Yesterday, T-Mobile stocked their stores with G1 handset, the first smartphone to feature Google's mobile operating system "Android." Along with the device itself, the Google Android Market also went live. There, developers are offering a number of applications for installation on the new phone. However, the Android Market isn't the only place to get apps. Both Handango and MobiHand have app stores of their own. Will this open ecosystem be good for the "Google phone" or will it lead to consumer confusion?
Students competing to get into the nation's most elite colleges and universities have begun to use sneaky, under-handed tactics involving Facebook, according to a new report from the Chicago Tribune. Via anonymous letters mailed to college admission offices, applicants suggest to admission officers that they check out the photos on a rival's Facebook page before determining whether or not to accept them into the institution. With competition for spots fiercer than ever, the experts cited in that article believe this marks the beginning of a new trend: "Facebook sabotage."
Yes there are profitable, self-funded SaaS product companies out there. They're the ones we're celebrating in our Gritty Entrepreneur series. To that end, we recently interviewed Timothy Young, CEO of Socialcast, which is in the "enterprise social messaging" market - otherwise known as enterprise microblogging. The consumer champions are Twitter and FriendFeed. The best known enterprise play (at least known within the Blogosphere) is Yammer, a company we panned. Socialcast not only has a revenue model, it also has profits, so that seemed worth investigating.
In good times everyone wants to
be a platform. But when times are bad and platforms are just an expense, the resources suddenly
shift away. The recent re-design of Facebook, the slow down of Google's
Open Social, and Flock closing
its extension site - these are all part of the same pattern. Platforms that don't
have monetization wired in are only good
for marketing. This is why the platforms of the future
need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but
long-term sustainability
and monetization.
In the middle of one of the worst economic crises experienced by the US, Health 2.0 Advisor Jane Sarasohn-Kahn confirmed today that US citizens are not as focused on heath care as they were a year ago.
"Twelve months ago," Jane Sarasohn-Kahn said, "the most important things on American voters' minds were the war and health care. Two days ago, the most important thing on American voters' minds is the economy. Health care and the war have taken a backseat."
This doesn't mean however, that health care plays second fiddle to the attendees of the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week - it's still their driving force. The rules of engagement however, as Clay Shirky pointed out in his keynote on Wednesday, are changing.
LinkedIn, a social networking juggernaut by anyone's standards and one of the few successful social sites targeted at business users, announced today that the company had secured an additional $22.7 million in Series D funding. The investment brings its grand total for Series D to $75.7 million.
During these uncertain times for many Web companies, the investment marks a decided vote of confidence in LinkedIn's strategy. Perhaps more importantly, the admittedly "strategic" investment hints at some potential partnerships for LinkedIn in the coming months.
A new report by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research states that usage of social technologies increased markedly in 2008: three in four US online adults now use social tools to connect with each, up from 56% in 2007. According to the report, the largest growth came from ratings and reviews, "voting" on websites, and user-generated video. Blogging and tagging were also popular.
Forrester predicts that if growth of ratings and reviews continues at its current pace, then "reading peer recommendations will fast become a permanent stage in the purchase decision process."
Three weeks ago we wrote about the release of the new Application Programming Interface (API) of sophisticated note taking system Evernote. We said we were excited to see what outside developers were going to do with it. Today we saw our first Evernote integration and it is awesome.
Group collaboration startup Pelotonics has turned Evernote into an easy way to load photos, voice messages, notes and other media into your project management system, including from a mobile device.
Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, considers Health 2.0 to be the new economics of aggregation - both information and people.
Speaking to a standing-room-only audience at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this morning, Shirky explained that in going forward, we must focus on three things: information, co-ordination and collaboration. The idea expands on his recent article Health Information Technology: A Few Years Of Magical Thinking? (with Carol Diamond), which warns the health care IT establishment against the dangers of "magical thinking."
This summer MySpace announced that it would implement OpenID and a number of new user data hooks for developers to build mashups with. That announcement was made in July and there's been no MySpace OpenID seen in the wild...until now.
As pointed out by intrepid explorer of the interwebs Chris Messina, there's now live code for OpenID authentication inside every MySpace user's profile. View the source on yours and you'll see it. This should be more than just single sign-on, too.
