The one feature that is still sorely missing from the iPhone is copy and paste. While we have seen a few third-party developers attempt to hack together a working system, none of these ever really worked out because they exploited loopholes in the iPhone operating system that Apple simply closed.
Today, however, copy and paste between Safari and Mail is really coming to the iPhone, courtesy of two nifty JavaScript bookmarks from Pastebud. Instead of trying to hack the operating system, Pastebud elegantly circumvents these problems by outsourcing most of the copy and paste mechanism to the web. We have been testing it for the last two days and it does indeed work as advertised.
When Google released its browser called Chrome this fall, there was an unusually loud controversy about its End User Licensing Agreement (EULA). The company responded quickly to those complaints.
Now the contract with users has been changed again, with a number of sections deleted since yesterday. Chrome's market share is already significant and the company is taking big steps to expand it further - that makes some of these new changes all the more interesting.
Back in September, Visa announced that their Visa Mobile Application would become the first financial application for Google Android-powered handsets. The application, launched only days ago, lets users receive notifications on their mobile phone about their account activity, receive offers from merchants, and use GPS to map out where those mobile offers can be redeemed or to find ATMs that accept Visa.
Today's high-school and college students got their first email account at an average age of 13. Most students have had one of their email addresses for 8 years and have an average of about 2.4 addresses each. But if you really want to reach these students, you should forget email. Send a text message instead.
It's no secret that a few of us here at ReadWriteWeb are big fans of Ocarina, the iPhone app from Smule that converts your iPhone into an ancient woodwind instrument. And we're not alone, thousands of users have paid $0.99 to purchase the application and try their hand at blowing timeless melodies through the iPhone.
Now, the creators of the app are offering $1000 US to each of the 10 best Ocarina players in the world as part of the "This Contest Blows" contest.
While we are no closer to really knowing what the future of the browser holds, today's closing keynote at Add-on Con in Mountain View CA gave us a brief glimpse into the future of Chrome (out of beta today), IE and Firefox.
The Future of the Web Browser keynote brought together Joshua Allen (Microsoft), Mike Shaver (Mozilla) and Brian Rakowski (Google) on a panel moderated by JSON creator Douglas Crockford who opened the session by apologizing for Opera not making the conference - their headquarters are in Norway, he explained. "Apple is about eight miles from here; you can do that drive in ten minutes if you're motivated. The reason they are not here is they do not want to talk with you," he said with a grin. And thus, the final session of the day began.
This week's RWW Live, our regular podcast show, was on the topic of 'shopping 2.0'. In Part 2 of our analysis of the show, we explore how e-commerce has evolved over the past few years - what web technologies our expert guests are currently using and the trends they've picked up on.
We had 4 expert guests on the podcast: Baynote (collective intelligence platform for online shopping), ModCloth (online retailer of vintage clothing), Retrevo (vertical search for electronics), and Cartfly (social commerce store network).
RSS and syndication are the veins that the new social web flows through. Countless products and services have been built on top of RSS in the past few years but there are always a few that stand above the rest.
As part of this year's Top 10 Products series, we offer below the Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008. These are the feed tools we and the people we know use day in and day out - we love them, we hate them, we wouldn't want to work without them.
Today's opening keynote at the Add-on-Con conference in Mountain View CA highlighted the similarities between monetizing add-ons and monetizing Web sites. Although distribution channels and products differ, according to moderator Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, in general add-ons generate revenue through: "search, advertising, affiliate type commerce and APIs."
According to a new report from Netpop Research, 76% of all U.S. broadband users actively contribute to social media sites in one form or another, and 29% contribute regularly to social networking sites. Among these social networkers, Facebook is quickly catching up to MySpace, though iMeem, LastFM, Digg, and LiveJournal are also very popular with college students. The report also compares the online habits of these social networkers with those broadband subscribers who choose not to contribute to social media sites and finds a number of very interesting differences.
