There are 4 billion mobile phones in the world, but only 2 billion bank accounts. That's not just a bit of trivia, but the very raison d'etre for the new mobile payment service called BOKU, launching out of stealth mode today. The service essentially turns your phone into a credit card, allowing you to pay for things "by mobile" with the charges showing up on your cell phone bill at the end of the month.
Opera has been buzzing up our inboxes lately with rather vague press releases on how it planned to "reinvent the web."
Well, we've just received concrete confirmation of exactly what that means. Their new product, Opera Unite, "turns any computer into both a client and a server, allowing it to interact with and serve content to other computers directly across the Web, without the need for third-party servers."
The Twitter firehose is glutted with retweets, hashtags, and information of every possible bias and contradition surrounding one topic: The recent election in Iran and supposed fraud in tallying votes for the losing candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
In the aftermath of the election, during which a (some say statistically improbable landslide) victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced, the social media buzz grew into a roar as a meme began to circulate: Where Is My Vote. A website, several Facebook pages, and now thousands of tweets have ensured few social web users have not yet heard of the controversy and the Iranian government's response of censorship.
This September, Mozilla is challenging users to earn their Internet merit badges by donating their time and talents to public benefit institutions, non-profits, and those in need.
According to an email we received from Mozilla, "Everyone should have the opportunity to know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a good experience when they're online. This new initiative is looking for people with a talent for writing, designing, programming, developing, or all-around technical know-how. Internet skills, no matter how novice or advanced, can change people's lives and make the Web better for everyone." Mozilla Service Week will take place from September 14-21, 2009.
Blog-indexing service Spinn3r announced today that for their new 3.1 release, they will offer support for the Twitter firehose - that's right, the entire public Twitter stream - as well as social media rankings.
The Twitter firehose feed content will belong to a new microblog designation that Spinn3r will also use for indexing other microblogging services. The rankings will consider the relationships and links between users and determine the top 10,000 accounts over four social and link-sharing networks.
According to a recent Hitwise bit of research, Facebook's users have grown up dramatically over the past year.
That is to say, more than half of all Facebook users are between 25 and 44 years old as opposed to 32 percent just one year ago. The site's marketshare has also grown remarkably over the last month with a nice spike over the weekend the social networking behemoth made vanity URLs available.
We love it when members of the ReadWriteWeb community share links with us to things we might like to write about. In order to make that easier to do, thus hopefully something you'll do more of, we're posting a bookmarklet you can drag up to your browser toolbar and click anytime you're on a page you want to share with the ReadWriteWeb staff.
Tip RWW <-- Just grab that link and give it a click any time you're on a page you want to share with us. An email window will open (just using a mailto: link) pre-populated with the link and page title, addressed to us. Hit send, maybe add a note if you like. Breaking news, good background information, critiques of the things we've written - whatever you like. We'll give you credit for anything we use in a post, unless you ask us not to. Consider yourself part of the RWW team.
Not too long ago, for most of us, MapQuest was the default online mapping service. Even today, after a number of changes to its site, MapQuest is still one of the most popular places to get maps and directions online, even though other services like Google Maps or Microsoft's Bing Maps (formerly known as Live Maps) offer more features.
Today, MapQuest released its first iPhone app, MapQuest 4 Mobile (iTunes link), and after testing it for a while, it quickly became clear that MapQuest's app is a worthy challenger for the iPhone's built-in mapping application, which is based on Google Maps.
Palm's new Pre smartphone is supposed to be remarkably easy for developers to work with but this weekend the company reached out to one such community and demanded they shut down any discussion of one of the most hoped-for software developments - tethering the Pre to laptops for mobile wireless internet access. Apparently, you will pay for multiple internet subscriptions and you will not use cell networks for regular internet access without paying an additional subscription beyond your phone's voice and data fees!
It's not often you hear an application's creators describe their service as "an unmanageable complexity" that "compromised the user experience," but that's exactly what those behind the content aggregation system Secondbrain are admitting right now. Their service, a bookmarking/social-media sharing/lifestreaming/social network kind of tool was hard to describe and even harder to use.
But now, that's all changing...or so they say. The company has basically scrapped their original concept in a revamp that's more of a "makeunder" than it is a "makeover." The new Secondbrain focuses on making bookmarking simpler while ditching most of the service's other features.
