IBM has announced an online "radiology theatre" product, currently at the prototype stage, which allows teams of medical experts to "simultaneously discuss and review patients' medical test data using a Web browser." The project is being run in collaboration with the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Boston and is built on IBM's next-generation browser platform Blue Spruce, which ReadWriteWeb reviewed when it was first announced back in November. IBM also used the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine. The app runs on the Linux or MacOS X operating systems and the browser may be Safari or Internet Explorer.
One of the more popular panels at SXSW Interactive this year was one called Beyond Aggregation. The panel included our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick, as well as Gabe Rivera (Techmeme), Louis Gray (LouisGray.com), Melanie Baker (PostRank) and Micah Baldwin (Lijit). The topics revolved around information gathering and management.
From the panel, Marshall and Louis had new sources and gathering tips, Gabe and Melanie weighed in heavily on how to manage information and Micah had some great suggestions on discovery of new information sources.
Over the last year, eBay has been trying to slowly move users away from its auctions and more towards purchases of fixed-priced items. Last week, however, eBay announced that it plans to return to its roots and that the company wants to put more emphasis on its auctions business again. Judging from the latest data from Compete, eBay's former strategy was clearly not working and was actually driving users away from eBay and toward other fixed-price retailers like Amazon and Walmart.
Apple today previewed a new version of its iPhone firmware, as well as a new version of its SDK for the iPhone. Among the highlights of the announcement were the availability of a new homescreen, MMS, copy and paste, and the long expected arrival of push notifications. Developers will now also be able to sell in game accessories and subscriptions through Apple's App Store.
iPhone developers will be able to download the new firmware today, while the rest of us will have to wait until it is released to the public later this summer.
Alltop, Guy Kawaski's project to get all the best sites on the Web organized by topic, is now offering a customization option. This new feature comes exactly one year from the official birth of Alltop, and on top of amazing growth of the site overall. It's called MyAlltop and it is deceptively simple - but very welcome - and really nicely integrated. Basically, MyAlltop lets you choose what sites listed on Alltop you like the most and pull them together on to your own custom Alltop page.
InsideFacebook, one of the best blogs dedicated to Facebook, just released a new metrics product that tracks the popularity of Facebook Pages (also known as "public profiles"). PageData tracks the most popular pages on Facebook, as well as the daily and weekly top gainers and losers. Barack Obama's page is by far the most popular Facebook page with close to 6 million fans, while Coca-Cola, Nutella, and a page about Pizza follow with around 3 million fans.
AlertThingy is an Adobe Air desktop application that was originally released specifically for the aggregator and social commenting service FriendFeed. To everyone's surprise, in releasing the second major update to the application, British-based development company Howard Baines has revamped the tool entirely to feature integration with nearly every major social platforms -- except FriendFeed.
On the panel were Kevin Gibbs (Tech Lead & Mgr Google App Engine, Google App Engine), Yousef Khalidi (Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft), Werner Vogels (CTO, Amazon.com).
An upcoming feature for Android smartphones called "Live Folders" will deliver real-time web updates to the phone's homescreen. Recently, this feature was revealed in a video of "Cupcake," a development branch of Google's mobile OS where new additions and changes are tested prior to being ported over to the main Android platform.
An internet worm that uses social engineering to direct you to a malicious web page is nothing new - that's just everyday malware. But there is something different about the latest variant of the Waledac worm: it uses geolocation services to target its intended victims. Initially, the Waledac worm sends a spam email message claiming there has been a dirty bomb explosion in "your city." If the victim clicks through on the provided link, the worm then uses a geo-IP lookup service to customize the story appearing on the malicious site which is designed to look like that of news agency Reuters.
