This Monday we're releasing our latest premium research report, entitled The Real-Time Web and Its Future. You can pre-order this in-depth report for just $200.
One of the 50 interviews we conducted was with Ted Roden, a Creative Technologist at The New York Times. In this post, an edited extract from our new report, we explore how Roden works with real-time data at The Times. We also discuss the creative real-time development he's doing on a side-project called EnjoysThings.
Pre-order now: The Real-Time Web and Its Future, $200 if you order before 30 Nov; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF).
Mobile technology, virtualization, the social web, cloud computing - a think tank study has all our good friends on a hit list.
The study, which shows primary security and privacy concerns of U.S. government IT leaders, is making the rounds among military and government bloggers. Policy makers are being told that the applications we know and love are dangerous and pose gaping security loopholes for cyberterrorism. Is a Big Brother overprotective meltdown? Or are our advances really causing greater risks for all users?
Thanksgiving is generally a horrible day for air travel, but tradition and the sweet smell of Thanksgiving turkey still makes millions of Americans forget the potential horror of being stuck in an airport. If you are one of them, or even if you are just heading to the airport to pick somebody up, here are some mobile applications and web sites than can help you make your Thanksgiving travel less stressful.
We're excited to announce that our latest premium research report will be available for download on Monday! Titled The Real-Time Web and Its Future, the report is a broad and deep look at the emerging world of real-time technology on the web. Based on 50 interviews with companies, engineers and executives building or leveraging real-time technology - the subtitle of this report could very well be "Real-Time, Beyond Twitter and Facebook."
Social networks, infrastructure providers, media companies, non-profits and financial services companies were all interviewed and will all find this report useful to quickly develop a sophisticated understanding of this important trend on the web. Large portions of the web will be operating in real-time and this report will provide you with an important competitive advantage. You can pre-order the report at a $100 discount here; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF) below.
Earlier this morning, Wikileaks began to post pager messages that were sent on September 11, 2001. According to Wikileaks, these messages were intercepted by an "organization which has been intercepting and archiving US national telecommunications since prior to 9/11." Some of these messages are from officials in police and fire departments, though a large number of messages are also from businesses. Others are automated messages to engineers that were sent by computers about network and hardware issues.
The latest edition of mobile navigation app Waze has just launched in the iTunes App Store and on the Android Market Place with the Symbian and Windows Mobile versions available on the Waze website. In this updated version, the company has added even more features to their already popular "munching" game which sends a Pac-Man like character loose on the roads to help build the company's mapping database and validate the roads already in place.
Unlike other mobile navigation apps, Waze "crowdsources" its map-making process, reliant on its users to switch the app on when driving around town. Then, using the phone's built-in GPS capabilities, Waze uses the information sent back to create base maps and determine traffic patterns in order to warn other users of traffic jams ahead.
One of the first social networking aggregators to take advantage of LinkedIn's brand-new API is Sobees, whose two client applications both now offer LinkedIn integration in addition to the other supported networks. A challenger to similar services like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowser, Sobees is a social networking aggregation tool originally launched as a desktop app back in 2008 with a web app version added earlier this year. Like its competitors, Sobees' clients use a columnar interface to display real-time updates from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.
Firefox gets distributed social networking and identity management.
The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discrete button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation? Accuse us of punning, but definitely sign us up. Google Chrome: Start taking notes.
A year ago we profiled an oddly-named service called ://URLFAN, which we concluded was a good 'Influence Index' for the Web. ://URLFAN ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. Unlike analytics services like Alexa or Compete, ://URLFAN doesn't measure website traffic. It's similar to Technorati, only ://URLFAN ranks all websites and not just blogs.
We noted in our original review that ://URLFAN's ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media - and in particular bloggers. That's a relatively small proportion of the world, however we think it's still a useful index because social media users are highly influential. With that in mind, which websites are currently ranked the most influential on the Web?
Smartphone users just got an early holiday treat from Google.
Now, when searching for movies on their iPhones or Palm WebOS- or Android-powered devices, users can get not only theatres, showtimes, and films; they can also get trailers, ratings, and proximity-based information. This way, you can get in the car and peal out of the driveway before conducting a desktop search for movies, thus saving yourself another excruciating 5 minutes of "holiday cheer" with the family.
