Novatel Wireless last week announced it will release the MiFi, a portable wireless router that will deliver wireless 3G data network access to multiple users in a small area. Much the same size as a credit card, the sleek looking MiFi will let users select access to EVDO or HSPA high speed data networks.
Just before announcing that Chrome was taken out of beta last week, Google released a browser security handbook for Web developers that details the key security features of the main Web browsers.
Released under a Creative Commons 3.0 license, the document provides a comprehensive comparison of security features of the commonly used browsers; IE (version 6 and 7), Firefox (version 2 and 3), Safari, Opera, Chrome and the lesser known Android embedded browser.
Almost every piece of information we access today is stored somewhere in digital form--think iPod, YouTube, digital cameras, mobile phones, not to mention our personal and professional information spread across LinkedIn, social networking sites and blogs. It's difficult to imagine life without digital data in this information age. But who manages it? And, more importantly, who will preserve it?
In this month's edition of Communications of the ACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, Dr. Francine Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, discusses the "data deluge" and offers a guide on how to manage and preserve your digital information.
It's amazing the stuff you find out about people just from reading their activity feeds on Facebook or FriendFeed. Deaths in the family, divorces, struggles with substance abuse, criminal convictions and sexual liaisons all seem to find their way into the same stream that reports pokes, zombie attacks and "Which Gossip Girl character are you?" quiz results.
Maybe I just need to get used to the incongruity of seeing tectonic life events reported with exactly the same prominence and gravity as an online Scrabble victory. Or maybe I just need to take online Scrabble a lot more seriously.
It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the product side, we continued our Best Products 2008 series with two more lists: Best Consumer Web Apps and Best RSS/Syndication Products. We also reported on Google's Chrome browser coming out of beta and MySpace's answer to Facebook Connect, MySpaceID. On the trends side, we delved into the world of online shopping - with a RWW Live podcast and follow-up analysis. We published our latest 'A-Team' report on freshly funded startups. And we check the latest from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire - our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.
Le Web 2008 conference, the web conference held this week in Paris, was not about bright, shiny, and new. It was about solid, reliable, and usable. The creative energy of the past few years now seems to be channelled towards building and growing apps that everyone, not just the tech community, wants. Here's a rundown of the major topics covered: portable identity, improved search, cloud storage, and video search.
You've got a lot going on. And sometimes, no matter how many sticky notes you slap on your monitor, phone messages you leave for yourself, or pseudo meetings you put on your calendar, you still forget some very important things you need to do.
It's understandable. You're busy. But there's one last thing to try: Remindr, a service that helps you hassle yourself about things you want to remember to do.
Digital copyright reformer turned high-profile anti-corruption activist Lawrence Lessig announced today that he's leaving Stanford and returning to his previous employer, Harvard Law. Lessig will work on anti-corruption issues from there. Lessig was the founder of the Creative Commons Foundation and many hoped he'd take a position in the Obama administration.
We've covered his latest move in greater depth over at Jobwire, our site tracking hires in tech, new media and related industries. Join us there for more details on Lessig's latest career change.
According to the latest Comscore report about the online video market, U.S. Internet users watched close to 13.5 billion videos online in October, which represents an increase of 45 percent compared to last year. Google's YouTube alone served almost 5.4 billion videos to 99.5 million viewers.
However, according to a report by AdAge, there was some negative news for YouTube in these numbers as well: the site's overall market share dropped almost 10% since July, as Hulu and other services are getting more attention from users than ever before.
Even in this age of social media, browsing the web is still a solitary activity, even though a couple of services like Socialbrowse, Kiobo, or Me.dium have tried to to turn browsing into a more social experience.
Another social browsing service we like a lot is Browzmi. When we first looked at Browzmi earlier this year, it was basically a browser inside of a browser, which was a cool technical achievement, but the experience was held back by the fact that you had to log in to the service and use Browzmi's own bookmarking service. Now, a newly released Firefox extension replaces the 'browser within a browser' and greatly enhances the social surfing experience.
