One of the most pleasing Web trends we're seeing in 2009 is the increasing penetration of web apps into the real world. Web applications for healthcare is one example. We wrote about a new Web-based Radiology Theatre built by IBM yesterday and today we discuss an iPhone app that helps people with diabetes. At yesterday's iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, diabetes software company LifeScan (owned by Johnson & Johnson) unveiled an iPhone app that wirelessly connects to a Bluetooth-enabled glucose meter.
The folks at Snipt.org haven't been sitting still since we first told you about their code snippet-sharing utility in January. Today they released a number of tools to extend their service. First, they have a new API that allows for applications to be built that can talk to Snipt directly. This allowed for the creation of an Adobe AIR-based client application called Cloud Coder, Javascript embed code to integrate Snipt on a blog and finally, a WordPress plugin that all use the API.
Omid Reza Misayafi, one of a number of Iranian bloggers arrested for "insulting" the government and religious authorities in that country, is dead. Misayafi's death was reported on Global Voices Online via an Iranian human rights site in Farsi and we learned of it from The Committee to Protect Bloggers.
No cause of death is yet known, but the Committee says torture of bloggers is common in Iran and they are usually placed in close proximity to the most dangerous criminals in any facility. Misayafi was sentenced in December to 30 months in prison "for insulting Islamic Republic Leaders." The man said he was a cultural blogger, not a political one, and only wrote a few satirical articles that got him into trouble.
Joshua Baer (@joshuabaer), founder of OtherInbox, was nice enough to sit down with us this weekend at SXSW Interactive and go over what's new with his company's product. OtherInbox was developed out of a need to intelligently manage the rest of your mail. That is to say, the mail that you might get from mailing lists, shopping sites, and other services but may not actually be from another human. We all get this mail, and to a greater or lesser extent have developed strategies to manage it, but OtherInbox provides a comprehensive and stylish solution. The big news is that the core service is now free of cost.
Yesterday, Google announced a new beta version of Chrome, which features a significantly faster version of V8, Google's JavaScript engine. Today, Google also launched Chrome Experiments, which showcases JavaScript intensive games, apps, and visualizations. The site is obviously meant to highlight the power of the combination of V8 and Chrome, though quite a few of the apps should also work on Firefox, Safari and IE. In our tests, however, Chrome did indeed provide the best experience.
At its annual MIX conference, Microsoft today introduced a number of interesting new products, including a beta of Silverlight 3 and a preview version of Blend 3, its Silverlight development tool. Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform also received a number of major updates today. Microsoft also announced that Silverlight 2 has been installed on more than 300 million PCs since its launch in October 2008 and that NBC will use Silverlight 3 to power its online coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Dan Hon is building a radical new future for one of humanity's oldest activities - the telling of stories. The modest young UK CEO's design company Six to Start won Best in Show at this week's SXSW Web Awards. The company's project, called Telling Stories, is a six part experiment with the book publisher Penguin.
Hon's vision of the future is sci-fi influenced, cross-platform and web-native. He mocks the "urban games" of online hipsters but believes there will soon be a layer of "Harry Potter ether" that we can dip in and out of while we're walking to work.
The Sunlight Foundation, one of the coolest geek organizations on the Internet, announced today that it has added $4 million to its budget compliments of the Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's group. Sunlight works with government information made publicly available to turn it into websites and services that anyone can find useful.
At the start of what could be the most open US Presidential administrations in decades, the Sunlight Foundation's work should be more potent, interesting and useful in fostering accountability than ever before.
In December, Movable Type announced a new product called "Motion," which integrates activity streams, microblogging, and portable identities into a software package that can be installed into the company's hosted publishing platform, Movable Type Pro. Now, after much testing and feedback, Motion for Movable Type has become publicly available. With this software, built on open standards, blogs can add social activity streams to their site. These are similar in appearance to those from the social web aggregation service FriendFeed, but are entirely within the blog owner's control. Motion also adds a social networking element to online communities with its user profiles and authentication tools that permit signing in from any provider, including Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, or OpenID.
Parts of Canada finally have their own Street View maps, but surprisingly, they didn't come from Google. Instead, the maps were created in a joint effort between British Columbia-based Canpages.ca and San Francisco-based MapJack, two companies that have teamed up to provide the service which Google has yet to bring to Canada. These new Street View maps also have features that the search engine giant doesn't offer, including a fullscreen mode and views of pedestrian pathways where cars can't travel.
