Zong, a mobile SMS app framework from Europe's Echovox, has cut deals with eight major US mobile carriers to enable the Zong turnkey applications and API to be used in the US.
Publishers can now use Zong apps to offer their customers polls, quizzes, alerts, RSS feeds and more via SMS shortcodes and responses. The company says its API also allows publishers to leverage web content, serve up and bill customers for a wide variety of applications beyond SMS interactions.
As part of MTV's coverage of the 2008 presidential elections in the US, the media network assembled a "street team" of 51 amateur journalists -- one in each state and the District of Columbia -- to file blog reports, photos, videos, and audio podcasts about election issues during the course of the campaign season. The videos are being syndicated to MTV's mobile web site, social network, and to the Associate Press Online Video Network. Members of the street team have been outfitted with laptops, video phones, and other popular tools of the citizen journalist via funding from a $700,000 grant from the John L. and James S. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge.
Steve O'Hear (who edits our digital lifestyle blog last100) has an interesting post on his ZDNet blog that questions whether Google's OpenSocial initiative is at all about data portability, or if in fact it really just about widget standardization. O'Hear quotes heavily from a recent article by Marc Canter, who is a strong advocate for open standards and data portability, that ran on CNet.
Meebo announced today that it is launching an API for its Meebo Rooms service. The API will allow the automated creation and embedding of chat rooms at the server level. Rooms previously had to be set up by hand on the Meebo site. "For example, social networks can embed a chat room on every 'group' page, entertainment companies can have live community groups for each artist or show, and blog platforms can embed a chat room in the 'comments' of every post, seamlessly," says Meebo, describing possible use cases on the API page.
We have written a lot here about the the vision of building a structured layer on
top of the current web. Annotating billions of HTML documents in a bottom-up way or building top-down tools that can automagically
interpret the existing information are the two approaches that we discussed. Together these approaches would result in a global
database which will make the web even more connected.
The ability to correlate content and concepts accross web sites would reduce the time necessary for searching and would enable the discovery of related information.
With the high profile launch this week of Qtrax, a free and legal P2P music offering (ReadWriteWeb coverage), ad-supported music downloads are very much in the spotlight, and as always RWW network blog last100 has its finger on the pulse, with great news coverage and analysis of the week that was in digital music, including an exclusive interview with the CEO of a large ad-supported music web site.
Web retailer Amazon announced their fourth quarter earnings today and included some interesting figures on the state of their distributed computing products. Namely, web services bandwidth now accounts for more bandwidth than all of Amazon's global web sites combined. To put this in perspective, comScore ranked Amazon the 7th most visited site in the US in December. The retail giant was 6th in the UK, 9th in Canada, 11th in Germany, 11th in Japan, and 20th in France. In other words -- Amazon is big, which means AWS-powered sites must be really big (collectively, at least).
Loic Le Meur's short video messaging system Seesmic made a number of announcements here at DEMO but when I got to sit down with him, that wasn't the subject of our conversation.
I wanted to talk about microblogging as a phenomenon, but the biggest take away I found from our conversation is the Seesmic's short video messaging is really different from Twitter. Both are important but so are the differences between them.
For 2007, our Best Web LittleCo was Twitter, the microblogging/status application that captured the collective attention of Silicon Valley at SXSW last winter and has been on a meteoric rise ever since. We picked Twitter because it "has captured the imagination and become a new hybrid of chat, social networking and blogging." But, unlike 2006's Best LittleCo YouTube, which has become firmly entrenched in the mainstream consciousness, Twitter still exists outside of most mainstream circles.
Vicito News is a new personalized news aggregation service that operates over instant messenger using an IM robot. The service currently works with AIM, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger. Vicito is something akin to Google News alerts for IM -- you tell the service what to watch for, and it updates you at preset intervals via instant messenger when it finds new news matching your query.
