Microsoft is joining the coupon craze popularized by sites like Groupon and LivingSocial with the launch of a new service called Bing Deals. The program is not an in-house creation built from scratch, but is being made available through a partnership between Microsoft and The Dealmap, a deal-tracking service that aggregates local deals, coupons and discounts from over 300 different sources and daily deal websites.
Bing Deals will work both on the desktop and mobile (via m.bing.com) and is also heavily integrated into Bing's search engine itself.
Last Tuesday New Zealand time, the city of Christchurch suffered a destructive and deadly earthquake. Measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale, the quake wreaked havoc because it was shallow and close to the city center. It was the second major earthquake to have hit Christchurch in 5 months, after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake on September 4, 2010. While the loss of life wasn't nearly as bad as the Haiti earthquake of January 2010, Christchurch has been devastated and its people are emotionally scarred. They've endured months of aftershocks since September, then the cruel shock of another Big One.
It's easy to feel helpless after such a devastating natural disaster, but social media tools have been usefully deployed over the past week. Last Tuesday we looked at how the Web mobilized straight after the quake. In this post we look at 3 specific ways that social media has stepped up to the plate, since then.
Here at ReadWriteWeb we are, I think you can safely say, obsessed with the upcoming robot-man slugfest on Jeopardy. We've covered it three separate times already.
Tonight is the first of three nights where the IBM supercomputer Watson fights it out against Jeopardy's two biggest champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. So why are we so into it?
Ericsson, the world's largest mobile telecom equipment maker, has today launched its own mobile banking system called Ericsson Money Services. This business is designed to make mobile money transactions both easier and more available to those without access to traditional brick-and-mortar banks. Initially, it plans to rival established money transfer services like Western Union and MoneyGram, but over the next few years, it may end up competing with credit cards as well.
AmazonTote, Amazon's free home-based delivery service, may soon expand into new markets according to a new report from the Financial Times. Although the report was delivered without citing any sources, it seems more than plausible, given Amazon's desire to tap into the groceries market now that it's mastered the art of selling of non-pershible, packaged goods.
The online retailer has been testing AmazonTote in its hometown of Seattle, and the program's website text, according to The Wall St. Journal, originally noted that the program was "expanding soon." That text is now nowhere to be found on AmazonTote's homepage, which makes this report all the more interesting now.
In early April of 1990, I was a contestant on Jeopardy. If you were watching back then, I was the "Supercomputer Programmer from Aloha, Oregon" who won three games and $38,000 and then lost - badly - in the fourth. So there's quite a bit of personal history tied in with the news last week that a supercomputer from IBM, called Watson, had beaten two all-time Jeopardy! winners, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, in a practice round for the three-day charity competition on Feb. 14, 15 and 16.
A few weeks ago, I predicted that Jennings would win, Watson would place a close second and Rutter would place third in the overall contest, and I'm sticking with that prediction in spite of Watson's first-place finish in the practice round last week. When I put on my handicapper's hat, the scores of the practice round - $4,400 for Watson, $3,400 for Jennings and $1,200 for Rutter - are consistent with my assessment that Jennings and Watson are evenly matched and that Rutter is unlikely to win.
Broadcastr, a Brooklyn-based mobile start-up, has struck an agreement with National September 11 Memorial and Museum to make 50 oral histories of first-responders available via smart phone and online.
When Broadcastr leaves beta In February, it will welcome the collection of additional cell-recorded oral histories it is hoping users will gather. Interviewers can also geolocate the interview.
Remember those pieces of paper with handwritten words on them that you used to post to people? "Letters" I think they're called. To be honest though, I wouldn't have a clue, as I've neither sent nor received one in my 16-year-old life.
I'm sure the majority of readers here have at least sent a personal letter to friends or family in their lifetime. However, the same cannot be said about my generation. I've sent tens of thousands of emails, Facebook messages, SMSs, and IMs - but never a single letter.
More than solely being a form of communication, letters are a very effective historical item. Think about letters sent home to families from the soldiers on the battlefields of both world wars. Letters were kept because they have a perceived value - it took time and effort to send a letter, and therefore people viewed them as much more valuable.
A three-month investigation published Saturday by The New York Times indicates the Stuxnet virus that did damage to Iran's nuclear program may well have been a joint project between the American and Israeli government.
The "Dimona complex" located in the southern Negev desert in Israel, where that country is said to have centered its nuclear weapons program, may for two years have been the proving ground for Stuxnet as well.
The Computer History Museum debuted its updated version last week. Improvements ran to $19 million and included a permanent space for the institution in Mountain View, California. It also included a push to upload the rest of the museum's collections and exhibits online by March of this year.
The museum focuses on the development of not just computers but computing - including languages, theory and philosophy of computing. The museum has fellows, capturing the most elusive and important material in computing and its ultimate inspiration, the human mind. Fellows include Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf, Grace Murray Hopper, Steve Wozniak and Linus Torvalds.
