Mozilla just launched a new directory for Jetpack add-ons. Jetpack is Mozilla's newest technology for building Firefox extensions with Javascript, HTML and CSS. Mozilla announced a major update to Jetpack yesterday. Today's launch of the new gallery will finally make it easier for Jetpack developers to showcase their plugins and for users to find interesting and useful new plugins to try. The new gallery has a lot of extra features that the Firefox add-on library doesn't currently have, including the ability to showcase new plugins with video demos.
Google just announced that it now uses public data from the World Bank to display graphs for queries like "children per woman in brazil" or "internet users in the united states." To do so, Google makes uses of the World Bank's public API. Through this, Google can access 17 World Development Indicators. Google displays this data in interactive graphs that make it easy to compare stats for different countries. The timing of this announcement was likely planned to coincide with the news about Wolfram Alpha's integration with Microsoft's Bing.
We test a lot of software around here, on the web, on our desktop and on our phones. It's a great job to have, but only so much of what we test really sticks and becomes a part of our daily routines. Every once in awhile we like to compare lists in our team chat room and then share them with you.
Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.
We're very pleased to announce the launch of ReadWriteWeb's fourth country channel: ReadWriteWeb Spain. It joins our existing three country channels: France, China and Brazil (which launched last month).
Our Spain channel is edited by Ignacio García Ramos. Ignacio and his team will combine translation of ReadWriteWeb posts with original posts about Spain's Web market. Like the mothership ReadWriteWeb, the Spain channel will focus on Web trends and products.
Microsoft's Bing now relies on Wolfram Alpha to answer some of its users' questions. This is not a full integration of Wolfram Alpha into Bing, though. Instead, Bing only gets answers for queries about nutrition and math problems from Alpha. A query for "french fries" will still result in the standard search results page with a list of links, but a new compute tab in the left sidebar will open up results from Wolfram Alpha. Bing now also uses Alpha to compute queries related to Body Mass Index (BMI). In addition to this Wolfram Alpha integration, Bing now also features improved hover previews with Facebook integration and full page weather results.
Google just announced dramatically reduced prices for their online storage options via a post on the company's Official Google Blog. The new rates give you 20 GB for $5 per year, or, as Google puts it "twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price." The new options also let you expand your storage all the way up to 16 TB if need be. As always, these extra storage options are available once you reach the limit of your free storage.
However, the system still only works with Gmail and the photo-sharing service Picasa. There's no mention of it expanding to encompass other Google services like Google Docs, for example. And there's definitely no mention of the seemingly mythical GDrive, the long-rumored online storage system supposedly under development which would allow for the upload of any file type for safe storage in the cloud. We're beginning to wonder: will Google ever offer us a real cloud storage solution?
Feeling a bit under the weather? Soon you'll be able to cough into your mobile phone for an instant diagnosis. A research firm called STAR Analytical Services is working to develop software that can analyze the sound of a cough and identify it as either associated with a common cold, the flu, or something worse - like pneumonia or another serious respiratory disease. Just as doctors have been doing for years, the software will "listen" to the wetness or dryness of a cough and determine whether all you need is a lozenge or if you need to come in for a doctor's visit instead.
It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. With that in mind, over the coming weeks ReadWriteWeb will look back on the defining Web trends of the past 10 years. From the dot com boom, to the nuclear winter after, to the passion and enthusiasm of the pre-Web 2.0 innovations (such as RSS and podcasting), to the highs and hype of Web 2.0, to the current era of the real-time Web, to the near future of the Internet of Things. We'll explore all of this and more.
We're starting with online music. No industry, except arguably the newspaper one, has been rocked (pardon the pun) more by the Internet than the music industry.
Back in the day, it was assumed that heavy Internet geeks were a bunch of basement-dwelling, trenchcoat-wearing, socially maladjusted introverts.
However, a new study from the Pew Internet Project shows that geeks, including IM users and bloggers, are more likely to help neighbors, get out of the house, volunteer, and behave as upstanding members of their IRL communities.
We've just found a new application for finding your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and other friends from around the web on Facebook - all at once and all quite simply.
This tool is called FBFriendFinder. It comes from the Dutch web dev shop Open & Sociaal, and it works like a charm by using OAuth, Facebook Connect and contact export functions to gather enough data to organize a user's social graph. The most interesting part, however, isn't the technology but the business model. You have to read it to believe it.
