Businesses under 10 employees account for a large portion of the US workforce. Yet the metrics associated with this market remain enigmatic, at best. And while professional organizations have tried to capture information on these workers - like the AIGA's annual review of design salaries - those surveys only show a slice of the pie.
Enter FreshBooks, a Web-based invoicing system focused on individuals and small companies. FreshBooks holds a wealth of data about this workforce - across a variety of disciplines - and they've asked their users for rights to share that data in anonymous aggregated form. The result? A unique glimpse into the numbers that make these businesses tick.
Remember when we told you that your MySpace web browser is coming? Well today it has officially arrived. In the new version of the social browser Flock, they've finally integrated their number one most-requested feature: support for MySpace. Additionally, the Flock 2.0 upgrade includes support for Media RSS, a technology which delivers real-time image and video streams in a standardized format. With this feature, Flock can support any web service as long as they offer a Media RSS feed.
Over the weekend we editorialized that the world financial crisis will have a big impact on where Web Technology is headed. Has the world arrived at one of those giant inflexion points, we asked, where one Web era is usurped by another? We asked you to leave a comment in the post telling us what you think will be next. Many of you did just that and also the post was fortunate enough to get to the digg frontpage, where it received 100 additional comments. Finally, we polled our friends on Twitter today and got many great replies.
This is an attempt to synthesize, analyze and categorize all of the responses from RWW, digg and Twitter. What is next after Web 2.0? Read on!
The latest beta build of Firefox - Firefox 3.1 beta 1 - is now available for download. With it, comes a whole new set of features designed with developers and designers in mind. The beta includes native support for the Geolocation API, CSS @font-face support, and audio and video tag support.
Mozilla details the new features in their post, but we'll hit the high points on what the new build includes.
The much-anticipated first Application Programming Interface (API) from the New York Times went live today, according to a post on the company's blog Open - All the code that's fit to printf(). First up is a campaign finance data API and next is a movie review API. Also available is a database management program initially developed for internal use at the NY Times.
The Times quietly announced in May that it would soon be publishing APIs, which are means by which outside developers can access NY Times data for use in other applications, interfaces and mashups. We believe that steps like this are going to prove key if big media is to thrive in the future.
On Monday, President Bush signed the controversial ProIP bill into law, which will create a 'copyright czar' position within the White House and raise the potential fines for copyright infringements. While proponents of the bill such as Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Tom Donohue see it as sending a message to criminals that "the U.S. will go the extra mile to protect American innovation," opponents of the bill argue that it will have unintentional consequences and created unintended harm.
If cookies were the multi-billion dollar magic for much of the web's first iteration, tiny technologies to power conversation could play a similar role in the future of business online. More fun than that, though, is the innovation we hope to see in the technology of conversation.
Comment and review plug-in suite JS-Kit announced today a new round of funding and the hire as an adviser of one of the web's most forward looking innovators, Data Portability Working Group co-founder Chris Saad. Though JS-Kit has a funny name, the company has a big installed base. In addition to being very easy to install, it recently partnered with red-hot content sharing service ShareThis and acquired the early market leader in plug-and-play commenting, Haloscan. What does the future look like for JS-Kit and how might that relate to the web at large? We asked Chris Saad for his thoughts this morning.
Yahoo today launched a new ad campaign for its search engine that stresses the security and convenience of using Yahoo Search. After relying on outside search providers (including Google) for a long time, Yahoo launched its own search engine in 2003, but even though it has constantly innovated and opened up its search index to developers, it has continuously lost market share to Google. By now, YouTube handles more search queries every day than Yahoo.
Given the state of the economy right now, keeping a close eye on your personal finances is becoming more of a necessity than ever before. Mint, the cloud-based personal finance tool that launched in September 2007 has now come out of beta and added a number of handy new features, including an IRA Rollover tool, and the ability to add custom categories to track your spending habits.
The popular and quirky MOO.com is a print shop providing stickers, postcards, business cards and personal introduction cards, which are narrower and longer cards. The products can feature artistic images you select from the site's offerings or can be printed using photos you upload to the service. Notable for promoting the artwork of hip designers, the MOO service is a favorite among the young and hip as well as among those who want to stand out as being non-traditional.
