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Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011 Jan 31 2012 05:00:26	ReadWriteWeb
Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011 Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year. "As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times," AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company's blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. "This represents year-over-year growth of 192%; S3 grew faster last year than it did in ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
3 Ways Social Media Can Put Enterprises at Risk Jan 31 2012 04:03:00	ReadWriteWeb
3 Ways Social Media Can Put Enterprises at Risk While the basic risks of social media are well known to most enterprise security managers, there are many dark corners of social media that can be just as dangerous or even more so. Here are three ways that social media can sneak malware and exploits across your corporate firewalls, and ways that you can pay attention and hopefully prevent their misuse. The biggest issue is that many corporate executives don't really know what is going on across their networks, and don't have any visibility into... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Top Tech Video of the Day: AT&T Customers Rave About th... Jan 31 2012 02:04:50	ReadWriteWeb
Top Tech Video of the Day: AT&T Customers Rave About the First Public Cell Network, 1979 Back in the late 1970s in Chicago, Bell System built the first mobile phone system that could support hundreds of concurrent connections. That was a big deal compared to, for instance, New York where only a dozen or so people could use the cell network at a time. When this video was made in 1979, Bell had 1,300 customers using its mobile network, and, if you believe them, their calls were clear and the connections never, ever dropped. Maybe they don't make them like they used to. Disc... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Daily Wrap: How Pinterest Impacts Purchases and More Jan 31 2012 02:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Daily Wrap: How Pinterest Impacts Purchases and More Alicia Eler looks at how Pinterest is impacting purchases. This and more in today's Daily Wrap. Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well. What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn't Face... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
To Facebook Friend is Human, To Unfriend Divine Jan 31 2012 00:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
To Facebook Friend is Human, To Unfriend Divine The Facebook friendship is a sacred one. It is a voyeuristic portal into your ideas, links you like, viral (or not-so-viral) videos you share, cute puppy pictures and maybe even your relationship status. But there comes a time for certain Facebook friendships to end. Facebook defriending is part of our collective Internet culture. Sometimes it's enough to just hide someone from the news feed and avoid clicking on their profile. Other times, defriending is a necessary last resort.... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Think Before You Tweet, And Other Good Advice From The ... Jan 31 2012 00:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Think Before You Tweet, And Other Good Advice From The Experts Officially, Sree Sreenivasan is the dean of student affairs and a professor at Columbia University's Journalism School, but for many he is the curator of Sree's Tips, a Tumblr blog crammed with how-to social media information, as well as a leading figure in the social media movement. This past weekend he was also the point person for Columbia's Social Media Weekend in New York. What follows is a recap of some of Sreenivasan's best advice for better utilizing Twitter from the weekend, as well as... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Draft 'Carrier IQ' Bill Would Have Carriers Inform, The... Jan 30 2012 23:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Draft 'Carrier IQ' Bill Would Have Carriers Inform, Then Track, Customers Last November, after a security researcher revealed that many Android phones contained software that tracked keystrokes while users were dialing phone numbers, news providers boiled the issue into a genuine spyware scare. That gave Carrier IQ, the maker of performance monitoring software, a black eye in the public mind. As the testing software maker continues to recover from a huge perception problem, a leading House Democrat is proposing legislation mandating that carriers inform customers of... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Obama's Google+ Hangout Didn't Change the Game, It Just... Jan 30 2012 23:21:00	ReadWriteWeb
Obama's Google+ Hangout Didn't Change the Game, It Just Changed the Channel The President of the United States held a Google+ Hangout today. He fielded questions selected from over 130,000 submissions as well as from five lucky Americans selected to hang out with him live. For the rest of us, it was a streaming video experience. It began with a swooping, dramatic intro, and then Google MC Steve Grove took control of the proceedings. This is the most user-friendly White House in history. It was a nice experiment in Web-enabled democracy. But despite the great camera ang... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Trying to Keep Up With Chrome, Mozilla Preps Firefox 10 Jan 30 2012 22:15:30	ReadWriteWeb
Trying to Keep Up With Chrome, Mozilla Preps Firefox 10 The latest stable release of the Firefox Web browser is on its way. Firefox 10 will emerge from beta with a few new features, most of which are geared toward developers. As is often the case, the new version pushes forward with a few of the latest features in emerging Web standards like CSS3, HTML5 and related technologies. In Firefox 10, it's more about the under-the-hood stuff than the on-the-surface user experience. Some of the more significant enhancements include a full-screen API for Web... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
[Infographic] Google Apps Has Some Big Paying Clients Jan 30 2012 22:11:00	ReadWriteWeb
[Infographic] Google Apps Has Some Big Paying Clients SaaS backup provider Backupify has recently examined its own customer sample to do some demographic profiling of Google Apps users. The results are somewhat intriguing, as you can see in the infographic below. If you remove .edu domains, Google Apps still has nearly 40% of all of its seats used by businesses with more than 10,000 employees. The company surveyed their customers who have at least 30 users. How did Backupify obtain this information on the size of each domain that is part ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
CA, VCE Private Cloud Package to Go Toe-to-Toe Against ... Jan 30 2012 22:09:12	ReadWriteWeb
CA, VCE Private Cloud Package to Go Toe-to-Toe Against Exalogic, CloudBurst The latest release by CA Technologies of a product called Private Cloud Accelerator is being described, by folks who only read the press release and skipped the details, as a new catalog for rapidly provisioning and deploying services over a company's private cloud. But what's really nice for a prospective customer to have at a time like this, is a private cloud. So the real news from CA today is actually this: By means of a partnership deal with Vblock infrastructure platform maker VCE, CA i... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Apps To Help You Deal With Too Many Apps Jan 30 2012 21:37:00	ReadWriteWeb
Apps To Help You Deal With Too Many Apps When you see as many apps as we do at RWW, you begin to feel like it's all been done. So many of the everyday jobs for apps to do can already be done by at least one app (if not dozens). How many ways can you share photos with your friends? How many social networks and check-ins and restaurant-discovery services do we need? Lately, we've started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing these tasks across their various apps. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Rawporter Wants To Make Us All (Paid) Broadcast Journal... Jan 30 2012 21:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Rawporter Wants To Make Us All (Paid) Broadcast Journalists A startup is hoping to combine two hot web trends, crowd sourcing and microearning, into a single savior for cash-strapped, broadcast newsrooms. Rawporter, an iPhone app that will soon be rolled out for Android, turns almost anyone into a local news cameraman or camerawoman. Instead of dispatching a camera crew to a fire during rush hour and risk they won't get there until after the flame is out, a television news reporter can create an assignment from Rawporter's Web interface and send it to a... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Study: 91% of Gen-Ys Use Their Phones in the Bathroom Jan 30 2012 20:45:00	ReadWriteWeb
Study: 91% of Gen-Ys Use Their Phones in the Bathroom Some people won't go anywhere without their smartphones. Not even the pot. A new study from 11mark surveyed 1,000 Americans about their smartphone usage, and found that a whopping 75% of American smartphone owners have used their phones in the bathroom. More women have used their phones in the bathroom than men (76% vs. 74%), but men are actually more attached to their mobile devices than women. Thirty percent of men surveyed said they won't go to the bathroom without their phone versus 25% of ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Hollywood Isn't Ruining DVD Rentals On Its Own: Netflix... Jan 30 2012 20:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Hollywood Isn't Ruining DVD Rentals On Its Own: Netflix is Happy to Help It's easy to slam Hollywood for not understanding how technology works, or for putting its legacy business models ahead of user experience. Especially when big media companies do things like restrict digital access to movies and then cry about piracy. But Hollywood isn't always acting alone. Sometimes, the savviest Web companies around - Netflix, for instance - are playing along, with their own agendas. The latest example: Not only must Netflix customers wait 56 days before renting Warner Bros... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
What Does Siri's Future Look Like? Jan 30 2012 20:15:13	ReadWriteWeb
What Does Siri's Future Look Like? It's only been three months since Apple unveiled Siri, the voice-controlled personal assistant built into the iPhone 4S. Although the product is technically in beta, it has already spawned imitations and Web video parodies. What is perhaps most exciting about Siri is not what it does now, but in its potential future uses. The latest clues about that future come from a newly-published patent, which hints at some of the things Siri may be able to do after its first iteration.The patent... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Federal Trade Commission to Hold Mobile Payments Worksh... Jan 30 2012 20:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Federal Trade Commission to Hold Mobile Payments Workshop in April 2012 will be the year that consumers will learn how to use their smartphones to make payments with smartphones. Mobile payments will see consumers paying for physical goods with near field communications, mobile wallets and PayPal among other options. It has become such a big trend in the digital economy that mobile payments have caught the attention of the federal government. The Federal Trade Commission wants to get in on the discussion. In April, the FTC will host a workshop on mobile paymen... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
[Beta Invites] Spool Lets You View Video, Even When You... Jan 30 2012 19:18:21	ReadWriteWeb
[Beta Invites] Spool Lets You View Video, Even When You're Offline Services like Read It Later and Instapaper have developed huge followings from people who want to quickly set aside content for when they have more time, or to access it offline. Now, along comes Spool, which promises to do much of the same link-saving as Read It Later and Instapaper, with the added perk of being able to do the same with video. We've been playing around with Spool, which remains in invite-only mode, for the past several days and found that it works (mostly) as advertised. We a... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Why Goodreads Gave Up on Amazon Jan 30 2012 18:58:00	ReadWriteWeb
Why Goodreads Gave Up on Amazon Goodreads, the social network for reading and reviewing books, had to make a change this month. It moved away from its main source of book data, the Amazon Product Advertising API, citing its "many restrictions." It completed the transition to Ingram Book Company's data today, and it also draws from other open data sources such as libraries. The transition went smoothly, but Goodreads did lose some data. "Fewer than 2% of our 7 million users have books currently affected," Goodreads says. The p... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Forrester Ranks Mobile Marketing Companies, Ignores the... Jan 30 2012 18:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Forrester Ranks Mobile Marketing Companies, Ignores the Brightest Startups The necessity of having a clear and cohesive mobile marketing strategy has never been greater. Companies that do not have a mobile marketing strategy now are light years behind the curve in the face of booming smartphone adoption and changing consumer behavior. Research firm Forrester took a look at some of the biggest and best mobile marketing companies to see how they stack up and what benefits they can add for companies. There is a problem with Forrester's research. Mainly, it looks only at ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn't Jan 30 2012 18:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn't Pinterest is growing fast, and 80% of the site's users are women ages 25-44. Laura Skelton, owner of Prix-Prix, told me about Pinterest months ago when we met up one chilly Chicago morning for brunch. "Have you tried Pinterest?" she asked me with a glint of excitement in her eyes. I shook my head no. "Try it out, but be careful, you'll get addicted." I am always wary of that caveat because I do end up getting addicted. I decided to stop by just to see what was up. I registered for an account a... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Select Testers Get First Office 15 Preview, New Cloud S... Jan 30 2012 17:40:11	ReadWriteWeb
Select Testers Get First Office 15 Preview, New Cloud Services Emphasized Whether Windows 8's radically re-imagined usage model catches on with tablet and PC users will depend in large part upon the role Microsoft Office apps will play. If it looks too much like Office 2010, then having Windows 8 relegate Office to the "Desktop" side while mobile-style apps take over the "Metro" side, won't make much sense. This morning, Microsoft gave out the first signal of how the shift will happen. The first technical preview of The Software Probably Known as "Office 2013" has ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Senate to Debate Again When and How Government Seizes t... Jan 30 2012 16:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Senate to Debate Again When and How Government Seizes the Cloud The rapid migration by U.S. government agencies to cloud-based architectures is producing radical, and potentially beneficial, changes to these agencies' management structures. Costs are coming down, and as some agencies are just now realizing, security and resiliency could be going up. But the very concept of cloud infrastructure is something that legislators have yet to become familiar with. So another long-debated piece of cybersecurity legislation will enter the next round of what has bec... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Feds to Megaupload Users: Tough Luck Jan 30 2012 16:15:02	ReadWriteWeb
Feds to Megaupload Users: Tough Luck Well, now we know what happens to our data if federal authorities ever seize a website we were using, arrest its owners and shut the whole thing down. For former users of Megaupload, the prospect of losing their data forever is now a very real one. The companies that host all of that data could start deleting it later this week, according to prosecutors. This data undoubtedly includes an enormous amount of pirated content, but among it also happens to be the personal files of many users who ut... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
[Research] Half of U.S. Cellphone Owners Research In-St... Jan 30 2012 15:15:00	ReadWriteWeb
[Research] Half of U.S. Cellphone Owners Research In-Store Goods With Their Devices The rise of mobile commerce is going to give traditional retail stores a headache. Results from a survey done by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that 25% of cellphone owners used their phone to look up the price of a product before buying it at a store. More than half of cellphone owners used their phones to determine what product to buy while in a retail store.Pew's research only touched on the notion of consumers researching products before buying them. The survey di... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Red Hat Quietly Joins the OpenStack Effort Jan 30 2012 14:58:00	ReadWriteWeb
Red Hat Quietly Joins the OpenStack Effort Word is that Red Hat refused to sign on to OpenStack when it was announced, because it didn't like the governance model. Red Hat also has its own cloud management software projects. But the company that once dismissed OpenStack seems to be coming around. Look closely at the OpenStack community and you'll find quite a few Red Hat engineers, including some that have become core contributors to OpenStack projects.The OpenStack project has a lot of vocal supporters, but how many companies ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Google Fires Kenya Lead Over Mocality Jan 30 2012 14:27:00	ReadWriteWeb
Google Fires Kenya Lead Over Mocality Google has reportedly fired its Kenya country manager, Olga Arara-Kimani, over a fraudulent use of Mocality's data. Nairobitech reported: "The Google Mocality saga has drawn its first casualties. Kenya country lead for Google, Olga Arara-Kimani formerly of Safaricom has been let go by the company. Also axed is a technical guy in Zurich... It is not clear how Olga was picked for the fall but as one observer noted, sometimes a sacrificial lamb has to be found for the brand name to weather the s... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Pentaho Opens Up Its Big Data Tools Jan 30 2012 14:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Pentaho Opens Up Its Big Data Tools Pentaho Corporation today announced that it has made freely available under open source all the big data capabilities in its Kettle v4.3 release, and has moved the entire Pentaho Kettle project to the Apache License Version 2.0. This is the same open source license that Hadoop and others use. We have covered Pentaho before here. Pentaho now can manipulate data stored in Apache Cassandra, Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce, Apache Hive, Apache HBase and MongoDB. In addition, Pentaho Kettle's... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Microsoft's Hyper-V Support Broken in OpenStack, Likely... Jan 30 2012 13:58:00	ReadWriteWeb
Microsoft's Hyper-V Support Broken in OpenStack, Likely to Be Dropped from Next Release Microsoft announced it had partnered with Cloud.com to support Hyper-V with OpenStack in October 2010. This was not long after the land-rush of companies clamoring to announce their support for OpenStack in the wake of its unveiling at OSCON 2010. It appears, though, that the folks in Redmond have lost interest in giving its customers support for using Windows Server Hyper-V to deploy OpenStack.On Friday, January 27th, OpenStack's Thierry Carrez sent a note to the developer list to rem... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Video Service Tout Claims It Boosts Users' Facebook, Tw... Jan 30 2012 13:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Video Service Tout Claims It Boosts Users' Facebook, Twitter Followers Tout got a big boost when Shaquille O'Neal announced his NBA retirement in one of the service's 15-second video clips. Before then, few people had heard of the service, which allows users to easily link the videos to their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Prior to O'Neal's unsolicited endorsement, Tout, which just launched in April, was largely unknown. After Shaq's quick message thanking fans, however, interest in the service exploded. "We got lucky with him being so involved with it," said Meli... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
HP Cloud Services Goes Into Beta Jan 30 2012 13:02:03	ReadWriteWeb
HP Cloud Services Goes Into Beta HP began its OpenStack-based Cloud Services this month, and there is a lot of promise but not much in the way of actual implementation yet. HP intends its cloud to cover both public and hybrid uses. Initially, the beta is free of charge although you will need to provide a credit card number for authentication (you won't be charged anything while the beta is underway). There are two main services initially available: compute and storage, roughly equivalent to Amazon's Web Services and S... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Twitter's Censorship Policy: Three Unanswered Questions Jan 30 2012 06:57:55	ReadWriteWeb
Twitter's Censorship Policy: Three Unanswered Questions In June of 2009, leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, the Chinese government blocked access by its citizens to Twitter, Flickr and a number of other US-based websites. Social media being already widespread throughout the country, perhaps the Chinese government feared the possibility of events like unfolded elsewhere 18 months later, in what became known as the Arab Spring. Two and a half years later, Twitter remains blocked in China, though many people find ways... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
5 Signs of a Great User Experience Jan 30 2012 04:28:36	ReadWriteWeb
5 Signs of a Great User Experience If you've used the mobile social network Path recently, it's likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it's easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It's a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path's suggestions and its connection to Facebook. In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people u... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500 Jan 30 2012 00:02:00	ReadWriteWeb
Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500 A new longitudinal study at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth focusing on the online activities of the Inc. 500 has found a huge drop in the number of companies maintaining corporate blogs over the past year. The UMass researchers, under the direction of Nora Barnes, has been following this group for several years. Only 37% of those interviewed had a corporate blog last year, down from half of those interviewed in 2010. "The use of blogging may have peaked as a primary soci... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How to Start A New Business in Less Than 50 Hours Jan 29 2012 22:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
How to Start A New Business in Less Than 50 Hours Just about every weekend someplace on the planet a peculiar series of meetups is happening called Startup Weekend. The idea is to bring together a group of people, many of whom have never set eyes on each other before, to form new ventures, many of which are tech-related. So far the model seems to be working: each weekend on average has produced two or three companies. According to the master website, more than 5,000 startups have been created since the process began, and some 2,000 just in the ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Twitter Upgrades Will Include Analytical Tools Jan 29 2012 13:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Twitter Upgrades Will Include Analytical Tools Twitter will unveil a series of new tools in the next few months, including sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter's manager for news and journalism. Anderson said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. She made her comments Saturday at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York.Anderson mentioned the new tools in passing when asked by an audience member about what was... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Data Privacy: What Bill Gates Said 10 Years Ago Jan 29 2012 04:46:29	ReadWriteWeb
Data Privacy: What Bill Gates Said 10 Years Ago Today is International Data Privacy Day, an event backed by companies like Intel, Ebay, Facebook and Microsoft, and dedicated to educating data owners about best practices in protecting the privacy of consumer data. The need to keep people from being exploited on account of violations of their privacy is clear, well-known, intuitive and amply articulated by highly capable people. The up-side of making use of peoples' data is far less so. The two concerns are closely tied together. That's som... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
New Brainshark Team Edition Jan 28 2012 23:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
New Brainshark Team Edition We've written before about Brainshark's mobile slide show app and today they have announced the availability of SlideShark Team Edition. It adds admin controls, team-wide content sharing, and usage analytics to the individual features found previously. With Team Edition, sales teams for example can share their slide decks as they tote about their iPads around the countryside. Individuals can still upload PowerPoint slides for their own use too. It's priced at $149 per user per year.... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Weekly Wrap-up: Social Media Reference Guide and More Jan 28 2012 19:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Weekly Wrap-up: Social Media Reference Guide and More Flowtown releases a great social media cheat sheet for those new to social media. Dan Frommer wonders if downloads or discs are more applicable for the next gen XBox. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more. [Infographic] The SMB Social Media Cheat... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Firefox Support Ending for Windows 2000, Windows XP Pre... Jan 28 2012 18:33:00	ReadWriteWeb
Firefox Support Ending for Windows 2000, Windows XP Pre-SP2 If you're one of the few Firefox users still on Windows 2000 or still using Windows XP without Service Pack 2 or later, Firefox is going to have to say goodbye. Yesterday, Mozilla's Asa Dotzler announced that Firefox team is moving to a newer version of the Visual Studio toolchain. Once Mozilla moves to Visual Studio 2010, they won't be able to build for Windows 2000, XP RTM or SP1.Dotzler says that the team has held off "for a number of years" to preserve support for Windows... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Cartoon: To Make a Long Story Short... Jan 28 2012 18:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Cartoon: To Make a Long Story Short... I'm somebody who can, uh, go on. At length. About nearly any subject. Ask anyone who's taken one of my classes... or read one of my blog posts once I get on a roll. So I can understand why I'll get the odd "TL;DR" in response. And I try not to take it personally; instead, I look on it as a reminder to pare my text down, murder my darlings and generally indulge myself a little less.That's on a good day. On a bad day, I mourn the rapid decline of human civilization, curse people's can'... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Netflix Engineer Daniel Jacobson: The API at the Root o... Jan 28 2012 15:45:00	ReadWriteWeb
Netflix Engineer Daniel Jacobson: The API at the Root of Your Business The first place I had ever seen an API actually at work was as part of an operating system. It was a strange OS at that, a permutation of CP/M that used a graphical front end called GEM, which would later be ported to the Atari ST. The definition was explained to me like this: An "interface," as everyone knows, is a specification for how electrical components interconnect. Well, now it's possible for an application program - the part that does what users need - to interconnect with the opera... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Why You Should Smile in Your Facebook Profile Photo Jan 28 2012 01:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Why You Should Smile in Your Facebook Profile Photo If you're not smiling in your Facebook photo, your life is probably going to suck in four years time. Reseachers J. Patrick Seder and Shigehiro Oishi at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville discovered that smile intensity from a single Facebook profile photo in the first semester of college predicted self-reported life satisfaction three and a half years later, at the time of college graduation. This type of study isn't actually unique to Facebook, however. A 2011 study by Harker and... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Third Critical Rambus Patent Invalidated, Nvidia Vindic... Jan 28 2012 00:37:51	ReadWriteWeb
Third Critical Rambus Patent Invalidated, Nvidia Vindicated U.S. Patent # 6,591,353, "Protocol for Communication with Dynamic Memory," tends to refer to a "memory device." The innovation with respect to this device appeared to be the introduction of a synchronous clock. That way, time-multiplexed transfers could take place in a regulated fashion. But as USPTO documents published today show, the appeals judges found that two existing patents cited by Nvidia qualify as prior art, and moreover, that the teachings demonstrated by those older patents would... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Thought SOPA Was Bad? 10 Reasons to Oppose ACTA Jan 27 2012 23:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Thought SOPA Was Bad? 10 Reasons to Oppose ACTA So, we've shot down SOPA and PIPA. Congratulations Internets for a job well done. Mission accomplished, right? Not so much. While that's two bad pieces of legislation pushed back, there's much more where that came from. Leaving aside existing nastiness like the DMCA, we also have the even nastier Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) (PDF). How bad is it? Bad enough that the European Parliament's rapporteur for ACTA (Kader Arif) resigned over it today (January 27, 2012). Unfortunately for t... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Top Tech Video of the Day: [Stuff] Entrepreneurs Say Jan 27 2012 23:10:41	ReadWriteWeb
Top Tech Video of the Day: [Stuff] Entrepreneurs Say "Connect it to Facebook, viral spread, boom, boom." I have no idea what that means but I do know that for some reason, I'm still not tired of the Sh*t [fill in the blank] Says meme. This video is for anyone who's spent more than five minutes reading Techcrunch, knows what Y Combinator is and has faced the (sometimes) irrational exuberance of a tech entrepreneur. "Overheard: Time to pivot." Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Google Maps vs. Do-It-Yourself: Which Is Better for Bus... Jan 27 2012 23:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Google Maps vs. Do-It-Yourself: Which Is Better for Business? As mobile becomes normal for the Web, location becomes key. The next phase of location apps are live, right there with the user as she goes about her business. When it comes to mapping the outside world, the space is pretty crowded. It's hard to argue with Google Maps, whose free consumer service powers the maps on both dominant smartphone platforms. For businesses, it's crucial to be on the map, and Google Places can't be overlooked. But there's another frontier of mobile mapping that matters,... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Facebook Could be the Biggest Tech IPO in History Jan 27 2012 22:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Could be the Biggest Tech IPO in History People familiar with the matter say that Facebook could file for its initial public offering as soon as next week, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal. The source also says that Facebook is close to picking Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter. The filing could happen next Wednesday, and the company is aiming for a $75-$100 billion valuation. It is looking to raise $10 billion in stock. Facebook started in 2004 as a college-only social network. It opened to the public in Septem... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
What You Should Know About ACTA and Your Rights Jan 27 2012 21:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
What You Should Know About ACTA and Your Rights The most controversial measures of concern to Internet users in the final version of the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for most Internet users are 1) that signing governments pledge to allow copyright holders a way to request, under court warrant, personal information about a suspected infringer from that person's ISP; 2) that means will be provided for a rights holder to legally pursue someone suspected of circumventing rights management technologies; 3) that goods cr... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How To Learn Who Has You In Their Google+ Circles Jan 27 2012 21:12:00	ReadWriteWeb
How To Learn Who Has You In Their Google+ Circles The second-most important thing about social media is talking to people. The most important thing is to know whom you're talking to. We can't have a conversation about "authenticity" or "realness" or any other airy social media concept until we understand that there are people listening on the other side of that megaphone, and that's very nice of them to do. In order to get something out of social media, our listeners have to get something out of listening to us. To give them what they want, it... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
When's the Best Time to Blog & Share? Jan 27 2012 20:45:00	ReadWriteWeb
When's the Best Time to Blog & Share? Anyone who spends their day on the Internet inevitably wonders this question. Should I start publishing later in the day, to hit the after-work traffic? Should I publish earlier in the morning, to catch commuters while they're on the way to work? Or is everything completely random, driven by the off-chance that a post will end up on StumbleUpon and enjoy a slightly longer tail? Social sharing widget Shareaholic looked at its 2011 data, breaking it down to the top 100 days and times for sharing. ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Amateur Food Porn Has Got To Stop Jan 27 2012 20:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Amateur Food Porn Has Got To Stop "We eat with our eyes," Iliana Regan told me, "and then it travels to our brain, and we love the sensation of the taste and the hot. I think it does a lot for the senses." Pretty steamy, right? Food is sexy. There can be no doubt. But just like sex, it's not always pretty. And in food and sex alike, humans love to take pictures. There are laws about the sex part, but food is not censored in our society. The temptation is strong in the smartphone age to share our daily deeds with the world. It m... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
[Poll] Does An Open Source webOS Have A Legitimate Future? Jan 27 2012 19:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
[Poll] Does An Open Source webOS Have A Legitimate Future? This week, Hewlett-Packard announced the open source roadmap for webOS along with the next edition of its application framework, Enyo 2.0. As we wrote yesterday, the time for webOS to shine may lie ahead. What it comes down to is how well the open source community responds to webOS and whether or not the original equipment manufacturers will ever decide to build webOS devices. The favorable response of the community and OEMs is not guaranteed. Many think webOS is as dead an operating system as... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
People Are Actually Paying For Spotify After All Jan 27 2012 19:15:46	ReadWriteWeb
People Are Actually Paying For Spotify After All When Spotify first launched in the U.S. over the summer, few doubted that the service would be popular among music fans. The real question has always been whether the company's freemium business model would manage to convert enough users to paying subscribers. It's still relatively early, but so far things look promising. More than 3 million people are now paying to use Spotify, according to the Financial Times. That's a conversion rate of more than 20%, a figure that has reportedly increased ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
The Cost of Doing Business: Foxconn, Apple and the Fate... Jan 27 2012 19:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
The Cost of Doing Business: Foxconn, Apple and the Fate of the Modern Worker "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." - Immanuel Kant Ours is an imperfect society. The nature of our reality, our desires and our need to possess, while maintaining a façade of moral righteousness, puts us at odds with the reality that exists within the systems we have created. In recent days, the character of our era of consumerism has been put in question. We want what is new, shiny, fashionable. We want it now. With this desire we turn our heads f... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Like a Gangly 8-Year-Old, the Mobile Web Needs to Grow Up Jan 27 2012 18:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Like a Gangly 8-Year-Old, the Mobile Web Needs to Grow Up Well, here we are in Twentytwelve. Supposedly it's the "year of the mobile" and all of our predictions about how we are going to use our mobile phones will finally come true. Although I believe this year will be a pivotal point in the history of mobile technology, we've got a long way to go. Currently the mobile Web is like a gangly eight year old who, when you gaze upon you sense feelings of annoyance, intrigue and hope for a better future. We've all been there and it ain't pretty. ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Facebook Sues Spammy Ad Network Jan 27 2012 17:35:00	ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Sues Spammy Ad Network Yesterday Facebook and Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna filed dual lawsuits against co-owners of Adscend Media, LLC, which Facebook Security claims is an ad network "that is alleged to develop and encourage others to spread spam through misleading and deceptive tactics, including the one known as clickjacking." Clickjacking (a.k.a. likejacking) is a technique that tricks users into clicking on an invisible "Like" button. Naked Security's Graham Cluley explains that this button "fol... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Ethiopia Sentences U.S. Blogger to Life in Prison Jan 27 2012 15:56:00	ReadWriteWeb
Ethiopia Sentences U.S. Blogger to Life in Prison The Federal High Court in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa sentenced expatriate journalist and blogger Elias Kifle to life in prison yesterday. Kifle is the editor of the Washington D.C.-based blog, Ethiopian Review. He was sentenced in absentia and remains in the United States. It was originally reported that he could receive the death penalty, which is the maximum penalty for his alleged crime of "political terrorism" in the northeast African country.He and several other defenda... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
[UPDATED] Is Twitter Helping Users Get Around Its New C... Jan 27 2012 13:48:17	ReadWriteWeb
[UPDATED] Is Twitter Helping Users Get Around Its New Censorship Rules? Some of the messages Twitter is sending about its new policy on censoring tweets in certain countries seem ambiguous at best. Perhaps the biggest piece of confusion for people trying to make sense of yesterday's announcement is Twitter's inclusion of a link with instructions on how to change your country setting. The change would appear to at least temporarily allow some users to read messages banned in their country by overriding the IP-address detection mechanism Twitter uses to assign a coun... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Daily Wrap: Ruby, PHP and Python Compared and More Jan 27 2012 02:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Daily Wrap: Ruby, PHP and Python Compared and More Ruby, PHP and Python are compared in an infographic by Udemy. This and more in today's Daily Wrap. Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well. The Shift From Watching TV to Experiencing T... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
It's Like Facebook For The Art World Jan 27 2012 01:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
It's Like Facebook For The Art World Forget the random pictures of babies and puppies, alarming status updates from family members and political rants. On My-ArtMap, you will be immersed in art. It's as simple as that. The site, which is targeted at an international audience, is available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Chinese. You can create a username and password for the site, or login using Facebook Connect. My-ArtMap is also available as an iPhone app.My-ArtMap is a social network exclusive... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How To Find That 1 Thing You Lost Online Jan 27 2012 01:01:00	ReadWriteWeb
How To Find That 1 Thing You Lost Online Argh! What was that video called? Was that on Twitter or Facebook? Where did I save that article? Who was it who made that joke about the Edsel? Do you find yourself asking these questions often? As we get wrapped up in more and more Web services, things tend to get disorganized. We've got inboxes over here, inboxes over there, boards here, there, tweets, docs, posts and shares. It's almost too much to keep straight. Fortunately, there are little helpers out there. I've found two I love, and I'... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Cloud Roundup for January 26, 2012 Jan 27 2012 00:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Cloud Roundup for January 26, 2012 On tap for today, we've got a new jQuery Mobile release, a look at Tendril Connect, and the latest BitNami Stack for Ruby on Rails. jQuery Mobile 1.0.1 Released – The jQuery Mobile folks have pushed 1.0.1 out the door. This fixes a bunch of issues and adds Samsung's Bada platform and Dolphin browser to the "officially supported" list. See the post for a full list of supported platforms and their "grades." If you're using iOS, Android and newer BlackBerry devices you sh... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Thursday's Top Tech Video: How to Translate Your Voice ... Jan 27 2012 00:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Thursday's Top Tech Video: How to Translate Your Voice to More Than 30 Languages Using Siri Just to be clear, Lingual is an extension for phones and iPads that are jailbroken (big surprise), but as you can see from Jeff Benjamin's preview, it's pretty remarkable. Not only will it translate individual words (it supports more than 30 languages), it can do phrases, too: "What's 'I need an iPhone 4s, please.' in simplified Chinese?" Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Megaupload Users Revolt, Threaten to Sue U.S. Authorities Jan 26 2012 23:44:19	ReadWriteWeb
Megaupload Users Revolt, Threaten to Sue U.S. Authorities If you think the RIAA and MPPA were mad about Megaupload, you should meet one of the site's users now that it's been shut down. I don't just mean one of the many, many people who were using Megaupload and its sister sites to snag unauthorized, copyrighted content. While those people must be irked, they'll have no trouble moving on to another service. The users who are really upset are the ones who, wisely or not, used the serve to send important, non-infringing personal and work-related files ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How to Recreate the Past on Facebook Jan 26 2012 23:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
How to Recreate the Past on Facebook The rollout of Facebook Timeline forces you to take a look back at your own "Facebook past," and think about whether you want to add to it. Today 1000memories launched the ShoeBox Facebook app, which gives you an opportunity to scan paper photos from the past and post them to Facebook. It brings back those "pre-Internet photos from the past." "A Facebook Timeline-integrated app (such as ShoeBox) which lets you post photos into the past, represents a recreation of an autobiographical memory," s... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Tech World Overreacts to Google's New Privacy Policy - ... Jan 26 2012 22:59:00	ReadWriteWeb
Tech World Overreacts to Google's New Privacy Policy - How Does It Affect You? Google updated its privacy policy on Tuesday. It replaced more than 60 separate policies with a single one that treats Google users and their data as the same across all Google services. Reactions were shrill. "The End of 'Don't Be Evil'" was trotted out for the umpteenth time. The Washington Post quoted privacy experts saying, "There is no way anyone expected this." My, that sounds terrible! But it's not true. Everyone watching should have seen this change coming. Google executives have mainta... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Strategy Roundtable: Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida Jan 26 2012 22:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Strategy Roundtable: Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida Today's roundtable was co-hosted with the Jacksonville Startup Weekend. For the uninitiated, Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where entrepreneurs come together to pitch ideas, form teams, and learn best practices. This past weekend, the Jacksonville entrepreneurship community hosted their own version of this exciting program. 150 people came together, and 17 businesses were formed. An additional 50 were on the wait-list, an evidence of the energy and enthusiasm that is bubbling in Florida r... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Intel Assembles a Braintrust, Patents to Go Up Against ... Jan 26 2012 22:15:00	ReadWriteWeb
Intel Assembles a Braintrust, Patents to Go Up Against H.264 It was supposed to have been the heart of a concept called NGV - a video codec that utilized the same principles used by H.264, but produce a tighter stream by almost half. It was touted as the final "Hail Mary" pass for RealNetworks to re-enter the competitive space that was quickly being won over by Adobe, and where Microsoft and Apple still had their feet in the door. During 2008, Real's engineers were showing off potential stream size contraction of as much as 30%. Now, the next-generatio... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Rise of Mobile Web Apps Will Give webOS A Time to Shine Jan 26 2012 22:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Rise of Mobile Web Apps Will Give webOS A Time to Shine Hewlett-Packard yesterday announced the open source roadmap for its beleaguered mobile platform webOS. This is HP's last-ditch attempt to actually turn webOS into a viable product after it acquired Palm in April 2010. It looks like the rebuilt source code for webOS will not be ready until September as HP takes the long view of the platform. Yet, when webOS is ready for prime time again, it may be just in time to take advantage of some of the deep current flowing through the mobile ecosystem. Spo... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Facebook Turns Adults into Adolescents; Is Google+ Next? Jan 26 2012 21:45:00	ReadWriteWeb
Facebook Turns Adults into Adolescents; Is Google+ Next? Today Google+ announced that it is now open to users ages 13+ (in all countries except for Spain, South Korea and the Netherlands). Until today, Google+ had been 18+. When Facebook began in 2004, it was open to college students only, most of whom are 18+ years old. In September 2006, Facebook became available to everyone, including users ages 13+. A study published last year by researchers at the University of Guelph in Canada looked at how parents acted on Facebook. Their study was published ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
[UPDATED] Twitter May Censor Certain Tweets In Certain ... Jan 26 2012 21:11:44	ReadWriteWeb
[UPDATED] Twitter May Censor Certain Tweets In Certain Countries Twitter will censor tweets in certain countries while still publishing them throughout the rest of the world, the company said Thursday on its blog. "As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there," the company said. "Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germa... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
The Mac Comeback: Analysis Reveals 46% of Companies Iss... Jan 26 2012 21:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
The Mac Comeback: Analysis Reveals 46% of Companies Issue Macs Over six years ago, I rounded up a group of analysts to elicit their opinions on what was then a startling trend: People who purchased iPods were then purchasing Macs. Was it a fluke, I asked? Some said maybe not: Buyers were learning to trust the Apple brand again. But there were too many mitigating factors at that time which could eventually derail the Mac's comeback, for which the only route to its eventual culmination appeared to be by way of the home entertainment center. What literal... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Saudi Prince: Politics Did Not Factor In Twitter Invest... Jan 26 2012 20:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Saudi Prince: Politics Did Not Factor In Twitter Investment The Saudi prince who invested $300 million in Twitter in December said the move was not politically motivated. "It was a pure financial investment with economic objectives," Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Chairman of Kingdom Holding Company, told CNN. "Politics has no ingredients whatsoever in that investment ... the secure economic financial investment with expected huge returns to our company Kingdom Holding." Alwaleed, who also has a stake in Apple, said he expects the computer maker to thrive... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
All of Planet Earth Is Now on Google+ Jan 26 2012 19:24:00	ReadWriteWeb
All of Planet Earth Is Now on Google+ Google Earth released version 6.2 today. It patches up some of the choppy textures it used to have, so it now looks like a smooth, realistic surface - no more "quilt effect." The texture improvements are now in all versions of Google Earth, including the mobile versions. This update also adds Google+ integration. Screenshots from Google Earth can be shared with Google+ circles with a new "share" button. In a telling display of Google's new unified product approach, the Google Earth annoucement... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
[Infographic] Security Concerns Surround Mobile Payment... Jan 26 2012 18:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
[Infographic] Security Concerns Surround Mobile Payments and Coupons Legal firm Loeb & Loeb is full of thinkers. Its clients and attorneys know that the world is a fluid place and the technology sector dynamic and ever-changing. As part of its "Media MindShare" series, Loeb & Loeb has turned its attention to the digital marketplace to study what the dominant issues will be in 2012. One of those issues is mobile commerce. That includes mobile payments and coupons as well as the security issues that inevitably will accompany the mobile commerce vertical. Are peop... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Buying a Donut Earns You Facebook Credits Jan 26 2012 18:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Buying a Donut Earns You Facebook Credits Plink has just announced a Facebook Credits loyalty program in partnership with fast-food chains Dunkin' Donuts, Quiznos, Red Robin and Taco Bell. Users earn Facebook Credits by joining Plink and logging on with their Facebook credentials and credit or debit cards. Like any loyalty program, the more people purchase, the more Facebook Credits they'll rack up. Members will be able to accumulate Facebook Credits at 25,000 locations nationwide, including Quiznos, Dunkin' Donuts and Taco Bell. They... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Legal Analysis: How the Megaupload Defense Could Proceed Jan 26 2012 17:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Legal Analysis: How the Megaupload Defense Could Proceed There will be two battles fought simultaneously in defense of Megaupload, the cyberlocker site accused by the U.S. of hosting and publicizing illicit copyrighted material. One is in the public arena, where we can expect the defendant to portray itself as Robin Hood, not so much stealing content from the rich as repurposing it for the poor, the meek, the 99%. It may even get some traction in that arena, but those same tactics may not play so well to a jury. That will be a separate battle whose... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Google+ Is Now Open To Teens, Offers New Safety Features Jan 26 2012 17:20:00	ReadWriteWeb
Google+ Is Now Open To Teens, Offers New Safety Features Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz announced today that Google+ will now be available to teens. Previously, the social network was exclusively for adults over 18, but now anyone with a Google Account can use it (13+ in most countries). This policy change comes with new safety features for teen users. They will get a warning pop-up before posting publicly. Only people in teens' circles can contact them by default. If a stranger joins a Hangout in which a teen is participating, the young perso... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
[Infographic] PHP vs. Python vs. Ruby Jan 26 2012 16:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
[Infographic] PHP vs. Python vs. Ruby Udemy has put together an infographic that compares Ruby, PHP and Python. This looks (briefly) at the history, popularity, ease of use, demand for programmers, benchmarks and more for each language. If you're job-hunting, Udemy says that you probably want to know PHP above Ruby or Python. According to Udemy, Python is the "most-discussed" language, followed by PHP and Ruby. The rankings come from IEEE Spectrum's analysis of IRC discussions. Udemy also looks at the TIOBE Index, where P... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
AT&T CEO Randall Stevenson Blasts FCC, Hints At Higher ... Jan 26 2012 15:50:00	ReadWriteWeb
AT&T CEO Randall Stevenson Blasts FCC, Hints At Higher Prices and Data Restrictions AT&T has a bone to pick with the Federal Communications Commission. In the mobile operator's quarterly earnings call this morning, CEO Randall Stevenson blasted the FCC over its leadership in making additional spectrum available to carriers to handle the explosion of mobile data flowing through the operators' pipes. Stevenson and AT&T are bitter after the FCC blew up its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. Stevenson said that because of AT&T's spectrum crunch it will be forced to raise prices and ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Why Does the Next Xbox Need Discs At All? Jan 26 2012 14:50:21	ReadWriteWeb
Why Does the Next Xbox Need Discs At All? If the next generation of Microsoft's Xbox gaming system will be designed to bring us well beyond 2020, why would it still rely on last century's technology, spinning discs, for games? Videogame blog Kotaku reported yesterday that the next Xbox - still not yet announced by Microsoft - will support Blu-ray discs, and may incorporate some sort of technology that prevents users from playing used games. Isn't a more future-thinking move to skip discs altogether and switch to an Internet powered ga... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
SoundCloud Goes HTML5, Makes Non-Flash Audio Player Its... Jan 26 2012 14:36:37	ReadWriteWeb
SoundCloud Goes HTML5, Makes Non-Flash Audio Player Its Default SoundCloud, the up-and-coming social audio publishing platform, is endorsing HTML5's role in the future of the Web. Today, the Berlin-based startup is officially rolling out its HTML5 audio player as the service's default, knocking the original, Flash-based player from that esteemed position. The new player first went into beta in November, giving those curious enough an opportunity to experiment with it. Now that the bugs have been ironed out and a few new features added, the widget is ready f... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Online Voting Comes Of Age (But Don't Expect To Use It ... Jan 26 2012 14:00:58	ReadWriteWeb
Online Voting Comes Of Age (But Don't Expect To Use It Anytime Soon) Soldiers stationed overseas have been able to cast absentee votes in 13 Florida counties since December using a Web portal developed by Democracy Live using Microsoft's Azure platform. Similar programs will be used for primaries in Virginia and California as a result of funding the three states received under the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act. Which begs the question: How long before all of us can vote from the comfort of our laptop or smartphone?I don't buy the a... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Microsoft Will Pay Nokia "Billions" To Use Windows Phone Jan 26 2012 13:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Microsoft Will Pay Nokia "Billions" To Use Windows Phone Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million in the fourth quarter to adopt the Windows Phone operating system, according to Nokia's fourth-quarter earnings report released Thursday. That was the first in a series of so-called "platform support" payments believed to eventually total billions of dollars. To date, Microsoft and Nokia have been quiet about the deal's specifics, perhaps because it appears as if Microsoft is paying Nokia significantly less than its paying other cellphone manufacturers. ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
QR Codes on the Rise in Print Magazines Jan 26 2012 13:00:05	ReadWriteWeb
QR Codes on the Rise in Print Magazines Mobile UX designers and marketing and analytics firm Nellymoser today released a comprehensive study of print magazine action codes. They took the time to review every 2011 issue of the top 100 national magazine titles: all 164,000 pages' worth. They found a total of 4,400 QR Codes, MicrosoftTags, Spyderlynk SnapTags, BEE Tags, JagTags, Digimarc watermarks and other codes with an iPhone or Android device. For each tag, they scanned and ran the resulting Web page or video. At least give them prop... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Daily Wrap: The User Experience Design of TV and More Jan 26 2012 02:00:40	ReadWriteWeb
Daily Wrap: The User Experience Design of TV and More Richard MacManus explores the shift from watching tv to experiencing it. This and more in today's Daily Wrap. Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well. The Shift From Watching TV to Exp... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Cloud Roundup for January 25, 2012 Jan 26 2012 01:45:00	ReadWriteWeb
Cloud Roundup for January 25, 2012 FireHost is expanding and offering European services, Dell is letting its customers have Linux their way, and EnterpriseDB wants to "cloudify" PostgreSQL. FireHost's European-Based Secure Cloud Hosting Services Go Live – FireHost has announced an expansion into Europe, with services through data centers in London and Amsterdam.Microsoft's plan for Hadoop and big data – Edd Dumbill looks into Microsoft's plan for Hadoop. "One of the most interesting features... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
[UPDATED] Anonymous Trolls Tech Bloggers, But Who Are T... Jan 26 2012 01:44:00	ReadWriteWeb
[UPDATED] Anonymous Trolls Tech Bloggers, But Who Are The Real Trolls? Noticed some Facebook downtime? We have. It's intermittent, but Facebook has some trouble with uptime right now, and a Twitter account representing Anonymous claims responsibility (somewhat obliquely, in order to troll tech bloggers). In some kind of conflation of Facebook with the government, a puppet representing Anonymous threatened Facebook with an attack in retaliation for SOPA/PIPA (though other Anonymous sources denied involvement). That was scheduled for three days from now. The organiz... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How Salesforce Chatter Connect Ate the Social Network Jan 26 2012 00:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
How Salesforce Chatter Connect Ate the Social Network One thing you can plainly say about Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: You know where he stands, and he's never on the fence. Over the past two years, one of Benioff's key themes at conferences and speeches is how software design, as part of the inevitable journey of all software to the cloud, is embracing the concepts of social networking. Facebook, he professes, is a lesson in itself. Then last August at the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce kicked the evolution of its Chatter platform into over... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How Will Free Wikipedia Access Change Africa and the Mi... Jan 25 2012 23:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
How Will Free Wikipedia Access Change Africa and the Middle East? Many of us take cheap high-speed Internet access for granted. I think nothing of downloading an MP3 album from Amazon MP3 while streaming a movie from Netflix on the Roku and browsing the Web on a powerful computer. That's not a luxury that's available to everyone, and in some parts of the world data charges prove prohibitive for going online for information. To help counter that, the Wikimedia Foundation and Orange have come up with a plan for free Wikipedia access. Overall, the deal looks li... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Big Question (Answered): "Do You Chat on Social Networks?" Jan 25 2012 23:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
Big Question (Answered): "Do You Chat on Social Networks?" When I'm on Facebook and a chat pops up, I typically curse and close the browser immediately or quickly attempt to find the "invisible" setting. It's not that I don't like my friends, if I am on the computer I am probably working. If I want to socialize I may send out a Tweet or a text message, which they can respond to at their leisure. I asked the staff and they agreed. I could find no staffer that admitted to chatting on a social network willingly, though one did say he occasionally fee... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Top 5 Non-Creepy Facebook Social Sharing Apps Jan 25 2012 22:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Top 5 Non-Creepy Facebook Social Sharing Apps When Facebook announced 60 new social sharing apps, I wrote about two that weren't joining the party. And now I'm trying to tell you about the top 5 social apps on Facebook? I know what you're thinking. But as much as we (and I) have issues with Facebook's feelings about privacy and data, sharing intrinsically makes us feel connected. Here are five frictionless sharing apps that do so in a non-creepy way. FoodSpotting: Sharing Pictures Of What You Eat FoodSpotting, that wonderful li... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How R Can Help Your Business Jan 25 2012 22:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
How R Can Help Your Business Looking for innovative ways to use R, the Big Data open source analytics language? Then take a gander at the two top winners of the first of a series of contests that R's corporate caretaker Revolution Analytics has produced. The winners, announced today, receive prizes that range from $1,000 to $10,000 for their submissions. It is an interesting collection and shows off the power of the language itself.Warning: this is pretty geeky stuff, with lots of coding examples and descriptions ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
EU Draft Data Law Warmer on Patriot Act, Colder on "Rig... Jan 25 2012 21:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
EU Draft Data Law Warmer on Patriot Act, Colder on "Right to Be Forgotten" There were two big expectations from this morning's release of the initial draft of data protection regulations from the European Commission, both of which were built up through quite a bit of fanfare from EC Vice President Viviane Reding's office last November. One was that the Commission would "stick it to" the U.S. Patriot Act, the law that enables American law enforcement agencies access to private data elsewhere in the world, under controlled conditions. Another was that citizens of E.U. ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Future Of the Smart Home? Engineer Hacks Android With t... Jan 25 2012 21:20:00	ReadWriteWeb
Future Of the Smart Home? Engineer Hacks Android With the Kinect API Take two open source projects, do a little creative hacking and ingenuity and what do you get? The Android-Kinect project. An engineer that goes by the name DDRBoxman hacked a Galaxy Nexus smartphone with his a projector, a PC and Microsoft's Kinect API and was able to use "touch" based gestures to control the user interface by interacting with the projection. Everybody has been waiting for The user experience brought to us by the film Minority Report. Well, this engineer might have brought us c... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Angry Birds Crash Into Facebook Jan 25 2012 20:30:00	ReadWriteWeb
Angry Birds Crash Into Facebook Asia Tech News reports that the smash hit Rovio game Angry Birds is coming to Facebook on Valentine's Day. The release will happen fast, rolling out to all 800 million users at once as opposed to a slow Facebook feature rollout like Timeline, which first became available to New Zealand users, then to all - and now it's being forced upon everyone. The big launch takes place in Jakarta. Indonesia holds the world's second-largest Facebook population, trailing only the United States. With its entr... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
Who Will Win the Race to Build the Web's Best Real-Name... Jan 25 2012 20:20:00	ReadWriteWeb
Who Will Win the Race to Build the Web's Best Real-Name Identity Service? When Mixel — an iPad-based collage app — launched last November, one of its features quickly caused frustration: Its requirement that users log in with Facebook before they could start creating and sharing art. The reason for that requirement, Mixel co-founder (and former NYTimes.com design director) Khoi Vinh explained, was real names. Vinh wanted to build the Mixel community around real names, not anonymity or pseudonyms. "We think this is essential to the kind of experience we're bu... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
I Google+ Hungout With You And It Wasn't Even Creepy Jan 25 2012 19:51:00	ReadWriteWeb
I Google+ Hungout With You And It Wasn't Even Creepy I just hosted the first ReadWriteWeb Google+ Hangout, and it was a blast. Vic Gundotra stopped by to say hello, and then the guests and I got to know each other a little bit by talking about how we're liking Google+ and Google's new direction so far. I've got my issues with Google+, and I've published some rough words about it recently, so I knew a RWW Hangout would attract some lively conversation. I didn't know how right I was. Unfortunately, our do-it-ourselves recording didn't work out, or ... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »
How Google Wants to Make TCP Faster Jan 25 2012 19:00:00	ReadWriteWeb
How Google Wants to Make TCP Faster Google has some ideas how to make the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) a little bit faster. Earlier this week, Google's Yuchung Cheng wrote about some of Google's research and ways that the "make the web faster" team suggests improving TCP. This includes things like increasing the initial congestion window, reducing the initial timeout for TCP, and using a new algorithm for loss recovery. According to Gooogle, this would decrease network congestion and boost page load speed signific... Read the full article on ReadWriteWeb »

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