ThyNews

While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn't sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they've also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here's the weird thing: It's only for stalking their employees. As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting. More »

Today at SXSWi, keynote speaker Danah Boyd took the stage to talk about privacy and publicity, and how they intertwine online. Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and has studied this space extensively for years. It was a compelling talk that challenged the notion that personal information is on a binary spectrum of public or private. To help underscore her points, she recalled and discussed a number of major privacy blunders from Facebook and Google. You can find my notes from the presentation below. Boyd says that privacy is not dead, but that a big… More »

Pixelpipe, the service that lets you syndicate text, audio, video and image files to 120 different social networks, blogs and sites, is adding geolocation functionality to its site with a Foursquare integration. The true virtue of Pixelpipe’s service is the fact that it lets you publish all types of files to various social networks and sites from a centralized place. And the startup offers its service on mobile devices, including a nifty Android app, as well. Using Foursquare's API, Pixelpipe now allows you to add check-in to a location with a link to media captured at the venue, which is… More »

There's been a lot of hoopla over the past couple of years about Twitter's so-called "firehose." Essentially, it's an open stream of all their data that is provided to developers to use for third-party apps. Foursquare has a firehose of its own, but access to it has been on lock down. Today, for SXSW, Foursquare opened up its firehose a bit more. Social Great, a service which tracks trending places in cities back on location data, has just gotten access to this firehose of data. This allows them to show in realtime the trending places throughout Austin, Texas, where SXSW… More »

A couple weeks ago, we noted the city of Topeka, Kansas' humorous attempt to get Google's attention: by rebranding their city "Google, Kansas." Why would they do such a thing? Because they want in on Google's fiber action — the search giant's proposed plan to sell 1 gigabit-per-second broadband to consumers. Now Baltimore, Maryland is getting in on the fun as well. The city has appointed a "Google Czar" — yes, that's the actual title — to lobby the company to put Baltimore on the list of cities in the initial trial. Tom Loveland, CEO of a local tech company,… More »

What happens when you pair seven visual artists with seven engineers and technologists? The New Museum in New York City is about to find out. An upcoming exhibit called Seven On Seven will put together artists and programmers for one day and tell them to come up with something together. It could be an application, a work of art, a full-blown product, or anything they want. Some of the participating technologists include Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, former Facebook data dude Jeff Hammerbacher, and Tumblr founder David Karp. The seven pairs of collaborators will present their final… More »

We're big fans of Animoto, a website that lets you easily create photo and video slideshows matched to music. The site is constantly innovating its nifty product, most recently adding an iPhone app and the ability to incorporate video. For those not familiar with Animoto, the startup basically allows you to take your images, video and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. What makes the videos cool is the company's technology that renders the pictures so they're in-step with the music you've chosen, adding nice transition effects. This morning, Animoto is opening up its API, allowing… More »

The problem with all of these people who are walking out the door at MySpace isn't so much the number of them, because MySpace is trying to replace them by hiring more people. It's the fact that the best people are leaving, and taking a lot of the knowledge base with them. Three star senior employees left to go to cross-town startup Gravity, we reported earlier this week. And tonight we've heard that Jeff Webber, the engineering director that oversees the email, instant messaging and other "communications" platforms for MySpace, resigned earlier this week as well to join a startup.… More »

How many e-book readers do you think are out there right now for you to choose from? If you did a little digging, I bet you'd find 50 or so. Maybe 10 really worth checking out. But right now is a bit of a weird period in e-reader history. The Kindle cemented e-readers in the consumer headspace, catapulting them from weirdo alternative technology to mainstream gadget. That's what the iPad threatens to do with tablets — we'll see about that. But the Kindle and the iPad are two important forces in the current e-reader wars; the question, upon the answer… More »

Ever wanted to tell the world how much you love BMW, Coca-Cola, and any of the other biggest brand names on Earth? Here's your chance: MyBrandz is a new community site that looks to let people talk about their favorite brands with other users, allowing them to share their favorite products, photos, and more. You may remember MyBrandz as the company that convinced a guy to tattoo the YouTube logo to his arm a few months back. My initial reaction to the site was that it was a bit bizarre — is there really an audience of people who want… More »

At the “Bigg Digg Shindigg” event at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference (SXSWi), Digg CEO Jay Adelson revealed that the popular social bookmarking site is getting a major overhaul, teasing the audience about new features such as personalized feeds and the return of the Digg leaderboard.The new version of the website is not yet available. However, if you visit New.Digg.com, you can sign up for the alpha and see a preview of what the new Digg will look like in the background. Mr. Adelson told the crowd that the site was “five years in the making.”While the company didn’t… More »

The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.Two months ago, Google threatened to shut down its China search engine over censorship. Yet until today, its China search engine has stayed up with results still censored. Now the search company is finally expected to announce that it’s going to actually follow through and slowly shut down its China search engine.So why does it feel like Google’s impending decision will not have the impact it could have had two months ago?When Google… More »

Here in Austin, I just finished introducing SparkHelp, the project Mashable has decided to support for the Pepsi Refresh SxSW Challenge. We’re competing against two other teams over the next few days to help get our idea $50,000 in funding, which will help make it a reality.The ProjectAfter lots of great submissions from our readers, we settled on SparkHelp’s simple and timely concept that we think stands to make a huge social impact with the resources of Pepsi and our support.Here’s how SparkHelp explains their concept:“SparkHelp’s idea is to encourage local communities to band together with a Foursquare meets Craigslist… More »

There’s no doubt Google has a sense of humor — its excellent April Fools jokes are a testament to that. But there’s a wealth of funnies that can found any time of the year too. Here we pull together a handy list of Google “Easter eggs” that you can uncover right now.Bearing in mind we’re working up another list covering surprises that can be found in Google Maps, Earth and Street View, have we missed any other tricks from those crazy Google funsters? Do share in the comments below.1. Try a Different Version of the Google HomepageSure, Google’s doodles make… More »

If you had to pick the one buzzword that’s dominating social media chatter today, it would have to be location. Just over a year ago, Foursquare burst onto the scene at the SXSW conference in Austin, TX. Since then, it’s only grown dramatically.The result has been a battle for domination in the geolocation space. While many still think Foursquare could be the next Twitter, rivals such as Gowalla are giving the mobile startup some heat, and big players such as Facebook and Twitter are launching location features or are about to launch them.Our own Pete Cashmore sat down with Bloomberg’s… More »

SXSWi (the South by Southwest Interactive conference) is certainly our favorite track of the SXSW experience, but it’s not the only portion of the festival taking place this weekend. Film goers are out en masse in Austin too, and directors — both big and small — are using the event to showcase their films. Or in some cases, using it to show off preview of their films.Texas-native Robert Rodriguez (whose Troublemaker Studios is based in Austin) showcased the first preview of July’s Predators, his newest movie, last night.Predators stars Adrien Brody and Topher Grace in what is essentially a reboot… More »

Hooray for Hollywood! — the big winner this week in our roundup of the top 10 Twitter trends. From the Oscars to Alice in Wonderland (and of course, Justin Bieber), celebrity — whether be it music or film — dominated the Twitterverse.The latest data, which comes from our friends at What the Trend, gives us a snapshot of what topics dominated Twitter. Given the topical nature of the list, hashtag memes and games have been excluded.Tween-favorite Justin Bieber lost his spot at #1 to the Big Show — AKA the Oscars. The 82nd Academy Awards dominated Twitter on Sunday night… More »

The creator of Chatroulette has revealed that he is working on a way to preserve user’s privacy, following the launch of Chat Roulette Map, a Google Maps mashups that pinpoints the location of users of the service.Andrey Ternovskiy, speaking in an interview with the New York Times Bits blog, stated, “There is a certain level of anonymity on the Chatroulette that Chatroulette Map takes away, but I plan to add something to my site to allow them to still hide their whereabouts.”Chatroulette Map highlights a Chatroulette user’s location by looking at his or her IP addresses, which is revealed via… More »

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: Giiv Quick Pitch: Giiv is a mobile gifting service that delivers gifts in real time in the format of a friendly text message. Genius Idea: Gift certificates are an awesome (if occasionally generic) way to say “You rock!” Giiv.com makes this process easier by letting you give gift cards and certificates to someone you care about via text… More »

Hunch, a New York City-based startup founded by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and SiteAdvisor founder/angel investor Chris Dixon, has raised $10 million in funding for its questions and recommendations site.Nearly a year ago, Ms. Fake revealed her new startup to the world. Her goal: to create a service that would help people make decisions via crowdsourced questions and advice from its users. Hunch launched last June and has been growing steadily ever since (it peaked at nearly half a million U.S. visitors last month).According to MediaMemo, the startup has raised $10-$12 million from Khosla Ventures and previous investors General Catalyst… More »

A Golden Record?Seriously, NASA, if Earthlings barely listen to LPs anymore, what makes you think Extraterrestrials will?Don’t get me wrong. It was a genius idea to include a golden record with images and sounds from our fair blue planet encoded in it when you sent Voyager off into space, but times have changed. Unless you expect us to be visited by an armada of interstellar DJs looking to search through our crates of wax for Terran beats, it might be time to update our technological image. So here’s a thought, why not buy a bunch of Sandisk Sansa Fuze 4GB… More »

You didn't just learn letters, numbers, and the occasional bit of Spanish from Sesame Street. You also learned about rock 'n' roll. Presenting part one of a two-part compilation of our favorite Sesame Street song parodies, from rockabilly to disco. Pop music has never been so educational, nor so furry... Honk Around The Clock As we all know, rock 'n' roll was born when R&B was appropriated by the honkies. Count My Blue Suede Shoes Not only was The Count a number-rock icon, he also brought the bouffant to Transylvania. Shake Your Rattle And Roll Rock 'n' roll was an… More »

In the upcoming year, our resolution is to get to know our community a little better. What you like, what you dislike, who you are. We've learned from talking to you, there's a lot to enjoy by meeting our community! Today, though, we've got an interview with forums users LuminousSpecter and socialhazardforhim about how they became engaged on the set of Voyage Of The Dawn Treader wearing shirt.woot shirts.     Don't they look happy? In their honor today, we're planning a little field trip to the shirt.woot blog. Everybody hand in your permission slips and jump on the bus,… More »

How About A Little Bass Response, Scarecrow?Come closer, my pretty! Let me get a better look at those delightful little ears!Eee hee hee! What a nice surprise, a pretty girl like you coming to visit me in my lonely castle! Wouldn’t you like to listen to these Wicked Earbuds? They come with three different sizes of cushions for the best possible fit and sound. Attractive to the eye, soothing to the ear… Here, feel the nylon mesh coated cord… that’s right… I’ve got you! You’re trapped! Eee hee hee! Now I’ll finish you, you accursed brat! Now you’ll pay for… More »

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE EMPLOYEE LOUNGE, Mortimer’s got something important to say to his plush primate pal Monte. But every time he’s tried to tell him, the words just came out wrong. This time, he’s come prepared with musical accompaniment. It’s open mic night in the break room. Hey, if this is the sort of thing you enjoy (it’s possible; there’s no accounting for taste), consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. We dump another movie onto the pile every so often, and subscribers are first to know. Think how much of your workday you’ll waste watching our videos, happy as… More »

We’d love to have a drink with all of our Twitter followers after work, but we still haven’t found a bar big enough for 1.6 million people. So we’re showing the love the only way we know how: by selling even more cheap stuff. Introducing Woot Happy Hour. Every so often, after a particularly rough day on the job, we’ll whisk you away at 4 p.m. Central to a mini-Woot-Off that will last exactly one hour before it turns into a virtual pumpkin. But when, exactly? There’s only one way to find out: follow @woot on Twitter. We’ll be announcing… More »

Sure, you've got a Facebook with a status bar you can use to update the world on your feelings about current events and your virtual farm. You've even got a Twitter account so you can let everyone know you just ran out of Funyuns and your roommate Wayne peed on the seat again. And that comes in handy when you're not checking in on Foursquare as the rightful-if-begrudging mayor of your local unemployment office. But where do you go to let everyone around you know that you just got lucky? Why, I Just Made Love, of course! The "Test her… More »

Geekologie has turned us on to something cool. Something that we feel should have existed a long, long time ago.     That's right, they're NES Cartridge Harmonicas. Finally, there's something classy for when you want to accompany yourself while playing Guitar Hero!     Apparently you can only buy these beauties on eBay and they're just over twenty bucks, which seems pretty reasonable for such a cool harmonica. But what we'd like to know this: if we took one on stage during some 8 Bit Music Festival, would Pete Seeger get mad and try to plug it in?     More »

Like any Federal building stuffed full of elected officials, the Utah State Capitol is a place where many, many, many stupid decisions are made. The latest and most spectacular bad decision involved our monkeys, and a balcony, and an echo, and lots and lots of marble. Oh, and there was a video camera too. Take a look...     Assuming that no one got fired for this, we find it incredibly cool that our happy little mascots got to fly in the Utah State Senate. We also like the frog, even though we have no idea where he even came… More »

Daddy, how was I born? Well, “born” isn’t quite the right word, Clonathon. You were grown from various strands of DNA in a nutrient tank in a secret laboratory far below the Nevada desert. You were one of among tens of thousands of other clones being created for an army of super soldiers to be loosed upon the world by the Shadow Government in its plans to bring us all under its control. But there was something special about you. Something so special, in fact, that your mother, who isn’t really your “mother”, but the female scientist that was assigned… More »

A nor’easter was blamed for two deaths in New Jersey and left hundreds of thousands without power in New Jersey, metropolitan New York and Connecticut. More »

As the health care drama enters its final act, Alan S. Frumin, the Senate parliamentarian, is in a starring role. More »

Attacks on the media along the border with the U.S. have resulted in what amounts to a news blackout. More »

Chaos, weak oversight and wide use of cash payments in the Iraq reconstruction program allowed Americans who took bribes to get off scot-free. More »

Rachel Alexandra, the reigning Horse of the Year, lost the New Orleans Ladies Stakes to Zardana, the stablemate of Zenyatta, who ran her record to 15-0 just a half hour later. More »

The Jayhawks defeated instate rival Kansas State in the final of the Big 12 tournament and solidified their claim as the best team in the country. More »

The Obama administration is seeking changes to the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law and proposing to eliminate provisions that have labeled one in three schools as failing. More »

Commercial trade schools are under fire because they are attracting more students and Pell grants. More »

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez’s relatives said they had learned that she had been released without charge after being held in connection with an alleged plot. More »

Passengers were not shocked by officials’ report that thousands of drivers gouged millions of dollars by setting taxi meters at too high a rate. More »

Concept Feedback – Free feedback for marketers, designers and Micropreneurs. Share your website and get quick feedback. Excellent resource for fast, free site reviews. lehan. paper. design. – Need an elegant “Thank You” card for a client? Or a custom card with your logo and message? Professional and elegant designs from a paper craftsman. HotNameList – If [...] More »

Each of us has our own set of strengths and weaknesses but we never take the time to figure out what they are. Even if you did would you know what to do with the information? You’ve probably heard that you need to identify weaknesses so you can fix them. After all, if you’re already strong [...] More »

By now we’ve discussed the fact that you should first plug your funnel, then improve conversion rates, then work on sending as much traffic as possible to your website. But we haven’t talked about how big of a role traffic quality plays in determining your conversion rate. Traffic Quality By “quality” I mean the following: how close each [...] More »

The Two iPhone App Stores – An insightful post about the two app stores – the “simple shallow” store and the “deeper, more expensive” store. The press loves to cover the “simple, shallow” store but the “deeper” store encompasses most of the apps. Lessons from a “Pay What You Want” Software Sale – A key takeaway: [...] More »

I had a realization recently while talking with a Micropreneur Academy member: focusing on increasing traffic and improving conversion rates is a fantastic game plan for a startup. But if you offer a recurring service a third step is required: retaining your existing customers. If you’re focusing hard on optimizing your website sales funnel it’s easy [...] More »

Here’s an interesting exercise: find a startup or microISV founder and ask the following: What are the top 3 approaches you use to find customers? The most common responses will involve search engine optimization, AdWords, blogging, podcasting, and perhaps social media. And this is good – these methods can drive substantial traffic to your website. Then ask about [...] More »

The Micropreneur Spotlight is a look at a Micropreneur Academy member who has launched their product. This episode’s Micropreneur is Ruben Gamez who recently launched online design proposal software Bidsketch. == Rob: Thanks for your time today, Ruben. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Ruben: First off, thanks for inviting me to be part of the [...] More »

The phrase “joining the dark side” perfectly summarizes my feelings about the fact that I joined Twitter a few weeks ago. It was the Business of Software 2009 conference that did it. They announced that you would miss out on certain parts of the conference if you weren’t on Twitter so I broke down and joined. Like [...] More »

I’m really into saving time, and one way I’ve found to do that is to skim books, or listen to them as abridged audiobooks when I’m on the road. In line with this, about a year ago I found an awesome collection of summaries of the best marketing books ever (in the opinion of the book’s [...] More »

My roof is leaking. In five places. Whoever thought it was a good idea to build a house with a flat roof should be forced to duplicate Google’s PageRank algorithm in assembler. So I called a roofer, Fred, to give me a quote to fix this mess. His skin is like leather and his voice sounds [...] More »

We write this for you, the tired, the weak and the weary, the dogged attendees of the South By South West festival in Austin this weekend. We know that you're exhausted, but it's not from the booze, the parties or the product pitches - it's the endless location based check-ins. If only someone had solved this in time, right? From what we can tell, the folks over at Brightkite have the solution with Check.in, but have yet to release it to the achey-thumbed, smart-phoned masses. Sponsor According to the splash page we found at Check.in, the app, which looks to… More »

Buzz, Google's controversial attempt to unseat Facebook as the most mainstream of social activity stream readers, just made some much-needed changes that Facebook could learn from as well. Buzz users now have more granular control over what social interactions with content trigger an email sent to their email inboxes and explicit explanations for why each piece of content was sent by email to them. These changes are a good start but ought to extended into the body of Buzz as well. Sponsor Just like most Facebook users can't explain the difference between the new algorithmically filtered News Feed and the… More »

Upon first glance we were skeptical. Generally when someone says they're launching a business directory it's an SEO play with little value to users. Nevertheless, the small business web directory is a pleasant surprise. The group is providing a variety of useful resources to help startups integrate services and scale up their internal operations. Sponsor Launched at last year's SXSW, the small business web is a group of software as a service companies that have joined forces to offer cheaper services to clients. Companies like Batch Blue Software, Freshbooks, Mailchimp, Shoeboxed and Outright have been integrating APIs in order to… More »

During today's SXSW keynote, social media research Danah Boyd, who works for Microsoft Research New England and is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about online privacy. Specifically, she focused on how users can navigate issues around online privacy and how developers can help them to do so. Sponsor Boyd, who has researched how mainstream users use social media for the last couple of years, argued that developers have to focus on questions about privacy and publicity as they use and develop these new applications and experiences. According to Boyd, privacy is not dead… More »

It's SXSW weekend so you may be pretty burnt out on conferences - or just sick and tired of hearing about them - but if you're in New York City this week, don't miss what's sure to be a profound and fascinating More »

Our top stories this week were about cutting the strings that tie us to our desks. And also about stalking celebrities at SXSW. Read on for our coverage and analysis. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things. Note: We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the… More »

Aviary, the online creative platform is a visionary tool. When it launched a few years back, the irony of a Flash based Photoshop competitor was, well, ironic. With the launch of Aviary in Google's App Marketplace, we can say that the company is close to making lightening strike twice, this time around creating a home for the creative professional and their most important assets. We want this to work - so we ran it through the paces. Here we got a front-line view on where cloud app meets cloud. We looked forward to counting the pixels that get wasted in… More »

Kaiser Kuo presented today at SXSW about Google in China. He spoke about how the Google situation will impact Chinese Internet users, other companies and the Chinese government. In the presentation, Kuo (who also spoke to ReadWriteWeb a week ago) clarified how censorship in China works. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the Great Firewall that has the most impact in China - but something China calls "self-discipline." Kuo also discussed what the next moves will be from Google, since he believes that the ball is in Google's court and Beijing won't push the situation. Sponsor History of Google… More »

We're seeing a lot more discussion on the topic of single-sign on for SaaS environments. The issue is becoming more important as security emerges as a top concern for companies considering making the move to cloud-based environments. OneLogin is a new company that offers single sign-on, cloud-based service that allows for small and mid-sized companies to enjoy the same level of security as large enterprise companies. Sponsor Most small companies do not deploy security methods that employ SAML, (Security Assertion Markup Language) an XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains. It's expensive to deploy. Open-source tools… More »

Once upon a time, smartphones were mostly about connecting busy professionals with their email accounts while on the go. Now that smartphones have reached the mainstream consumer market, however, people are looking for more than just email access - and a surprisingly large number of smartphones hardly ever leave their owners' homes. According to a new study from Web analytics firm Compete, 74% of smartphone owners now primarily use their devices for personal reasons, and they often spent the most amount of time with the device at home. Sponsor As we noted last October, when they leave their homes, a… More »

iPad mania has hit since Apple's answer to the tablet became available for pre-order on Friday morning. We already mentioned with glee that the mute switch has been transformed into an orientation lock. Now, sales estimates suggest that virtual iPads are flying off virtual shelves as fast as Apple fans can click "Buy Now," and a number of details are surfacing about iBooks, 3G data services, and more. Of course, Apple hasn't made any official announcements about sales numbers, but that hasn't stopped clever buyers with a Google spreadsheet from estimating how many iPads Apple is selling. Using order numbers… More »

As St. Patrick's Day draws near, Apple fans are counting themselves among the lucky. After all, Steam is finally coming to the Mac, the iPad finally has a ship date, and the iPad developer program now has a much lower barrier to entry. Read on for the top Apple news from the last week: HTC lawsuit came after warning by Apple to handset makers: Apple supposedly contacted executives at "tier-1" handset makers in January saying it was ready to go to the mat over its iPhone-related IP. Those warnings, coupled with Apple's complaints against HTC, may have a chilling effect… More »

The biggest story this past week on Ars was ad-blocking. You may not have realized it, but blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit. We discussed why that is (diminished resources to continue doing what we do) and showed you how to whitelist Ars and other sites you care about.Cisco had us all holding our collective breath on Monday night, promising an announcement that would change the Internet forever. When it went down on Tuesday morning, we were a bit disappointed to discover it was just a new (admittedly impressive) router. Read the comments on this post More »

Those playing Assassin's Creed 2 on the PC got a rude reminder of DRM's pitfalls when the servers that authenticate the game went down. Many complained on the company's official forum, and tempers ran hot.At GDC, Sony showed off its new PlayStation Move controller, along with a number of games. The audience response was positive, but the demos shown seemed both inspired and informed by what the Wii has done before. We got a quick hands-on with the controller followed by a bit more time playing SOCOM 4 with it. Read the comments on this post More »

At this year's Game Developer's Choice Awards, Vavle's Gabe Newell won the Pioneer Award, and he used the opportunity to share a slide show with the crowd of developers, press, and business people. His message? DRM is not good for business. He spoke about DRM adding negative worth to products, and his remarks were greeted by loud and enthusiastic applause. "One thing that you hear [Valve] talk a lot about is entertainment as a service, it's an attitude that says 'what have I done for my customers today?'" he said. "It informs all the decisions we make, and once you get… More »

Apple has made inroads into the professional market with the iPhone—the company has noted that some Fortune 500 companies have deployed them alongside or even replacing BlackBerrys. Despite this, analysis of app usage suggests that it remains a mostly personal device. Mobile analytic firm Localytics examined logs of use of third-party apps and found that app use during the week typically begins to ramp up around 5am and slowly increases to a peak around 9pm. Weekdays also tend to have a little bump in use right around lunch time. On weekends, however, use starts picking up around 6am, reaching a… More »

Netflix has canceled its $1 million contest aimed at finding a better recommendation engine in the wake of a privacy lawsuit settlement. The company informed its users today via the company blog, noting that it had "reached an understanding" with the Federal Trade Commission, leading it to ditch the Netflix Prize contest. Netflix first announced the contest—actually the sequel to its original contest—in August of 2009. The goal was to crowdsource its active user base to write a more intelligent recommendation engine based on users' past rentals. This is something Netflix already does, of course, but there's always room for… More »

New Zealand's government-run Internet filtering system is now running, and two ISPs are already using the system. Seven thousand websites are on the list, most dealing with child sexual abuse, bestiality, and other illegal content, as classified by the country's official censors (you too can be a censor for a day). Such material has been illegal offline in New Zealand for years, so the expansion of the program to the Internet isn't a big surprise. But will it work? The government runs the filter, but ISP participation remains voluntary. Currently, Maxnet and Watchdog are confirmed to be using the filter,… More »

Chinese authorities are pounding their desks over compliance with the law as Google's C-Day approaches. The "C" is for Censorship, of course, which Google plans to lift in China sometime in the near future. The company has been in talks with China ever since the highly publicized hack earlier this year, and although the two may not be in agreement over what to censor, it seems likely that Google will keep at least some of its business in China. "Google has made its case, both publicly and privately," China's Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong told the press… More »

The UK's libel laws, which place the burden of proof onto those who have published inflammatory statements, have had a chilling effect on journalism in that nation, and have led to a closet industry in "libel tourism." As such, there have been repeated efforts to reform the laws, often led by professional organizations of writers and journalists. A 2008 case, however, brought a new community into the fight: science communicators, drawn in when the British Chiropractic Association sued a journalist for calling some of its medical claims "bogus." Although the legal fight has continued, the journalist in question, Simon Singh,… More »

A couple weeks ago, I created a screencast that demonstrated how to build a three-level navigation menu. In a response email, one of our readers requested a tutorial on how to build a lava-lamp style menu. Luckily, it’s quite a simple task, especially when using a JavaScript library. We’ll build one from scratch today. [...] More »

In this video quick tip, we’ll review how to work with HTML 5 video in your own projects. Because older browsers and Internet Explorer do not understand the <video> element, we must also find a way to serve a Flash file to viewers who are utilizing those browsers. Viewing Options Screenr (Mp4) Unfortunately, much like HTML 5 audio, [...] More »

In today’s episode, we are going to be working with several helper functions, related to files, directories, and downloads. We are going to learn how to read, write, download files, and retrieve information about both files and directories. Also at the end we will build a small file browser that utilizes jQuery as well. Catch Up Day [...] More »

Tumblr’s popularity over the last year has increased exponentially. The reason why is quite simple: Tumblr is flexible, powerful, and, most importantly, a pleasure to work with. Unfortunately, there aren’t many training resources available for the platform yet. In this video series, we’ll go through the process of taking a Tumblr theme, designed in [...] More »

If you’re a book lover, you may have noticed that the vast majority of book-related websites out there leave a bit to be desired when it comes to design and information architecture. In fact, some author and publisher websites make me feel like my eyes might bleed! But there are some gems out there, and we’ve [...] More »

In jQuery 1.3, the team introduced the live() method, which allows us to bind event handlers to elements on the page, as well as any that might be created in the future dynamically. Though not perfect, it definitely proved to be helpful. Most notably, live() bubbles all the way up, and attaches the handler to [...] More »

Repetitive tasks can quickly become tedious. As a designer, you probably often find yourself designing the same elements over and over from scratch. STOP! Wasting time is so old-fashioned. It also means you’re wasting money! So, let’s review some ways that you can automate and systematize your Photoshop workflow. And be sure to download the project [...] More »

Over the weekend, Elijah Manor tweeted about a new IDE, called WebStorm, that is currently being offered as a public preview, from JetBrains. After spending a few hours with it, I’m extremely impressed! In this video quick tip, I thought I’d show you some of my favorite features that you, frankly, just don’t see much [...] More »

jQuery is not always as it appears. There's a lot of cool stuff going on under the surface, and there are many methods just waiting to be discovered, and many potential usages of jQuery's API that you may not have considered before. In this article I'll be taking you through a few of the not-so-obvious [...] More »

When space is at a premium, making use of sliders is the optimal way to present information. Today, we’ll take a look at how to create a slider similar to the one used in the iTunes store. Developers often seek the functionality provided by sliders in order to fit lots of information in [...] More »

This past week 13 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 26 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Clipta, Drop.io, EditGrid, Foxrate, Google OpenID, Ifbyphone, Infosniper.net, Qype, RPX and Windows Live ID Web Authentication. The most often used APIs this week are Google Checkout, Google Maps and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Security (4 APIs, 4 mashups), Shopping (3 APIs, 3 mashups) and Mapping (2 APIs, 3 mashups). More »

Microblogging status messages may be small, but they pack quite the mashup punch. Twitter (our Twitter API profile) itself makes up 8% of all mashups on Programmable Web. So, it's to be expected that two of the three status message mashups below use Twitter. The other connects to Facebook. More »

It can be hard to find good news regarding employment thanks the recent financial downturn. Apparently no one told Amazon, who have a post on their Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog announcing that they have lots of positions to fill. More »

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is vital to any successful website. The team at SEOmoz are experts in this field and now offer a number of premium SEO tools including the recently released Open Site Explorer, which provides a wealth of information on backlinks and link popularity. Now the same information available through Open Site Explorer can be accessed via their new API. More »

Radio stations are always looking for the "phrase that pays." That's passé. When it comes to local businesses on the web, it's praise that pays. Whether it's Yelp reviews, FourSquare check-ins, or customer feedback provided in Intuit's ongoing Love A Local Business competition. More »

Google has released a new geocoding web service that is sure to bring a smile to map mashup developers working with the Google Maps API. Announced earlier this week on the Google Geo Developers Blog, version 3 of the popular geocoding web service has been released, with several improvements and new features that will make it easier geolocate addresses. The new geocoding web service shares many of the geocoding improvements included with v3 of the Google Maps API. More »

If you're looking to run a successful developer program, you should probably pay attention to Mathys van Abbe. He's the founder of Mobypicture (our Mobypicture API profile), which has just celebrated its 500th developer. More »

The US Army has joined the ranks of government agencies courting developers by announcing a new competition called "Apps for the Army" (A4A). The competition aims to promote some fresh ideas and practical web and mobile applications for use within the military: More »

For several years millions have shared the places they've been using the Where I've Been website and Facebook application. The site also has an API (our Where I've Been API profile), which allows for much of the same functionality, such as searching countries, marking it visited and adding content such as a story or photo. More »

Have you had to pick someone up from the airport only to end-up doing several laps of the airport because the flight was late? This sort of setback due to arrival delays is one of those modern day inconveniences that FlightCaster and their FlightCaster API hope to eliminate. More »

I find it difficult to believe, but the reports keep pouring in via Twitter and email: many candidates who show up for programming job interviews can't program. At all. Consider this recent email from Mike Lin: The article Why Can't Programmers... Program? changed the way I did interviews. I used to lead off by building rapport. That proved to be too time-consuming when, as you mentioned, the vast majority of candidates were simply non-technical. So I started leading off with technical questions. First progressing from easy to hard questions. Then I noticed I identified the rejects faster if I went… More »

I apologize for the scarcity of updates lately. There have been two things in the way: Continuing fallout from International Backup Awareness Day, which meant all updates to Coding Horror from that point onward were hand-edited text files. Which, believe me, isn't nearly as sexy as it … uh … doesn't sound. I am presenting and conducting a workshop at Webstock 2010 in New Zealand. This is a two week trip I'm taking with the whole family, including our little buddy Rock Hard Awesome, so the preparations have been more intense than usual. On top of all that, according to… More »

How much is a good idea worth? According to Derek Sivers, not much: It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until… More »

Have you ever opened a simple little ASCII text file to see it inexplicably displayed as onegiantunbrokenline? Opening the file in a different, smarter text editor results in the file displayed properly in multiple paragraphs. The answer to this puzzle lies in our old friend, invisible characters that we can't see but that are totally not out to get us. Well, except when they are. The invisible problem characters in this case are newlines. Did you ever wonder what was at the end of your lines? As a programmer, I knew there were end of line characters, but I honestly… More »

As a long time reader of Joey DeVilla's excellent blog, Global Nerdy, I take exception to his post Fast Food, Apple Pies, and Why Netbooks Suck: The end result, to my mind, is a device that occupies an uncomfortable, middle ground between laptops and smartphones that tries to please everyone and pleases no one. Consider the factors: Size: A bit too large to go into your pocket; a bit too small for regular day-to-day work. Power: Slightly more capable than a smartphone; slightly less capable than a laptop. Price: Slightly higher than a higher-end smartphone but lacking a phone's capability… More »

I'm a big fan of John Gruber's Markdown. When it comes to humane markup languages for the web, I don't think anyone's quite nailed it like Mr. Gruber. His philosophy was clear from the outset: Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible. Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest… More »

I can't believe it's been almost two and a half years since I built my last PC. I originally documented that process in a series of posts: Building a PC, Part I: Minimal boot Building a PC, Part II: Burn in Building a PC, Part III: Overclocking Building a PC, Part IV: Now It's Your Turn Building a PC, Part V: Upgrading Now, lest you think I am some kind of freakish, cave-dwelling luddite, what with my ancient two and a half year old PC, I have upgraded the CPU, upgraded the hard drive, and upgraded the video card since… More »

You may notice that commenting is currently disabled, and many old Coding Horror posts are missing images. That's because, sometime early on Friday, the server this blog is hosted on suffered catastrophic data loss. Here's what happened: The server experienced routine hard drive failure. Because of the hard drive failure, the virtual machine image hosting this blog was corrupted. Because the blog was hosted in a virtual machine, the standard daily backup procedures at the host were unable to ever back it up. Because I am an idiot, I didn't have my own (recent) backups of Coding Horror. Man, I… More »

I recently added microformat support to the free public CVs at careers.stackoverflow.com by popular demand. Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. The official microformat "elevator pitch" tells us nothing useful. That's not a good sign. It doesn't get much better on the learn more link, either. I'm left scratching my head, wondering why I should care. What problem, exactly, do microformats solve for me as a user? As a software developer? There's lots of hand-wavy talk about data, but precious little in the… More »

I've been unhappy with every single piece of software I've ever released. Partly because, like many software developers, I'm a perfectionist. And then, there are inevitably … problems: The schedule was too aggressive and too short. We need more time! We ran into unforeseen technical problems that forced us to make compromises we are uncomfortable with. We had the wrong design, and needed to change it in the middle of development. Our team experienced internal friction between team members that we didn't anticipate. The customers weren't who we thought they were. Communication between the designers, developers, and project team wasn't… More »

On FreelanceSwitch, you’ll meet a lot of boss-shunning, solo-working rebels. But there may come a time when the freest of freelancers will need to hire employees. Or subcontractors. Or you might want to sell your freelancing business, and the buyer will want to know how you’ve been handling things. In short, these are the times when you [...] More »

One of the most difficult parts of freelancing is the tendency of the freelancer to eventually lose joy for the work. You may have come, like me, from a gig that paid well but didn’t fully capitalize on your talents. You decided to start working as a freelancer in order to make money doing what [...] More »

Last week I introduced you to the latest collaboration between Rockable Press and FreelanceSwitch, How to Write Great Copy for the Web by Donna Spencer. I am happy to announce that the book has been launched today and Rockin’ List members get a $5 discount on the digital book, bringing the book’s price down to [...] More »

This post is an excerpt from my eBook, The Blog Business Funnel. It teaches freelancers how to run a profitable freelance business, fed entirely by a healthy and thriving blog. This excerpt is from Chapter 7: Scaling Up. FreelanceSwitch readers can claim a special discount at the end of this post. One of the nicest things [...] More »

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As a freelancer, I’ve tackled plenty of projects. Not all have been enjoyable, naturally, but I’ve been able to keep a steady flow of work. I don’t think every job has to be perfect, and as long as I’m making good money and maintaining my freedom, I’m generally satisfied with my career. While I’ve worked regularly [...] More »

As a freelancer, you may find yourself either a) too busy or b) too clueless to handle your own marketing. This happens more often than you might think, and even some excellent freelancers with a strong reputation aren’t doing a very good job at marketing. But you, you’re smarter than that. And you realize you should [...] More »

A couple of years ago, FreelanceSwitch brought you How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer by Collis and Cyan Ta’eed, which helped a lot of you find your feet in the world of freelancing. Since then, FreelanceSwitch and Rockable Press have been working together to bring another great guide to your bookshelves: How to Write Great [...] More »

Staying motivated isn’t easy – we often convince ourselves not to be. We often give ourselves excuses, allow other people to put us down, or look at the success of others and think, “That’ll never be me.” There are two basic types of motivation: intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation comes from the feeling of self-achievement [...] More »

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This year, I'm helping the User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) conference put their proceedings videos online so that more people can access them. So far, I've gotten most of the videos from this year uploaded to the conference YouTube account. If you've closely followed the tech media coverage, you might recognize projects like the pressure sensitive keyboard and Mouse 2.0.However, one of my favorite projects this year was a muscle sensing system that (among other things) allows you to play Guitar Hero without a guitar. It directly senses the electrical signals in your arms and maps those to the… More »

Some of my colleagues in the Applied Sciences group in Microsoft Hardware have recently gotten some media exposure for one of their recent projects: the pressure sensitive keyboardCongrats! It's a very nice prototype, and I look forward to seeing what the students at UIST cook up in the innovation contest.If you aren't familiar with UIST (User Interface Software and Technology), it is a conference dedicated to new interface research. It is one of my favorite conferences to attend. It's where I demonstrated my past work like Automatic Projector Calibration, Foldable Interactive Displays, where Chris Harrison (recently known for Physically Changing… More »

It's always good to give people reminders of what is possible when you don't stick with just a mouse and keyboard. This is a very nice piece of interface work for 3D drawing. The system is called Rhonda. The drawing is a bit on the abstract art side, but it's easy to see the level of control he has.The great thing about 3d drawing is that the current tools are awful, so new ways of doing it are always interesting. Unfortunately, the bad thing about 3d drawing is that there are a relatively small number of people on the planet… More »

If you've been wondering why my project blog has been pretty quiet, I can finally say it is because I have been helping Xbox with Project Natal. If you haven't seen the vision video, it is definitely worth checking out: Now, I should preface by saying I don't deserve credit for anything that you saw at E3. A large team of very smart, very hard working people were involved in building the demos you saw on stage. The part I am working on has much more to do with making sure this can transition from the E3 stage to your… More »

Since, I'm on a bit of a mini-robot kick at the moment. I thought I would share some of the videos I've seen lately that at least inspired it. The elegance of some of these movements and the music remind me of the child-like imagination that we perhaps once had before becoming more jaded with age. At least, the dreams of a little engineer.This last one is just fun. More »

A couple of weeks ago, I was participating in the Siggraph Jury review process looking at some of the projects submitted this year. There were a couple of submissions using humanoid servo motor robots. Since I have always had an itch to play with robots that I've never had a chance to scratch, I decided to look into buying one. One of the best selections of these robots I found online was at Trossen Robotics. After a lot of reading and video watching, the current highest rated robots appear to be the Robonova, Kondo KHR-2HV, Futaba RBT-1, and the edutainment… More »

In a bit of procrastineering research, I started looking into making my own ferrofluid. Apparently the best stuff to use these days is Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) Toner. But, it's a little hard to find in bulk. The most amazing work I've seen done with ferro-fluid is by Sachiko Kodama:It's difficult and messy stuff to work with. Not to mention you need to know how to generate custom magnetic fields to move it. So, it's always been a little low on my project list. Though, in my brief search for materials, I came across this wonderful artwork by flight404.… More »

This is absolutely astonishing! What are YOU doing with your sheep? eh? Whatever it is, it's probably not as good as this: More »

It's not often you hear that phrase. I don't think I've ever used it myself, but a few people have been tossing that around when talking about Kutiman's work at Thru-You.com who does video remixes of musicians around the world to create amazing new musical/video pieces. The one that is getting the most blog exposure is called The Mother of All Funk Chords. However, the one I think more clearly demonstrates the subtlety and intricacy of this artistic contribution is below entitled "I am new":There have certainly been many video remixes before, but this steps it up a few notches… More »

I'm not sure who Vincente Sachuc is, but he's certainly got a career in cinematography if he wants one. This makes me want to get back into creative film work rather than technical videos. He mentions this is captured with a Casio EX-F1 at 300 fps and edited at 24 fps. A skateboard and a Steadicam Merlin help with the smooth traveling shots. Of course, you could buy one of my Poor Man's Steadycams at 5% of the cost of a Merlin =o). Colorization done in Premiere and Photoshop.New York 2008 from Vicente Sahuc on Vimeo. More »

Single sign-on solution Date Updated: 2010-03-13 Tags: cloud, enterprise, sbweb, security More »

Twitter analysis, metadata, and monetization services Date Updated: 2010-03-12 Tags: microblogging, semantic, social, Twitter More »

Finance, income and expense tracking Date Updated: 2010-03-12 Tags: accounting, financial, sbweb, taxes More »

Email marketing service Date Updated: 2010-03-12 Tags: email, marketing, sbweb More »

Online human resource application Date Updated: 2010-03-12 Tags: enterprise, HR, jobs, sbweb More »

Point of sale and inventory control system Date Updated: 2010-03-12 Tags: enterprise, Inventory, sales, sbweb More »

Social network analysis tool Date Updated: 2010-03-10 Tags: semantic, social More »

Small business management software suite Date Updated: 2010-03-09 Tags: billing, CRM, enterprise, pm, sbweb More »

CRM software Date Updated: 2010-03-09 Tags: CRM, email, sbweb More »

Project management software Date Updated: 2010-03-09 Tags: collaboration, enterprise, pm, project-management, sbweb More »

Twitter.  Digg.  Facebook.  37Signals.  These are companies known on every continent.  They are not publicly traded and don’t have huge offices or development… More »

Andrew Keen and Steve Gillmor debate Campaign 2008. Recorded December 7, 2007. More »

This is a guest post by Ben Huh. The toughest competition I’ve ever had to deal with was The Joneses. I had never… More »

A lot of developers just like to code. They aren’t promoters, they hate tracking down payment, and they don’t know the first thing… More »

We always talk about all the new innovations the internet brings to your computer.  But what does it do for your TV? Atlanta… More »

A Guest Post by Jason Cohen. NetFlix just posted their first ever decline in subscribers. They attributed this to Blockbuster — the company… More »

The Gillmor Gang talks Buzz with Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Wednesday, March 3, 2010. Audio Only (right click… More »

The barriers to creating a TV show online are infinitely less than they are on traditional TV.  We have grown from a society… More »

A guest post by Ben Huh of the Cheezburger Network. As soon as I took on the job of CEO for the world’s… More »

It’s pretty easy to waste a lot of time finding entertaining content on the web.  There are 1000 videos that have no relevance… More »

If 2009 was the year of real-time Web, with practically every major service finding ways to bring content to its users instantly, 2010 is about optimizing the new real-time world, expanding interoperability between sites, finding more ways for users' content to be discovered, and taking the potential of real-time out of the status world and into the real world. Today, at the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas, one panel asked if we were making serious progress in this vision, and if companies, feeling increased competitive pressures, are short-changing users in the process.Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, who moderated… More »

When the well-respected open source advocate Chris Messina announced he was joining Google in January, many folks were concerned that his being absorbed in to the big company Borg would mean a cessation or redirection of some of his projects targeting the next generation Web, possibly in exchange of proprietary efforts to promote the company's products. Today, at the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas, he spoke on how he and others in the community, both at Google and outside of it, are working to bring more meaning to our social networks, activity, and feeds, through extending today's… More »

Cadmus, the Twitter filter and conversation collector we have covered a few times on the site, has just introduced support for Twitter lists, providing personalized trending topics by list and conversations from that list, giving you an instant update as to what your friends or a specific group of friends are talking about on Twitter. Also, in parallel with the start of the SXSW Interactive 2010 event in Austin, Cadmus has created a dedicated page for speakers at SXSWi.We've recently seen Twitter introduce trending topics by geography, a good move beyond the worldwide trending topics the company has featured since… More »

Oakland Is Up 12-3 Over San Francisco In This 9 Innings BattleBehind only technology, sports, specifically baseball, is my true obsession. I've dedicated a good amount of my idle time and brain power over the last 20 years absorbing statistics and remembering the sport's lore, and for several years, before we had our twins, my wife and I had season tickets to the Oakland A's. In the months when baseball isn't played, it can get very frustrating to not have the regularity of the sport, the speculation on players and trades, and the daily contests. This offseason, I cheated a… More »

The Google Reader team hasn't been completely at "Play" of late. They have put in some work too. The latest updates to the popular RSS reader, which I am buried in multiple times a day in an attempt to consume and share the best news on the Web, are focused on the mobile version. While considered small, in comparison to the launch of Play, and continued efforts to make Reader play well with Buzz, the updates have made it both more fun to consume feeds while on the go, but also a lot easier.Google Reader Mobile (Sorted by Magic)The two… More »

In what the company called Blogger's biggest announcement in several years, Google introduced a versatile template designer this morning that opens up a wide array of creative high-quality designs to the millions of users on the platform. The launch comes in the wake of Blogger's 10th anniversary, and raises the bar in terms of both appearance and ease of customization, guiding Blogger users to leverage new professionally designed themes with thousands of background images, and customization on layout and color themes. The combined package could mean the end of flat-looking Blogger templates, and gives potential WordPress users or switchers a… More »

For most of us, resumes are updated with great irregularity - usually just before leaving one job, and just after arriving at another. These resumes also are much more focused on our pasts than our future - highlighting previous jobs and degrees, durations of each stop, and what we think were the most notable accomplishments. In parallel, online resumes that encourage connections, such as LinkedIn and Plaxo, are dominated by connections to previous colleagues and partners found at each position. This leaves the often most-difficult portion of the resume, the objective, as the only major segment that looks to the… More »

Anybody who watches my online activity knows that I try to consume a ridiculous amount of information and filter out the best to you. My most efficient tool for that is Google Reader, which captures all the feeds I am interested in, as well as recommendations from friends I follow. The best of these items get shared. But not everybody wants to read a ton of items as fast as possible, in the order they were received, with no sorting on relevance. With that in mind, Reader is experimenting with a new tool called "Google Reader Play", available today in… More »

Thing Labs, the parent company of Brizzly, one of the more innovative Twitter Web clients out there, unveiled a slew of announcements this morning, with the acquisition of popular iPhone application Birdfeed and WikiRank, a visualization Web app based on Wikipedia data. The acquisitions will help fuel the launch of Brizzly's first branded iPhone application, and a new Brizzly Guide, which extends the trend explanations core to Brizzly since the product debuted with permanent definitions, accessible even after a topic stops trending.The Brizzly Guide, as you can assume, looks much like Wikipedia, integrating a trending topics definition with related links,… More »

Editor's Note: This version replaces a prior one that suggested rollout had already started.When Google Buzz debuted a month ago, integrating a new social network into your GMail, it did not roll out to business accounts running GMail on Google Apps. At the time, the company promised Apps customers would see Buzz added "within a few months." A premature promotion of the mobile version of Buzz to both consumer GMail users and Apps users made some see Buzz erroneously, before its time.On Tuesday, as Susan Beebe's showed, many Apps users saw Buzz appear as "New" in their GMail settings, with a… More »

Stories: 1) Texting While Driving: Put The Thumbs Away 2) Girl Scouts Venture Online To Market Their Cookies 3) Inchvesting In Detroit: A Virtual Realty 4) Online Music Service Spotify Prepares For U.S. Launch 5) Recipes Using Girl Scout Cookies 6) Belief On The Big Screen: Secrets Of Special Effects More »

Stories: 1) After Digital Switch, Basic TV Offers Cable Alternative 2) Google Case In Italy Raises Web Freedom Concerns 3) Internet Freedom A Relative Concept 4) Software Mimics Person's Voice 5) Where R U? Tech-Savvy Burglars Want To Know 6) U.S. Crafts Plan To Quicken Broadband Speeds More »

Stories: 1) Cell Phone Data: Can You Track Me Now? 2) Who Was Behind Attacks On Google? 3) For Mature Audiences Only: Video Game Ratings 4) Concerns Of Racism In Multiplayer Video Games 5) With iTunes Consumers Ponder Ditching Cable More »

Stories: 1) Do Smart Phones Thwart Public Records Laws? 2) Despite Glitches, Electronics Make Cars Safer 3) How Governments Control The Flow Of Information 4) Video Game Lets You Drop Beats As You Drop Blocks 5) Experts Gather For Hackers' Convention 6) Google's New Ventures Examined More »

Stories: 1) America's Cup Sails Into (And Over) Uncharted Seas 2) Using Haiku, Sun CEO Resigns On Twitter 3) For Telecommuters, It's Not About Going To Work 4) $7.2 Billion For Broadband Is Largely Unallocated 5) Thanks To Hulu, Indie Film 'Strictly Sexual' Hits Big 6) Dante's 'Inferno' Makes A Hell Of A Video Game More »

Stories: 1) iPad Morphs From MADtv Sketch To Apple Device 2) Mobile Device-Use Constrained By Bandwidth 3) Geek's Dream Lab Could Create Jobs In Michigan 4) Listener Says John Edwards Should Cheat Smarter 5) Texting Underground Can Save Lives And Caves 6) Catching Hospital Workers Dirty-Handed More »

Stories: 1) What's The Allure Of Tablet Computers? 2) Hollywood's Computers: Telling A Story In A Flash 3) How Flash Brought The Internet To Life 4) In An Era Of Immediacy, Why Fear The E-Book? 5) State Department: Internet Freedom Critical 6) What's In That Fish Stick? Give It A DNA Test More »

Stories: 1) Google Executive Weighs In On China, Censorship 2) Donations To Haiti Pour In Via Text Message 3) The Doomsday Clock Takes A Step Back 4) Communications A Priority In Disaster Zone 5) Scott Simon In The Valley Of The Monkeys 6) The Phone Book's Days Appear Numbered More »

Stories: 1) Hot Gadgets Vie For Attention At Electronics Show 2) Web 2.0 Suicide Machine: Erase Your Virtual Life 3) Tighter Smog Rules No Longer Just An Urban Concern 4) Virtual Coin Toss Lets Football Fans Watch The Flip 5) The Coolest Gadgets You're About To Want 6) Mobile Advertising A Huge Battle For A Tiny Space More »

Stories: 1) For Veterans With Burns, A Virtual Reality Aid 2) China Aims To Ride High-Speed Trains Into Future 3) The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse 4) World Awaits Release Of Google Phone 5) A Once-Dark Polaroid Factory Goes Green 6) What To Watch For At CES: Netbooks, eBooks More »

A site that filters the news from 7 tech blogs based on whether the news is sxsw related or not. Date Updated: 2010-03-12 Developer: ninjamonk Tags: austin, google-app-engine, sxsw APIs: Google App Engine More »

This mashup allows Box.net users to load spreadsheet files directly from their Box accounts into EditGrid, where they can be viewed and edited, then saved back to a Box account. Date Updated: 2010-03-12 Tags: spreadsheet, storage APIs: Box.net, EditGrid More »

A slideshow widget that displays pictures, mp3s (including voicemail), and notes from a drop.io drop on your Chumby. Date Updated: 2010-03-10 Developer: ericskiff Tags: music, photo, telephony, widgets APIs: Drop.io More »

Relisir the source for information on upcoming albums from bands and artists uses Clipta Video Search to pull in related videos on album pages. Date Updated: 2010-03-10 Developer: Relisir Tags: music, search, video APIs: Clipta More »

You don't have to log in to TwitPic to post your pictures. Download TwitLoader and experience easier posting of your photos to Twitpic and Twiiter. Date Updated: 2010-03-09 Developer: shamekh Tags: messaging, photo, social APIs: TwitPic, Twitter More »

Italian public jobs search engine and map. The jobs are grabbed from the Gazzetta Ufficiale. Date Updated: 2010-03-09 Developer: demysc Tags: italy, jobs, mapping, recruiting APIs: Google Maps More »

Enter your words. The most popular in Twitter will win. Twitwinner compares your words based on live data and shows the results in a visual way. Date Updated: 2010-03-09 Developer: twitwinner Tags: messaging, microblogging, search, SEO, social, trends APIs: Twitter More »

Qype reviews on an map. Date Updated: 2010-03-08 Developer: chris299 Tags: mapping, recommendations, reviews, social APIs: Google Maps, Qype More »

WordPress & Commission Junction Working Together. This WordPress Plugin is for search, analysis and promoting. You can manage your CJ account from within your WordPress blog. Date Updated: 2010-03-08 Tags: blog, shopping, wordpress APIs: Commission Junction More »

Converts between all major currencies using the latest exchange rates, including United States Dollar (USD), Euro (EUR), Japanese Yen (JPY), Chinese Yuan (CNY), British Pound (GBP), Canadian Dollar (CAD), Australian Dollar (AUD) and more. Date Updated: 2010-03-08 Developer: alanj Tags: converter, currency, finance, Foreign, money APIs: Foxrate More »

I decided to go way back to one of the first callers of Ask Jason (TWiST #5), I contacted Don Charlton, Founder of The Resumator.  Don called in to ask, how do I create buzz for a non-sexy product (recap)?  It looks like Don is doing a great job and starting to create that buzz [...] More »

Brendan Miranda called in on TWiST #32 to pitch MusicTrainer a website that will teach you via video how to play different instruments.  While Brendan’s pitch wasn’t necessarily great, that can be improved, his idea Jason says is genius.  Jason and George gave great advice on how to improve and simplify his idea and even [...] More »

Webcam chat at Ustream Saturday’s guest will be Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, General Manager of Venture Frogs, coming to you live from SXSW.  Many of you already know Zappos and the amazing customer service and culture that surrounds the company but what do you know about it’s CEO?  I thought I’d focus on somethings you [...] More »

Jason expresses his disappointment in President Obama’s priorities in placing health care over job creation and entrepreneurship.  He goes on to challenge President Obama to be bold and great and not to try please everyone. More »

Download the MP3 Here! Jason’s guest this week was Howard Morgan, Co-Founder of First Round Capital and a  30 year veteran of the technology industry.  Highlights of the show this week include: biggest passes that did great, incubator programs and what they offer and who are the greatest tech. entrepreneurs of the 80s, 90s, 00s. Ann