ICANN, the not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that has managed domain names on the Internet since 1998, just announced that it has reached a new deal with the US Department of Commerce that will allow it to operate as a more independent entity. Other governments and the private sector will now have a greater say in how domains will be managed. The Commerce Department will continue to hold a seat on ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee, but it's influence will now be on par with that of other members of the organization.
InMobi, which is the largest mobile ad network in Asia, Africa, and Indonesia, just released some interesting data regarding mobile web usage which shows that RIM's BlackBerry is leading the pack ahead of Apple's iPhone in Indonesia. Indonesia is one of the world's fastest growing mobile consumer markets and will become the third largest mobile market by 2010. Apple, however, is currently losing the race against BlackBerry in this market. While InMobi saw requests from BlackBerry devices increase by 842% in the first half of 2009, requests from iPhones only increased by 205%.
Company calls customers in attempt to sell paid version of mobile app
Within iTunes' user ratings section of iPhone application mogoRoad, a real-time traffic monitoring tool available in Switzerland, several users claim to have received phone calls from the development company behind the mobile software. Reportedly, the company is asking the app owners if they would like to purchase the paid version of the application. While unsolicited sales calls are annoying and intrusive, the bigger issue here is how did the company get its customers' phone numbers to begin with? According to mogoRoad, the information came from Apple.
European researchers have been working for years on a system that allows developers to create internet applications that can manage and fix themselves. Called SELFMAN, the project aims to address the challenges inherent in large scale applications. According to Peter Van Roy, project coordinator, "The central challenge when you build big internet applications is how to keep them running without having to tweak and manage them all the time. We wanted to make big internet applications easy, so that all the management problems you normally have are handled by the system itself. It will take the internet to the next level."
Indeed it will.
It's been a long and winding road for serial volunteer and social media philanthropist Sloane Berrent.
Since her unplanned departure from an L.A.-based startup in 2008, Berrent has traveled through eight countries, documenting and publicizing the struggles of those in developing areas through her blog posts, tweets, images, videos, and her own presence at events at home and abroad. From post-Katrina New Orleans to a trash dump in Manila to a monastery in Burma, read on for her story of trying to achieve social good through social media.
The Yahoo! Developer Network blog has a post today calling for "innovative and flawless" applications to be submitted for inclusion in a gallery section on their redesigned homepage.
Apps are to be built using Yahoo!'s proprietary development platform, YAP. The YDN post further noted, "We're working on an array of additional developer monetization opportunities - these will be available soon." The gallery's inaugural class includes YAP-built applications from Mint, Lumosity, Flixter, Target, and WordPress.
Kutano, a browser-based Twitter client that also aggregates comments on Twitter about the website a user is currently visiting, just launched the first client for Google's Sidewiki project. Sidiwiki allows users who have a special version of the Google Toolbar installed to annotate any web page and comment on any blog post. These comments, however, are normally only visible to users who also use Google's toolbar, but Google also allows third parties to access this data. Kutano is the first company to make use of the Sidewiki API to aggregate these comments and annotations.
Social slide deck site SlideShare will announce today the winners of its 3rd annual "Best Presentation in the World" contest. A panel of business presentation expert judges selected one deck as the grand prize winner out of 3,750 entries from over 130 countries.
That grand prize winner was titled Healthcare Napkins All and was created by visual communication specialist Dan Roam and Dr. Tony Jones. You may or may not agree with the political perspective of this 51-slide presentation, but it's an undeniably impressive way to deliver information.
Warner Music, which had removed its videos from YouTube after licensing talks with Google broke down last year, just announced that is has reached a new deal with YouTube and that Warner's music videos will once again appear on YouTube. The partnership, according to the official announcement, covers the complete Warner catalog and "includes user-generated content containing WMG acts." Warner will be able to monetize user-generated content thanks to Google's Content ID technology, which can detect copyrighted content in YouTube videos and then allow the copyright holders to sell ads against this inventory.
When Barnes & Noble launched its eBook store, it immediately attracted a lot of potential customers. According to Compete's Dillon McGovern, more than four times as many people visited the eBook section on B&N's website than the Amazon Kindle store during the first week after the launch in July. After just about a month, though, these numbers returned to normality and today Amazon once again leads the pack by a very wide margin. While B&N was able to attract a lot of interest in its new eBook offerings, it was clearly hurt by the fact that it didn't offer users a hardware eReader yet.
