NewsGator, the company behind the popular FeedDemon and NetNewsWire feed readers, just announced that it will shut down the NewsGator Online Reader on August 31, 2009. The company will provide users with instructions on how to migrate to Google Reader. NewsGator's desktop and mobile feed readers already support synchronization with Google Reader. Until today, though, users could choose between syncing with NewsGator or Google Reader. New versions of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire for the Mac will be available today. A new version of NewsGator's iPhone app will also arrive in the App Store soon.
eMarketer reports that, according to the "Consumer Internet Barometer," the majority of Twitter users (42%) use the service to communicate with their friends. About 29% use Twitter to update their status, 26% to find news, and 21% for work-related reasons. Oddly, only 0.3% said that they use Twitter for fun. Significantly more women use Twitter to keep in touch with friends than men (48.4% vs. 33.6%). Besides this, though, there is little difference between how men and women use the service. About half of the survey respondents were introduced to the service by a friend or family member, and a third heard about Twitter from a co-worker.
EBay is working on software to replace the guts of Skype but is worried that it may not succeed, may lose a court battle with Skype's founders over rights to the core technology and may need to do something drastic in the next few years. The company said in a regulatory filing yesterday that if it fails in both the legal and technical avenues it's pursuing then "continued operation of Skype's business as currently conducted would likely not be possible."
Google Reader offers a nifty mobile interface, and apps like Byline (iTunes link) and NetNewsWire (iTunes link) are well-designed native apps that allow iPhone users to keep up with their feeds. But slogging through a few hundred subscriptions on the iPhone's small screen can quickly turn into a frustrating experience. My6Sense, which launched the first beta of its web-based mobile feed reader last December, is now finally ready to release its native iPhone app. Thanks to the app's ability to organize your feeds according to a personalized recommendation system that automatically learns from your preferences as you browse through your feeds, keeping up with hundreds of feeds on the iPhone is now easier than ever before.
Oh, the irony. One day after it was announced that Microsoft's Bing will be replacing Yahoo's own search engine on Yahoo.com, Yahoo! came out with a new local search functionality that ought to be the envy of every search engine.
Searching for local businesses on Yahoo now brings up a nice interface containing reviews, an overview, photos and driving directions inside a drop down box you can access without leaving the page you're on. It's a smoother user experience than Google or Bing offers and Yahoo may have more local business information than either of those two competitors can offer in-house as well.
Silentale is a soon-to-launch startup whose goal is to consolidate your conversations and contacts from all the platforms you use including webmail, social networks, and even your mobile phone. Running as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform on top of Amazon Web Services, the oddly named Silentale will function not just as an aggregator, but also a searchable archive of all your web communication. While normally we wouldn't dare blog about a company whose product you couldn't try out yet (that's just mean), we just couldn't resist. It's been a long time since we've seen a startup this promising and we can't wait to give it a shot ourselves.
Today at the cybersecurity conference known as Black Hack, researchers Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner will present an SMS exploit that could take over your iPhone with just one text. Once the phone is compromised, the hacker would have access to all the functions on the phone allowing them to send email, access your contacts, make phone calls, and of course, send text messages that would send the exploit to more devices.
This serious vulnerability (which apparently Apple sat on for over a month) is probably the first time that most people have heard of mobile phones being used to create botnets. However, this isn't the first sighting of a mobile phone hijacking attempt for the purpose of botnet creation - a similar exploit was discovered earlier this month. Does this mean we're on the verge of a new and dangerous trend: the creation of "zombie" phones?
In this latest installment of our ongoing series on the Internet of Things, we look at one of the big advantages of Internet-connected objects: trackability. In other words, knowing precisely where an object is at all times - and even better, its condition. This is important particularly for goods that are perishable, such as food. We recently wrote about IBM's RFID and sensor solutions to track food and horticultural goods.
But tracking objects via the Internet has got very practical uses too for consumers. I can't think of a better example than the recent case of my lost luggage.
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We at Hakia are proud to announce our upcoming commercial ontology, perhaps the world's first. What is a commercial ontology? If you're asking this question you have just touched on an important distinction: fantasy versus reality. In the context of the Web, a commercial ontology is a realistic version of an ontology, as we explain below.
Companies in the internet TV space should start worrying. It seems Microsoft's foray into life streaming on the XBox 360 will arrive as early as autumn. As promised in early June at the
E3 event, 360 Live users will see Twitter, Facebook and streaming radio service Last.fm available to their community as downloadable apps. Additionally, the existing Netflix application is expected to be updated to allow users to browse through titles directly from Live. With the promise of on-demand games, streaming videos, music and a new social media component, the Xbox community is about to look a lot like open source media center Boxee.
