| Evernote for Windows Gets Social The note-taking and storage app Evernote is cycling through the various platforms, releasing updates and upgrades along the way. Most recently, it's web app received a major redesign, and now it's the turn for improvements to Evernote for Windows. These improvements focus on the social and sharing aspects of Evernote, giving Windows users the ability to share notes for the first time. You can share individual notes to Facebook or Twitter or email. You can also share entire notebooks - idea when you're working on a group project.
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Let's Hack Education, with the Data and a Contest from DonorsChoose A recent Brookings Institute survey found that Americans want more media coverage of education. People said they want more information about their local schools, about violence on campus, about teacher performance and student achievement. But even if there was more reporting and better access to official data about crime and test scores and demographics and budgets, that would still be a pretty incomplete picture of our education system. So imagine if you could have access to data about what over 165,000 teachers in over 43,000 public schools said some of their most important classroom needs were. Imagine if you had the data about over 300,000 classroom projects that have inspired some $80,000,000 in charitable giving. That would give you a richer picture of what was happening in the American school system. It could highlight what teachers say they need for their classrooms. It could highlight what donors wanted to support. So here you go then, because that's just what DonorsChoose.org is doing. The charitable giving website is releasing its data as part of a contest, aptly titled Hacking Education.
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iPhone 5 Production Starts this Fall, Says Analyst Apple's next-generation iPhone 5 may not begin production until September 2011, or so say the analysts at Avian Securities. The firm recently released a research note saying that its supply chain checks seem to indicate that Apple is planning to launch this new iPhone later than usual - possibly late 2011, or even early 2012. The analysts said they uncovered evidence of a "lower-cost, lower-spec" iPhone as well.
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Farewell, Flip Camera Today, Cisco has announced its intentions to shut down its Flip camera business and restructure its consumer product line. Specifically, Cisco plans to realign its consumer business with a focus on four of its five key priorities: core routing, switching and services, collaboration, architecture and video. But despite "video" being listed as one of those priorities, that no longer means "Flip" brand video. It appears that single-purpose gadgetry has no place in today's smartphone-obsessed world,
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UX Evolutions: The Future of the Camera First it was smartphones integrating cameras. Could we be about to see the inverse - cameras integrating smartphone technology? That's the concept being explored by Seattle design company Artefact. They've come up with an intriguing prototype for a camera that incorporates smartphone technology - a.k.a. a SmartCam. Artefact claims that innovation has stalled in the camera industry, that there hasn't been much new in camera devices over the past 10 years. They're aiming to shake up the camera industry and are already talking to camera companies (and others) about implementing their vision. I spoke to Artefact's founders to learn more. This is the fifth post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming - and producing - media is changing with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. So far we've looked at music on smartphones, news apps on the iPad, RSS Readers on smartphones and online radio in cars.
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John McCain & The Wall St. Journal Should Not Determine the Future of the Internet A bipartisan bill limiting what companies can do with online user activity and profile data may be introduced tomorrow by Senators John McCain and John Kerry, according to reporting first in the Wall St. Journal and then today on marketing news site Clickz. The Journal's Julia Angwin, citing anonymous sources, reports that the bill will require that sharing of user data between companies be opted-into by users and that users be able to see what data about them is being shared. That might not sound so bad on the surface, but in a new world of fast-developing technology - it's good to think hard before making laws based on what might seem like common sense. The internet is a young thing and legislation like this could cut deep. Leadership on the issue from John McCain, who less than 3 years ago thought it appropriate to run for the Presidency without ever having used the internet before, seems particularly inappropriate. This is an issue that needs to be looked at from a pro-technology perspective, at least in part.
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Bump: Moving Beyond People to Places & Things Last year, when a friend and I went to buy our first iPhones, the first thing we went out and downloaded was Bump - the app that lets you share simply by bumping your phone into another one. It seemed like magic. At the time, however, it was only meant for sharing contact information and it soon made its way to the back of our app screens before eventually disappearing off our phones. These days, Bump is much more than simply a magic app to share your phone number and email address and today we got a chance to sit down with Bump co-founder and CEO David Lieb to talk about where the app has gone and where it's headed to next.
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Twitter Location, Which is a Mess, Expands Trend Detection to 70 New Places Twitter announced this afternoon that the Local Trends feature it announced in 41 cities and countries in January, 2010 has now expanded to 70 more places. Trending local topics are an easy way to discover people and conversations outside your own personal niche. The band Rise Against is playing in my town tonight, for example, and I probably wouldn't have noticed it had I not checked what's popular in Portland. This near-tripling of venues for the consideration of what's hot seems likely to foreshadow a future when advertisers will be able to purchase trending topics on a local level. A more logical step, though, would be to try to fix the problems with location on Twitter. There's clearly something wrong with it as so few people append locations to their Tweets. Check out the screenshot below for some idea why.
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Amazon Introduces an Ad-Supported Kindle (Proving an E-Reader Is Just an Ad for a Bookstore) Amazon has just announced that it's releasing a new Kindle: "Kindle with Special Offers." This version is $25 off the regularly priced e-reader (that is, for $114 instead of $139), because those "special offers" include advertising. The e-books themselves won't have ads in them, but the home screen and the screensaver will. Sponsors for the first series of screensavers include Buick, Proctor & Gamble, and Visa. Ads themselves hardly qualify as "special" and neither does the rather paltry discounted price. But to sweeten the deal, Amazon says there will be "special offers" available to these Kindle owners, including half-off Amazon Gift cards, discounted Audible books and Amazon mp3 albums, and a $10 credit when you buy one of 30 Kindle bestsellers with your Visa card.
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Traffic Down at Post-Paywall New York Times [STATS] At the end of March, The New York Times finally activated the paywall that it had announced a year earlier. The publication took a "porous" approach to charging users, letting readers access up to 20 articles a month for free and allowing for links from social networks like Facebook or Twitter to pass through without counting. Still, onlookers have wondered what the effect of the wall would be on the site. According to Web traffic measurement firm Hitwise, the numbers are in and traffic has certainly dipped in the nearly two weeks since the wall was put in place.
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