Flingo is the latest social TV service to hit the market. It has the ambitious goal of merging your television watching with your Web activity, in real-time. This works two ways: Web content is adapted according to what you're watching on TV, and your TV screen gets Web features such as checking in and tweeting.
What's most intriguing about Flingo is the developer platform. Via a public API, the company is positioning itself as "the world's largest enabler of applications for your Internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray players and Set-top boxes." The company says it is already the largest publisher of smart TV apps.
When the site relaunches later this year, former social networking heavyweight MySpace will aim to reclaim the position it once held as a preeminent hub for music.
MySpace went through several attempts to reinvent itself before being sold by News Corp in June. Its new marketing head Al Dejewski told Ad Age the company will shift its focus more intently on music and try to compete against the likes of Spotify and iTunes, .
Consumer-grade 3D printer manufacturers MakerBot Industries has raised $10 million in venture financing lead by Brad Feld's Foundry Group, the fund announced today. The MakerBot project is exciting because it represents a democratization of physical manufacturing.
"I believe that we'll look back in 20 years and 3D printers will be as ubiquitous as laser printers are today," Feld wrote this morning. "We aren't yet at the point that is equivalent to the first HP Laserjet in 1984, but I think we'll see a comparable product from MakerBot within a year. In the mean time, I'm going to keep downloading 3D things from the Thingiverse and keeping my Thing-O-Matic busy."
Security company McAfee released its second quarter threat report today and the language in it is quite frank: "The security industry may need to reconsider some of its fundamental assumptions, including 'Are we really protecting users and companies?'" With malware at its highest levels ever, the escapades of LulzSec and Anonymous continuing unhindered and new varieties of spam being created almost every minute, it is a pertinent question.
Android is now far and away the leader is mobile malware. For-profit mobile malware has also grown significantly, with SMS-sending Trojans and other complex Trojans compromising smartphones. Rootkit malware that takes over the operating kernel of a computer or a smartphone is also becoming popular among malicious programmers. As McAfee notes, "The second quarter of the year was clearly a period of chaos, changes and new challenges."
It's a little discussed but widely-known fact that Twitter is bigger outside the United States than it is inside its home country: it's huge in Brazil, Japan and the Philippines, for example. It turns out Twitter's pretty hot in the Spanish speaking world, too.
Rebecca Villaneda of HispanicBusiness.com points out some interesting numbers in an article tonight: the official Spanish Twitter account @Twitter_Es now has half a million more followers than the official global Twitter account in English, @Twitter. That's pretty remarkable; according to Twittercounter.com, @Twitter_Es just took the lead earlier this Summer. Twitter en español amassed its bigger pile of followers in less than half the time, too.
Now that Libya's Internet is returning, even as that country's rebel forces firm up their possession of its capital, Tripoli, someone has made one small, but elegant gesture, they've renamed a square.
More accurately, they have reversed the name. Renamed "Green Square" by Libyan dictator Moamar Qaddafi, it now shows up on Google Maps under its old name, Martyr's Square.
Martyr's Square was the name of the square in Tripoli before Gaddafi regime renamed it. Google says the name change was made by a user late Sunday night, as rebel forces took over the city. It was approved by Google, meaning it was visible to the public, shortly thereafter.
Google says the square's name has been re-labeled Martyr's Square, though map users can continue to search using either name to find the location.
Google uses a broad range of sources to keep its maps up to date. This includes public and commercial data providers as well as user contributions.
Twitter has just announced the rollout of user galleries for tweeted images. Galleries will show images shared using all the major services supported by Twitter, including yFrog, TwitPic, Instagram and Twitter's new native images. Galleries can be found on the user's profile page through the Web interface. They will display up to 100 recent images in chronological order. They won't display video, nor will they show images tweeted before January 1, 2010.
Twitter profile pages will now display thumbnails of the user's four most recent tweeted photos on the right sidebar, right under their vital Twitter statistics, and clicking 'View All' opens the user's gallery in the current window. This is the first new feature Twitter has built upon its native image sharing, which launched this summer. Until that launch, third-party services handled image sharing on Twitter. The new user galleries will support those services, but the galleries themselves will only be available from Twitter's website.
It's been about a week since Fox instituted an eight-day waiting period for users who are not paying subscribers to either Hulu Plus or the Dish Network before they are allowed to stream new episodes of TV shows. Under the new authentication program, only those willing to pay up can watch new episodes the day after it airs. Everybody else has to wait.
Not all viewers have the patience, it turns out. In the absence of a free, immediately-available streaming option, many of them are turning to piracy, according to an informal study performed by TorrentFreak.
Skype, the Internet telephony company that is itself currently being acquired by Microsoft, has announced that it will itself acquire GroupMe, a group messaging startup.
Created at a hackathon last year, GroupMe is one of a handful of apps that enable people to have multi-person chats via their mobile devices. Group messaging has become a bit of a phenomenon this year, as a number of solutions have sprung up offering services that enable private group chat conversations from users' phones.
Google Maps announced today that it has just become available on over 40 new top-level country domains, including Mongolia, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Venezuela and more. Country domains are an important point of access for users around the world, since the languages and results can be customized to suit the specific audience. Google Maps is now available in more than 130 countries and more than 60 languages.
Google also announced this week that Street View, its photographic interface for exploring places in three dimensions through Google Maps, is coming to the Amazon rainforest with the help of the Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon. The Google LatLong team has had a big week of international news, and their addition of weather to Google Maps yesterday rounds out a pretty busy product week overall.
