Within the next 24 hours we will be emailing out a very special, limited time offer to fans of the ReadWriteWeb Facebook Page. If you're not already a fan of our Facebook Page, we encourage you to join our page now in order to receive this offer. Hint: it includes a special, friends-only discount to our upcoming Mobile Summit on 7 May. For those of you who can't make the Summit, we have other goodies for you too!
We'd like to grow our Facebook fan base, as it's a good way for us to interact with you outside of our own website. So to encourage this, we will be mailing our Facebook fans this once-only offer within the next 24 hours. Join our Facebook page now to be certain of receiving this offer.
Last fall, we told you about an exciting and innovative competition to find - and fun - civic-focused web abd mobile apps in New York City.
Tonight, after an all-star panel of judges had reviewed more than 80 apps over a month-long period, a handful of winning applications were announced.
These apps include WayFinder, a resource for navigating around the city; Taxihack, a live-feed commentary on New York City taxis; Big Apple Ed, a guide to New York City schools; and seven others.In keeping with Mayor Bloomberg's focus on innovation, transparency, accessibility, and accountability, New York City is today launching the NYC BigApps Competition, a challenge to developers to create software based on city data.
The competition will be hosted by ChallengePost, an online network for organizations and individuals to create and offer competitions. The launch of NYC BigApps will be also be officially announced at tonight's NY Tech Meetup. So, what's in it for developers? Read on.
In its fifth year, Google's Summer of Code continues to usher advanced education students into the open source environment. For a three-month period, 150 open source projects benefit from the work of 1000 students and 2000 mentors. Some of the organizations involved include Creative Commons, Drupal and the Sunlight Foundation.
Google I/O is a now annual event being held this year on May 27 - 28, 2009 in San Francisco. It's aimed at web developers, to whom Google will showcase "how to develop web applications with Google and open technologies." ReadWriteWeb has 10 free tickets to give away to Google I/O; and we thought an interesting way to do that would be to ask for your feature requests on current Google products. Choose any product you like - e.g. Google Reader, Google Health, or the new Google Latitude - and tell us what feature you'd like to see Google add to it. Or if the product has an API, what third party app you would like to see.
Google has made a tradition of tweaking its logotype in honor of holidays, special events, and celebrations. And that tweaking has resulted in a library of interesting interpretations of "Google." Now, they're giving school age children the chance to participate in the fun and win some cash with the "Doodle 4 Google" contest. What are they up against? Let's take a look back at 30 of our favorite Google Doodles over the years.
It's no secret that a few of us here at ReadWriteWeb are big fans of Ocarina, the iPhone app from Smule that converts your iPhone into an ancient woodwind instrument. And we're not alone, thousands of users have paid $0.99 to purchase the application and try their hand at blowing timeless melodies through the iPhone.
Now, the creators of the app are offering $1000 US to each of the 10 best Ocarina players in the world as part of the "This Contest Blows" contest.
With the current economic conditions, finding funding can be a challenge for many young companies - or even established ones. Sometimes it helps to get creative.
For Yieldex - a company that predicts available online advertising inventory to help optimize campaigns - that creative funding angle came in the form of participating in the Amazon Web Service Start-Up Challenge. And it paid off, twofold. Not only did they end the week with an extra $100,000 by winning the second annual Amazon AWS Start-Up Challenge, they also - as we reported in Jobwire - managed to woo a former AOL exec to join the team.
Project10X has just published a "Web 3.0 Manifesto". It's a kind of sequel to their Semantic Wave 2008 report released in January this year. Mills Davis, Managing Director of Project10X, told us via email that the new manifesto "reveals how semantic technologies will drive product and service opportunities in the next stage of the internet."
You can download the Executive Summary here. We got a look at the whole report and it is packed full of great data, including the two top 10 lists of Semantic Web opportunities detailed below.
Also in this post we're giving away 3 free tickets to Defrag for the best suggestions in the comments for 'web 3.0' apps. See below for more details.
Earlier this week we ran a competition for 2 full tickets to the New York Web 2.0 Expo conference 16-19 Sept. The tickets are valued at over $1000 each and we also have a consolation prize of a free Expo hall pass (value $100).
To be in to win one of the 3 prizes, we asked: for the 'Web Meets World' charity auction at the Web 2.0 Summit later this year (5-7 Nov), what would YOU bid on that web celebrities could offer? The 3 best answers, subjectively chosen by the RWW team, are printed below.
