In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we report on why and how Facebook has opened up to OpenID, explore the rising popularity of Linked Data, analyze the current trends we're seeing on the Web, look at the future of the iPhone, and more. We also update you with the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.
The Catholic Church isn't exactly known for its speedy adoption of new technologies, but today the Vatican launched a new web portal, as well as a Facebook app to coincide with the upcoming 43rd World Communications Day. In addition, the Vatican also announced an iPhone application. The iPhone application has not been approved by Apple yet, (we assume that even the Vatican's apps gets scoured for porn and profanities), but the Facebook app is available now.
It's been one week since we launched our first premium report for businesses, the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. The report has been well received and a handful of people have been kind enough to write reviews of the document and companion online portal on their blogs.
You can click here to learn how to purchase the guide or read on for a sample of reviews published around the web so far.
ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom with headquarters in Manhattan. ProPublica's newsroom employs 32 journalists and receives financing from the Sandler Foundation and other contributions. The organization's mission is to continue the tradition of investigative journalism at a time where a lot of newspaper organizations have had to cut back on their newsroom operations. The really interesting thing here, though, is that ProPublica is giving away all of its content to other newspapers and online publishers for free under a non-commercial, no-derivatives Creative Commons license.
Dale Herigstad, Chief Creative Officer at design firm Schematic, spoke today at the XML Auckland conference. Herigstad worked with Steven Spielberg on the conceptual design for the film Minority Report, including designing the hologram screens on which Tom Cruise used his hands to navigate.
The subject of Herigstad's presentation today was new forms of User Interfaces for Web, TV and other media. Examples of the interfaces he discussed were touch screen and "distance gestures" - the latter being what Cruise was doing in Minority Report. Herigstad showed some real world examples of distance gestures, mostly from the TV/movie industry.
Today, IBM will announce its plans to target Vietnam as a key market for new investments and partnerships with venture capital firms and affiliated startups in Southeast Asia. The hardware/software giant will open a new facility in Vietnam and will start joint research and curriculum programs with local universities.
Specific areas of interest for IBM investment include analytics, clean tech, cloud computing, smart grids, electronic health care, and green data centers. The company's expansion into Vietnam is a response to what they see as accelerated IT growth in that area.
Collecta has recently come to our attention as a player in the real-time search arena. The site isn't currently available for users to run searches of their own; however, hot-topic samples (searches for "Obama" and "swine flu") are being displayed on one-off pages.
On the sample pages, the engine collects tweets, Flickr photos, blog posts, and comments containing the given term and updates the page with text, images, and links in real time. The site is slated to go live and announce an API this month.
We like tools that are fascinating to use and make users look smarter than their peers. Visualization apps and sites rank pretty high on the fascination-o-meter, and they're also great for those of us who learn best by seeing and doing, rather than simply reading text.
The folks at Thinkmap (the makers of Visual Thesaurus) have just launched a tool called VocabGrabber that is absolutely as cool to play with, as it is informative and useful. It takes any text a user chooses (it can process an obscene amount of copy - up to 200,000 characters, or about 100 pages) and parses it for likely vocabulary words, organizing them in several fascinating ways and showing linguistic and contextual links to other terms.
We recently had the opportunity to test the new Microsoft Office plugin from OffiSync, which integrates Google Docs and Office. We can sum up our findings with one word: WOW. Although still in beta format, the plugin worked extremely well, providing that one missing aspect to the Microsoft Office software suite - an online component for storage, sharing, and collaboration.
Today, Google announced a major new update to its Chrome web browser that gives the application a large speed boost, as well as some new features. According to Google, Chrome now loads JavaScript-heavy pages 30% faster than the previous stable version. Some of the new features that Google announced today were already available in the last beta version, but users on the stable version will now get access to Chrome's full screen mode, form autofill, and improved new tap pages. In addition, Google says that the new stable version of Chrome contains over 300 bug-fixes.
