Earthmine, the Best Technology Innovation/Achievement category winner at tonight's Crunchies, is a company that might seem uninteresting at first glance. When I first saw earthmine I assumed that it was just a Google Maps Streetview knock-off. I was wrong.
This startup is doing something far more interesting than that. While Google Maps and related consumer products have whetted the public's appetite for visualization of specific places on a map, earthmine is making those places machine readable.
Toonlet is a new site where you can create your own cartoon strips with customized characters and leave cartoons as comments in response to other peoples' strips. It's fun, fast and easy. Kids will like it and I do too.
There's lots of sites on the web where you can create your own comic strips but few of them let you build your own characters. On Toonlet there are seven collections of resizable body parts you can mix and match, including one contributed by comic rock-star Peter Bagge, author of the 90's best seller Hate.
Amazon is entering the second leg of their Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and they're calling on Amazon customers to help them decide which unpublished author scores the grand prize that includes a Penguin Publishing book deal and $25,000 advance. Starting with a pool of nearly 5,000 entries, Amazon this week announced their pool of semifinalist entries and are calling on readers to help whittle those down by reviewing excerpts from the novels.
Wellsphere is a perfect website for those of us who have trouble keeping our New Year's Resolutions. At Wellsphere, the goal is to build online communities where people encourage each other to "get active, eat better, and unwind." As we all know, that's easier said than done. The way Wellsphere works is that it connects members with local health and wellness resources, classes, and activities that match their goals, while fostering a supportive community environment where members motivate each other to stay on track.
Have you ever wondered what the English language looks? Yeah, neither have I. But a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University did, and tapping into the billions of images freely available on the Internet, they came up with a visual map of the English language using nearly 80 million of those images. The images are arranged based on the semantic relationship between words, and thus, according to the researchers, the project explores "the relationship between visual and semantic similarity."
Project10X has just released a 400-page study of
semantic technologies and their market impact, entitled
Semantic Wave 2008: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0
and Multibillion Dollar Market Opportunities. The report discusses the emergence of semantic technologies for consumer
and enterprise applications, and the evolution from Web 2.0 to the so-called "Web 3.0".
A free 27-page summary of Project10X’s Semantic Wave 2008 Report has been made available to ReadWriteWeb readers.
LongJump, a company based out of Sunnyvale, California, has introduced a Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) product that offers you an easy way to build a database application backend for your website and business. With LongJump, database setup is simplified - you no longer need to worry about server provisioning, redundancy, backups, patching, or any of the other IT complexities involved with running your own servers. Instead, you just sign-up with LongJump, set up your data structure and permissions, and connect your web services.
Yahoo! announced this morning that the company will authenticate the identities of its 248 million users if they chose to login to OpenID supporting sites with their Yahoo! ID.
Like the AOL announcement of roughly the same thing in February of last year, the key question is whether Yahoo! will do anything substantive with OpenID or whether, like the AOL announcement, this will just be window dressing to legitimize advocates of OpenID. AOL's support for OpenID appears to have resulted in little more.
With the Macworld conference in full effect at the Moscone Center in San Fancisco, our network blog last100 has been keeping tabs on all the juicy tid-bits to emerge from Apple's annual party. While we already know about the big announcements to come out of Macworld -- like the Apple TV 2, iTunes movie rentals, and the Macbook Air -- last100 has been busy pumping out a lot of great coverage and analysis to keep you up-to-date on the other goings on at Macworld and what it all means for you.
Nonprofit tech analysts Idealware released a collection of resources today that anyone can use to evaluate APIs under consideration. Titled “Getting Your Systems Talking: A Framework to Evaluate APIs and Data Exchange Features,” the guide at its core is a worksheet that walks you through more than 30 different technical questions you should ask about any new data exchange technology you're evaluating. It's free to download.
While data portability is a hot topic of the day, there hasn't been a lot of tangible work done around the details yet. Idealware's guide could make implementation of these themes much more manageable. Readers may also be interested in this related discussion about data portability use cases over at the DataPortability.org public discussion.
