Foursquare's Push API, which the company first unveiled to developers in February, will be publicly released sometime this afternoon, according to a post on BetaBeat.
Select developers have had access to the API since the company's last hackathon and have been using it to build applications that take advantage of the Foursquare's push notifications. The API will go into a public beta just a few days before the company's global hackathon on Saturday.
An experiment in near-field communications is underway at Arizona State University that shows the potential and future of NFC-enabled smartphones. The university has been rigged so that a select group of students can use their NFC smartphones to gain access to university buildings and resident's rooms. Students have said that they would be interested in using their smartphones to pay for public transit, meals in dorms and to purchase merchandise.
This is precisely the type of test that is the precursor to widespread adoption. Test are performed at universities, rolled out to other small communities and the businesses and large corporations. Within a few years, everybody is doing it. NFC-enabled smartphones are just starting to make that journey.
As the company prepares to launch its long-rumored Android-powered tablet, Amazon is busy hammering out content initiatives to ensure the device is well-suited to delivering ample digital content consumers and, in turn, more revenue back to the company's bottom line.
In addition to negotiating with magazines and newspapers to offer a subscription service it hopes can challenge Apple's upcoming Newsstand, Amazon is reportedly also thinking about launching an e-book rental service, according to the Wall Street Journal. The service would make a library of backlist e-books available to Amazon Prime subscribers, who already pay $79 per year for free fast shipping and some on-demand video.
Twitter will support Chinese language in the coming weeks, according to a research report published today.
It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.
Last week, Diaspora, the open-source, privacy-aware social network of our nerdy dreams, posted its first public response to the launch of Google Plus and the recent efforts around privacy and selective sharing at Facebook. For a reaction to news that two Web behemoths are drinking Diaspora's milkshake in terms of features, the blog post sounds pretty upbeat, with perhaps just a hint of caginess. "We're proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles," the Diaspora team writes. "We're making a difference already."
Let's not get into whether Diaspora can take credit for features of Google Plus and Facebook. There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it's decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered.
Google has finally admitted that it can't keep Google Maps up to date without the crowd's help. The LatLong Team has just announced a Regional Expert Reviewer program, appointing the best contributors to Google Map Maker as volunteer moderators.
Map Maker, which launched in 2008, allows Maps users to submit edits, but these all had to be reviewed by internal Google teams before being added to the live map. Today's change shifts some of that burden onto the most dedicated volunteers, indicating that Google no longer wants to handle all that work itself.
Rhetoric about the "post-PC age" has ramped up considerably since Apple first launched the iPad in the beginning of 2010, adding a hot-selling tablet device to the smartphone-fueled wireless Internet revolution already underway.
PC sales have already started to wane, but it won't be until 2015 that they'll really take a hit. That's the year that mobile Internet users will outnumber people accessing the Internet from PCs and other wireline devices, according to new information from International Data Corporation (IDC).
Of all of the potential applications of near field communications (NFC) technology, the one we hear the most excitement about these days is mobile payments. And while everybody from tech giants to analysts is predicting that we'll soon be paying for things by waving our phones, this is far from the only current use of the technology.
Mobile gaming is another space that is seeing the effects of NFC. In June, Rovio announced the launch of Angry Birds Magic, which connects the company's popular mobile game to the physical world using NFC and GPS. Players using supported devices can tap their phones together or wave them in front of Angry Birds NFC stickers to unlock new levels and birds in the game.
This time last year, we compared the growth of the two leading light blogging services: Tumblr and Posterous. The conclusion was that Tumblr had all but defeated its rival. All through 2010, Tumblr showed exponential growth. That has continued into 2011. Over the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per month to over 300 million now (according to Quantcast). Over the same period, Posterous has grown from about 7M visits per month to about 11M. So the gap has widened: a year ago Tumblr got 14-15 times more visits per month, now it's double that.
Tumblr is now so popular that its founder got invited to The White House and its logo acquired a fish jumping through it. Tumblr is also getting 12 billion page views per month, an estimated 8 times more than Wordpress.com.
US Senate lawmakers will introduce a bill next Thursday that would fine big companies that lose consumer data in a security breach due to poor security measures.
The Personal Data Protection and Breach Accountability Act, sponsored by Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, would enable the Justice Department to fine businesses with more than 10,000 customers $5,000 per violation per day, with a maximum of $20 million per violation, according to The Hill.
