If you've been looking for a reason to jailbreak your iPhone, look no further. Yesterday, iPhone developer Alec Renolds announced on multiple online forums that his long-awaited BitTorrent-powered application called "appDowner" is about to be released. When he first announced this project last year, the idea was to create a simple BitTorrent client for the iPhone. Unfortunately, personal issues got in the way of development and the project was put on hold for months on end.
But now, Renolds has returned and this time he's expanded on the original concept to create what appears to be a full-on App Store replacement application.
Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. This one is by Hakia, one of the participants in the recent 2009 Semantic Technology Conference.
Participants in the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference walked away considering fundamental questions about what is and isn't semantic technology. The relevance of this post's title will hopefully become clear by the end to those of you mischievous readers who may have stumbled upon it with other ideas. The conference was a great and well-organized affair in San Jose, California. One of the highlights was the Semantic Search Keynote panel, with all of the major players on stage (Ask, Bing, Google, Hakia, TrueKnowledge, and Yahoo!), as seen in the picture below.
Cooliris, the browser extension that launches a 3D visual search interface to the web, has just updated their application with what at first seems to be just a minor upgrade. But don't be fooled, this small change to the Cooliris add-on is actually going to have a major impact on the product's usability.
So, what's different? As of today, Cooliris will no longer launch into a full-screen 3D browser when activated. Instead, Cooliris will launch into a separate browser tab. This change was heavily requested by Cooliris users, a multi-tasking bunch of folks who wanted to be able to quickly switch back and forth between Cooliris's 3D web and all the other open tabs and applications running on their computers.
There's another dimension present, everywhere we go, that a growing number of technologists are working to uncover. These people aren't talking about theoretical physics or a magical world of fairies and gnomes - they're talking about information that could offer more context to traditionally physical lived experience. Augmented Reality (AR) is the phrase being used and this practice of making layers of data available on top of real world experiences could be a big one soon.
Improvements in geolocation, bandwidth, mobile devices and APIs are the foundation of this feeling that a useful Augmented Reality may be more realistic today than ever before.
It's been more than ten years since Tim Berners-Lee first spoke about the semantic web and computers indexing all web-based data. He said, "The day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize." Since then a handful of companies have attempted to tackle the issue of machine-based indexing and language interpretation. None of them are perfect. Below are 6 unique approaches to semantic data collection.
Looking for a good conspiracy theory today? Well here's one: Chris Almond, the administrator of a Facebook group called the Rogue Facebook Apps Early Warning Group just got kicked off the social network. Why did this happen? Did Facebook not like how he was posting details about Facebook malware, hacks, and attacks? Attacks like this recent one that exposed private Facebook profile information just by clicking on a link?
Or was Facebook simply following through on a TOS violation because Chris had accidentally sent out duplicate messages to group members, thereby getting flagged as a spammer and subsequently booted from the network?
You decide.
It's been a long time coming, but according to a message posted to the Google Voice Twitter account this morning, as well as a posting on the Google Blog, Google is getting ready to open up its free Google Voice service to more users. According to NBC's Janet Shamlian, who did a piece about Google Voice for the Today Show this morning, the service might actually open up for all U.S. users today - though as much as we would like this to be true, we think the reporter got this part of the story wrong. If you haven't done so already, however, now would be a good time to get your invite request in, as Google will first let in users who requested invites before opening up the service to everybody.
We have used Google Voice ever since it was still GrandCentral (Google acquired GrandCentral in July 2007) and couldn't be happier with the service, so here is our rundown of what you can expect once you get your own Google Voice number.
The US Office of Management and Budget issued new reporting guidelines this week for recipients of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the normally polite geek watchdog organization the Sunlight Foundation has come out swinging.
"...[A]bsent from the new instruction is a requirement to make raw data public," Sunlight's co-founder and Executive Director, Ellen Miller, wrote this morning. "By not including raw data at Recovery.gov, transparency is dramatically reduced. Sunlight has argued strongly for raw data in machine readable formats as the starting point for Recovery.gov. This is a significant failure by the Administration to live up to its promise for full and complete disclosure. Significant failure."
Glubble, which provides families with their own free social networks and also features a Firefox plugin that makes surfing the net safer and easier for children and hooks right into Glubble's web services, released a major update of its service today. Most importantly, Glubble now features a very well thought-out photo sharing solution, the Glubble Family Timeline, which also smartly incorporates messages and status updates. In conjunction with the release of the new family timeline feature, Glubble also announced a new premium product today, which, for $39.95 per year, allows users to upload and store more photos per month than the service's free offerings.
If you've ever been to a conference or some sort of large event, you've probably seen a live Twitter stream in action. Up on a big screen in a prominent place, often the stage itself, the live stream tracks the relevant hashtags or keywords about the event, be it a conference, a panel, a meetup, or some other sort of heavily-tweeted gathering.
But sometimes there's an issue with displaying the raw, unfiltered tweets in this way: they can be disruptive. All it takes is one Twitter user trying to be funny - or, worse, a troll saying something rude - to take the discussion off course. Now there's a new solution to deal with this problem: Paratweet.
