If you're flying out of Los Angeles or Orange County airports next week, make sure your mobile phone is charged and ready to go - especially if you've purchased a new mobile boarding pass from American Airlines.
AA, following in the footsteps of Continental and Delta Airlines, last week announced the option to have your boarding pass sent directly to your mobile phone or PDA, in an attempt to save paper and money, and speed things up for travelers.
It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side, we analyzed the significance of MySpace's new profiles, looked at how Google is tracking flu trends, explored a partnership between an online finance tool and a newspaper, and more. On the product side, we brought you an exclusive first look at a new IBM browser technology, reported on the latest big release of Windows Live, checked out a major update for Gmail, and more. We also have highlights from the Enterprise Channel and our new product, Jobwire. Finally, we have the recording from this week's RWW Live about online job tools.
We at ReadWriteWeb are huge Basecamp fans. It raises the productivity of small, physically dispersed teams (like ours) to a level that enables new virtual companies to be be viable. Basecamp changes the traditional answer to the question: "can we operate virtually from around the world, or do we all need to live in the same place?" ReadWriteWeb, for example, lives on Basecamp; it is our office.
But there is one problem. Basecamp is browser native. I want mobile native. And ReadWriteWeb's VP of Content Dev Marshall Kirkpatrick tweeted today that he wants a Basecamp AIR app. Either way, it's clear that browser-only doesn't cut it anymore for Basecamp.
It's been a little over a year since Google announced OpenSocial, a common API for social applications across multiple websites. It's an aggressive undertaking: an underlying technology designed to help all developers add intelligent social features to their offerings more quickly and easily, regardless of the types of sites they're developing.
To commemorate the first year, OpenSocial fans recently gathered at MySpace for a celebration and an update on the progress over the past 12 months. The verdict? The concept of OpenSocial has traction - and hundreds of millions of users currently benefiting from it.
Howcast, one of the leading video tutorial sites on the Internet, just released an iPhone application (iTunes link) that allows you to access their video content while on the go. Most of the videos on Howcasts have a very high production value and can teach you anything from how to cook eggnog to how to jump start your car. The app is very easy to use and allows you to search for videos, bookmark your favorites, or browse through the most popular content on the site.
President elect Obama will bring the President's weekly "fireside chat" into the 21st century by offering it not just on the radio, but in video on YouTube as well. It's as if the new populist President really cares whether the next generation has a connection to what he's doing. That's where the people are - on YouTube, on MySpace and on Facebook.
More people will watch the President's talks than ever before, and they will post video responses. That's pretty remarkable.
It's been a little bit more than two years now since Google merged Google Spreadsheets with Writely, and while there has been a lot of talk about online office suites, the latest data from Compete indicates that Google Docs & Spreadsheets is still mostly attracting casual users who don't spend a lot of time with the service. Also, one of the most interesting data points in the Compete study is that only about 58% of unique visitors to Docs & Spreadsheets actually used one of the available apps after visiting the site. A large number of users never makes it past the marketing pages.
We love this story. Back in July we wrote about the inspiring experience of Peldi Guilizzoni, a lone software developer who'd built a web design mock-up tool called Balsamiq and who was opening up his financial records on his blog to show everyone how things were going. We'd been following his progress since before he launched, but just 6 weeks after Balsamiq hit the market at roughly $79 per license, we wrote that Peldi had already made $10k in revenue.
That was a cute story, but now it's been just 5 months and today Peldi reports that he's just cleared $100,000 in sales of the four variations of his product. Talk about a simple tool coming along at just the right time! It's cool software, too.
Netvibes, one of the many personalized homepage products available today, has just announced a new feature which allows users to share anything from their Netvibes pages - not just tabs, but also articles, widgets, and RSS feeds. This new feature allows those items to be shared via integration with two of the most popular social networks: Twitter and Facebook, the latter being powered by Facebook Connect. What's not to love? As it turns out, based on the comments found on the Netvibes blog, users are not happy about this change.
Has this happened to you? You receive a message on Facebook that you've been tagged in a photo, but when you go to look at the photo you discover that it wasn't you at all, but some sort of product, service, or cause that a marketer is trying to promote. According to news from AdAge, this is the latest in guerrilla marketing efforts making its way through Facebook right now. It's so slimy, we hesitate to even mention it here, lest we give anyone ideas.
