Brighter Planet is a venture backed financial service that uses an innovative web interface to help you track and reduce your carbon footprint. Just like hybrid car owners obsess about the fluctuating MPG displays in their cars, Brighter Planet believes it will be compelling to show people visible progress online concerning their personal ecological impact.
One of the categories at next week's Crunchies awards show, which ReadWriteWeb is co-hosting, is Best technology innovation / achievement. The 5 finalists in that category are: Earthmine, Like, Move Networks, Twine, Viewdle. Here's a look at what each of these startups does and what makes them "innovative".
Among the 5 finalists, there is 1 Semantic App, 2 Visual Search Engines, a 3D mapping service, and an Internet video streaming product. Tell us who you think should be the winner in the comments.
Like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, rumors about Microsoft buying so-and-so just won't die. The latest rumor to keep floating across our desk is that Microsoft is buying second place content delivery network (CDN) Limelight Networks. In August, Microsoft entered into a technology sharing partnership with Limelight. Under the terms of that deal, the two companies would, "cross-license certain technologies, consider joint development projects in the future, and cooperate on extending and improving their respective technology infrastructures." Now it appears that Microsoft may be looking to buy the CDN outright.
The third batch of tickets for the Crunchies startup awards ceremony and party are available now for purchase. The event is a collaboration between ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, VentureBeat and TechCrunch and it will be held on January 18 at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. The ceremony starts at 7:30 p.m. and will be followed by a party, which is open to all.
Tickets are $40, and $10 from each ticket will be contributed to the American Heart Association.
A couple of weeks ago, I surmised that because Apple enjoys a dominating end-to-end position in the digital music market, most consumers are never really affected by the DRM restrictions they impose -- if users are buying music to play on their iPods, then they don't really come in contact with the DRM. If consumers aren't bothered by DRM, or perhaps not even aware that it exists, will "no DRM" resonate as a marketing message? Recently released sales data seems to suggest so.
Sick of Facebook application overload? Feeling like you're on Myspace all over again? The Facebook team has heard your cries and announced tonight that they will soon release a new service that allows users to move all but their favorite apps to an "extended profile" section.
I think a lot of users are going to appreciate this. I'm not so sure about app developers.
Many of us are wondering what Apple has in store for their annual expo, Macworld, which begins this Monday. Last year it was the iPhone, two years ago it was the Intel iMac, the year before that the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini. Earlier this week Josh Catone wrote an excellent post, listing 9 specific Macworld predictions and assigning a percentage of probability to each.
In the following poll, we've included each of Josh's predictions - and also added some more from RWW commenters.
The World Community Grid is an organization whose mission is to create the "largest public computing grid benefiting humanity." Similar to the well-known SETI@Home project, individuals donate their computers idle time to the project, becoming members of a worldwide computing grid. This grid effectively becomes a large system with power that surpasses that of any supercomputer. These donated spare cycles are then used to contribute to projects that benefit humanity. By splitting the work that needs to be done into small pieces, research time is reduced from years to only months.
Following the December announcement that social network Bebo was aligning itself to the Facebook platform, the company announced today that the Bebo Open Application Platform is "100% open" – meaning that any 3rd party developer can deploy their applications on Bebo.
Previously the Bebo platform was only available to a select group of media and developer partners, including NBC Universal, CBS, NBA, Yahoo!, RockYou, Slide, and others. As of now, there are 63 apps in their Developer website - Bebo obviously hopes to ramp this up quickly now that anyone can develop apps.
Human-built search engine Mahalo appears to be shooting past the traffic numbers it got when it launched, according to Heather Hopkins at traffic analyst firm Hitwise.
Mahalo pages are collections of the most useful links regarding a wide variety of timely topics in popular niches. I find the idea of curating a collection of content over time fascinating. On each page at Mahalo you can suggest links, grab the OPML file for all the feeds on a page and even get a Firefox plug-in to take Mahalo everywhere you go. I know it's not hip to like Mahalo in tech circles, but I do.
