Seventeen years ago today Nirvana released their widely loved album Nevermind and many of us in our 30s today were thinking about college. In between the less accessible era of nihilistic punk music and the post-engagement fluff of the Emo genre, Nirvana heralded a brief period when popular music acknowledged to kids that the world was in bad shape but that we weren't alone in feeling that way.
If it had been available then, I would have used the website GreenReportcard, just launched today by the Sustainable Endowment Institute, in my college hunt.
With all the hype surrounding the iPhone and Google Android, users may have forgotten about one of the best mobile browsers available for Windows Mobile and Symbian owners. We're talking about Skyfire, the award winning mobile browser that we can't get enough of! Skyfire gives mobile users one of the best web browsing experiences to-date. It's also one of our picks for must have windows mobile applications. Today, Skyfire users can get a great update that breathes new life into this mobile browser. Here's a look at what's new with Skyfire.
Google's 10th anniversary seems to be driving the company towards more introspection and philanthropy. Today, Google announced Project 10^100, through which the company is soliciting ideas for projects that have the potential to change the world and help as many people as possible. Google will select the 100 best ideas submitted to the project and then ask users to vote on which ones to fund. These votes will determine the 20 finalists and a group of judges will then choose the five best ideas from this pool. Google has committed $10 million to fund these ideas.
Glubble is about to release a major update to its parental control plugin for Firefox, which we first reviewed in 2007. This new version takes Glubble far beyond its origins and introduces a wealth of social networking features. Every family now gets a homepage on Glubble.com, which includes a Twitter-like instant messenger, photo albums, and an event calendar. Glubble represents a natural evolution for parental control software towards a more social approach, and after testing it extensively, we have come away impressed with its functionality and ease of use. Glubble for Families will launch on September 25.
A new personal web scout called Yotify just launched into public beta today. This service lets you track anything on the internet and only reports back when it has results for you to review. Your Yotify "scouts," as the searches are called, can be shared with others via email, Facebook, FriendFeed, or even directly with the other Yotify members you befriend on the site. But don't worry, this isn't yet another social network designed to waste more of your time. Instead, it's just the opposite: Yotify utilizes the power of the social web to save you time and give you your life back...you know, the one away from the computer?
Part 1: Will Barcodes Bridge The Gap Between Reality And The Net?
One of the promises of the mobile web was the possibility of being able to integrate the internet with the real world. One of the ways to accomplish this task is through the use of barcodes. The idea is that you take a picture of the barcode with your camera phone and you're then delivered to a mobile web site. This could effectively make anything - whether a poster, an ad, or an object - a virtual part of the world wide web. Although this technology has been available for years, it's only now with the birth of the smartphone, or more precisely, the next-gen smartphone, that the potential for this type of integration may finally be realized.
Google's search advertising is the best cash cow ever invented for the Internet. None of the well funded alternative search engine contenders are able to put a dent into that dominance. But all of Google's other experimentation, all that frenzied innovation from their assembled brains trust, seems to be hitting headwinds. A tiny Indian company called Zoho is giving them a run for their money in Web Office and the latest report indicates that Knol is not even making a dent into Wikipedia. YouTube monetization is also hitting hurdles. We look at why all of this should matter to Google.
Fifteen percent ownership of Russian email, news and blog portal Mail.ru was purchased this summer for $300 million, according to new reports today from Russian journalists citing sources close to the deal. That puts the full value of the company at a whopping $2 billion, 30% more than Google paid for YouTube.
The shares were bought by internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, which now controls 50.6% of Mail.ru. You can see a clumsily Google-translated version of the site's "blogs" section here.
The New York Times announced today that it will syndicate ReadWriteWeb content, as part of a re-designed Technology section on its website. Over the coming weeks you will see ReadWriteWeb content incorporated into the Technology section front.
This is great news for us, because it brings our brand of web technology news, reviews and analysis to a much wider audience. It also means that the innovative and often little known startups we write about daily get a chance to be seen in a mainstream publication. The New York Times has a reputation for quality and in-depth journalism, attributes that we strive for on ReadWriteWeb - so we're excited about this partnership.
Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform Wordpress, has acquired IntenseDebate, a blog commenting plugin that works on almost every blogging platform. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. This is the third major acquisition for Automattic after buying Gravatar in 2007 and BuddyPress in early 2008. Automattic promises that IntenseDebate will remain platform agnostic, just like Aksimet, Automattic's comment spam blocker.
