| SkyDrive, Microsoft's "iCloud," to be Integrated in Windows Phone Mango In a none-to-subtle PR move, Microsoft posted on its official Windows Live Blog yesterday about its own cloud service called SkyDrive, which will be integrated deeply into the Windows Phone handsets with the next software update known as code-name "Mango." This news comes just after Apple announced "iCloud," a new cloud backup, sync and storage service that will be available with the release of iOS 5, the next version of the Apple mobile operating system. The timeframe of the two releases - Mango and iOS 5 - are practically the same. Both will arrive sometime this fall. But what we want to know is this: is SkyDrive really all that similar to iCloud? Or is Microsoft hoping the Apple news will bring more awareness to its years-old service?
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Twitter.com Gets Its Own URL Shortener Twitter has been developing a lot of new core products recently that used to be filled through third-party applications. Yesterday, the company introduced a new feature to Twitter.com - automatic link shortening. If you wanted to shorten a link within Twitter.com before, you had to use a link shortening service like Bit.ly or TinyURL and paste the link into the edit tweet field. Twitter will now truncate URLs that are longer than 13 characters and give them a t.co ID (Twitter's URL shortening handle) while keeping the original URL intact so you know where the link originated.
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Glassboard: Rock Star Team Regroups From RSS-Land to Tackle Private Mobile Content Sharing Private mobile content sharing for groups is something no one has really nailed yet, but feels like it could be a very big deal. Rising from the tragic ashes of the consumer RSS reader market, a new team that includes NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons, FeedDemon creator Nick Bradbury and Newsgator's VP of Mobile and Data Walker Fenton will announce Wednesday at Apple's WWDC that it is spinning off from parent company Newsgator to create a new app called Glassboard. Glassboard, which will open to the public next month, will allow iOS and Android users to share text, photos and in some cases location with small groups. It is built with Microsoft Azure as its back-end and will integrate with Microsoft's forthcoming Office 365. The team is being intentionally "agnostic" about its target market, saying it could be used by families, work teams or companies and their clients. These guys have built some incredible things in the past and it will be very interesting to see what they can bring to one of the biggest potential markets of the day.
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Foursquare & 7-11 Offer Commercial Spaceflight as Contest Prize Never mind NASA, I'll slurpee myself to the moon. You had to know it would come to this someday. No longer content to give away free iPads or earth-bound vacations, the social media world is about to shoot one of its own into space. (Presuming the Wuffie flows, that is.) Social network Foursquare has teamed with junkfood distributor 7-11 to offer a trip to suborbital space as a prize in an online contest. Who's going to top that? While the US spaceflight program is getting its budget shut down, there's something rather poetic about this opportunity. As part of a promotional campaign for upcoming Steven Spielberg move Super 8 (which does get good reviews), the two companies are offering a variety of prizes to Foursquare users who check-in at a 7-11. "There are over 21,000 prizes," Foursquare explains on its blog today, "Every 88th check-in wins free Super 8 movie tickets...every 88,888th check-in gets a free Zero-G Experience. And...if there are over 888,888 check-ins in June, one lucky winner goes to Space! Space!!!"
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The Internet Archive, Now Preserving Printed Books As Well The Internet Archive is arguably one of the most important projects on the Web, with its mission to preserve the Internet and make available to the public the rich collection of all the digitized material therein: websites, music, videos, as well as public domain books. It's the latter - the ongoing efforts to digitize books, something that many libraries, archives, and private companies are currently undertaking, that has prompted the Internet Archive to recognize the importance of not just preserving electronic copies, but physical copies of materials as well.
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United Nations Proclaims Internet Access a Human Right The Arab Spring has seemed to have inspired a death bed confession in favor of free speech on the part of the United Nations. After introducing and passing a resolution condemning blasphemous speech, the U.N. recently reversed that decision. Now, the United Nations has proclaimed that Internet access itself is a human right. UN seal photo by Julian Rotela Rosow
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Anonymous Announces Operation India Once Anonymous, the hacking collective, got the taste of blood on the world stage, credit card companies seemed to be less tantalizing. Some of these country operations have been more successful than others. Although the success may be more in focusing attention on the issues the citizens themselves are fighting for than any real damage against the repressive infrastructure. So far we've seen Operation Tunisia, Operation Zimbabwe, Operation Egypt and Operation Iran. Now, Anonymous has turned its attention to the subcontinent in Operation India.
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5 Concerns Groupon's IPO Filing Didn't Address Groupon has had a terrific ride. Since pivoting from a community action site, it has dominated the mindshare of Internet commerce. Its IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission lays out a lot of that success, including growing from 3 million to 83 million subscribers in one year and generating nearly as much revenue in the first quarter of 2011 as it did in all of 2010. But that, as they say, is past performance. The key question for potential investors is "How will Groupon do in the years ahead?" There, the IPO filing, doesn't provide much guidance. Here are five concerns I see.
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Commenting via Twitter and Facebook Now Enabled for WordPress.com Blogs Visitors to WordPress.com blogs will now be able to sign in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts in order to leave comments. This is in addition, of course, to being able to comment anonymously (as a "Guest") or as a WordPress user. The new feature is intended to give users the flexibility to decide which identity they want to utilize for comments, even if they're logged in to WordPress via multiple accounts. You can, for example, be logged in via Facebook or WordPress but decide to leave your comments under your Twitter profile.
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Ning Now Lets You Broadcast Live Video with Ustream Integration Ning announced a new feature today that will enable its users to broadcast video directly from their sites. The capabilities are a result of a partnership with Ustream, bringing the live streaming video capabilities to the social networking platform. The Ustream integration will let Ning users embed both live and recorded video into their sites. In addition to the video content, the new feature will also make available live chats so that people watching the event can also participate.
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