ReadWriteWeb

If you're looking to add change tracking to a Web app, you might want to take a look at Ice from the CMS group at the New York Times.

Ice (or Ice.js) is an implementation of change tracking for any content-editable element on the Web. It can track changes (inserts, deletes) from multiple users, and has some optional plugins for converting "smart" quotes and creating em-dashes.

Imagine getting points in an online game each time you drink more water, floss your teeth or take a step toward some other healthy lifestyle goal. That's the promise of Green Goose, a company that uses tiny sensors and accelerometers on stickers or credit cards to track everyday behavior and record it online.

The company demonstrated today how its technology, which is currently in pre-production in China, lets a user put a sticker containing a tiny sensor and a year's worth of battery power, on the handle of a toothbrush, for example. The motion of the toothbrush sends a message to the Green Goose base station which then publishes a record of the activity online. A wide range of everyday activities can be tracked and the whole system was a big crowd pleaser at Jason Calacanis's Launch conference. Two members of the panel of investor judges put $100,000 into the startup on the spot while the company was still on stage. A third, Bill Warner, had already invested. "It's amazing and there's so much more you haven't even heard," he said about the company.

Mike Beltzner, the man in charge of the development of open source browser Firefox, announced this morning that he'll be leaving Mozilla once the 4.0 version of the popular browser launches and he's helped transition the team towards developing 5.0 without him. You'll never guess where he's going next. Apparently he's joining a company called Dug Software, a 70 employee provider of geological exploration software.

Beltzner came from IBM Canada almost 6 years ago. At Mozilla, he helped build one of the most important pieces of software in the world. Firefox broke Internet Explorer's stranglehold over the browser market and forced Microsoft to support universal internet technical standards. Firefox has an estimated 30% world wide market share among browser users, a remarkable achievement.

Jeremie Miller is a revered figure among developers, best known for building XMPP, the open source protocol that powers most of the Instant Messaging apps in the world. Now Miller has raised funds and is building a team that will develop software aimed directly at the future of the web.

Called The Locker Project, the open source service will capture what's called exhaust data from users' activities around the web and offline via sensors, put it firmly in their own possesion and then allow them to run local apps that are built to leverage their data. Miller's three person company, Singly, will provide the corporate support that the open source project needs in order to remain viable. I'm very excited about this project; Miller's backgrounds, humble brilliance and vision for app-enabling my personal data history is very exciting to me.

Everyblock, the data-driven hyper-local news website covering 16 US cities, announced today that it has added continuing education listings from the website TeachStreet to its newsfeed. Now you can learn when there are new cooking or violin classes in your neighborhood, side-by-side with news of police activity, restaurant reviews and news stories about your area.

I love Everyblock and haven't paid enough attention to TeachStreet before, it looks good too. MSNBC owns Everyblock and it's an invaluable service, but each time a new data source gets added, a fundamental flaw in the user interface rears its head again. None the less, this is an exciting dataset to see added to the hyper-local news.

The news that Google may be considering its own mobile payments service shouldn't actually be news to anyone who's been following the Internet search giant's latest moves - it's just a matter of connecting the dots. But the insider reports over on Bloomberg Businessweek today confirm that the thought has at least crossed Google's mind.

According to "two people familiar with the plans," Google may launch the new mobile payments service, which allows consumers to tap or wave their mobile phones at a cash register to pay for their purchases, sometime this year.

Well, surprise, surprise.

News.me, the stealthy social news project being developed by Betaworks in conjunction with The New York Times, has just started accepting invite requests. As part of the partnership deal, The New York Times took an equity stake in Bit.ly, a URL-shortening service from Betaworks, the technology incubator behind several notable social Web companies, including Twitter dashboard TweetDeck, real-time analytics service Chartbeat and audience engagement platform SocialFlow.

How exactly Bit.ly will be used in the upcoming News.me service is still unknown, but we do know that it will debut in the form of an app for the Apple iPad. And now you can request to be first on the list to try it out.

Heidi Allstop was a Junior year psychology student when she launched her online business Student Spill, a website where students can anonymously submit descriptions of their personal problems and receive responses within 24 hours from trained student supporters.

Now available on 10 campuses around the United States, Student Spill provides a simple method of offering support and of gathering information about what kinds of support a school's students really need. "Usually universities are wrong in their assumptions," Allstop says. "They have no way to get insight into what is bothering students, to know what students are crying on their pillows about." Spill-using schools can leverage the data the service provides for student retention, risk mitigation, suicide prevention and to develop recommendations for services they should consider. It's an excellent example of value created through analysis of aggregate social app user data.

The man believed to have been imprisoned longer than anyone else in the world for the contents of a blog, Egyptian Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, has been released after four years and 10 days of detention, his supporters have announced on their blog.

Suleiman, who blogged under the name Kareem Amer, was sentenced in 2006 to four years of jail for insulting religion and the leadership of Egypt on his blog. He was critical of, among other things, Egypt's treatment of women and of its Coptic Christian minority. Supporters report that during those four years, Amer was tortured, beaten, attacked by other prisoners, disowned by his family and had his books, letters and personal effects taken away. His case is of international interest not just because of his humanity, but because of the political conflict between authoritarian states and a new world of freely self-published bloggers who would challenge them with new Web technology.

Andy Baio is a man who gets things done, though his accomplishments are often quite unusual. Now he's taking that attitude straight to the nation's capital.

In 2008, Baio posted online, and refused to take down, the grainy video tape of Sarah Palin's participation in the 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant. He's received cease and desist letters from lawyers representing Disney, the Beatles and Bill Cosby. He made millions co-founding the early social calendaring website Upcoming.org and selling it to Yahoo. He interviewed the mysterious Italian factory worker whose video shattered all YouTube records without explanation, before its author deleted it. He commissioned an 8-bit cover of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue on the 50th anniversary of the album's release (Kind of Bloop). What else was left for Baio to do? Go to Washington, of course.