In April, eBay filed a notification with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) seeking permission to circumvent section 47 of the Australian Trade Practices Act of 1974, which disallows businesses from creating exclusive deals that have the purpose or effect of lessening competition, in order to more fully integrate PayPal into its operations. As the ACCC put its, "Generally speaking, [the Act prohibits] exclusive dealing involves one business trading with another person, imposing restrictions on their freedom to choose with whom, or in what, it deals." Today, the ACCC released a draft notice denying eBay's request.
By now, you've heard of Adobe AIR - the cross-OS runtime that lets you run rich internet applications on your desktop. We've covered several of our favorite apps in the past, as well as places to find new ones, but so far all we've seen are consumer applications. What about the business world? Will companies ever be using AIR apps on their desktops? As it turns out, many already do and they're as easy to deploy as Adobe Reader.
Mozilla has been announcing Release Candidates for Firefox 3 consistently for the past month. In fact, Firefox 3 RC 3 was just released earlier today. One could guess that the time for an official release was right around the corner, but we wouldn't have guessed it'd be this soon. Only hours after RC3, and after 34 months of development, the company has announced that Firefox 3 will be officially released next Tuesday, June 17th.
We all know what it looks like when a novel is adapted for film or television. But what would it look like when the novel format is adapted for the Internet? We reported in March that more and more reading is being done online, especially by the younger generation, but because of the distractions of the media rich world in which we live, most reading on the web is actually just skimming. So how do you create a compelling novel format for the online world? Canadian author Nicola Furlong thinks the answer is a new web publishing format she's calling a "Quillr."
"...someone is going to build a billion-dollar company around the implicit social graph. And I'm betting on Skydeck." Jason Devitt
Welcome to the second installment of our new People in Tech series. In this post we interview Jason Devitt, CEO/Co-Founder of Skydeck. It's a mobile web startup built on the premise that "you ought to be able to manage your cell phone records the same way that you manage your email." The second big idea of Skydeck is that your true social network is hidden in your communication records. Read on for more insights...
The Rensselaer interactive debate on the future of the Web is just starting now and is being webcast live here (note: Silverlight required). You can watch the debate and submit questions - including while it is happening - by clicking here. Update: The debate is now over, see our comprehensive notes below...
iBreadCrumbs is a new web browser add-on designed specifically for students, researchers, professionals, or anyone who is doing research on the web. By clicking a toolbar button in your browser, you can use iBreadCrumbs as a clickstream recorder, recording the web sites you visit while researching a particular topic. Your saved research can then be shared with others through the iBreadCrumbs social network so others can continue where you left off.
ReadWriteWeb is the exclusive Media Partner for an interactive debate on the future of the Web, which kicks off in a couple of hours time. The debate features Tim Berners-Lee and will be webcast live. You can watch the debate and submit questions - including while it is happening - by clicking here. Semantic Web and Net Neutrality remain the most popular topics, so it should be fun. The event is being webcast live here (note: Silverlight required).
Font management heavyweight Extensis will release a new product next week that it says will bring font management into the modern era. As non-designers, we're interested in the steps this niche product is taking that are similar to emerging industry wide trends.
The makers of the popular Suitcase font manager are now combining that product's user friendly front end with acquired technology to power the back end IT control. The Extensis Universal Type Server will offer Mac and Windows server software, a web interface for administration, offline access to shared fonts and granular user groups and control.
Prediction markets are speculative markets in which investors put money into ideas that are tied to a future event -- such as "Will the Lakers cover the spread?" The idea is that the more people who buy into an idea, the more likely it is to occur. This is an application of crowd wisdom. One such prediction market, Intrade, which has been in operation since 2001 and has 73,000 traders, is running a number of prediction contracts on the 2008 US presidential election. Are their predictions more or less accurate then good old fashioned phone surveys?
