Web 2.0 Called; It Says It's Just An Ad Platform Now
When we saw drag and drop widget creation service Sprout Builder launch at the DEMO conference a year ago this month, we called it far and away our favorite company that launched there. A year later the cold reality of financial survival beckons and Sprout has announced that there is no longer any such thing as a free widget. Users will need to pay a minimum of $140 for a year of uptime for three widget projects.
Today, a number of education and business organization called upon Congress and the Obama administration to invest heavily in classroom technology and teacher training as part of the forthcoming economic recovery package. These organizations, including the Consortium for School Networking, the International Society for Technology in Education, the Software & Information Industry Association, and the State Educational Technology Directors Association, have asked the new administration to spend roughly $9.9 billion on installing and upgrading the technology in America's most disadvantaged schools.
jQuery, a popular Javascript library that lets website developers do beautiful things with relative ease, is celebrating its 3rd birthday today with an announcement that the project has joined the non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy and the release of a new version.
Project participant Rey Bango points out on the blog Ajaxian today, "considering the churn rate for open source projects, [jQuery's 3rd birthday] is a monumental achievement."
This morning, HireCube's Aniq Rahman alerted us to a major change on YouTube. A growing number of videos now appear without sound and with a notice that these videos contained "an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders." It looks like YouTube is starting to implement audio fingerprinting software that automatically removes licensed audio tracks. Update: Here is YouTube's official reaction.
As the mobile handset continues to move from being one of our many computing platforms to becoming our primary platform, we want to be able to do more and more with it. We want to send messages with it, carry music on it, record video with it, and use it as a remote control for our lives. It's all about immediate gratification and the power to get things done wherever and whenever you have the ability to do so.
Kwiry - an SMS-based service designed to simplify mobile tasks - has just announced a feature that plays right into that mindset: allowing you to control your TiVo remotely via SMS.
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has joined the executive team of a stealthy new startup called Ginx, according to financial filings unearthed by PEHub. Very little is known about the company but based on passing whispers from early testers of the private data we have have some guesses about what the service does.
Ginx appears to be a people and news recommendation service built out of a Twitter publishing tool and a URL shortener. We think that sounds great, those lightweight technologies hold huge stores of valuable data. The company has raised about $2 million in funding so it's the real deal, not a fly by night operation. Check out a screenshot below and our full coverage of Omidyar's new gig over on Jobwire, our blog covering new hires in tech and new media.
Noesis is a new semantic web search engine that helps scientists studying the environment access and retrieve the research data they need. Developed at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the new engine has the potential to enable scientists and researchers everywhere to perform more productive and focused searches thanks to the semantic technology Noesis uses.
A couple of entrepreneurs out of Kerala, India, are re-envisioning the way that banking is done. Anish Achuthan (26) and Rameena Rabeedin (28), have developed a branchless network consisting of low-cost ATMs, Smart Teller Machines, E-POS terminals, and a mobile banking gateway that lets you perform transactions using your cell phone. The end result of their efforts brings modern banking technologies to semi-urban and rural markets where traditional banks are unwilling or unable to set up ATMs.
It's a well-known fact that Google is working to capture high-resolution images of the landscape for its mapping products. What might come as a surprise is that they're also pursuing a similar challenge within the walls of one of the most famous museums in the world - The Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. Now, thanks to this groundbreaking project, you can get closer to the masterpieces of The Prado than you ever imagined - using Google Earth.
Google tonight announced a reseller and accreditation program for Google Apps. Resellers, after being trained by Google, can now market, support, and customize Google Apps Premier Edition for their customers. Resellers will get training and support from Google, as well as tools for sales, marketing, and integrating Google Apps into their customers' existing architectures. Google has already rolled out a pilot of this program to more than 50 partners worldwide.
