Update: This news is now official.
Online telephony service Skype will be sold by eBay to a group of private investors, possibly including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's new venture capital group, and the deal will be announced on Tuesday according to a report by a team of reporters from the New York Times.
EBay faces legal challenges from Skype's founders that the company said earlier this summer could mean the end of Skype as we know it. From an innovation perspective, we're always excited when such an interesting company breaks free from a slow-moving monolith that acquired it.
Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in order to display information to the wearer. You heard right, in a few years your cyborg eye will talk to you. In an article with the IEEE Spectrum, Parviz relays the challenges of custom-building semi-transparent circuitry into a polymer lens roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter.
This past week's buzz phrase (so much so that it was a trending topic on Twitter) was "augmented reality" (or AR), which is what you get when you mix your perception of the world around you with computer-generated information. While still in its infancy, the technology holds the promise that you might one day be able to point your iPhone's camera at a Starbucks and see a little notice pop up that says, "There's a Starbucks here."
Between self-aggrandizing FriendFeeds, bottom-feeding link baiters, and perpetual Twitter spammers, finding cool online friends can be challenging. Michael G. Noll and Ching-man Au Yeung created the SPEAR (SPamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) algorithm in the hopes of separating the social media wheat from the chaff. This morning the two postgraduate students offered their findings to Delicious in a blog post. The project was first evaluated using data sets collected from the popular bookmarking community.
Discover Anywhere Mobile, a Toronto-based mobile travel guide publishing startup, announced today that it has completed an iPhone app with Augmented Reality (AR) views of subway, light rail, train and airport data for 33 cities throughout North America. That app will be made available as soon as the next version of the iPhone Operating System is launched to the public.
Discover Anywhere's implementation of AR looks well-suited to the needs of users, but we asked company President David Janes why users would need an AR view at all. Why wouldn't a list of nearby transit stops and a map be enough. Janes offered an interesting explanation of Augmented Reality's value.
Arnaud Nourry, the CEO of the world's second largest book publisher, Hachette Livre, says that the current pricing trends for eBooks may soon kill the hardcover book as we know it. In an interview with the Financial Times, Nourry says that he worries that the combination of the $9.99 price for bestsellers and the fact that Google now offers millions of out-of-copyright books for free could destroy profits for traditional publishing houses. Nourry is especially worried about the fact that Amazon is currently selling eBooks at a loss and that the company will soon demand that publishers will lower their prices so that it can actually make a profit from selling eBooks in its Kindle store.
Developers and enthusiasts have hoped that official support for Augmented Reality (AR), the display of data on top of a view of the real world, would come to the iPhone in early September. Today's announcement of a big Apple event on September 9th that's focused on the iPod, however, gives reason to suspect that the next version of the iPhone operating system will spend more time in the oven.
AR startup Acrossair reportedly told the LA Times in July that Apple told it that official support for AR was coming in iPhone OS 3.1. Acrossair may have introduced the hope that 3.1 was coming in early September. It's still possible that we might see AR support in a week and a half, but other developers tell us they wouldn't be surprised to see some more beta versions tested before it launches.
Not sure how trustworthy those Wikipedia articles really are? A few months from now, the addition of WikiTrust as a standard feature for the English Wikipedia will give users one more tool to evaluate the trustworthiness of Wikipedia articles and editors. WikiTrust, an extension for MediaWiki, the software as the core of Wikipedia, assigns a color code to each word in an article, depending on the author's reputation and how often the text has been edited recently.
A newly released feature from "cloud desktop" software maker Gladinet lets you perform a new kind of backup procedure: cloud-to-cloud. Usually, when you think of cloud backup programs, you think of applications that take your computer's files and upload them to the web for safekeeping. Or perhaps you think of apps that take your files in the cloud and back them up safely to your PC or external hard drive. What's not as common is finding a way to backup your online files from one cloud storage application to another. There simply aren't many good tools out there for doing so. However, with Gladinet's new cloud backup feature, currently only available for Google Docs, you can backup your files from Google's cloud to someone else's, whether that's Amazon, Box.net, EMC, or whatever else you choose.
Fwix, a website for local news, aims to be a "real-time local newswire" for your hometown. Offering a combination of traditional content pulled from newspapers and blogs along with items submitted by citizen journalists, the site reads more like a location-based lifestream than a typical news site. Key to the site's success will be the inclusion of user-generated content coming in from iPhone submissions. The company plans to launch an updated version of their Fwix iPhone application this week which will allow anyone to file news stories, photos, and videos from anywhere, all geo-tagged thanks to the iPhone's GPS location data.
