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2 More Weeks Until the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit – Register Today!

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:50:00 +0000

There are just two more weeks until the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 , so we invite you to register now . Be a part of high-value, intimate conversations with people working throughout the world of mobile, from garage developers to industry luminaries. The summit will take place May 7, 2010 , in Mountain View, California and will be an exploration of the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. We are looking forward to some amazing discussion and debate about mobile with participants like : Sponsor Deb Schultz of Altimeter group Patrick Chanezon, Don Dodge & Bob Meese of Google Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless Scott Raney and Tom Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures Adam Blum of Rhomobile Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Brent Simmons of Newsgator Technologies Patrick Burns of DASH7 Alliance As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the "unconference" format. Laura Fittion, founder of oneforty.com , had these thoughts about ReadWriteWeb's last summit: "There were a lot of investors there and it was a great dialogue between startups and investors. The unconference format was great because it got away from the bogus who-is in the real-time Web, and made it who-wants-to-be. You didn't have to be big and influential to get your ideas across - if it was a good idea then it got heard. It wasn't just Twitter, it was many things real time, defined pretty expansively." How Unconferences Work What's an unconference all about? Here's the idea: Convene an incredible group of people, frame the discussion, ask important questions, then guide participants in building an agenda for the day to maximize the value of the event and minimize hot air. Martin Källström, CEO of the real-time blog and feed tracking service Twingly brought his team over from Sweden for our last event. " Last year we happened across one of Kaliya Hamlin's unconference events," he told us. "We spent a couple of hours there and it was an amazing experience. The unconference format is an amazing way for things to happen; it gets everyone to lower their defenses. By opening peoples' minds to 'this is about whatever we want it to be about", they look at how they can create value. " Or, as Google's Brett Slatkin said when using the elite FooCamp events as a way to explain the unconference format: "Foo-style [unconferencing is] always way better than talks." As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin , who in our opinion is the best in the business at this style of event. We're using the same venue too, the beautiful Computer History Museum. Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth , so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you - the attendees - who ultimately set the agenda. You can begin adding your suggestions now. We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business . Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks: Geo-location services - what can you do using location as a platform ? Commerce & Marketing - as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel? Content, Publishing & Recommendations - the technologies and best practices. Mobile Social Networking - how to tap into communities on mobile devices. Internet of Things - the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data. Augmented Reality - the technology and business applications of AR. Native App vs. Browser Based - Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian. If you're a company in the mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages. And a big thank-you to our current event sponsors: CallFire , WorldMate , Alcatel-Lucent and Ipevo . The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our second event and we can't wait to discuss the opportunities in Mobile with you on May 7. You can find banners and logos to link to our event here , if you're so inclined. We hope to see you on May 7! Discuss

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2 More Weeks Until the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit - Register Today!

Sony Getting Rid of Floppies in Japan

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 02:00:00 +0000

2011 will be the year the floppy disc goes extinct. Sony, which sold 47 million of the 3.5-inch discs a year at its height, is phasing them out in Japan, one of the last markets. According to the Examiner , sales fell to only 8.5 million in 2009. Sony's sales of floppies worldwide ended in March of this year. Sales in Japan will end next year exactly a year later. Most worldwide manufacturers of floppies already put the kibosh on the little devils. I wonder what we'll do, a decade hence, when we unearth a mysteriously labeled floppy a decade? Maybe some things are better left as mysteries. Sponsor Other more popular, and capacious, media for information storage and transmission, including USB drives, DVDs and CDs and online, the demand for the discs has severely declined. Added to that the fact that few computer makers are even including disc drives, there's just no compelling reason to keep investing in them. Discuss

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Sony Getting Rid of Floppies in Japan

Lotus Notes Adds Tungle, Tripit and Gist

cgseo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:00:58 +0000

The cloud fundamentally changes the way enterprise applications function. Increasingly we are seeing traditional enterprise applications emerge in the cloud and partner with other Web-based services that have consumer appeal. In turn, we are seeing cloud-based consumer type services transform into enterprise grade offerings that provide customers with the same experience they get in their work as they do at home. Sponsor IBM's Lotus Note s is a clear example of how this symbiotic relationships is evolving. Yesterday, Tungle , the calendar application, released a Tungle.me app for Notes users. Tungle allows users to view other people's calendards and availability. With Tungle.me for Lotus Notes, you can set custom availability and synchronize it with your Lotus Notes calendar. Once meetings are scheduled, they are automatically updated in the background. The news follows a number of applications that have been introduced for Notes users. Those include services like TripIt and Gist . Tripit is a travel planning service. Gist allows Lotus Notes users to add dynamic profiles for people in an inbox, calendar and contacts list. Gist for Notes allows a users to have news, blogs, and tweets all in one place, find related people, emails, links, and attachments. It connects to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Discuss

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Lotus Notes Adds Tungle, Tripit and Gist

Beyond Street View: Google Photographers Begin Going Inside Businesses

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:33:58 +0000

Google is now accepting applications from businesses to be among the first places the company sends photographers to take panoramic photographs of the insides of buildings. Street view? You aint seen nothing yet. We reported in February on rumors that this project was in the works. The company says the photographs will be taken by professionals trained in low-lighting, will be as unobtrusive as possible, will initially be traditional in format and will be stitched together to form panoramas in the future. Sponsor In September we wrote about a company called Micello , billed as Google Maps for the Indoors, which is creating floor maps for places like shopping malls around the country. That would make a nice compliment to the new indoor photography feature. Startups like Micello are probably no more worried about Google stepping on their toes than they were before, but the new indoor photography launch does have at least one independent professional photographer worried. "Did Google just put low- to mid-range commercial photographers out of business?," social photography blogger Aaron Hockley tweeted this morning. If that was a consequence of Google's new feature, the world would be much poorer for it. Discuss

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Beyond Street View: Google Photographers Begin Going Inside Businesses

Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform Goes for the Endzone

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:26:00 +0000

Yesterday, Hitachi took the wraps off their Unified Computing Platform by introducing its open data center platform. It is aimed at consolidating the enterprise functions of networking, storage, and compute into an orchestration layer. Virtualization is still guiding the evolution of the data center, in this case all the way to the physical form. If you like consolidating your systems into big iron with lots blinking lights, Hitachi has you covered. And if you like open systems that connect to your existing infrastructure, Hitachi believes that playing nice with others is in the domain of unified computing. Sponsor If you're interested in this idea, check out the video summary of the platform . The company shares us a deeper view of this product line and the problems it is intending to solve. Many of the opportunities targeted address budgets, for example, how to remove operating expense through the orchestration of resources. Orchestration is the Huddle on Third Down Orchestration merges network, system, and storage resources as a single unit to be managed and reported in. An analogy might be found in football. In the huddle, the quarterback might call "the slant 6" and all eleven members of the team interpret that play and perform their respective jobs. Orchestration, as Hitachi describes it behaves in a similar way. It will respond to plays like "scale up for product launch". All the members of the team (disk, server, and network) go to their respective places and do the jobs needed. And, if needed, adjust appropriately to the conditions on the field. Hitachi leverages a partnership with Microsoft's System Management tools to closely align the plan and reality to bring more intelligence into the equation. The Computing Stack is the Team This product is also about abstracting systems through software. The company is betting that the coordination of the tasks of operating systems, storage and networking within a single framework provides a lot of value to the business. Hitachi takes the point of view that it is best to harmonize existing assets though open standards and looks at computing as a utility to be shared in the organization. Some of the features the product contains make it easier for organizations to achieve scale across functions and environments. It is designed to support this modern data center principles: Multi-tenancy Charge back for resources Distributed physical data centers Public cloud resources through open APIs Hitachi Unified Compute Platform looks like an impressive physical device. It brings together resources normally held in separate racks and hosts them in a single location and reduces a lot of the work of wiring up data centers. As we unfold another chapter in computing, Hitachi is leveraging its strength in consolidation to meet the trend of massive growth of data. At a glance, there are a lot of reasons why IT managers might choose unified computing products: cost, ease, agility. Looking out a few years, it is easy to imagine growth in this category overall. Is Hitachi well positioned for aggregation of data center resources with its Unified Computing products? How will EMC, Cisco, IBM, and HP fare in the movement towards unified computing? Photo credit: idovermani Discuss

Facebook’s Community Pages Unleashed Upon World

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:00:00 +0000

Today on the Facebook blog , Alex Li announced that Facebook would institute a number of new, or newish, features that will multiply the connectivity of the community. These features are Community Pages and Connected Profiles. "Community Pages are a new type of Facebook Page dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it." Unlike a Facebook page devoted to, or run by, a company, a Community Page might be devoted to an area or an activity that cannot be legitimately claimed by a limited group such as a corporation. Sponsor These pages are not community-created, not off the block anyway. Users can make their own . But Facebook has created Heaven only knows how many Pages will be cobbled together out of raw Wikipedia copy. Will Facebook users interested in Sichuan cooking or the subtle charms of Orlando, Florida, race forward to create independent copy and make the placeholders into something more than linkbait? Li-i-i-nks! Li-i-i-nks! The Connected Profiles certainly add to this proliferation of linking. Fields in your profile, like city, education and employer, as well as your interests, will now be automatically linked to their respective pages. "Instead of just boring text," said Li, "these connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you." Additionally, each time you login, Facebook will have a suggestion box filled to bursting with links for you. Frankly, the proliferation of links that result from these features makes it sound like nothing so much as a content farm like Answers.com or Demand Media. If you're publicity shy, you may need to avoid these Community Pages altogether. "Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you're connected to." The solution? Never connect to any you don't want the world to know about in the first place or disconnect from the ones you don't want. Given the automatism of the profile links, it looks like your default situation will be publicly linked and will have to de-link from each page you don't want, regardless of how clear you've been about your privacy. Discuss

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Facebook's Community Pages Unleashed Upon World

NPR API Delivered 1.1 Billion Stories in March

cgseo — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:08:51 +0000

National Public Radio first began offering its content via API nearly two years ago now and business, to say the least, has been booming. According to a blog post today by NPR Director of Application Development Daniel Jacobson, the API delivered more than 1.1 billion stories last month, and almost 5 billion since tracking began six months ago. Sponsor First, Jacobson shows the number of API requests made over the past six months, which he explains does not translate directly to the number of stories delivered. According to Jacobson, "The big jump in total API requests from July to August are due to the launch of many new products in July. Among them are the new NPR.org, the NPR.org Flash Player, the NPR News iPhone app, WBUR's new web site, and Minnesota Public Radio's new site." Next, we see the number of stories delivered, which turns out to be an equally impressive chart. NPR's API allows outside parties to have access to audio content dating back to 1995, consisting of more than 250,000 stories in more than 5,000 different aggregations. The results are returned in a number of formats, from RSS, MediaRSS, JSON and Atom to NPRML, a specialized format that accounts for 86% of content distribution. Jacobson notes, however, that an overwhelming majority of content delivered by NPR's API is being sent to affiliated sites and stations. While some media companies, such as News Corp, attempt to block their content from distribution , the NPR API seems to be making access to its content widespread. Jacobson includes a slideshow at the end of his post that shows just how many places and ways NPR content is being accessed as a result of its API. To use NPR content via API, all you need to do is register with NPR and agree to its terms. The company says that "we want you to use, enjoy and share the journalism and programming produced by NPR and participating NPR member stations, but it is also important to respect the rights and integrity of the work and of the dedicated people who created it." Discuss

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NPR API Delivered 1.1 Billion Stories in March

Weekly Wrap-up: Twitter in the Library, iPhone Gets Multitasking, Goodbye Google Gears, And More…

cgseo — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Our number one post this week was that Twitter's archives will soon be housed in the hallowed halls of the Library of Congress. There's got to be joke about librarians shushing tweets in there somewhere. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010. We wrote about Internet of Things threads you'll be wearing soon, a real-time trip into Twitter's past, and that augmented reality is going to the fishes on the Discovery Channel. Read on for more. Sponsor Story of the Week: Twitter in the Library of Congress Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress Apple Announces iPhone OS 4 with Support for Multitasking 10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon Goodbye, Gears - Google Docs Boots Plugin for HTML5 on May 3rd Top 10 YouTube Videos About Facebook New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com . Mobile Web Where Does Android Register on Google's "Evil" Meter? Opera Takes a Back Seat to Safari on the iPhone Microsoft's New Phone Gets the Social/App Balance Wrong More Mobile Web coverage Augmented Reality Discovery Channel Puts AR In Front of Millions of Eyeballs More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Internet of Things 10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon DASH7: Bringing Sensor Networking to Smartphones More Internet of Things coverage Real-Time Web Google's Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative More Real-Time Web coverage . Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs Under 30: Advice From Your Peers Mary Meeker's Internet Trends: The Future is Mobile Apple's Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave Social Media Analysis: SAS Makes Its Play ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Weekly Poll: What does Virtualization as a Service Really Mean? Drupal Founder Takes on Jive Software Another Cloud Computing Acronym To Drive You Bonkers Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrap-up: Twitter in the Library, iPhone Gets Multitasking, Goodbye Google Gears, And More...

Coming Soon: Multi-Tasking on the iPad with Many-Device Apps

cgseo — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 02:00:00 +0000

Virtualization is a star - at least in the big stage of the iPad. Since the device launched, Citrix Receiver has been one of the top ranked business apps in the store. Chris Fleck, mobility leader on the Citrix team shares this demonstration showing a Citrix Receiver application enabled with four applications running side by side on iPad. He goes further to show the same apps running on a host of other devices. Sponsor Born to Multitask Citrix Receiver uses HDX, the name of the remoting technology Citrix has innovated based on the ICA Protocol (Independent Computing Architecture) the company has been developing on for over 15 years. Fleck tells us that HDX is conceptually similar to RDP/VNC but it includes significant optimizations for WAN performance, Multimedia, and user experience across multiple devices and OS's. Here is a clip from the demonstration video showing four side-by-side apps running on iPad. Citrix Receiver is able to zoom on in each application to make it full screen, or display all four simultaneously. Many Apps - Many Devices The demonstration continues showing each device in this picture, from Mac to PC, iPhone to Android, all running the same applications. At one point, Fleck goes on to demonstrate how to "flick" multiple applications on the iPhone. This demonstrates one app showing full screen and the four other applications are swipable, like photos in your photo library. This seems like a natural extension of the iPhone and really could be useful for building larger enterprise applications or portals. This demonstration reminded us of one thing, the apps matter. When we see an iPhone application on Android, or Windows 7, it still looks pleasing to navigate. Perhaps there is room in the enterprise for a Apple's Mobile Human Interface Guidelines . Enterprise designers, maybe it's your time to build insanely great apps for the enterprise that follow patterns of the iPhone and iPad. Whether new, or old, Citrix Receiver is breathing life into applications and iPad is getting down to business. The company plans to release this capability with its partner SoftwareFX at the Citrix Synergy event next month. Do you think Citrix Receiver become a default way to connect iPad in the enterprise? Discuss

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Coming Soon: Multi-Tasking on the iPad with Many-Device Apps

RipCode Brings Streaming Flash Video to iPhone & iPad

cgseo — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:22:11 +0000

For websites that find themselves stuck in the middle of the ongoing feud between Apple and Adobe, there might be another way out of the mess - Ripcode . According to the company, its latest product is a server-side solution for websites that want to get their Flash-based content onto Apple's iPad and iPhone. Sponsor The somewhat futuristic sounding "TransAct Transcoder V6 can intercept Adobe Flash-based file or live video" and translate the video into a format compatible with both the iPhone and the iPad. As the company points out in its blog post , Flash is used in a number of settings, especially live streaming of news and sports and other video content. And while HTML5 is one solution, it is not yet widely adopted and the company's transcoding service offers an immediate and seamless solution. The transcoder is a completely server side solution, meaning it does not have to be installed by users or pass by Apple's scrutiny to get into the app store. Instead, it runs on the website server and detects the requesting platform and transcodes the video as needed. "The 'Flash on iPad' dilemma is really just the latest in a long line of speed bumps on the road towards 'any-content, any-time, any-place, any-device' that we all desire. Fortunately, our technology removes this barrier in a way that is attractive to content hosters, a key device manufacturer, a key video player provider, and the end user alike," RipCode CEO Brendon Mills says in the company's blog. The best part of this solution, as far as it relates to both Apple and Adobe, is that it has nothing to do with either. And rather than having to swap out services and modify your whole website, a simple server-side install handles the issue entirely, outputting the appropriate video format for whatever the device. The service supports a number of formats and will be demonstrating this week at the NAB 2010 in Las Vegas. Discuss

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RipCode Brings Streaming Flash Video to iPhone & iPad