Google has just announced the latest class of countries to graduate from Google Map Maker and become full-fledged citizens of Google Maps. Map Maker allows "citizen cartographers" to add details like little roads, businesses and geographic features to parts of the world that Google's staff can't easily reach.
Today's announcement incorporates community contributions from a bunch of new countries, territories, and even an entire continents into the live Google map. The graduates are: Afghanistan, Antarctica, Ecuador, Georgia, Guatemala, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Honduras, Iraq, Norfolk Island, Saint Pierre & Miquelon and Saudi Arabia.
LinkedIn has launched status updates from companies. Administrators of company pages can post short updates just like individual users can. This provides companies with a way to engage followers and start conversations from within the public LinkedIn stream.
Users of LinkedIn could follow company profiles since 2010. Previously, users following a company would see personnel changes, new job openings and company profile updates. Now companies can also share 500-character messages, links and media with followers as well.
Following the news of the death of Steve Jobs on Wednesday night, millions of people took to the Web to mourn the founder and former chief executive of the biggest technology company in the world.
Everyone from Apple customers and admirers to other tech luminaries and the President of the United States expressed their condolences in the form of obituaries, blog posts, tweets and status updates on Facebook and Google Plus. Somber homepage tributes went live on Apple.com, Google.com and other major websites, and some publications like Wired and Boing Boing altered their homepages dramatically to pay tribute to Jobs.
Earlier today, the tech world was rocked by the sad news that Steve Jobs had died. I'd like to pay tribute to Steve Jobs, on behalf of ReadWriteWeb, for what he brought to the Web world. There will be hundreds of different tributes written by many tech publications - deservedly so, as Steve Jobs had a huge impact on many aspects of technology.
In this post I want to highlight 3 main things that I'm grateful to Steve Jobs for: 1) re-defining mobile computing with the iPhone and iPad; 2) his design philosophy; 3) his leadership. Steve Jobs strived for greatness in the products his company built, which resulted in a great user experience on the Web for millions of people.
The technology world was saddened to learn today that Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc., has passed away. He was 56 years old.
Apple's board of directors released this statement:
We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.
With all the hussle and tussle over the iOS5 and iPhone 4S announcements earlier this week, we thought we would take our own unscientific and idiosyncratic poll of our RWW staffers and see whether they would be ready to plunk down their own hard cash money (we have to pay for own phones here, don't you know?) and upgrade. The answer was a resounding No. Now granted, many of us have the regular 4 models, so an upgrade to a 4S isn't as compelling. But read on for yourself what everyone has to say.
It hasn't even been two years since the first widely popular consumer tablet hit the market, but the devices are already making a big impact.
Among people who own an iPad or other tablet computer, many of them are engaging with other, older forms of media less than they used to, according to a new study by GfK MRI. Unsurprisingly, printed books, newspapers and magazines are being read less by tablet owners, who now have a wealth of new digital sources of news, magazine content and eBooks.
Yahoo-owned photo sharing service Flickr may have been eclipsed by Facebook as the world's most popular photo sharing site, but there are some things Facebook is probably never going to be able to pull off. For one thing, the creation of a giant public repository of rights-liberal photos available for re-use. Flickr announced today that it has hit 200 million Creative Commons licensed photos, making it the world's largest CC photo collection. Creative Commons is a series of easy-to-use licenses that communicate the conditions that your creative work may be re-used under without asking you explicit permission. (E.g. "with attribution," "for non-commercial use," "no derivatives.")
What's so great about CC photos? For one thing, they are an incredible boon for follow-on creativity. Creativity, the good people of Creative Commons argue, always builds on the past. In a read-write world on the web, the less we're slowed down by standard copyright when it isn't applicable (when we want to share our work with people freely) then the more our photos, music and writing can serve as a platform for explorers who would go further regarding the topics we've engaged with and published on.
Neal Stephenson's latest novel, "REAMDE," brings black hat hackers, MMORPG gamers, virtual gold miners, Russian organized crime figures, dope smugglers and the flotsam of post-Cold War intelligence organizations into a super freaky all-night disco dance party, evocative, in terms of its well-orchestrated spectacle and cast-of-thousands, of Cecille B. Demille (or Shakespeare).
Stephenson is well known for two rather different milieu: near-future tech-heavy worlds that could be short-handed as cyberpunk and the 16th century European and Near Eastern world of his Baroque Cycle, with the Cryptonomicon and Anathem as bridges between the two. The excellent REAMDE is different. It's about a very recognizable here and now.
There will be no deep Facebook integration with iOS 5 or the new iPhone 4S. The notion of Apple and Facebook teaming up for the release of the iPhone 4S has been secondary to most of the discussion surrounding the development of iOS 5. There are a variety of reasons that these rumors came up and why people believed them. None of them were believable. It would have been almost impossible for Apple to put Facebook's Open Graph API into iOS without anybody noticing.
Yet, the rumors persisted. The final beta versions of iOS and the gold master were theoretically supposed to be released a few weeks ago. We now know that iOS 5 is coming October 12. What was the delay? Maybe to keep from people knowing the last minute features Apple instituted. Facebook could have been a part of that. There is still no Facebook iPad app and the Open Graph is not baked into iOS and the two companies are not teaming up on HTML5 development. Take a look at why after the jump.
