What do you get when you combine an image recognition app with voice search, local content, and a touch-screen advertising service called "hot-spotting?" Apparently you get the next generation of mobile search from a company named Getfugu. This mishmash of services will be launching next month with one goal in mind: keep mobile users from having to type in their mobile searches using the keyboard.
Operating as a collective, an ant colony can achieve remarkable things, complete tasks, and solve problems that would be unimaginable for a single ant. Colonies are responsible for building elaborate nests, waging battles, and creating efficient highway systems to food sources. The collective intelligence of an ant colony can serve as inspiration to help us solve complex human problems. Businesses in particular are finding innovative ways to apply these lessons from nature, from routing trucks to managing plane congestion on the tarmac... to making Internet search more accurate.
Market research firm eMarketer released a new report today that examines how men behave differently than women online. Despite being a minority both in US population and online, men are still a large and often (according to the report) 'overlooked' segment of Internet users. The report stresses that gender informs online behavior more than other factors, such as race or ethnicity.
Some results of the study? Men visit more sites and stay online longer, use social networks as much or more than women and are more likely to access the Internet from a mobile device.
Thanks to its extensibility, Firefox quickly became the favorite browser for most power users. But while extensions are a great way to make Firefox more functional, Mozilla's designers are also currently thinking about a complete redesign of the way the browser looks and feels, in order to keep up with changing usage patterns. The most radical proposal we have seen so far would do away with the standard browser tabs, and replace them with an interface that looks more like iTunes than Firefox.
Concrete CMS today announced the general availability of its easy-to-use open source CMS product, Concrete5. The new release builds on Concrete's foundation offering of a CMS that is as easy to configure as a blog, with the flexibility of a full web development platform. Improvements in Concrete5 include an updated file manager, embedded Picnik image editor, new help system and more. Concrete's main competitors in the CMS space are Drupal and Joomla, but Silicon Florist says Concrete5 "crushes them in terms of ease-of-use."
Online auction giant eBay, rumored to be shopping around for a buyer for its 2005 acquisition of voice-over-IP phone service Skype, announced in a press release today that it has now decided to prep the ground for a 2010 Skype IPO launch. The announcement also says that this is one of several outcomes considered for Skype when eBay president John Donahoe became CEO early in 2008.
The rise of link sharing on Twitter has cut down on many peoples' use of RSS readers and social bookmarking services like Delicious. Now blog post ranking service PostRank is aiming to systematize that shift - and they've done a really good job.
Imagine a system for delivering only high-value information via Twitter. That's what PostRank has built with its new PostRank Twitter Newsroom. The system finds the most engaging blogs on various topics, then automatically pulls the most talked-about posts from those blogs and now delivers those links to you via Twitter.
The European Commission is preparing legal actions against the British Government for breaching European privacy laws because it failed to reign in Phorm, a targeted advertising company that is infamous for working with ISPs to target ads by using deep packet inspection without the clear consent of the ISPs' users.
While Phorm argues that its technology is compliant with both U.K. and European law, the European Commission alleges that Phorm continues to intercept user data without clear consent from the users.
The Cooliris browser add-on was just updated to a new version that now offers something many users have been clamoring for: Linux support. With the 1.10 release of this 3D photo and video viewing plugin, Linux users running Firefox 3 can now also take advantage of this visually impressive software program for surfing through rich media on the web. In addition, the new version of Cooliris includes improvements to their Facebook support, the ability to browse local files on your computer, and the addition of metadata to the content you're viewing.
Yesterday we heard Fox News reporting that Facebook may be responsible for lower GPA scores and now today a new study comes to light claiming that rapid-fire media - like that of Twitter for instance - can actually impact our moral compass. In fact, the study says the fast-moving nature of some online social spaces may not provide us with the time we as humans need to feel higher emotions like admiration and compassion.
