OtherInbox wants to help you keep spam out of your regular email inbox. The company gives you a virtually unlimited amount of disposable email addresses to use whenever you think somebody might start sending you spam or sell your address to spammers. Unlike other disposable email services, OtherInbox doesn't just give you a random email address, but a personal sub-domain to which you can add an unlimited amount of addresses. OtherInbox is currently in private beta, but we were able to get a few invites for our readers.
While Google only announced its own browser last Tuesday and did not include an API in this first release that would allow developers to create extensions for it, Japanese developer Kazuho Oku found a way to run userscripts on Google Chrome. While its functionality is still limited, Greasemetal is already showing a lot of promise and works exactly as advertised, even though it is not compatible with all Greasemonkey scripts yet.
According to the latest data from mobile advertising company AdMob, traffic from Apple's iPhone on AdMob's advertising network almost doubled in August. Apple's iPhone saw the fastest growth of all smartphones worldwide, closely followed by the Samsung Instinct. It is also noteworthy that the top 5 smartphones in the U.S. generated 54% of all smartphone traffic.
The internal IT department, headed by the CIO, no longer acts as the gatekeeper for all new technology coming into the enterprise. IT may stand at the gate to the castle, but SaaS and social media startups are swimming across the moat. Internal IT can still set fire to the moat and otherwise make life difficult. But how do you make this a win/win relationship, so that they welcome your entry? Start by understanding how IT is thinking about social media.
Giftag may not be a revolutionary product, but it is kind of nifty. The product was created by Best Buy (BBY), a retailer that didn't have an online registry service. Instead of creating one, though, they decided to create Giftag instead: a browser plugin that lets you make online wishlists and share them with your friends. The technology will be integrated into Best Buy's web site in the coming months.
Are you tired of reading non-objective articles written by what are supposed to be credible journalists? You're not alone. According to Pew Research, 66% of Americans say they consider the press "one-sided." (Wonder what side that is?) At SpinSpotter, they believe the mission of the press is supposed to be to inform us of the news, not persuade. However, that's not always the case these days.
With so many Americans getting their news online instead of in a daily newspaper, SpinSpotter decided to use the power of the web and all its many users to combat the growing trend of media bias. How? Simple: by making you the editor. With the new browser plugin from SpinSpotter, you can edit and share any sign of bias on the web.
RWW is the Premiere Media Sponsor for the Defrag Conference, happening 3-4 November in Denver Colorado. Event organizer Eric Norlin has published a list of things that will be happening on Day 1. They include a discussion about Strategic Intuition; an 'Around the Horn' session led by with Paul Kedrosky; 'The Quantification of Everything' from Esther Dyson; "flow" apps; Knowledge Networking and Ambient Intimacy; a discussion about whether collaboration is changing how we consume and interact with analysis; Appfrica: the growth of information overload in Africa; Social Computing and the Enterprise.
There are more startup tech companies launching this week than almost anyone can keep track of, but any time a new service launches - one thing is key to its survival. The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line.
What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. Below are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.
At Apple's "Let's Rock" special event today, Steve Jobs introduced a new version of iTunes, the availability of HD TV shows for the American market, a new design for the iPod Nano and iPod touch, as well as a major update for the iPhone/iPod touch firmware. According to Jobs, Apple has sold 160 million iPods worldwide and now holds 73.4% of the market in the US.
Adobe AIR, the Rich Internet Application framework that brings together the responsiveness of the desktop, the connectivity of the web and the dazzling good looks made possible by working in conjunction with other Adobe apps, has hit an important milestone this week. The company announced last night that the software has now been downloaded more than 25 million times.
Update: Adobe PR wrote us to clarify that the announcement is not in fact that 25 million people have downloaded AIR but that 25 million AIR apps have been downloaded. That's less clear and less exciting, but is exactly the kind of PR fluff that agencies issue all too often. Have you got any real news or do you not have any real news? This kind of stuff drives us nuts and we apologize to our readers for the misunderstanding.
If you've been wondering when AIR would become more than an edge case platform to develop on, that time could be now. In fact, more than 850,000 developers have already downloaded the AIR software development kit, according to Adobe's Ryan Stewart. We think this is really good news.
