microblogging (Like Twitter) Was 3X as Popular in China as in U.S. Last Month The Internet may feel U.S.-centric today, but there's a big and rapidly connecting world out there. Leading Web-traffic monitoring service Experian Hitwise announced today the launch of its newest venue: Hitwise China. Hitwise is great about publishing timely tidbits about Web statistics and I look forward to seeing U.S., global and China stats contrasted. The first offering along those lines? Hitwise says that microblogging is more common in China than it is in the U.K., U.S., France, Canada, Australia or India. Sina Micro blog, the leading Chinese microblogging service, sees one out of every 158 website visits in China, Hitwise observed last month. That's more than 3.5 times as large a Web market share as Twitter has here in the US. That sounds like a good market to go monitor.
Continue reading »
Minecraft Coming to Android (But Probably Not the Droid You Were Looking For) Fans of Minecraft, the popular building block game, have long been waiting for a mobile version. iOS and Android versions have been "in the works" since early this year, but now there are a few more details available. We still don't know when the mobile versions of Minecraft will be released, but we do know where: on the PlayStation phone. Minecraft developer Mojang told the gaming blog Gamasutra that an Android version of the game will come first to Sony Ericsson's PlayStation-certified Xperia Play.
Continue reading »
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment