Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Did Google Steal Sidewiki From a Start-Up?
Web annotation is a sexy and increasingly crowded space in the market.
Web annotation is a sexy and increasingly crowded space in the market.
According to a Bloomberg report this morning, early-stage startups have a new friend in very high places.
Some people go to Washington to try to make the government more honest; others try to make it smaller.
Recently, Palm came under fire when programmer Joey Hess discovered the Pre’s smartphone OS was sending users’ GPS locations back to Palm on a daily basis.
Security firm Symantec has identified the top 100 searches conducted by children online.
In the Web world, you know that a trend has major traction when IBM is all over it. Like any large Internet company, Big Blue is careful about which trends it latches onto. It was a good couple of years before they were spotted at the Web 2.0 conference, for example. However in the case of Internet of Things, IBM is proving itself to be an unusually early adopter.
Sociologist and ethnographer Liz Pullen spent a month tracking the top 500 Twitter users (as ranked by number of followers) as well as the much-contested suggested users list.
A few days ago, the social web browser Flock released version 2.5 of their software, integrating Facebook Chat, improving Twitter functionality, and adding a new broadcasting feature called “Flockcast.”
Techmeme is on fire this morning with discussion of Rafe Needleman’s CNet post about Twitter’s supposed plans to index the content of links shared over the microblogging service.
The White House is making unprecedented use of consumer web technologies but those technologies aren’t always well suited to fit the government’s needs.
University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson has successfully tested a “brain wave monitor” to the Twitter publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging service.
During the “Launch Pad” session, five start-ups took a grilling from developers, journalists and venture capitalists, then faced a crowd vote at the Web 2.0 Expo’s version of “American Idol.”
As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?”
None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.
Looking at a regular graph of traffic data from Digg and Facebook, it would be easy to assume that Digg is lagging far behind Facebook’s staggering growth. However, Compete just produced a very different graph that compares traffic at Digg and Facebook since their respective launches, and according to this data, Digg is actually doing better than Facebook.
In a recession, budgets are tightened, jobs are cut, and those who remain are expected to do more with less. Given this type of economic reality, it’s surprising to hear of an industry reporting an increase in spending on anything, much less on something as new as social media. Yet that’s exactly what’s occurring. According to a new Forrester Research survey of 145 global interactive marketers in both B2B and B2C companies with more than 250 employees, the use of social media as a marketing tool is on the rise.
In business, “online collaboration” suggests complex jobs getting done more efficiently by teams of people wherever they are located. The productivity gains–which are substantial, albeit often hard to measure–have drawn lots of companies into the market. As the market matures, we will see consolidation. And we’re interested in seeing what form this consolidation will take.
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