Mozilla makes the popular browser Firefox but the organization has a whole lot of other projects as well. The Mozilla Labs website has long been a tangle of different projects that were hard to find and hard to keep track of. Today, Mozilla Labs announced that it has launched a new version of its site that better organizes its many experiments and lets users "follow" particular projects of interest to them. The new site is at beta.mozillalabs.com and users there can sing up to follow updates on projects, people and events.
The new beta Labs site is powered by the same social network technology as Mozilla's innovators' social network Drumbeat. Drumbeat seems relatively well adopted, but at launch the new Labs site is sparse, incomplete and a little challenging to use. Hopefully the new site will help more Labs projects get more consumer engagement, more developer support and thus lead to more innovation for web users.
The third iteration of Apple's hot-selling tablet computer will not be on the market until 2012, the Wall Street Journal has confirmed.
Rumors of a 2011 release for the device were already in the process of being quashed by various sources when the WSJ's Lorraine Luk reported that the company is aiming for an early 2012 launch, according to the reporter's sources and information about recent orders placed by Apple for components like chips and display panels.
Campaign for imprisoned Syrian blogger. Anyone who still believes that imprisonment and torture of social media users is limited to political radicals and gadfly journalists need look no further than Syria's Anas Maarawi to be disabused of that notion. Maarawi was arrested on July 1. Talk about geek like me. Maarawi started Ardroid, the first Arabic language blog devoted to Google's Android OS.
His supporters have started a Facebook page to publicize his situation. A blog, Free Anas, has also been started, as well as a hashtag, #freeanas. Get on it, nerdlingers.
Foursquare, the much-discussed location-based social network, announced today that it has gone beyond allowing users to check-in to places and now includes events as well. Hundreds of thousands of events being held in more than 50,000 places (many no doubt movie theaters) will become visible, in some cases hours before an event begins and in other cases summary information for things like sporting events will be delivered after an event concludes.
The most interesting part of the announcement is the inclusion of additional information by venue or event hosts. ESPN is partnering with Foursquare, for example, and is including both timeless Tips about sporting locations and after-action game summaries in the Foursquare news feed. If this points towards a larger trend of more, richer and more timely information becoming a big part of Foursquare, then that's a very good sign.
The next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system will include an app store and offer a consistent experience across desktops, tablets and smartphones.
Windows 8 is being developed in two flavors: one for desktop computers and one for tablets and phones, with consistencies across both versions. This brings Windows closer to the model that Apple has adopted with its Mac OS X operating system, the desktop version of which has slowly been adopting similarities with the experience iOS offers on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Think Windows 7 meets Windows Phone 7.
The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), a group that represents hundreds of songwriters and music publishers, has backed out of four-year-old litigation against YouTube after reaching a settlement with the video-hosting giant.
The agreement, which the Google-owned video site struck with the NMPA and its subsidiary Harry Fox Agency, will allow music publishers and songwriters to start getting royalties from songs posted to YouTube, whether the post includes the original music video or a user-generated one.
At one point, a print magazine about the online world was inevitable. (Remember Yahoo Internet Life?) But now, with the proliferation of smart phones, tablets and magazine apps like Flipboard, not so much. So the launch of The Social Media Monthly is a bit of a surprise. Even more so its distribution.
The first issue of the magazine is out today. Publisher Cool Blue Company announced its availability at the Barnes and Noble bookstore chain in the U.S., as well as distribution in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark.
Google has updated its powerful search app for iOS with a quicker way to filter results by type, as well as with support for pre-loading Instant Pages, which was recently added to the Chrome desktop browser. The update also adds a more intuitive, gesture-based help screen for figuring out the few key interface elements. It's a universal app for iPhone and iPad available now in the iTunes store.
Last week, we reported on a leaked blog post from Google indicating that a new native search app is coming to Android as well, but that update still hasn't been released.
Earlier this week, Fox made good on its promise to limit Web access to its television content until eight days after a show has been aired.
The network's new system enables Dish Network and Hulu Plus subscribers to watch new episodes online shortly after they air, but requires everybody else to wait. Subscribers can watch brand new episodes on Fox.com by authenticating with their Hulu or Dish Network account credentials.
Internet analytics firm comScore released a report today that shows the most visited retail and auction sites on the Internet. Amazon, to no surprise, is the big winner with 282 million visitors in June. That correlates to 20.4% of the entire worldwide Internet population. Auction site eBay trailed Amazon sites by nearly 60 million visitors to land in second with 223.5 million, or 16.2% of all Internet retail consumers across the globe.
A relatively new entrant into this chart is Alibaba.com, a Chinese Internet retail vendor. It had 156.7 million users to come in third at 11.3%. China has the largest base of Internet users of any country in the world, and it is drawing heavily from the Asia Pacific region, with 85.7% of its visitors coming from the region. One interesting note from comScore's research is that it seems to have pinned the approximate number of global Internet users at 1.38 billion and change. Web-based retail has been a major force in the U.S. for more than a decade but is just now starting to change how the rest of the world interacts with consumer products.
