| Startups StrawberryJ.am and Buffer Team Up on Tools to Curate the Web Two startups aimed at tackling the problem of excessive noise on Twitter are combining forces. Twitter-powered new reader StrawberryJ.am is partnering with tweet-scheduler Buffer to surface the top stories in your social stream each day and tweet them at regular intervals. Think of StrawberryJ.am as an automated curator of stories in your social stream. Its algorithm finds what the people you are following are tweeting about them presents them to the user in a manner reminiscent of Reddit or Digg, though combined with the social graph, the way XYDO does. You can then load those stories into your Buffer queue and they will be tweeted throughout the day. StrawberryJ.am is offering beta invites to ReadWriteWeb readers. Check after the jump for information.
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Coming To A Bar Near You: Facial Recognition & Real-Time Data Facial recognition and detection software is a hot button issue on the Web right now. Facebook has stirred a hornets nest by using facial recognition with users' pictures, asking people to tag their friends. Google has said that is a line of creepy it will not cross. Facial detection software is not just limited to the Web though. A new startup in Chicago called SceneTap uses facial detection and people-counting cameras to scope out your local bar to tell you "what is going on." What is the male-to-female ratio at your favorite club? Who is buying drinks? SceneTap cameras see it all and provide the data to users and bar owners. Seem a little creepy? Maybe not as much as you might think.
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2WAY Summit Preview: Teens + Mobile = Trouble? Moral panic. Time and time again, changes occur that make some people feel as though the very fabric of society is at risk. Those changes can be cultural; they can be technological. Often, they involve activities associated with and undertaken by youth. It's no surprise then that of mobile phones and children have repeatedly elicited moral panic. According to a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 75% of 12- to 17-year-olds own cellphones. Project Tomorrow's Speak Up 2010 survey found that 20% of children from kindergarten through second grade said they owned cellphones, and 29% of those from third through fifth grade said they did. These children don't just own feature phones either; an increasing number say they own smartphones and have access not just to mobile voice, but texting and data plans as well.
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What the Internet Thought of This Week's Apple News (Charts) Social media monitoring firm SocialNuggets was tuned into Apple's developer conference (WWDC) this week, and specifically the news revealed during CEO Steve Jobs' keynote address. The firm's goal was to see what Internet users had to say about all of Apple's new products and services. To reach its conclusions, SocialNuggets monitored over 12,000 social media mentions, blog posts, forum postings and other online mentions. The results are not surprising. For the most part, the reaction to nearly all of Apple's announcements, from iOS 5 to iCloud and beyond, was overwhelmingly positive.
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2WAY Summit Preview: Who's Leading the Future of Location? According to comScore, 16.7 million people used location check-in services in March 2011. More than 12.6 million of those people did so through their smartphones. The rise of the smartphone and location services are inextricably linked as platforms like FourSquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places and Google Latitude become mainstays in people's digital arsenals. Yet, in 2009, the location market did not exist. Foursquare and Gowalla were just getting off the ground and the notion that your phone was tracking your every movement was not of great concern to the public. How did we get from zero to 16.7 million in a matter of years?
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When Gmail Plug-ins Compete, Users Win: Rapportive Ups the Ante Late last month Google launched a Gmail plug-in that looked an awful lot like popular startup service Rapportive's sidebar CRM app - but with additional functionality from Google services like Calendar. What's a little startup to do? Rapportive's plan is apparently to move faster and adds more on top of what Google can do. That makes a must-have browser add-on even better. Today Rapportive is announcing a big upgrade to its baked-in Twitter functionality. You can do so much Twitter stuff in the sidebar of your Gmail now! Check out the demo video below.
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Can Windows Phone Make Take A Huge Jump, As IDC Predicts? The last smartphone forecasts are out, this time courtesy of research firm IDC and the predictions might be a bit of a surprise. Windows Phone adoption is expected to skyrocket between now and 2015 top the point that one out of every five smartphones shipped will come from Microsoft. The loser in the forecast? Apple. That is right, IDC is making a bet on Redmond over Cupertino in the worldwide smartphone wars. Again. The rationale is Nokia and its penetration into emerging markets. Does this make sense though? Nokia is in turmoil, partly because of its partnership with Microsoft. Symbian was the back that Nokia rode to its former place as the top mobile vendor. Its market share is eroding and Nokia will stop development of the platform within the next few years. Can it really be that simple for Microsoft to unseat the iPhone?
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Microsoft Launches Tools for Finding iPhone Apps Just because Microsoft has its own mobile operating system called Windows Phone 7, that doesn't mean it's above using the popularity of Apple's iPhone to attract new users to its up-and-coming Bing search engine. For example, this week, the company highlighted a recently added Bing feature called "auto app discovery" by way of a company blog post that describes how the Microsoft search engine is a great tool for finding new iPhone applications.
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The Atavist: How Multimedia Should Be Done in Digital Magazines As media consumption devices evolve, so too does the form content takes on those devices. A great example is a new iPad and iPhone app called The Atavist, which is changing the way nonfiction stories are created and sold. Co-founder Evan Ratliff told the audience at the AdAge Creativity and Technology conference yesterday that The Atavist was created to fill a hole in the publishing market. The Atavist sells multimedia enhanced nonfiction stories. In length they're about halfway between an extended magazine article and a book. It's similar to the content in Kindle Singles, where simplified versions of stories from The Atavist are also made available. In The Atavist iPad app, which I tested out, each story (there are 5 available currently) is packaged into a rich, immersive experience. As well as text, there are photos, videos, audio, links which pop up contextual information, sharing options, and more.
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