Surchur, a web, blog, image, video, and social media search engine, has just relaunched their online dashboard. The company calls this an "update," but it's more like an overhaul of their earlier product. Launched back in spring of 2008, Surchur's original homepage was barely even worthy of a mention, much less of use. But today, the company's "dashboard to the now" delivers a well-designed and comprehensive view into the "real-time web" - that is, what's happening on the internet right now.
We continue to be impressed with the direction The New York Times is taking with their Times Open strategy - exposing more and more data from the Gray Lady via a number of APIs. The level of access that the venerable publication has continued to provide has been laudable. There's just been one thing missing: immediacy. But the latest API - one of the most impressive to date - takes care of that concern. Introducing the Times Newswire API, an interface that provides immediate access to articles on NYTimes.com - as they're published.
ZumoDrive, a new cloud storage service that looks and feels like a native drive on your desktop, just opened up its public beta program. This public beta coincides with the availability of ZumoDrive's new iPhone/iPod Touch application in the App Store (iTunes link). The mobile app allows you to access your documents and photos, and play your music from your cloud drive without having to worry about running out of disk space on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Free ZumoDrive accounts come with 1GB of cloud storage, while paid accounts start at $2.99 for 10GB.
Howard Lindzon, a hedge fund trader who created the high-profile short video show Wallstrip and then sold it to CBS, today launched a new fund to invest in social applications. The eight-person group is called Social Leverage, LLC and will presumably compete with a handful of other small funds to get a piece of the hottest new apps before they seek more substantial funding.
The new fund's portfolio currently includes the most popular Twitter client, Tweetdeck (also funded by a constellation of other small stars), Lindzon's Twitter for stock tips service StockTwits and WallHogs, a bizarre company that prints over-sized vinyl wall hangings from user-uploaded images. Who will Social Leverage back next? We can only wonder, but it's sure to be interesting.
Wouldn't you love to have people in every corner of the globe talking about your website face to face and on their blogs? That's the enviable position that online crafts marketplace Etsy finds itself in according to survey results the company published today. Word of mouth and personal blogs are the primary way people around the world are finding out about the site and there's an active community of craft sellers on Etsy from every continent but Antarctica.
At a time when marketers are obsessed with getting traction on Facebook and are just beginning to take users outside the US seriously, Etsy's survey of its international members is fascinating - as is the company itself.
A few weeks ago, just after the introduction of the new Kindle 2, the Authors Guild complained that Amazon's eBook reader had a text-to-speech function. According to Paul Aitken, the Guild's executive director, this meant that Amazon would have to pay for audio rights for every book downloaded onto the device. Today, Roy Blount Jr., the Guild's president, echoed this sentiment in an op-ed piece in the New York Times.
Skip the lecture, download the podcast. That's probably not what university professors tell their students, but perhaps they should. New psychological research conducted by Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, shows that students who only listened to podcasts of lectures achieved substantially higher exam results than those who attended class in person.
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Recession? What recession? According to a survey from ABI Research, many U.S. consumers are spending hundreds of dollars per year on mobile applications. Over 15 percent of those surveyed had spent nearly $100 over the past twelve months and a surprising 16.5 percent had spent between $100 and $500 during that same time frame.
Amazon.com changed the retail world. In the process the company built up so much surplus computing power that it started a dirt cheap "computing in the cloud" business that changed the computing world. This week the company's newest project Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services began offering more than 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) of fascinating public data for developers to access on the fly through Amazon's cloud computing service.
We're talking about an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences, including the Human Genome, huge amounts of chemistry data, machine readable encyclopedic entries about millions of different topics and an entire dump of Wikipedia. US Census data, data from the US Department of Transportation and more. It's all accessible by web applications in no time at all. What do you think this is going to change?
The Republic Project, a new online music business, officially launched its service this morning. At its core, the Republic Project reinvents the special edition music box set for the digital age. Users who pre-order albums on the service will get access to exclusive behind the scenes video shot by the band while recording the new album, access to artist blogs, as well as additional 'fan only' content like live chats and access to rare tracks. The albums on the Republic Project will be available as DRM-free MP3s.
