New York based technology and consulting firm Arc90 introduced its first publicly available product today: Kindling. Arc90 describes Kindling as an "idea management and collaboration tool for small groups and companies." A more straightforward way to describe it would be as a version of Digg or reddit for small groups. Unlike those sites, however, Kindling focuses purely on voting on original ideas, not news stories.
When Wordpress 2.5 hit the web, there were a lot of big changes made to the blogging platform. Since then, numerous bugs and quirks have been discovered. Some of the changes were so drastic that users have been holding off for Wordpress 2.6. If you've been waiting to see improvements for Wordpress 2.5, you won't have to wait much longer. While 2.6 isn't a big release like WordPress 2.5 was, here's a rundown of what users can expect to see.
Have you every wanted to run your own magazine, but never had enough money or a large enough audience to make it worthwhile? Well, if there's one thing that the self-publishing industry can cater to, it's the long tail. Now, thanks to a startup called MagCloud, even the smallest of ventures can produce their own, professional, full-color magazine and without the costs normally associated with hiring traditional publishing companies.
The Google Maps team just announced the addition of a new feature to Google Maps: the ability to contribute to and edit maps through Google Map Maker. Users can now edit and moderate various map features, including roads, lakes, power lines, and bike trails among others.
While Google already allows users to create and share new map layers through 'My Maps', this is the first time it is actively looking for help in creating maps (almost) from the ground up.
In April, Umair Haque posted a manifesto on his blog on the Harvard Business Publishing web site where he called for today's investors and start-ups to start building applications to "change the world" instead of just making apps that make money. He challenged Silicon Valley to find a problem to fix that will change the world for the better and then pledged that he would help by providing free consulting. Recently, he revisited this topic which he was due to speak on at this year's Supernova conference.
Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. Tonight the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and make the platform open source. Nokia clearly aims to challenge Android, the open source mobile operating system of Google. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says that it wants to create "the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications".
The highly anticipated "memory augmentation" service Evernote opens to the public Tuesday and you'll probably want to check this service out just to see what it tries to do. We may change our minds after more lengthy testing, but so far this combination of a bookmarking, note taking and photo cataloging service with apps for the desktop, web and mobile - not to mention the Optical Character Recognition powered search - adds up to a whole lot of potential ... and frustration.
Buried in Bob Iannucci’s discussion at Supernova 2008 last week was this comment: “Connecting people only through voice communications is limited,” the Nokia chief technical officer said.
To us, that sums up everything Nokia is doing, including today’s announcement. Nokia, the world’s largest handset manufacturer, is purchasing Plazes, the location-based social networking service based in Berlin.
Is LinkedIn worth $1bn? Yes. Why? Because Bain Capital says it is. The stock is not public, so you and I cannot trade it. The whole notion of the average punter trading tech stocks (or the average punter's pension fund trading it on your behalf) seems rather quaint, from some bygone era. But why has the public market for tech stocks disappeared? Where has it disappeared to? Will it ever return? The LinkedIn financing offers some clues to these questions.
Seattle based travel startup Yapta.com re-launched its homepage today as a full-service air travel search engine. Yapta originally launched in May 2007 as a browser add-on for bookmarking flight information and tracking price developments. The new site has retained this focus, but moved it away from the extension and made all of its core functions available on the homepage as well.
With the airlines cutting back their service in every imaginable way while raising their prices simultaneously, Yapta offers travelers another tool to at least try to save some money on their trips.
