Fabrication-on-demand service Ponoko launched a powerful new feature called Photomake today; now anyone can upload a photo of a drawn image and Ponoko will create a physical object based on that photo alone. This whole company is really fun but Photomake turns it into a generally accessible tool for those of us who aren't designers.
After uploading a photo of a drawing, users pick which of a list of materials they'd like their design created with and then Ponoko provides a cost for fabrication. The items aren't cheap but the experience looks fantastic. Check out the video demonstration below.
Online study group community Cramster announced today that the company has raised a $3 million investment and after checking out the site, we can see why. This active, full featured and well design service looks really compelling for students and has a solid business model.
Members can participate in forums about homework, get quick answers to questions 24 hours a day and access explanations of problems from more than 200 of the most popular text books in 7 subject areas. There are free and paid membership levels at $10 per month and users deemed helpful by others can receive financial rewards like gift certificates.
Most cases in which the RIAA accuses somebody of illegally sharing files never make it to court. Instead, the RIAA usually offers the defendant a deal. Jammie Thomas, however, who was accused of sharing 1,702 songs on Kazaa in 2007, decided to fight the RIAA, went to court, and was found guilty of illegally sharing 24 copyrighted songs. The jury awarded $220,000 in damages to the RIAA. Now, however, the judge who heard the case has reversed this decision because he gave incorrect instructions to the jury.
When we first introduced you to Elgg two years ago, it was a new social networking platform whose focus was on e-learning. Since that time, the software has been rewritten and it has moved away from being strictly for educational use only. Today, the award-winning Elgg is one of the top open source social networking platforms available on the internet.
A little over a month ago, Elgg 1.0 was introduced to the world. In this newest release, several years in the making, the software has been improved from the inside out. It has a more attractive UI and design, for starters. But under the hood you'll find more changes like better plugin support, RSS and OpenDD views, and a new database schema.
This week we're looking at how religious organizations are using Web technology. Today's post looks at a blog that aims to "challenge misconceptions and stereotypical perceptions about Islam and Muslims worldwide". The site is Inside Islam and we caught up with lead blogger Kaitlin Foley today to find out more. For the previous posts in our series, check out our reviews of LifeChurch.tv (a Christian church) and Shalom Hartman Institute (a Jewish institute).
The Pew Internet and American Life Project, always a source of fascinating survey results, has come out with a new one about technology and work. The latest is titled "Networked Workers: Most workers use the internet or email at their jobs, but they say these technologies are a mixed blessing for them."
The gist of the analysis is that people who use the internet at work also use it to do work at home; it makes them more efficient but also increases the demands on their time. Any of us who live that kind of life could have told you that - but what we find more interesting is the surprisingly low number of people who say they use certain technologies at work.
The long awaited MySpace Music service is launching tonight around 9pm PST. (It's the old site at that link right now.) We just got off the phone with the company for a briefing and we liked what we saw. It's going to be a very big deal.
Users will be able to assemble playlists from a huge catalog of songs from all four major labels and from independent distributor The Orchard, full length songs are all streamable for free, users will be able to purchase DRM-free MP3s through a close integration with the AmazonMP3 service and developers will have a gradually increasing amount of access to user activity data from the Music section. Screen shots below.
Browser vendor Opera, which is a stronger player in the mobile browser market than it is on the desktop, has just released more data on of the state of the Mobile Web. The latest report tells us that usage of the mobile Web continues to grow in terms of unique users and page views. What's more, 'long tail' sites are showing up well in the data too, which is a sure sign the Mobile Web is gaining traction in key growth markets like the U.S. and China.
The company states that in August, their mobile browser Opera Mini (our coverage) was used by approximately 17.3 million users, who viewed more than 4.1 billion pages - about 242 pages per user, per month.
CAPTCHAs, those pesky challenge-response tests that many web sites use to determine whether you are human or a spambot, are an annoyance to many users. According to a report in Science (subscription required), users now solve about 100 million CAPTCHAs a day. ReCAPTCHA, a project based at Carnegie Mellon University, has found an ingenious way to harness all this work and, according to the findings published in Science this week, CAPTCHAs could be used to transcribe printed texts at the rate of 160 books a day.
Social news site Digg is announcing today that it has raised another $28 million from existing investors, bringing its sum total raised to more than $40 million. Remember when people used to tell stories about Digg rejecting VC money as too much in its early days? Those times are long gone.
The paradigm that Digg has popularized, letting users vote on which stories should be on the site's front page, is now found in any number of other places. From the programming geeks at StackOverflow, Reddit and Hacker News to the customer service requests at Dell Ideastorm, Uservoice and elsewhere - "it's like Digg for..." is now a commonly used phrase. No where, though, has Digg itself faced a bigger challenge than in Yahoo's new site Buzz.
