Can being "present in the now" be packaged and sold as a service? A number of companies believe that it can be and are aiming to offer a "real-time" layer of functionality to consumer websites and businesses interested in this growing trend online.
On one hand it's just a speed up the infrastructure play, but the impact of real time information delivery on a user's experience of a website can be profound. The latest entrant into this market of white label real time service layers is called Notify.me.
At Where 2.0 today, Yahoo announced a new product in its already impressive lineup of geo technologies: Placemaker. Placemaker is a new open API from Yahoo that helps developers to make their applications and data sets location-aware. Developers can feed Placemaker any kind of structured and unstructured data, including feeds and web pages, and the app will analyze the text and extract location data from it. This, could, for example, allow news organizations to easily tag their content with location data and create hyper-local products based on this data.
Earlier this year, we heard that ESPN was supposed to come to YouTube this April, but AdAge now reports that the Connecticut-based sports network will finally arrive on Google's highly popular video portal on July 15. This would be an interesting development by itself, especially given that ESPN is owned by Disney, which just made a major investment in YouTube's competitor Hulu.com, but the really interesting part of this announcement is that ESPN will not only be the first network to offer pre-roll ads on YouTube, but that it will also integrate its own video player on the site.
Aneesh Chopra, President Obama's nominee as the US Government's first ever Chief Technology Officer, was asked very few hard questions in a confirmation hearing yesterday and none of the Senators asked him anything about Open Government. The President's memo calling for there to be a US CTO set a deadline of May 21st (tomorrow) for delivering suggestions regarding Open Government but Chopra told reporters he wouldn't comment on his likely suggestions because he hadn't been confirmed yet.
NextGov reported from the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and said that Chopra only briefly alluded to the matter of Open Government in his initial testimony. That's very disappointing.
As we reported earlier this month, Craigslist, after a slew of negative press and pressure from various political organizations, decided to revamp its 'erotic services' section. For South Carolina's Attorney General, Henry McMaster, this was not enough of a change, however, and last week, McMaster announced that we would still file charges against the classified-ad site as, according to him, "the Craigslist South Carolina site continues to display advertisements for prostitution and graphic pornographic material."
In return, Craigslist has now filed its own suit in federal court in South Carolina, "seeking declaratory relief and a restraining order with respect to criminal charges he [McMaster] has repeatedly threatened against Craigslist and its executives."
This week I gave a short presentation at a local event, Webstock Mini, in which I looked at some of the trends we're seeing in Web Technology this year. The presentation is embedded below. I gave the term 'Web 3.0' a bit of a ribbing. But my overall theme was that there is indeed a difference in the products we're seeing in 2009, compared to the ones we saw at the height of 'Web 2.0' (2005-08).
In 2009 we're seeing more products based on open, structured data e.g. Wolfram Alpha. We're seeing more real-time apps e.g. Twitter, OneRiot. And we're seeing better filters e.g. FriendFeed (and Facebook, which copies FriendFeed - er, I mean is inspired by).
This month we are offering some additional value to our long-term sponsors. It's a new type of contextual link advertising and we think it is important to the future of blogging as a business. For our wider audience, some of whom operate websites that are monetized through advertising, the background may be interesting.
During Digg's Townhall (embedded below) this evening, founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson announced that the shout feature on Digg will be removed later this week to be replaced with a new share option that will "streamline your ability to share on Facebook and Twitter."
According to an e-mail from Digg tonight, it will likely happen Thursday. "We've elected to remove shouts in favor of more popular sharing options, based on user feedback and broader market research," a Digg spokesperson told us. The new share feature will also include an e-mail option.
Google.org has just announced an international roster of partners for their PowerMeter gadget.
PowerMeter is "a Google gadget that can show consumers their personal electricity consumption right on a home computer," according to today's announcement on the Google Blog. "Our software relies on 'smart meters' (or other metering devices) as a data source. Over the past several months we've been looking to partner with utilities that are installing (or have already installed) this equipment in their customers' homes. We're energized by our very first Google PowerMeter partners."
Business cards are a horror show. When it gets to the point that you have to either resort to a die-cut, motion-sensitive, titanium-plated laser show of a card or get your contact info embossed on beef jerky to avoid being forgotten in the trash heap of useless swag and Clif Bar crumbs at the bottom of some biz dev guy's carry-on, we think it's safe to admit that the whole business card milieu needs an attitude adjustment.
Here are a few cool, tech-forward tools to ensure neither you, nor your contact details, are lost in the shuffle.
