Austin-based Gendai Games has been operating mostly under the radar with their innovative iPhone game-creation software GameSalad. According to AustinStartup, the wait is now over and we all can try our hand at creating the next big iPhone game, even if we don't have elite programming skills. And that's the strength of GameSalad - you don't need to know how to code in order to prototype your game idea.
Microsoft Silverlight may not be the first solution you think of when considering how YouTube might stream live TV. But in fact that's exactly what CBS used on their NCAA March Madness On Demand YouTube channel. It appears that the player and feeds for audio and video are coming direct from CBS, and upon further examination the Silverlight-powered player is identical to the one offered on CBS' own March Madness site. We first heard about this new offering from a post on NewTeeVee.
Google Labs added four new offerings to their already rich set of optional features you can enable in Google Mail. The new features arrive in the form of previews for different site content, specifically YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and Yelp. The new Labs features all work the way you would expect them to, activating when a link to one of these services is detected and appending the message with a small gallery.
Streamy, which calls itself a "real-time news reading and sharing site," opened its doors today after an 18-month long private beta. Streamy is a mix between an RSS reader, a social media aggregator, and a real-time search engine. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed, and Flickr accounts to Streamy, and post status updates from Streamy directly to these services. Streamy will also recommend interesting stories to you, and, thanks to its innovative user interface, sharing stories with your friends on the supported social media services is extremely easy.
When you think of virtual worlds, the first one that probably pops into your head is Second Life, but in reality, there are a number of different virtual worlds out there. There are worlds for socializing, worlds for gaming, even worlds for e-learning. But one thing that most virtual worlds have in common is that they are places for play, not practicality. (Yes, even the e-learning worlds are designed with elements of "fun" in mind). Outside of some reports that virtual worlds will replace web conferencing in the enterprise, we haven't seen a lot of innovation in this space which would make businesses sit up and take notice. However, that may be about to change thanks to new software that lets you perform data visualization and manipulation techniques within the virtual world environment.
When Facebook updated its users' homepages last week, we already wondered how users would react to these changes. After all, when Facebook introduced the news feed in 2006, its users were anything but happy about this change. Now, a new application is quickly spreading on Facebook that allows users to vote on the new design. This application is not endorsed by Facebook, but the current vote totals are quite interesting: 43,000 users liked the new layout, while almost 700,000 users said that they did not like it.
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After more than a year of beta testing, Microsoft released version 8 of Internet Explorer today. IE8 is definitely a better browser than IE7, and features quite a few important new functions, including accelerators, and web slices. IE8 is also significantly faster than IE7 and features a large number of new functions that make browsing the web easier and more secure. IE8 is an important upgrade for those users who are still using IE7, but we don't think that it offers enough compelling reasons for users of other browsers to switch back to Internet Explorer.
Two US journalists from the groundbreaking mixed media company Current TV have been detained by authorities in North Korea, the NYTimes reported this morning. Current was co-founded by Al Gore and has innovated extensively in both its technology and business model.
Laura Ling, a Chinese-American, and Euna Lee, a Korean-American, are in North Korea reporting on refugees fleeing poverty.
Last night, Nielsen Online reported that Twitter has now surpassed Facebook and others to become the fastest-growing site in the "Member Communities" category for the month of February. Although Facebook, the world's most popular social network, has more members than Twitter, that's not what this measurement is about - it's about growth. And Twitter is growing. It's growing like crazy.
