We saw a cartoon recently that shows the attendees of a "Climate Summit", with a single naysayer yelling out from the back of the crowd "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
Well, in the spirit of creating a better world for nothing, we bring to you three iPhone apps that we hope can help do just that.
Here's an idea for you: instead of slowly amassing followers, like on Twitter, or carefully culling your friends list over time on Facebook, making sure everyone is in their appropriate list and category, collect and dispose of friends like you ask for the time or a spare cigarette on a busy city street.
That's what Lokast, the self-described "disposable" social network lets you do - carry your throw-away lifestyle over into the digital world.
Everybody piled into the ballroom today at the Austin Convention Center to hear Spotify CEO Daniel Ek give the final keynote interview of SXSWI of 2010 fully expecting to be blown away with the release of the peer-to-peer music player.
Instead, we got somewhat evasive and allusive answers on when to expect a U.S. version and were left looking to yesterday's announcement of MOG's move to mobile, with full knowledge that Napster is nipping at its heels.
Today at the South By South West festival in Austin, three finalists competed in the Microsoft BizSpark Accellerator finals in the "Innovative Web Technologies" category.
The companies, RecycleMatch, Siri and Skimble argued their positions on stage in front of three judges and tonight the winner will be announced at 6pm CST.
The first thing we think of these days when someone mentions "location-based services", or LBS, are the mobile social platforms we've gotten used to "checking in" to wherever we go - Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, MyTown and the like. But looking forward in the LBS market actually requires us to look back to feature phones and a GPS-less existence.
According to Jason Finkelstein, the director of product and marketing at LBS solution-provider WaveMarket, we are looking at a "truly horizontal market" that can be "applied to dozens of different types of businesses". But first, there are a number of hurdles to jump over.
During his SXSW keynote interview today, Twitter's Evan Williams announced the service's new @platform. While the keynote interview itself was rather forgettable (a large part of the audience left before it was over), the @platform will have wide-reaching consequences for Twitter and its ecosystem. This new platform will allow publishers to integrate Twitter deeper into their site and recreate the "open, engaging interactions" their readers expect from using Twitter "without sending them to Twitter.com."
Calling itself an "all you can eat, on demand, whenever you want it" music service, MOG gives its users access to "just about every artist, album and song ever made" for $5 a month - certainly not a deal to scoff at.
Today, at the South By South West festival in Austin, the company has announced the release of a mobile version of its application.
Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment.
But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?
For anyone in this business who isn't at SXSW in Austin, Texas this week, pretty much every social media channel feels like sitting next to a high school clique loudly talking about a party you weren't invited to.
If SXSW doesn't interest you, or if you're able to rise above it all, then my hat's off to you and your Zen-like transcendence.
During today's SXSW keynote, social media research Danah Boyd, who works for Microsoft Research New England and is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about online privacy. Specifically, she focused on how users can navigate issues around online privacy and how developers can help them to do so.
