TechCrunch
- Yelp’s CEO On Google: We Were Suprised…I Don’t Think It’s A Permanent Situation
Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman deserves credit for trying to play nice with Google, even appearing onstage at the Social Currency CrunchUp with John Hanke, a Google VP of Product Management. As expected the tension was palpable, as Hanke and Stoppelman discussed Google Places and the goliath's heavy reliance on Yelp's content. Beyond the professional veneer, there's no question that Stoppelman feels burned. The recent developments, he says, were unexpected: "Well I think we were surprised becau… - Rival Smartphone Attenuation Videos Vanish From Apple’s Website
Well this is interesting. One of the key points at Apple's recent press conference to discuss the iPhone 4's antenna, was that the problem (called "attenuation") is not unique to the iPhone 4. To highlight this, Apple showed videos of the problem on smartphones by rival companies. Those videos were then posted to a special antenna page on Apple's website. Those videos are now gone. As you can see on this page, the videos are nowhere to be found. Instead, the page now only shows the overview of … - Photographic Evidence Of Stealth Startup Tello Raising $100k
Let's call this a single source rumor. But the source is Paul Carr's camera, so we feel pretty good about it. The picture was taken last night at the TechCrunch summer party at August Capital. Tello, says our source (the camera), has raised $100,000 from angel investor Dave McClure, who's checks appear to have an imprint of the Twitter fail whale in the background. This is one of his first investments from his shiny new 500 Startups fund. What's Tello? We don't actually know. Founder and CEO J… - Reports Of The Mouse’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
The Magic Trackpad (if I must call it that) has generated some controversy on the TC network. MG thinks it signals the end of the mouse era. I think it's a great tool but is being lauded by a group of people unfamiliar with decent mice (read: Mac users). I happen to love both Apple's trackpads and great mice at the same time, but it seems to me that we're overlooking the real conflict here. And as it turns out, mice and trackpads (magic or otherwise) are on the same side. The next generation of… - Help Key: Watch Netflix From Outside The U.S.
You Americans have all the good stuff. Stuff like BP pumping oil in the Ocean and guns, lots of guns. And then you have Netflix and we people outside the U.S. are wondering what could it feel like to have a service like that. Now I know. In Europe we also have online movie services. They are completely useless unless you are prepared to pay 3€ ($5) for a single movie for 24 hours. The content of these services is not very satisfying either. This is of course not an option for people who know… - From OpenWebAsia In Kuala Lumpur: South East Asia’s Web Under The Spotlight
Earlier this month, I attended OpenWebAsia – South East Asia in Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia, a two-day tech and web industry event that attracted over 350 international attendees. The event shined a spotlight on a market that's still largely overlooked: a whopping 600 million people live in South East Asia, which boasts a rapidly growing web and mobile population. What follows is a short summary of just a few presentations, panel discussions, and startup demos I witnessed at OpenWebAsia (those wi… - The Flickr Bogan-Martin Award For “Media Overreaction”
One thing you can say about the Flickr team - there's some fight in 'em. They apparently were not super pleased with our coverage of their annual (and unofficial) Grant-Pattishall Award given each year to the Yahoo engineer who “who breaks Flickr in the most spectacular way.” I'm not sure why, I think the award is fun. So now they have a new award, called the Bogan-Martin Award: "The Bogan-Martin Award is given yearly to the Flickr staff member who inadvertently generates the most spectacu… - Paul Graham’s Checklist, Would You Make The Cut? [Video]
With more than 200 deals since 2005, Y Combinator's Paul Graham knows how to size up a young team of entrepreneurs. However, he didn't get it right from day one. On Friday, we got a chance to talk to Graham after his morning panel with SV Angel's Ron Conway. He discussed how his strategy has evolved over the past five years and why the balance of power is shifting in Silicon Valley. See videos ahead. … - Chamillionaire Just Wants Your Business Card
Grammy award winning artist Chamillionaire (a.k.a Hakeem Seriki) has become a regular at tech conferences, perhaps because the hustle and flow culture of the rap business and the hustle and flow culture of the tech business are surprisingly similar. His stories of struggles between artists and music labels are resonant to anyone who's experienced the relationship intricacies of startups and VCs.… - Half Of All Facebook Users Play Social Games — It’s 40% Of Total Usage Time
Perhaps you've heard: social games maker Playdom was acquired by Disney a few days ago for a deal potentially worth north of $750 million. Playdom CEO John Pleasants took the stage today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, to talk a bit about the deal and the future. Pleasants says that he's not exactly sure what his title at Disney will be yet, but he thinks he'll be the General Manager of Playdom. He's also not sure if Tapulous (another gaming company just acquired by Disney) will b…
Mashable
- 10 Cool Konami Code Easter Eggs [PICS]
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start. If you were a video gamer in the late ’80s, there’s a very good chance you’ll have pressed that combination of buttons more than a few times.The code…… - New Gmail Design Revealed in Leaked Screenshot
A version of Gmail used by Google employees has been revealed in a screenshot included with a Chromium OS bug report, and the image reveals more than a half dozen changes to the Gmail most of us…… - 5 Things the Internet Will Do for $5 [VIDEOS]
When we first heard about Fiverr — the service which asks, “What are you willing to do for $5?” — we were seriously skeptical. Who would actually advertise to do anything for the cost of an overpriced coffee?…… - 5 iPhone Apps to Help You Learn to Dance
It’s National Dance Day, so listen up: You’ve got to get movin’. Some people are born with rhythm and simply know how to move. Others aren’t so lucky. While our mothers may have toted us to childhood ballet classes, some…… - Top 10 Twitter Trends This Week [CHART]
Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi thriller Inception (staring the palpably handsome Leonardo DiCaprio) nabs the top of the Twitter talk chart for the second week in a row.What else is up in the Twitterverse? Talk to Brazilians. Their tweets…… - Twitter Hits 20 Billion Tweets
There have now been more than 20 billion tweets since Twitter’s inception, according to tracking service GigaTweet.The milestone comes just two months after the service hit 15 billion tweets and about five months since it…… - Our Favorite YouTube Videos This Week: The Mythology Edition
Hello there, weary travelers, winding your way — LOTR-like — toward the glimmering horizon that is the weekend. Isn’t this is thing we call life one, big adventure? Nah, we didn’t think so. That’s why we’ve decided to make this…… - BlackBerry Tablet Coming this November? [REPORT]
BlackBerry tablet rumors continue to gain momentum, with a new report indicating that the device, possibly to be called the BlackPad, is set to hit stores this November.According to Bloomberg, Research in Motion, the company behind the…… - New Apple Patents Detail Plans for Travel, Clothing and Commerce
A veritable treasure trove of documents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show some of the different ways that Apple is looking to integrate location, travel and commerce into future versions of iOS.Patently Apple has uncovered some…… - 10 Best Viral Video Remixes on YouTube
You know a viral video has truly made it into the zeitgeist when it gets the remix treatment, which can itself go viral; so meta.For your viewing pleasure we’ve hit up YouTube for 10 of the best……
Web 2.0 Show
- Episode 74 - Neil Patel of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg
Episode 74 features Neil Patel (@neilpatel), Co-founder and Director of Marketing at KISSmetrics. Neil talks about metrics-based decision making, user feedback and more.… - Episode 73 - Prfessor and Piggy Back / Pitch the Show
Jim Kukral of Prfessor and Avand Amiri of Piggy Back pitch their business to Adam, Jonathan and Jim Rogers of i2E.org… - Episode 72 - The Lean Startup / Eric Ries
I had a chance to talk with Eric Ries - Eric is the author of the blog Startup Lessons Learned and the creator of the "Lean Startup" methodology and "The New Entrepreneurship".… - Episode 71 - Capital Factory / Josh Baer
Adam speaks with Josh Baer, a Parallel entrepreneur and the Managing Partner at Capital Factory, an early stage accelerator program for tech startups. Adam rates this show as: MUST LISTEN!… - Episode 70 - Flowtown / Ethan Bloch
Adam speaks with Ethan Bloch, Co-Founder & CEO of Flowtown to talk about the wonders of serendipity, following your gut and the ins and outs of product development following Eric Reis's "Lean Startup" model.… - Episode 69 - InfoChimps / Founding Team
I sat down the Founders of InfoChimps.org. Infochimps mission is to increase the world's access to structured data. We talked about handling large data-sets, Mentorship and the importance of Pitching your business.… - Episode 68 - Carsonified / Ryan Carson
I spoke with Ryan Carson, a Co-founder of Carsonified, to talk about building a creative agency, separation of personal and business brands, hiring and retaining great designers, running a World Class conference circuit and more.… - Episode 67 - HootSuite / Ryan Holmes
I spoke with Ryan Holmes, the Founder and CEO of HootSuite to talk about their Social Media Dashboard HootSuite, rebranding from Bright Kit, pursuing VC funding and when it makes sense to take it.… - Episode 66 - Freshbooks / Mike McDerment
I spoke with Mike McDerment, Co-founder and CEO of Freshbooks. Mike shares lots of great advice on building a business, the importance of choosing the RIGHT business partner and more in this jam packed episode.… - Episode 65 - Venmo: SMS-based Payment Platform
I caught up with the Founders of Venmo, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail. They have no titles, they wear all available hats in their ultra lean 2 person startup based in Philadelphia, PA.…
ReadWriteWeb
- Raising Money - The July Roundup
Just as the month of June closed with a flurry of discussion around investment creeds and crashes, the end of July has seen the debate and discussion continue, with a number of blog posts that continue to explore the state of the investment, both angel and VC funding. The most recent discussions were prompted, in part, by Y Combinator's AngelConf, held on Thursday. Billed as a "how-to" for prospective angels, the event featured a number of prominent investors as speakers, including Paul Graham,… - No Surprise - SaaS Causing Real Effects on the Supply Chain
According to the ARC Advisory Group, the supply chain management market grew 7% in the last five years. That growth would have been more if it had not been for the recession. In comparison, the SaaS market grew at a compound annual growth rate of 20% during those same five years. According to ARC, the overall SCM market includes "execution, production, warehouse, and transportation management -- as well as Supply Chain Planning -- strategic, manufacturing, and inventory planning." Sponsor T… - ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, 31 July 2010
We're always on the lookout for upcoming Web tech events from around world. Know of something taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us. You can import individual events in the Events Guide into Google Calendar using the link beside each entry, or download the entire thing as an iCal file (which is importable into Google Calendar, Outlook, Windows Live Calendar, etc.) or even view it as a world map. Sponsor 31 July 2010: San Francisco To… - Weekly Wrap-up: Street Slide vs. Street View, StumbleUpon's Success, Digital Natives Not So Savvy, And More...
Readers were in the mood for maps this week because they pushed this story about a must-see video of Microsoft's Street Slide into the most-viewed category. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010: Internet of Things sensors are chicken; golfers get a hands-on augmented reality experience; and these are the data-sucking mobile Droids you're looking for. Read on for more. Sponsor Top Stories of the Week A Must-See Video of Microsoft's Street Slide, Bett… - Managing Rapid, Unexpected Business Growth
It should be any entrepreneur's dream come true. But for some startups, a sudden, overnight explosion in growth can nearly bring the operation to its knees. Such was the recent experience of Blank Label, a Web-based company that sells custom-made, user-designed dress shirts for men. After launching in October 2009, Blank Label enjoyed some modest initial success, selling a few hundred shirts in the first few months of business. Sponsor The online buzz generated by the startup's uniq… - Like a Robot Struck by Lightning: Gowalla to Launch Write API, Possibly With Pictures
Imagine you were a robot who only knew how to describe the world in four ways: self, other, time, and object. Now imagine you were struck by a bolt of lightning and found your robot brain aware of a whole new column in the spreadsheet...Place. You'd feel like a whole new robot and you'd probably sing a very happy robot song. That's what the social web is going through right now, with the rise of location data and services as a viable pivot point for developers to work their magic with. Next … - Twitter Annotations Not Coming Soon, After All
This spring at Twitter's first developer conference Chirp the big splash was a forthcoming feature called Annotations. The feature will allow publishing software to annotate Tweets with a wide open variety of metadata, which could then be read and analyzed by other software. Annotations are going to be big, if and when they launch. At Chirp it was said that the Annotations feature would launch in the second or third quarter of this year. Now the company's developer advocate, Taylor Singlet… - Survey Finds Gap in Attitudes Between the Cloud "Haves" and "Have-Nots"
London-based communications SaaS provider Mimecast has announced the results of its second annual Cloud Adoption Survey. The survey, conducted by independent research firm Loudhouse, assessed the attitudes of IT decision-makers in the U.S. and UK about cloud computing. And the results are unsurprising, echoing the findings from elsewhere: the majority of organizations are now using some sort of cloud service, or considering moving to the cloud. Concerns about security and cost are cited as the… - Elegant.ly Finding a Designer for Your Startup
The design and user experience of a site is often a make or break experience. Users, company hires and investors are heavily swayed not only by how neat a site looks, but how well thought out it is. Simply put, if your site is bad on the experience or design front, it makes it look like your team can't execute, which is about the worst thing you can say about a startup. Finding the right people to do this is incredibly hard. Agencies generally are way out of the startup budget and can have s… - Developer of Android App That Transmits Users' Voice Mail Passwords Denies Malicious Intent
Many news outlets, including ReadWriteWeb reported yesterday that the first piece of Android malware may have been discovered in the wild. It now appears that we were mistaken. In an interview with Android Tapp Jackeey Wu, the developer of the wallpaper app in question, denied malicious intent. He said he was gathering device information to take advantage of favoriting features in Android. Sponsor In my applications I collected some device data, not user data. I collected the screen size to re…
Bokardo
- Dunning-Kruger Effect: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is Part 1
A fascinating read about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which to my observation is enjoying somewhat of a heyday in certain circles. I see reference to it everywhere…well here is an interview with David Dunning, the one who originally thought of it. “There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we [...]… - How (And When) to Motivate Yourself
A great piece by Peter Bregman in the Harvard Business Review about How (And When) to Motivate Yourself: I write at least one post a week. Does that take discipline? Sure. But when I break it down, the hardest part — the part for which I need the discipline — is sitting down to write. [...]… - A good problem to have | Mike Industries
Mike Davidson rightly points out why iPhone/iPad apps are often better than their web counterparts. It also amuses me when people talk about two things in particular with regard to the iPhone and iPad. First, how much better some companies’ iPhone apps are than their web sites, as if the company is somehow so much [...]… - Facebook Behaving Badly
The difference between Facebook’s public commentary on new features and the actual privacy implications of such features could not be more stark. Consider this tidbit from the EFF, Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information, about a change that Facebook made just days ago, on April 19: : “Once upon a time, Facebook could [...]… - Strong, Weak, & Temporary Ties
Paul Adams, UX researcher at Google, is studying what sorts of relationships people have online. His latest piece, Designing for Social Interaction: Strong, Weak, & Temporary Ties shows how people mostly use social networks to map their life, not create a whole new online one:… - Apple Removes Rate on Delete for Apps in iPhone 4 – Mac Rumors
Apple is removing a much-maligned social feature from its iPhone software: Developers will be pleased to learn that Apple has removed a controversial "Rate on Delete" feature from iPhone 4. Starting in iPhone 2.2, when a user deleted an App from their iPhone, the operating system would ask the user to rate a App using [...]… - Scott Adams on Curiosity
Curiosity is one of the most underrated phenomena in the world. It’s ironic that people aren’t more curious about curiosity. It’s a powerful thing. For example, if you ever wondered if someone is attracted to you, the answer lies in curiosity. If someone asks personal questions about your past, your plans, your likes and dislikes, [...]… - The Undesirable Middle
James Surowiecki on how companies without a clear focus on either the high end or low end are in trouble. As we move out of mass media (TV) as the primary way people learn about things into a web-driven era, this will probably hold true even more… For Apple, which has enjoyed enormous success in [...]… - Are You Fun to Follow on Twitter?
Over at Harvard Business Review, Tammy Erickson observes most tweets are not very interesting: Frankly, most people’s tweets are neither interesting nor fun to read — certainly not on a daily or hourly basis. Many, not at all. I say this with no condemnation, since I admit mine are pretty lousy, too. And I have [...]… - Five User Experience Trends
Since my blog has been broken a lot recently I missed this excellent overview of Five User Experience trends by Gene Smith. I can’t help but agree with all of them: Services as Software – Gene is one of the first people in the UX industry to admit that good enough, fast and cheap tools [...]…
Signal vs. Noise
- Nuts & Bolts: Potpourri
As my final installment in the Nuts & Bolts series, I want to hit a few of the questions that were sent in that I didn’t get a chance to get to earlier in the week. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. What colocation provider did you choose, and why? After an exhaustive (and exhausting!) selection process, we chose ServerCentral to host our infrastructure. They have an awesome facility that has some of the most thoughtful and redu… - This week in Twitter
A few of this week’s 37signals staff posts at Twitter. @asianmack: Great view on popular cameras used on Flickr. Surprised they don’t tie commerce to this. http://www.flickr.com/cameras/ @jsierles: Have you hugged your sysadmin lately? http://www.sysadminday.com @jasonfried: Airlines: Make it easy to share an itinerary before it’s booked. Would make it easier to book a flight for someone. @rjs: Coudal is so good http://www.coudal.com/monona/ @jasonfried: My one-hour video… - We're hiring an iOS/mobile developer
Between Draft, Campfire, and Highrise, we’ve been building quite the iOS portfolio of applications. We want to take good care of them and continue building more iOS and mobile applications, so we’re hiring a dedicated programmer for the task. Think you’re up for it? Check out the complete job posting on the 37signals Job Board. … - A little bit of empathy goes a long way.
While driving home this afternoon, my wife’s car was rear-ended. The car that she was following stopped suddenly, forcing her to stop suddenly. The next driver in the chain wasn’t quite able to stop in time. Fortunately, nobody in either car was hurt, but, it was pretty traumatic for my wife and kids and my 6 year old son, Noah, was crying. Enter the North Carolina Highway Patrol. Police officers often get a reputation for being cold or unsympathetic, and I’ve certainly m… - Nuts & Bolts: Storage
Next up in the Nuts & Bolts series, I want to cover storage. There were a number of questions about our storage infrastructure after my new datacenter post asking about the Isilon storage cluster that is pictured. To set the stage, I’ll share some file statistics from Basecamp. On an average week day, there are around 100,000 files uploaded to Basecamp with an average file size that is currently 2MB for a total of about 200GB per day of uploaded content in Basecamp. And that’s… - Product Blog update: Campfire for iPhone, Draft update, favicon/iPhone icons in Basecamp, etc.
Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog: Campfire Introducing Campfire for iPhone Ember officially became 37signals Campfire for iPhone (iTunes App Store link). As an added bonus, we’ve dropped the price from $9.99 to $0.00. Campfire for iPhone is free! Draft Draft for iPad updated to version 1.0.1 Draft, our iPad app that lets you quickly-sketch-and-share via email or Campfire, has been updated to 1.0.1. The update is now available in the App Store. Included in this up… - VIDEO: SVA Dot Dot Dot Lectures: Jason Santa Maria…
SVA Dot Dot Dot Lectures: Jason Santa Maria on web vs. print. “These things might seem obvious, but they’re not the conversations we’re having.” (via RS) … - QUESTION: What could we be better at?
What could we be better at? … - Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: TechSmith, Litmus, iData, and A Small Orange
Below: We’re getting so many submissions for our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series that it’s tough to find room to profile everyone. So here’s a roundup post featuring a quick look at several different companies that have $1M+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Litmus Litmus is a tool for email marketers. It helps them test their email designs across a range of different email clients. The founders attended 37signals’ Building … - Creating a design library
We’ve got some bookshelves in the new office. We want to fill them with inspirational pictures of design, landscapes, architecture, objects, ideas, industrial design, automotive design, type, materials, layouts. Nothing web-related. Anything that would inspire a spark by flipping through the pages. Words not required. Got any winners? …
Web 2.0 List
- Study: Young More Likely to Pay for Web Content
One of the most surprising results of a new, more wide-ranging survey by the marketing and media information firm Nielsen was that some people are actually prepared to pay — and they're probably not from the demographic you'd expect.… - Facebook gripes protected by free speech, ruling says
Miami, Florida (CNN) -- A former Florida high school student who was suspended by her principal after she set up a Facebook page to criticize her teacher is protected constitutionally under the First Amendment, a federal magistrate ruled.… - Massive cyber attack simulated in U.S
Security experts launch a cyber attack "war game" to test the nation's cyber security defenses.… - Email as Identity: Google Turns on WebFinger
If you've been on the Internet for long enough, you may remember the old UNIX finger command. With finger, you could just type in a command like finger email@readwriteweb.com and the email server would return more information about this person. Today, Google enabled the next generation of the finger command - WebFinger - for all Gmail accounts. WebFinger provides users with a standardized and decentralized way of sharing their profile and identity information online… - Wi-Fi Turns Rowdy Bus Into Rolling Study Hall
The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.… - China Alarmed by Threat to Security From Cyberattacks
BEIJING — Deep inside a Chinese military engineering institute in September 2008, a researcher took a break from his duties and decided — against official policy — to check his private e-mail messages. Among the new arrivals was an electronic holiday greeting card that purported to be from a state defense office.… - 5 Ways Airlines and Hotels Can Drive Revenue with Social Media
Social media is no longer the “new” thing, especially for airlines. JetBlue has over one an a half million followers on Twitter. Lufthansa allows passengers to update their Twitter or Facebook status about where they are in the sky. AirAsia drives buzz about its new destinations through custom micro-sites. However, most airlines (and airports and hotels) are still struggling to earn direct revenue from their social media efforts.… - Is the 'Avatar' concept really possible?
Scientists say we are many decades, even centuries, away from making this kind of sophisticated interaction possible, if it can be done at all. But the fundamentals of components required to create this complicated system of mind-controlled avatars are already in the works, and have useful applications in medicine.… - Google analyst: U.S. Internet needs to get faster
Mountain View, California (CNN) -- Google long has been an advocate of a single Web, one that's free of government censorship and barriers to information access. That's not the reality in today's world however.… - If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present
Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social. Yes, they have Orkut and OpenSocial, but no one actually uses them. Okay, some people use them, but not in the meaningful social ways that people use Facebook or even Twitter. Today, Google may have just solved their social problem.…
ProgrammableWeb
- 23 APIs Used in 7 Days: Amazon, Facebook, Flickr, Google Maps, Google Wave, Twitter and Yahoo
This past week 24 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 23 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Google Wave and Tweetmeme. The most often used APIs this week are Google Maps, Twilio and Twilio SMS. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (5 APIs, 8 mashups), Mapping (4 APIs, 6 mashups) and Search (3 APIs, 3 mashups).… - Gowalla’s Write API: the Experience is Distributed
Location-sharing service Gowalla is preparing to launch its long-awaited write API (our Gowalla API profile). The move could makes its platform as desirable as its main competitor, FourSquare. With it, comes the need to relinquish a bit of control of the user experience, something Gowalla has considered an important factor of its success.… - Cash and iPads Abound With Developer Contests
There are notably more contests than usual now and many are listed in our contest section. Prizes and acclaim are meant to attract great developers to build cool things on top of each company's API. Some of these challenges end soon, so you'd better get started.… - 37Signals Acquires Developer’s Campfire iPhone App
Collaboration company 37Signals bought the popular Ember iPhone app, which uses the company's Campfire API (our Campfire API profile) to display and update chats. The app has been renamed 37Signals Campfire and is now available for free (previously $9.99).… - Twitter Streams: a Glimpse of Future Realtime APIs?
Twitter has started early beta testing for a new User Streams API. Currently the service is just for desktop clients, but it could eventually fuel other types of applications that need access to data in realtime. Similarly, the stream concept may be one we see used by other services.… - Making Mobile Apps? Not With These APIs
If you're developing mobile websites or native apps, you'd better take a closer look at the fine print. Some APIs, including one from Amazon, specifically exclude mobile applications. And there's not much explanation--or logic--behind the exclusions.… - $1 Million in Funding and It’s Just an API
Late last month, IQ Engines raised $1 million in its first round of funding. The image recognition service is made up of its pay-per-use API and an iPhone app built on top of it.… - Twitter Blocks Only Available Via API
Here's another hole for you to fill, Twitter. While users of the popular status message website can easily block spammy members, there's no way to find a list of accounts that you have blocked. No way, that is, except for through Twitter's own API.… - How to Drink from the Google Buzz Firehose
Every single public message on Google Buzz, the content-sharing platform from the search giant, is now available to any developer. A similar, if much fatter, pipe is available from Twitter, but only for large partners paying big bucks. Accessing the "firehose" is about the same any other API, which makes it an easy way to get a lot of content quickly.… - Best New Mashups: Keep It Local
The web makes everything global and yet, everything is also local. APIs allow content and data to be filtered to just the stuff we need. The collection of great mashups below take advantage of those features to show local content to anyone, using location as a filter.…
O'Reilly Radar
- The Louvre of the Industrial Age
This morning I had the chance to get a tour of The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, along with Dale Dougherty, creator of Make: and Makerfaire, and Marc Greuther, the chief curator of the museum. I had expected a museum dedicated to the auto industry, but it's so much more than that. As I wrote in my first stunned...… - Augmented reality as etiquette coach
Alasdair Allen, author of Programming iPhone Sensors, says real-time facial identification -- the sort that pairs names and faces on the fly -- is closer than you might think. He expands on that topic and a number of others in this video interview.… - Four short links: 30 July 2010
The No-Twinkie Database -- These are all the Twinkie Denial Conditions described in my “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” Designer’s Notebook columns. Each one is an egregious design error, although many of them have appeared in otherwise great games. A collection of "don't do this" for app designers. (via waxy) Cloud Privacy Heat Map (Forrester) -- a map showing...… - Which social gaming companies are hiring
Disney's announced purchase of Mountain View gaming startup Playdom, follows on the heels of EA's purchase of London-based Playfish last November. Based on active users, Zynga remains by far the biggest online social gaming company. But what other independent companies are growing? To see which companies are expanding, I used our data warehouse of online job postings to detect recent hiring.… - Facebook Mountain ("I wish I knew how to quit you")
Facebook is an unstoppable force, rocketing to 500 million users, building a breakout software platform and hardwiring the web with "Like" buttons and single sign-on via Facebook Connect. This piece looks at the reasons why, even in the face of abysmal customer satisfaction levels that rank below the airline industry, the social networking giant's reign is only getting started.… - Four short links: 29 July 2010
How to Raise Funds for Non-Profits (Joi Ichi) -- One organization sent a message to all of their donors during the Haiti crisis asking them to give to an NGO that they had vetted. They didn't ask for any money for themselves. This had a hugely positive effect and the donors trust in the group increased. Wallets aren't zero...… - Startup Showcase submissions at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC due 8/2
We are looking for startups to show-off at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. We always find a place to showcase them and this year is no different. This year we're hosting our first ever Startup Showcase. Highlighting the startup ecosystem's creativity and variety, the Showcase will give you a chance to get in front of hundreds of potential users and a couple of high-profile investors. The submissions for the Startup Showcase are open until next Monday, 8/2. Let us know you are interested now. The Web 2.… - Capturing health data in everyday life
In this audio interview, Paul Tarini, team director of the Pioneer Portfolio at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, discusses the health-care value of sleeping patterns, eating habits and other everyday data.… - Four short links: 28 July 2010
The end of the road for the Nexus One (LWN) -- The pessimistic among us can be forgiven for concluding that the battle for open handsets is being lost. The carriers determine which devices will be successful in the market, and they have absolutely no interest in openness. Customers are irresistibly drawn to heavily advertised, shiny devices with low...… - Open government is a mindset
While online tools and digital platforms that enable greater transparency, collaboration and citizen participation will continue to improve beyond those used in 2010, the culture of openness within agencies will also need to evolve in order for open government to achieve any measure of success.…