If you need remote access to your desktop from your iOS phone or tablet, now you can get there for free. Starting today, LogMeIn has a new app in the Apple App Store and it is free. This replaces their low-end Ignition app that they previously charged $30 for. It doesn't give you everything that the current paid app provides, such as file management and cloud storage and HD video/audio streaming. But if you just need remote access, then the free app will do quite nicely. You of course need to run the free version (or the paid version) of LogMeIn on your Windows or Mac desktop, and set up an account online with them to complete the connection.
What I like about LogMeIn is how they are upstanding guys. If you put down your money in the past for Ignition, you will be grandfathered in and have the premium features forever. They are planning on an Android app next year, naturally. The Pro version is $40 a year.
As Google works to emphasize up-to-the-minute search results, it has also quietly killed off a search feature that helped users search for content from the past. As users in the Google search help forum have noticed, the Timeline feature for Web search has disappeared. It helped filter search results for specific timeframes.
Timeline view is still available in Google News, but it only searches certain archived publications instead of all Web results. Google community managers have suggested the normal date range filter as an alternative, but this isn't a browsable feature like Timeline was. Just as it has done with Google Reader in recent weeks, Google has killed off a feature used by a small but dedicated set of its users.
Whether you think the protestors camping out in various city parks around the world is justified or not, it is interesting to see this analysis published in Technology Review today. They used a tool from SocialFlow that examined a pile of Twitter data. Did you know the first use of their hashtag was in a July 13 Adbusters blog post?
Push me, pull me, real time web: we've now got enough options available to us when choosing how to consume our favorite web content that we may as well start mixing things up a bit, no?
Push delivery technology company Superfeedr today released a new Chrome browser plug-in called Msgboy. (The first 200 people to use this link can get it.) The plug-in accesses your browser's history and uses it to make a big list of web pages you like and feeds you're subscribed to. Then it uses Superfeeder's XMPP and Websockets technology to push new updates from those sources to your browser, in the form of a Chrome Notification. Click the plus and minus buttons in the pop-up and you can quickly train it to know what kind of notifications you want or don't want to see. I've been using it this morning and like it a lot. There are a lot of feeds I've subscribed to that I don't remember to check very often anymore; now they are in the corner of my screen all day.
There are dozens of remote PC control apps for iOS, including Citrix Receiver, various VNC ports and LogMeIn Ignition. The latter announced an update to its $30 app today that includes the ability to send any kind of file back and forth between your PC and phone, without having first to collect them from iTunes or iPhoto.
Over the weekend, the keen eyes at Search Engine Land noticed that Google's Realtime Search had gone missing. The website returns a 404 error, the option no longer appears in the left-hand sidebar and search results for news no longer include real-time links.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the closure, but called it a temporary one. According to Google, Realtime Search has been shuttered as a 2009 agreement between Twitter and Google had expired, making what was one of the key element of that real-time content - Tweets - no longer available.
Last week at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit, our COO Sean Ammirati spoke to Betaworks CEO John Borthwick. Betaworks has funded and incubated a number of companies in the real-time Web market, such as TweetDeck, Bit.ly and Chartbeat.
Google is making a push to be the de facto leader in real-time communications on the Web. The search giant hopes that by developing a new open source Web standard for video and audio communications it can be on the forefront of the next generation of Internet networking.
Google is doing this through a program called WebRTC, a project that was spawned from the company's acquisition of Global IP Positions (GIPS) in May 2010. Google is now ready to begin implementing WebRTC into its Chrome browser. It will augment its current video chat capabilities within Gmail and put a dent into real-time, unified communications aspirations of companies like Microsoft (Skype), Apple and Cisco.
Instant access to information has change the world. In the early days of the Internet, people buzzed about the "Information Superhighway." Thinking back to the early 1990s and the first iterations of America Online and Netscape, everything seems so...quaint.
In the mid-1990s, it took two minutes or more for a modem to make a connection and boot the World Wide Web for your "surfing" pleasure. Two minutes is an eternity in today's Internet and communications landscape. The ability to send messages and find information in real-time has certainly changed the way we work and live.
Facial recognition and detection software is a hot button issue on the Web right now. Facebook has stirred a hornets nest by using facial recognition with users' pictures, asking people to tag their friends. Google has said that is a line of creepy it will not cross.
Facial detection software is not just limited to the Web though. A new startup in Chicago called SceneTap uses facial detection and people-counting cameras to scope out your local bar to tell you "what is going on." What is the male-to-female ratio at your favorite club? Who is buying drinks? SceneTap cameras see it all and provide the data to users and bar owners. Seem a little creepy? Maybe not as much as you might think.
