While it can sometimes seem like Skype has been around forever, today only marks the 5th anniversary of the popular VOIP client. When it was first released, Skype marked a huge improvement in voice quality over any other VOIP client at the time. Just a few days after its release, Skype already had close to 10,000 users online at any time. Since then, the company has added plugins, video calls, voicemail, Skype to phone calls, and many other features. Most importantly, though, Skype has changed how we communicate with each other and allowed us to run small, virtual companies.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk has fallen prey to social media spammers and it is now full of requests to spam bookmarking services for pennies per link. Although these HITs may stop short of being "fraud" in the legal sense of the word, they are certainly dishonest and unsavory. In addition to these spam bookmarking requests, we're also seeing HITs for Diggs, Stumbles, Slashdots, etc. of spammers' web pages and web sites.
In case you're unfamiliar, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourced marketplace for tasks. A person needing work done can set up a HIT (human intelligence task) - the small job they need done. Others come along to perform the HITs, earning micro payments along the way. In this way, businesses, developers, and other individuals have access to an affordable, scalable workforce
Yesterday, Google announced the winners of the Android Developer Challenge I, a contest that awarded cash prizes to the most innovative and promising applications designed for the upcoming mobile OS, Android. The ten top teams received $275,000 and 10 other teams received $100,000. The ADC Gallery lists all the winners as well as the finalists.
Although Google has already named their winners, we decided to browse through the gallery to find the apps that we're most excited to use. Some of the apps, like for example, cab4me, may have been declared a winner, but we know not everyone lives in a major metropolitan area where hailing a taxi is a part of everyday life. Instead, we picked out some apps that have more universal appeal. They are as follows:
Yahoo's wildly popular photo sharing site Flickr is a lot of fun to use, but it really helps to take some time and learn how to use it well. We've recently engaged more seriously with Flickr and wanted to share some quick tips that we think will help you get more out of it, too.
Some people want to know how to do marketing on Flickr or use Flickr in nonprofit organizations, but in this post we're going to talk about ways you can enjoy the Flickr more for any purpose.
Today, Comcast announced that it will amend its Acceptable Use Policy and add a clause to it that will establish a "monthly data use threshold" of 250 GB per month. This effectively puts a cap on the amount a Comcast user can download per month and codifies an informal policy Comcast was already enforcing. While 250GB is a large amount of data right now, it won't be once a large number users start watching HD streams which can easily take up numerous GB per hours.
If you think regular online dating is still too slow and inconvenient, SpeedDate.com might just be the thing for you. The San Mateo based online dating service just raised $6 million in a Series B round from Menlo Ventures after raising a Series A round for the same amount in January 2007. SpeedDate.com sets itself apart from its competitors by allowing its users to quickly set up short webcam conversations.
We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. Today, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don't necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.
For all its supposed simplicity, Really Simple Syndication or RSS has continued to confuse and intimidate millions of people online years after its introduction. What can be done to make RSS more mainstream? Google plans to roll out a small but simple feature that could go a long way. We wouldn't be surprised to see every blog publishing service follow suit.
"Follow this blog" is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they'll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company's RSS reader. It's a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.
In Tampa, Florida, one of the cities that comprises the megalopolis known as the Tampa Bay area, home to Busch Gardens, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and only minutes from beautiful beaches on the Gulf Coast of Florida (oh, and this author's stomping grounds, too), a local politician is giving credit to Facebook for his recent win in the primaries for the local County Commission.
On Facebook, the crowd is still very young, with an average age of 22.96 as of this February. Typically, the youth vote, although coveted, could not be counted on thanks to low turnout of young voters at the polls. However, this small time local election may prove to be one of the first examples of the huge impact Gen Y can have on the political process.
When Google acquired the microblogging service Jaiku in October of last year, many people had high hopes for Jaiku's future. Would a Google-flavored Twitter soon show up everywhere from iGoogle to the upcoming Android handset, we wondered? Instead, news from the company slowed to a trickle and the doors stayed locked to newcomers - signs that many took to mean Google had essentially abandoned the service. But today, things are happening at Jaiku once again - most notably, unlimited invites are now available. Is Jaiku poised to make a comeback?
