Microblogging and curation platform Tumblr reached its 10 billionth post today, marking another milestone for the hip and ever-growing service.
The service currently hosts over 28 million blogs, which are used to publish tens of millions of posts each day. The site's total posts hit 10 billion earlier today, according to the company's "about" page.
Clear Channel, the largest radio station owner in the United States, has teamed up with music intelligence platform The Echo Nest to build an Internet radio service similar to Pandora and Last.fm.
Clear Channel's iHeartRadio service uses The Echo Nest's massive dataset of 30 million songs and 5 billion related data points to let users create radio stations based on their musical tastes. It has been dubbed a potential "Pandora killer" by Billboard and indeed its functionality could hardly be more similar to Pandora's. Users can create stations based on a particular artist or song, vote tracks up or down and skip a limited number of songs per station.
In a first in the mobile health marketplace, the US Federal Trade Commission has filed settlements against two app makers that falsely claimed that using their smartphone apps would eradicate blemishes in teens and adults
The FTC passed down the proposed settlement claims against DermApps and Acne Pwner, forcing them to pay in total $14,294 and $1,700 respectively to the thousands of people who downloaded the apps from the iTunes store in a belief that it would shape up their skin flaws.
There's no shortage of services that take content from the Twitter firehose and present it in a different way. But one caught my eye recently, because it's doing something I'd always hoped a really good RSS aggregator would do: track topics. Nobody ever built the RSS topic tracker that I'd dreamed about. It's not a technical problem, more of a demand one. As you all know, the Web has evolved over the past 5-10 years into a very social tool. People prefer to follow (= track) people, more so than follow topics.
However, perhaps the time for topic trackers has come - given the ever growing problem of information overload in the Social Web. Twylah is thinking along those lines and has served up a pretty good (beta) solution.
Cybercrime is booming business. According to Symantec's newest Norton Cybercrime Report, the money involved with digital attacks is now almost as lucrative as the illegal drug trade - $388 billion last year. That includes productivity lost to cyber attacks, money corporations and individuals use to thwart cybercrime and direct cash losses associated with viruses, malware and identity theft.
Norton says that 73% of adults in the United States have experienced cybercrime in their lifetime. That seems low. If you use the Internet, you navigate phishing scams, viruses, spam and poisoned search results on a daily basis. Are the cybercriminals winning?
With mobile tech, Siemens helps torture a new generation, this time in Bahrain. Siemens was instrumental in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there as they murdered millions of Jews, along with Gypsies, trade unionists, leftists, homosexuals and others. Serving as one of its engines of genocide, Siemens provided the German Reich with, among other things, slave labor factories located next to concentration camps. Apparently, Siemens thinks that it has been good enough for long enough and that this Internet thing has made a sense of history a thing of the past.
Bloomberg reports that Siemens AG and its joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, has made it possible for Bahraini secret police to intercept and generate transcripts of text messages and other mobile communications made by protesters in that country's troubled version of the Arab Spring.
There are now 100 million people actively using Twitter, the company announced today.
If this news sounds vaguely familiar, it's because the five-year-old microblogging service reached 100 million user accounts awhile ago. These new numbers refer to active users, which CEO Dick Costolo defines as people that sign into Twitter and use the site at least once a month.
Google just announced that they have acquired Zagat, publisher of worldwide restaurant guides. Zagat's bread and butter has been printed guides, so joining forces with Google will bring integration with Google's powerful platform of local tools like Maps, Places and Hotpot, Google's own recommendation engine. Watch out, Yelp.
The Google local apps are still relatively barebones compared to dedicated competitors like Yelp and Foursquare. Even recent additions to Google's dominant Maps tools haven't made it to mobile yet. But this acquisition, along with Google's purchase of The Dealmap last month, reveal Google's hand in the local recommendations game, and it looks like a flush.
Analyst firm Research2Guidance studied download numbers for all the major mobile apps stores and it has some choice words for Apple and Android - they are over hyped.
Research2Guidance says that the results from its second quarter 2011 smartphone application monitoring report indicate that applications published on the "lesser" app stores (Windows Phone Marketplace, BlackBerry App World, OVI Store) generate significantly more downloads compared to the Apple App Store. It is a gutsy statement to call Apple and Android "over-hyped" but Research2Guidance does make an interesting point.
As the 10 year anniversary of the terrorist attack that brought down New York's World Trade Center approaches, there are many opportunities to comb through the wreckage of national consciousness, courtesy of both news and social media. Among the most complete is Understanding 9/11, an Internet Archive project to collect all broadcast coverage of the event.
Whether you were all the way across the country as I was or in the neighborhood, you have, no doubt, very strong feelings about the event and may want to memorialize it somehow. But reabsorbing the terrible images seems almost unwholesome to me, personally. Do it if you want, if you think it will benefit you, but watch out. An alternative might be Broadcastr's September 11 Memorial. Here you can bear witness, in person or via telephone and your testimony will become part of the historical record.
