The new Web era is about the mainstream. This is when millions of small businesses and digital free agents make a good living by providing better products to a much more savvy market. This is the point in the Crossing the Chasm model when all the innovation stops, start-ups get consolidated into a few mega players and it all gets a bit boring until the next wave of innovation hits us.
Sk*rt, the small but quickly growing Digg-style site for women, announced tonight that it's changing its name and is asking its users to vote for what the new site will be called. The much smaller and just-a-touch younger women's magazine Skirt.com has been trying to get its hands on the Sk-rt.com domain name for some time and clearly the name is an odd one anyway (I like it, but so goes life). Regardless of why the name is being changed, it's pretty cool that the company is deciding with a vote.
Umair Haque is a smart guy. He studied neuroscience at McGill, did an MBA and econ/strategy research with Gary Hamel at London Business School, and began working towards a PhD in strategy and innovation at Oxford in 2004. He also founded Bubblegeneration, a consultancy that studies the economics of consumer-facing industries. Haque is now the Director of the Havas Media Lab, which advises entrepreneurs, investors, and firms with "craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation." He also thinks Web 2.0 is full of crap.
Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use, a report released today by the United Nations Foundation and the Vodafone Group Foundation, uses 11 case studies to detail how relief, advocacy, and development organizations are utilizing mobile technology to accomplish goals in areas where "wired" infrastructure is sparse. The case studies examine mobile technology use by organizations working toward UN Millennium Development Goals, and reveal that mobile tech is changing the way non-governmental organization (NGOs) approach their work.
Since launching in May of last year Google's Street View maps have expanded from the original 5 cities to 44 regions. Street View has largely been seen as a "fun" tool -- Wired held a contest to find the best images captured from the service last spring, for example -- and some have even found it rather creepy. Today, Google added Street View functionality to its directions application to create a very helpful service.
There's a mind-numbing amount of conversations and transactions going on around the internet these days and quality aggregation of content is a very hot trend. When is more too much, though? Are some aggregation services shooting themselves in the foot by sacrificing quality for breadth? Is this madness and does it need to stop?
Call it feature creep, call it "so meta it hurts," it appears that a growing class of websites run the risk of aggregating too much. Maybe that's not the case, but there are some issues and we're going to write about them. We'll also offer collected examples of sites that take one strategy or another - you can let us know if our own aggregation here is too much.
SocialTumbs is a decision making utility that taps the wisdom of the crowd to help people make tough choices. Utilizing the "pro vs. con" approach to decision making, SocialThumbs allows users to look at both sides of a tough decision and call on others to help them muddle through it.
Twistori, according to the site, is the "first step in an ongoing social experiment." The brainchild of Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, Twistori pulls tweets from Twitter (via Summize) containing specific keywords: i love, i hate, i think, i believe, i feel, and i wish. In then publishes the tweets it finds anonymously in a non-stop, auto-updating river of news. The result is a continuous stream of feelings from the Twitter community.
Despite the federal legislation of the Do-Not-Call list, many people still receive telemarketer phone calls on a regular basis. Although you can report the violators to various government agencies, few take the time to do so. But now there is a web site that can help: Callercomplaints.com aims to build the largest telemarketer database on the web, built entirely by user submissions.
In the first real sign that recommendation engine Strands (formally MyStrands) is branching out from mobile and music, the company has announced the acquisition of Expensr, an online personal finance application. Strands is also launching moneyStrands, a personal money management solution. We've noted before that Strands is a company to watch, having taken $55m in funding so far and using it to develop a broad range of recommendation technologies.
