WhyGoSolo, a completely self-funded startup from Washington D.C., wants to help you transition your online relationships and friendships to the offline world. For some people, the interactions they have online are so fulfilling that they are overlooking the importance of having real-world relationships. With WhyGoSolo's online community and tools like their Facebook app and upcoming twitter integration, you'll now have a new way to meet people online to hang out with in the real world.
Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog
It's official: Toshiba, the leading partner in the HD DVD camp, has waved the white flag. The next generation DVD format war is over. Blu-ray wins.
The move to stop production of HD DVD players and recorders was an "agonising decision", according to Toshiba president Atsutoshi Nishida, but one that the company had to take after "judging that there is no way of winning the competition."
Scribd, the online document sharing site, announced today the creation of a new document format built for the web, dubbed iPaper. This web-based viewer lets you view documents in a browser using a Flash-based widget, with no need for software downloads. Also launched today is the Scribd platform, a set of tools that lets anyone use iPaper on their own internal web site.
Outages aside, there's no doubt that the rise of web scale computing platforms, like Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, have lowered the barrier of entry for Internet startups. Going completely serverless would have been unheard of during the late-90s dot com boom, but new cloud computing platforms have made it possible for small companies to scale quickly, easily, efficiently, and cost effectively. However, even if services like Amazon's have made hosting and scaling a web app more simple, there is still a good deal of server management involved. Enter Mosso, a Rackspace-backed company that merges the idea of cloud computing with the familiarity of a managed, shared environment.
Bertalan Meskó from the excellent ScienceRoll blog has uploaded a presentation he gave recently at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference. The presentation, embedded below, is a great overview of how the Web is being utilized in the medical profession.
I was particularly interested in the story of Dr Jay Parkinson, a Web-savvy doctor. He has an impressive website, where he describes himself as "a new kind of physician".
The Bungee Connect platform is the first end-to-end, cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for professional-class web applications. Today, Bungee Labs released a new version of the Bungee Connect web application development and hosting platform and opened its Public Beta program to all developers. With Bungee Connect, developers can use their web browser to access the Bungee development platform to build, collaborate on, test, and deploy web applications.
A couple of weeks ago we wrote about the emerging phenomenon of weekend code-a-thons in which programmers and designers get together over a short period of time to try to build web apps really fast. We went over some of the different approaches to the weekend code-a-thon and interviewed a participant in the Rails Rumble in an attempt to try and figure out why these get togethers are so attractive. An upcoming event in Santa Clara, California called Weekend Apps is taking a slightly different approach and not just focusing on app building, but also about building a sound business.
We have two prize winners to announce, for yesterday and today. Our 7th and 8th daily Comments Competition winners come from two different posts. The first is one from Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds. It came from martin english, who wrote that companies still need "backup clouds", even if they use Amazon's clouds. Congratulations Martin, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget.
Our second winner is kayvaan, for a comment on our post The Birth of the Political Long Tail. Congrats kayvaan, you also win an Amazon voucher!
A very interesting site for whistle blowers called WikiLeaks is facing government censorship as today a California judge reportedly ruled that the company in control of the site's domain name must shut down public access to the entire site. You can visit the site directly via its IP address. (Thanks, TechDirt) See a wide randing discussion over on Techmeme and a collection of resources we've assembled for tracking this and related issues, below.
On Friday, a massive outage occured at Amazon Web Services that generated a wave
of negativity and criticism in the blogosphere. Not long ago, Rackspace, one of the world's largest hosting companies, experienced a outage that resulted in a similar reaction. When the backbone collapses, so do our favorite services. This makes
us mad. It makes us say things like: well, maybe we shouldn't be using the cloud. Or things
like: why can't we get 99% uptime? Or: isn't this what an SLA is for?
