The U.S. House of Representatives has announced a public hearing to explore making publicly-funded research open to the public. Legislators in both the House and the Senate have already introduced bills calling for this. If they pass, the implications could be significant and might result in an economic jump.

Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act into the House on April 15. An identical Senate version of the bill was introduced by Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). Bi-partisan support for public access to federal research has been growing.

The bills propose specifically that the 11 federal agencies with research budgets of $100 million or greater make the published results of their research free to the public.

Knowledge is (Economic) Power

If these 11 massive agencies suddenly were required to make their research public (with a governmental value of suddenly), it could possibly act as a shot of adrenaline to the private sector. Who knows what products and services might be launched, or improved, on the back of this research? It could result in a significant leap forward for an economy that seems at times terminally stalled.

Presumably, the government already has the research that they've paid for. (Presumably.) But a public in possession of that information might make for a much less patient public. If a government agency, for instance, knows something that could improve its services, but allows bureaucratic foot-dragging or inter-agency squabbling to slow its implementation, that agency would find itself in, let's say, a compromised position politically when an informed public realized what it was doing.

Having been in a position to listen and talk to career bureaucrats facing change, we are not as sanguine as we could be at the news. It would be surprising indeed if half the people responsible for sharing this information with the pubic didn't go limp at the first approach of torch-wielding villagers at their castle door. To work, this bill will require that the chief executive make it known in no uncertain terms that any agency head with a hitch in his gitalong will shortly thereafter find himself on the street in the company of all his closest advisors.

Government agencies around the world are notorious for delivering less-than-optimal website experiences. This is often due to a government agency, rather than citizens, driving website requirements.

There are other factors, such as legislation, that demand transparency and leads to the publishing of multiple documents that the majority of people could care less about. As a result, government domains have bloated to unbelievable sizes, and some governments such as those in the U.K. and New Zealand have adopted consolidation policies.

Based on this example, we have to admit we were expecting that governments would simply port their same, less-than-optimal website experiences to the mobile Web. However, we were able to uncover a few intriguing mobile government apps that are, to our delight, useful and usable!

Reporting an Issue to Government

GoRequest is a location-aware iPhone application that allows a person to log an issue with their local government. The app is free and submits issues directly into the issue tracking system. The user experience is top notch - simple and task oriented. Unfortunately, it is only available in 22 cities so far in the U.S.

For the lucky ones that live in these enlightened locations, you are able to select from a list of potential issues as broad as Road Kill (Dead Animal on Roadway), Graffiti, Accidental Spills, Illegal Dumping, Abandoned Vehicles, Police Non-Emergency, Ice Removal From Gutters and more. Once you have selected the issue, you can enter a description and take a photo of, for example, the dead animal. The application detects your location automatically.

America's Most Wanted

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched, of course, an app for its Most Wanted list. The app lists the Top Ten Most Wanted, the Most Wanted Terrorists as well as a list of top missing kids.

If you have information about one of the Most Wanted, you can submit a tip to the FBI. The app also provides links to FBI Tweets and its YouTube and Facebook pages. Unfortunately there is no sharing functionality incorporated into the app. The application was built by NIC, which is a provider of outsourced eGovernment portals.

Government Data On Steroids

NYC Way is a great example of application developers taking all the open government data they can find and turning it into something useful - although we question the usability. NYC Way was pointed out to us by Adam Greenfield on his recent visit to Wellington.

The best way to describe this app is that it's an application portal to 32 useful applications that offer New York City-specific location-based services. You can use it to locate the nearest free Wi-Fi, coffee shop or restroom, report an issue to city officials, or learn safety tips. Although the user experience as a portal is something to be desired, the functionality and helpful data available is truly mind boggling - a Swiss Army knife for finding your way around New York City. This app portal has benefits for locals and tourists alike.

The Saving Grace?

There is still the risk that government agencies will approach mobile much like they have approached the Web. Fortunately, the constraints - such as cost of development, screen size, functionality and file size - that are inherent in developing for the iPhone and other smartphones may be the saving grace that forces agencies to think twice about users' real needs.

You can read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of the iPhone here, and the mobile Web here. And don't forget you can download the RWW iPhone application here.

Do you have a favorite government app on your smartphone? Are small, regional agencies better at creating user-friendly apps, or do federal agencies do it best? Let us know in the comments!

Building photo credit: Ivan Petrov

SaaS offerings made available will be government-approved services like email, productivity apps, document management and business process management software. Those services are intended for use by other government agencies. Even more exciting may be the application platform that's part of the plan.

The prospect of government agencies using a government cloud platform to build and deploy web based applications like the private sector has used services like Amazon's cloud computing is exciting. By lowering overhead and easing application management, a government cloud could yield a wave of application innovation across agencies. That's the theory at least.

If government is to become the next hot application development sector, it will have to compete with a private tech sector that's already deep into this paradigm and offers developers the possibility of turning cheap web apps into huge riches through acquisition by larger firms.

Also worth watching will be any integration between the government's new cloud platform, data created by the apps deployed on it and the federal site data.gov, where an ostensible cross-section of public data is cataloged for subsequent use as development fodder. Creation of a mutually beneficial development ecosystem seems ambitious and promising, but could be far-fetched. Apps on a cloud, contributing data to the data storehouse, so that other developers could pull that data back onto the platform to create new apps and feed new data back into data.gov listings? Sounds too good to be true.

For a more in-depth look at the government's cloud agenda, see today's write-up by Jason Miller at Federal News Radio.

Berners-Lee, a man whose invention of the web has had a greater impact on humanity than all but a handful of inventions over the last 50 years, is now one of the world's leading advocates not just for government data on the web but for free public access to raw bulk data that anyone can process for analysis and mashups. While the new Obama administration has made big promises about open government, it may now quickly find itself falling behind the UK.

The Obama administration has had a mixed record so far in terms of opening up government data. The launch of Data.gov was widely celebrated, though we found it too limited an offering. The Democrat controlled Senate finally opened up its voting record in machine readable XML format last month (that's great), but the nominee for the first federal CTO position faced zero questions about data transparency in his congressional hearings (that's bad). The White House said yesterday that it has clearly heard the public call for more open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces filled with open data) - so things certainly won't be standing still on this side of the Atlantic either. US CIO, Vivek Kundra, wrote an excellent blog post on the challenges and opportunities of open government data on Monday.

Having Berners-Lee on the team should be a huge boost for the UK government efforts, though. Most recently Berners-Lee made headlines for (trying to) lead the TED conference of global thought leaders in a chant of "Raw Data Now!" That conference was the same one where Bill Gates opened a jar full of mosquitoes into the crowd like a mad man, so that the elite group could get some feeling of the fear associated with malaria like so many millions of other people feel.

In other words, Berners-Lee is a hard core advocate of open data. It's hard to imagine a more high profile move for a government to take than to announce that he's coming on board to help the effort.

New federal CIO Vivek Kundra is in charge of the site, which will act as a central repository for government data, including XML, CSV, KML files and more. At launch a mere 47 data sets are included and they appear to lean towards the least controversial matters. None the less, it's exciting to see the effort happening. Hopefully some awesome mashups are on the way!

There are many, many sets of data available from the federal government but the Data.gov site says it was selective about quality and standards when choosing what to include. It's hard not to compare other sources of government data and feel disappointed, though. The privately built USGovXML.com contains far more data and was built by one independent developer over four months. That site lists ten Department of Interior XML feeds, for example, none of which appear on Data.gov. You can find a feed of food recalls there, but not on Data.gov.

Twenty six government agencies are represented in the catalog, though not all are offering raw data. The FBI is listed as a source but only offers a widget that can be placed on websites, not access to raw data.

New York Times data wonk Derek Willis pointed out that the initial offerings are non-controversial. "Most are from USGS, EPA and National Weather Service," Willis observed this morning. "No [data from] Department of Homeland Security, State or DOJ."

Likewise, a search of the data sets for keywords like food, prisons and drug all bring up zero results. Those are examples of particularly important topics because they are matters of justice and injustice - shedding light into dark corners where injustices are being perpetrated is one of the most important things that government data and the subsequent computer assisted reporting can accomplish.

There are no RSS feeds available for the whole catalog or search queries, something that would be very useful for tracking additions of new data. We expect that will change soon.

People will no doubt argue that some data is much better than no data, and while that's true: for a new federal office to engage with such an important topic with the weight of history and the whole administration behind it and then come up with something this limited is disappointing.

API and mashup watcher John Musser of ProgrammableWeb was more generous than we are about the initial offerings:

"They're off to an excellent start. It's a big step in accessibility of government data. As we've been seeing with other v1 gov-data efforts, like the recently available data on senate votes: step one is give people structured data like xml, step two (or later) is to make it available via an API. They have a healthy amount of metadata. The number of data sets is not that large, but of course it's just the beginning."

It is just the beginning and we applaud the launch of this effort. We hope that the initial launch will pale in comparison to the long term value of this collection of data.

The folks at Sunlight Labs, Google, O'Reilly/TechWeb and Craig Newmark just launched a new part of their Apps for America contest to build the best mashups and data visualization tools for data in the new Data.gov site. Check it out!

See also the newly launched Whitehouse.gov/open - launches today just keep popping up.

The motion that was submitted to the city council points out several reasons why endorsing open data, open standards and open source policies is an good idea and city councillors has resolved to:

* Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;
* Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;
* Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large
* Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;
* Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;
* License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction.

Other cities like Washington, DC, Portland and Toronto have expressed interest in adopting open policies for their information and data, but so far Vancouver is the only one to explicitly spell it out in an agenda motion.

Problems with data transferring, usability and licensing issues have kept many municipalities from adopting such policies. Hopefully Vancouver can overcome these issues and become the world's first truly "open" city.

Angel investor Dale Okuno gave founders Kurt Daradics and Jason Kiesel an undisclosed sum in April 2009, and the company has already reported marked success with their first client, faith-based media conglomerate Salem Communications.

"FreedomSpeaks' commercial-use API allows organizations to white-label our service," said Daradics. "Talkpac.com is an example. They've sent over 100,000 letters this month in their radio tax campaign."

There are a few competitors in the space, such as CapitalAdvantage, which offers online advocacy to representatives and media, and Convio, a comprehensive advocacy system. From the user side, FreedomSpeaks differentiates itself by offering more access to representatives on the micro level.

"The main point that sets us apart is the breadth of our data set," said Keisel. "We go down to the county and city level. In addition, they do have a SaaS thing they offer. If I'm signed up with Convio and I put a link on my site to send a letter, the link goes to Convio. We allow an embed, which makes the whole process smoother for users and consolidates traffic for clients."

"We're also set up to integrate with social media," Keisel continued. "We currently have integration with Twitter and are working with Facebook, MySpace, and the other social networks. Complete integration will follow in the coming months."

Money and politics combine to form an issue no less confounding and controversial than that of monetization and startups.

Although user accounts are free, the site charges politicians a monthly fee to maintain a custom profile. Fees run along a sliding scale that ranges from $1,000 per month for federal politicians to $100 per month for city representatives. The site also uses display ads as a revenue stream and sells non-identifying demographic data to news organizations, research firms, and marketing agencies.

The quick way to submit a question is to use the widget you can find here. But there are plenty of other resources available if you are interested in learning more about the Summit of the Americas, starting with the America.gov Townhall page or the Howcast Townhall page. The America.gov site in this case links to the Howcast site, which pulls together all the links, how-to videos, and forum posts about this summit, with additional media on their branded YouTube page. The videos and other US State Department media are located on their own YouTube page, and finally there is not one but two professional sites covering Summit of the Americas activities in general.

We have covered how Obama's administration has harnessed YouTube in the past, and it looks like they are taking advantage of that channel again, linking to the Howcast Townhall site directly from the official White House blog. It definitely appears as if they are sincere about leveraging the technological infrastructure that is out there in order to drive engagement for events like these. With any luck, that is what is going to happen, as the issues discussed may lead to lasting decisions about how the democratic nations of the Americas combine to combat these global issues.

According to stories on Nextgov and Federal Computer Week, the GSA had a number of other legal concerns about the standard terms and conditions of these services, including problems with indemnification clauses, liability limits, and endorsements, which led it to enter negotiations with these services. Also, a lot of the standard agreements call for dispute resolutions by state courts, while for government agencies, federal law has to apply.

It is important to note that these new agreements only cover the free services offered by these companies. The GSA is also looking into expanding these agreements to a wider range of social media services.

A number of federal agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Library of Congress already use services like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. To do so, however, these agencies either needed special waivers, or they negotiated terms directly with these services. Some of these initiatives have been very successful. Pictures from the Library of Congress, for example, have been viewed over 15 million times.

Library of Congress on iTunes

In addition, the Library of Congress today announced that it will begin to share more of its content on YouTube and, as podcasts, through Apple's iTunes. This initiative will launch in the next few weeks.

Engaging the Public

We are glad to see that the GSA has now removed some of the major stumbling blocks that stopped a large number of government agencies from using social media sites. Now we just hope that these agencies will also use these services to actually engage with citizens.

Once registered on the site Open for Questions, it looks like you can search for questions, vote on questions that are already listed, and submit your own. As it stands right now, the trend definitely seems to point to more voting for existing questions over new questions being asked. At the top of each topic area there is a new (random?) question along with the highest-voted questions in descending order.

The site also keeps a tally of the number of questions and votes that you cast. You can go back and revisit those with links provided on the left if you want to change your vote or just re-visit the questions you voted for. Finally, it appears that each submitter is a hyperlink, so if you see a question that is particularly challenging, you can click on the submitter's name and see if they have any other questions in other topic areas.

You only have a couple of days to get your questions and votes in, so hurry on over to Open for Questions and get yourself registered. You may even hear your question being read by President Obama next Thursday!

Update: Commenter Baratunde let us know the software driving the site is called Google Moderator. Taking a look at his earlier blog post on the transition; the software does look remarkably similar. Thanks, Baratunde!]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/holy_cow_the_white_house_has_a_digg_clone.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/holy_cow_the_white_house_has_a_digg_clone.php News Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:58:56 -0800 Phil Glockner Yesterday on the O'Reilly Radar blog, House Representative Mike Honda (D-San Jose), called out for suggestions and guidance for ways to better utilize technology to get the public involved with U.S. government.

His post, entitled Request for ideas: Crowdsourcing the Evolution of Congressional Websites opened with this plea:

How can Congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government? Instead of viewing the public as a customer for services, I believe that we should empower citizens to become our partners in shaping the future of our nation.

Rep. Honda cites several ongoing efforts in this regard, such as Tim O'Reilly's original request (which made a headline on Slashdot) as well as his prior legislation on allowing more access to legislative databases. He sees this as steps toward getting to the concept of government 2.0, where technology plays a greater role in allowing collaboration between congress members and the public.

This is an open call for your thoughts and suggestions on the legislative databases that should be made accessible, as well as how that data could be used to drive innovative approaches on policy and 'shape the future of the nation'. There are a number of ways you can participate in this open call: you can submit ideas via this surveymonkey link, use the #honda2.0 and #opengov hashtags in your tweets, and, of course, leave a comment on the original article.

We did a quick search of tweets related to Rep. Honda's post and found a couple: One pointed to the Sunlight Foundation, co-founded by Ellen Miller (@ellnmllr), a site dedicated to open government accountability, and the League of Technical Voters, a site created and maintained by Silona Bonewald (@silona), which is geared toward technical efforts to improve lawmaking and governmental processes. We hope that with congress members such as Rep. Honda and others coming on board, this effort can really pick up steam and end up creating a more transparent and responsive government in the future.

Uncle Sam image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Rep. Honda image courtesy of O'Reilly Radar's Mike Honda profile page.

From the outside, everything looks splendid. But the truth on the ground is that Government 2.0 is gummed up like molasses on a steamy afternoon.

Problems Bubbling Up

Relatively archaic government policies, rules, and customs that impede progress are being covered by the Washington Post and reach the highest levels of government. To this day, Department of Defense workers, even some of whom are in charge of new media output, cannot access YouTube. At one government agency, public affairs employees use government-purchased Macs and wireless cards to circumvent social networks being classified as "dating sites" -- by other employees! And in extraordinary cases, contractors hired by agencies to carry out the work of Government 2.0 are banned from doing the very job they were hired to do.

Meanwhile, amid rapid iPhone sales and the permeation of mobile technology throughout society, senior counter-intelligence officials publicly discuss security risks they face while traveling. Hackers have a new priority target: the President's PDA.

All this is happening while many of Government 2.0's supposedly biggest fans -- the Web 2.0 enthusiasts -- behave like the biggest critics of government efforts, particularly regarding citizen participation in policy making. The rejuvenated WhiteHouse.gov website, the newly launched Recovery.gov site for making the economic recovery more transparent, and the preferential use of YouTube to share information with the public have all been criticized, often in near real-time. Adding to the confusion, social media news reports about such things as the White House's use of Twitter have turned out to be unfounded because of spoofed accounts and guesswork rather than source checking. And salivating hackers at events like DEFCON discuss the many vulnerabilities of social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, which are nearly ubiquitous among young professionals.

The Midlife Crisis

Government 2.0 has reached its midlife crisis. Despite some leadership from influential individuals on using social software in government, there is still in many cases a disconnect between authorities issuing directives and ground troops carrying them out. In some corridors of Washington, this impervious middle section of government is jokingly referred to as "the clay layer," the layer through which no light shall pass. Resistant to change and adhering strictly to doctrine even when nonsensical, people in the clay layer can halt progress. Despite their intentions and being in a strategic position, they often stop the progress being called for.

This midlife crisis was pointed out by one of Government 2.0's most outspoken evangelists, Chris Rasmussen, of the U.S. intelligence community, at a well-attended event held recently in the Washington area. As covered in a widely read trade press article, Rasmussen lamented the impossibly high standards that social tools are held to, even within government firewalls. Furthermore, many tools, such as Intellipedia, are used as supplements to (rather than substitutes for) legacy systems. As Clay Shirky once quipped, this is like putting an engine on a rowboat to make the oars go faster.

At this crossroads, "creative destruction" will require hard decisions about shutting down certain systems and processes and focusing employees on new ones. Employees at the grassroots level need to be given true executive empowerment, rather than dictatorial directives. But how to achieve this?

A Way Forward

In about a month, thought leaders from Washington and beyond will convene for the Government 2.0 Camp, an "unconference" designed to hash out these issues. The event is expected to build on previous ones, and its output will surely guide future agendas. Even now, organizers and other thought leaders are debating how Government 2.0 Camp can and should be used, and they are doing it in the open. On the agenda? How social software affects information security; social technology as part of everyday work versus fad products to be procured; and how to get citizens more involved in solving government problems.

An influential military thinker, Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, once said: "You have a choice: you can either create your own future, or you can become the victim of a future that someone else creates for you. By seizing the transformation opportunities, you are seizing the opportunity to create your own future." How will Government 2.0 advocates create their own future?

Kundra became "web 2.0 famous" last Fall when as D.C. CTO he switched 38,000 District of Colombia government employees off of Microsoft Office and onto Google apps instead. What kinds of crazy moves could he make as the government's CIO? We can only imagine.

We noticed that Kundra's bio page on the D.C. government's website was removed this week but remains in Google's cache.

See Jobwire, our site covering new hires in tech, for our extended coverage of the likely forthcoming announcement.

This morning the highly effective nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation launched a new microsite called Our Open Government List, where anyone can make suggestions for government transparency and all of us can vote on our favorite ideas. It's like Digg for steps to open up public data.

Anyone can submit ideas or vote on those already submitted; no account creation is required. Click on the titles and you can post and read comments on the idea.

What's in the lead so far? The number one vote getter this morning has been to create a "Digital deposit of government information to libraries." APIs and bulk data access, and metadata standards are also getting a lot of votes. Voting has just begun, though, so now is a great time to jump over to the site and have your voice be heard.

The Sunlight Foundation is a very respected organization and we're sure that the results of the voting will be seen by the Obama administration. The group is co-producing a sold-out Barcamp called TransparencyCamp in D.C. this weekend, and we hope they'll see some key Obama staffers there. So head on over to Our Open Government List and put in your two cents!

If you like ideas like this, you should check out the UK's Show Us a Better Way, a mashup contest to fund developer use of public data.

We don't know who the country's first CTO will be yet (there are rumors) but whoever it is should have plenty of great publicly generated ideas to consider as soon as he or she takes office. Given the delay in the appointment, we imagine the CTO will appreciate the Sunlight Foundation's help in meeting the 120 day deadline for transparency suggestions.

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Web Trends

How a Facebook "Sentiment Engine" Could Be Huge

Rumors of a Facebook "sentiment engine" analyzing aggregate user data, or a new form of the company's Engagement Ads that offer rapid polling to advertisers, have been flying around the web since the start of this week's World Economic Forum in Switzerland. The reality behind these rumors seems to be much less exciting (or creepy, depending on your perspective) than many people claimed - but we'd like to entertain some thoughts on just what Facebook could do with such a system. Remember when Google published the most popular searches being performed during the Presidential debates? That represented a sea change in real-time awareness of what people care about. A Facebook "sentiment engine" has that same kind of potential, and we'd love to see some of this data be put to use in service of such innovation.

Fake Social Network Profiles: a New Form of Identity Theft in 2009

Forget credit cards and social security numbers, a new lot of identity thieves will soon come after your web profiles, or says security firm Aladdin in their Annual Threat Report. According to the firm, if you don't own and control your online persona, it's relatively easy for a criminal to aggregate the known public information about you in order to create a fake one.

Government 2.0: The Rise of the Goverati

Everyone knows how well Barack Obama's presidential campaign made use of new media to raise money and market the candidate. We also know how big a role social technology played during inauguration week, from handheld flip HD footage appearing on network TV to people reporting on Twitter about what they liked and disliked. After President Obama took office, spirited debates proliferated in the blogosphere about whether or not whitehouse.gov is Web 2.0-enabled and what the role of President Obama's CTO might be. But one striking trend has largely flown under the national radar: the rise of the goverati.

RWW Live: Recommendation Engines

ReadWriteWeb has been running a special series on recommendation engines and this episode of RWW Live is part of that. The show featured 3 very knowledgeable guests: Jesús Pindado, Strands Vice President, Business Solutions; Yosi Glick, Jinni CEO & Co-Founder; and David Selinger, richrelevance CEO & Co-Founder, who previously led the R&D arm of Amazon's Data Mining and Personalization team. Check out the recording below:

Download MP3

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Jobwire

Dan Zarrella Hired By HubSpot

New media marketing hacker Dan Zarrella has joined Boston's fast ascending firm HubSpot, the company told us this week. Zarrella calls himself "The Social Media and Viral Marketing Scientist" and is one of the few people on the web with the credentials to back up such a bold claim.

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Web Products

Google Latitude: Ready to Tell Your Friends (and Google) Where You Are?

Where you are is as important as what you're looking for. That's why more and more services are looking to location as a filter for providing relevant information when and where we need it. So it only makes sense that Google - a company known for its ability to deliver relevant information - get into the location-aware app game. This week, they jumped in with both feet by releasing Google Latitude, a way to keep track of your friends' current whereabouts - and let Google have a view into your nomadic or sedentary habits.

Did Google Just Kill All the Other Mobile Social Networks?

Google Latitude will have major ramifications to the current mobile social networking market, which was just beginning to get off the ground. The question we must ask now is this: did Google just validate mobile social networking ...or did they just kill all the competition?

Baynote: Does Focusing on Real-Time Behavior Trump Amazon's Technology?

Baynote is one of a number of recommendation technology providers which licenses its product to commercial companies. As we'll see in this article, Baynote places particular emphasis on real-time user behaviors - which Baynote claims goes beyond Amazon's "first generation" approach to recommendations. One thing that we've discovered so far in our series on recommendation engines is that every company in this market - including those which create their own platform, like Amazon and Netflix - have differing approaches and ideas on what makes a good recommendation engine. We spoke to Baynote founder and CEO Jack Jia, to find out why he believes their approach trumps Amazon.

Soon, Majority of Web Users Will No Longer Use IE

It might take a few more years, or it might happen suddenly, but trends appear to indicate that the time when Internet Explorer is used by the majority of people on the web will soon come to an end. New numbers from analytics firm Net Applications put IE at a mere 67.5%, having dropped more than 7% last year. The bulk of that loss is coming from users of IE 6, an 8 year old browser that many users now appear to be replacing with Firefox, Safari or Chrome, instead of updated versions of IE.

Google Earth Now Maps the Ocean Floor and Mars in 3D

This week Google released a major new update to Google Earth that now includes the rumored maps of the ocean floor. Google unveiled this update at an event at the California Academy of Sciences. After installing the latest version of Google Earth, you will be able to explore the ocean floor in the same way you browse the Earth's surface. Besides mapping the oceans, however, Google has also added three more interesting new features to Google Earth: easier access to historical imagery, the ability to record and narrate fly-through tours with the new 'touring' feature, and a 3D map of Mars.

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Enterprise

How Businesses Can Use P2P

Almost every description of P2P in the context of business infrastructure starts something like this: "P2P is notorious for..." This comes from many years of people associating P2P with illegal downloading, to the point that the terms are now almost synonymous. Such an association is inherently unfair, however, because no one equates TCP/IP and crime, despite the fact that TCP/IP is the protocol of choice for many cyber-criminals. Rather than resorting to out-dated and inaccurate definitions, let's start from scratch and consider the following: what is P2P, really? What is it good for? How can we use it to save and earn money?

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

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That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.