Until recently, iPhone location app designs were limited by the constraints of single-tasked OS capabilities: launch Foursquare and check-in, use Yelp find a nearby place of interest, open another app to update your status and tag it with location.
All of these scenarios require users to have a participatory role in publishing and sharing. This works well for some apps that require active engagement such as broadcasting your Twitter status and where you'll be later. But an entirely new class of compelling scenarios really shine when you use a technology called geofencing to leverage background location and push location updates up to public and private clouds.
Today at 3 PM PST (6 EST), Facebook will unveil its new official live video streaming channel, Facebook Live. To kick off the launch, actress America Ferrera will stop by Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, California and use Facebook Live to announce details of her new movie, "The Dry Land," a Sundance Film Festival entry.
Facebook says that, in addition to special celebrity-oriented videos like today's, the live video channel will also be used for official Facebook announcements, press events, live chats with Facebook engineers and live streaming of its developer conference, f8.
SPARQLZ is a stealth technology project aimed to provide a graphical user interface for everyday users to assemble, edit, share and mash-up modular, persistent, real-time searches across the web of Linked Data. It's a side project by an independent team within a large data corporation, with dreams of spinning their work off as a startup.
It's a pretty hot idea: it's like Yahoo Pipes, for Linked Data - but easier to use and already populated with big sets of valuable information to mashup and parse. Linked Data is a growing field of datasets that are categorized with standardized markup, tied together and easily cross referencable by machines. The US and UK governments, news organizations, music data bases, social networks and other organizations are participating in the official W3C Linked Data community. Now SPARQLZ aims to make all that data easy to construct future-facing search queries for.
Yesterday's elections in Kenya are a story of triumph. The country, which had a terribly violent election season in 2007 turned in a sleek, peaceful set of returns this time. The referendum on a new constitution for the country returned a 67% yes vote. Why? In part, due to the real-time Web and mobile technology.
"Yes team declares referendum victory saying it marks the birth of a new republic." That was how Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper's website reported... sorry, I mean live-blogged the returns.
Infochimps, the big data marketplace, is releasing two new API calls today, as well as several improvements to its current API offerings. The Infochimps APIs provide access to the company's Twitter and U.S. Census datasets, giving developers, researchers, and marketers the ability to take advantage of the company's "big data" without requiring the computing resources necessary to query it. "We do the data so other people can build awesome things," says Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer.
Want to turn your website into a storm of real-time user activity? Another way to do so has just arrived. The real-time web framework called Tornado, which Facebook open sourced last Fall, has just released version 1.0.
Tornado is a real-time web server built in Python that supports tens of thousands of continuous connections and thus the long-polling method of real-time data delivery. It is the core of FriendFeed, a technically innovative service built by two ex-Googlers and leaders in the real-time web community, which was acquired by Facebook in August, 2009. Built largely by the man who is now CTO of Facebook, Bret Taylor, this first version of Tornado was taken across the finish line by another heavy hitter: Ben Darnell of Thing Labs.
How do you get your users to interact with each other? That's a question Envolve, a new Facebook-like chat feature for websites, is trying to solve. While we have seen a number of similar services in the past, Envolve is one of the best website chat tools we have seen so far. While most sites now give users the ability to comment on blog posts or review products, website chats like Envolve offer a far more interactive experience by allowing users to chat with each other in real time.
It was just a year ago that Khris Loux - then CEO of JS-Kit - declared the "death of the comment" at the hand of websites like Twitter and Flickr, announcing his venture with Echo. Today, it looks like Loux has changed his tune as Echo is announcing its real-time recent comments widget, a simple add-on that brings real-time, dynamic content to static webpages.
We have to wonder, however, if everything should go real-time, or if some things should be kept on a delay.
Several days ago we wrote that Twitter's analytics team was about to launch a new project. Twitter VP of Communications Sean Garrett denied there was anything earth-shaking going on.
"I wish we were launching something worth 'all this whoop-la,' but this is an update to an existing analytics product that very few people see."
However, a post on an official Twitter blog seems to give the lie to that statement.
It's now a little over 6 months into 2010, so a good time to reflect on the highlights of the year so far. At the beginning of the year, we identified some key trends to track: (in alphabetical order) Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, Mobile, Real-Time Web, Structured Data.
Mobile and Real-Time Web have been particularly eventful in 2010, as you'll see below. Augmented Reality and Internet of Things are both early stage trends, but have continued to edge towards the mainstream this year. The movement towards Structured Data has made significant progress in 2010, primarily thanks to RDFa and the adoption of that Semantic Web format by Facebook, Google and other big companies.
