Hi Everywhere! is an interesting take on the travel social network. Rather than help users plan trips, it matches travelers to local guides in their destination city and then encourages both to record their experience in travel journals. It's an interesting idea, but will it work and is it even safe?
A lot of things happened in 2007 that seemed to threaten Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market. Microsoft launched its new Zune MP3 players, which received mostly glowing reviews, and they kept their installed user base happy with major firmware updates for old players. Meanwhile, Amazon launched a major DRM-free MP3 download service at a cut-rate (compared to Apple's). But generally, the facts still point to Apple dominance for awhile to come.
After weeks of speculation that Digg or someone else was going to buy Spanish social news site Menéame and social news hosting service coRank - it's been announced that the two will instead merge to form a new site called MeneaRank. This new venture could really shake things up. Update: In a great example of the pitfalls of cross-cultural reporting powered by little more than Twitter and Google Language Tools, it turns out that today is Feast of the Holy Innocents - apparently the Latin American and Spanish equivalent of April Fool's Day. Doh! Hopefully there's some truth to this joke, though! Thanks for the heads up in comments, kind readers.
last100 editor Steve O'Hear has written an informative and thorough overview of the digital music scene in 2007. Steve noted: "Ditching DRM, new mobile offerings, pay-what-you-want and other alternative business models - one word to sum up activity in the digital music space in 2007: “experimentation”."
The post also predicts what will happen in digital music in 2008. Here's what Steve expects to happen with DRM:
Long-time inventor Dave Winer has released an early version of his new Mac software called FlickrFan tonight. Though there are some kinks in it at launch, the service leverages a number of APIs to do some very cool things.
FlickrFan is basically a screen saver program that will display high-resolution images from any Flickr account, recent Associated Press photos or any other RSS feed with media enclosures (so Flickr tag streams or Photobucket feeds should be no problem). Presumably this is only the beginning. The software is run off of Winer's all-too-unwieldy OPML Editor, but FlickrFan looks much easier to use.
Music recommendation and discovery engines are hot stuff but what if you could use some of the same juju to better organize the music you already have in your collection? The newly launched Veenix TuneExplorer for Mac does just that. By looking at qualities the company says include "pitch values, pitch variance, fundamental strengths, and a host of other sonic qualities" - the program acts like Pandora within your music collection.
George Bush signed a $555 billion omnibus spending bill yesterday that included a huge victory for advocates of open science on the internet. All research funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency with a $29 billion research budget, will now be required to be published online, free to the public, within 12 months after publication in any scientific journal.
This should open up a whole world of new opportunities for online research. Readers outside of the academic world but aware of the financial future of health information online in the commercial sector can imagine the analogous excitement about this announcement for academic researchers.
From the people who brought us social bookmarking site Mister Wong comes Beam it up Scotty, a mobile file sharing service that launched at the Le Web 3 conference a couple of weeks ago. Beam it up Scotty is a way to send pictures, music, videos, documents or any other file to any mobile device for free, but is it really worth it?
This is a collection of startup tips covering software engineering, infrastructure, PR, conferences, legal and finance. They describe best practices for an early-stage startup. We hope that you will find these tips useful, but also please remember that they are based on subjective experiences and not all of them will be applicable to your company.
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) have become an incredibly powerful viral marketing and audience
engagement tool over the last
couple of years. However, the elements of a
successful ARG remain a mystery to most people. Some of the most
successful ARGs that I have participated in over the past few years were the
I love bees
campaign for Halo 2, the Iris campaign for Halo 3, the political dystopia campaign, for NIN's Year Zero,
and most recently the Harvey Dent political campaign for the upcoming The
Dark Knight movie.
