Last month we announced the launch of 12seconds.tv. 12seconds.tv is being described as the Twitter of videoblogging, where users can create a short video clip of anything for up to 12 seconds. We even challenged our readers and received some hilarious responses. The service is taking off nicely and has recently implemented a host of new features and partnered with a few great up-and-coming services and applications.
The iPhone has been making headway in its battle to become a business-ready tool. Obviously, the addition of Microsoft Exchange support was a big step towards being considered a viable alternative to the traditional smartphones used at work, like Blackberry and Windows Mobile. However, beyond simply supporting enterprise email, the iPhone platform has a lot of potential to cater to the needs of its business users, too.
Today, we're introduced to what hopefully will continue the trend of more "serious" apps for iPhone: LinkedIn.
Iterasi, the dynamic bookmarking tool we told you about earlier this year, has just announced a new release that finally brings their service to the Mac. Previously, Iterasi was available on Windows machines (IE & Firefox), but Iterasi will now also work on Macs via a Firefox plugin. In addition, the much-anticipated scheduling service has also been released.
Yesterday we wrote about Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the Enterprise, the buyer. The conclusion was that the impact of social media on the Enterprise was very big, addressing the very "nature of the firm". This post looks at Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the vendor, specifically startups. This is a 30,000 foot view, but we aim to get past the hype to insights you can use in your startup. Further posts in our recently launched Enterprise Chanel will drill into specific market segments, companies and technologies.
Tonight, Microsoft has publicly launched Photosynth, its long awaited Live Labs product that allows you to stitch your photos together to create a detailed 3D environment. While most of the computation is done on your desktop, the images are uploaded to Microsoft's servers and Microsoft is giving all Photosynth users a total of 20GB of storage for their collections. The rendering and browsing is done with the help of Seadragon, another Live Labs product.
In this post we review 10 promising developer platforms for the Web. We're not talking about the obvious ones either, like Facebook, iPhone, OpenSocial or even Twitter. Those have been covered extensively already. The list below features some of our favorite 'lesser known' web developer platforms. There are bound to be other excellent developer platforms not noted below, so as always please use the comments here to point out your own favorites.
We've written a lot of times about developer platforms for the Web and we've reviewed a fair number of them. A web platform at its simplest is an API, allowing external developers to build on top of your web app or product. As we explained in our post APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion on the Pros and Cons, "offering an API is a great way to make developer friends and developing for a large Platform has the potential to bring your work to a huge audience."
We get excited around here whenever a new application offers an Application Programming Interface (API) for 3rd parties to develop against. Oh, the possibilities! Sometimes, though, it just doesn't pan out and our dreams are dashed against the craggy rocks of reality. Mashups are hard and just because you've got some cool data and good hooks for developers to pull from doesn't mean anyone's going to build anything worth using on your API.
News has emerged that the Chinese government has detained at least five bloggers from the United States for reporting on protests in favor of Tibetan independence. Included among the detained was the widely admired founder of the video blog series Alive in Baghdad, Brian Conley.
The detentions follow a wave of arrests of Chinese dissidents leading up to the Olympics. The US government pledged as the games began to engage the Chinese government concerning human rights - we wonder what those conversations look like now that China has detained journalists consistently critical of US policy as well.
At Intel's Developer Forum, Yahoo today announced an initiative to bring the Internet to your TV set through what it has dubbed the 'Widget Channel.' While many a company has tried to bring the Internet to the living room (and mostly failed in the process), Yahoo is taking a slightly different approach by not trying to bring a full browser experience to the TV, but by creating a platform for widget developers.
Today, eBay announced a number of changes to its fee structure, which will emphasize fixed-price sales over eBay's traditional auctions. Fixed-price sales have been growing at a faster rate than auctions for eBay, so emphasizing this business model makes a lot of sense for eBay. To do so, the company has reduced the price to list an item for a fixed price by over 70% to 35 cents and sellers can now list multiple quantities of the same item for the same price.
