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pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/jolie-facebook-logo.png"Facebook Credits is continuing its march from the virtual into the real world today, with the a href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-09-01-target01_ST_N.htm"introduction of Facebook Credits gift cards/a at Target stores nationwide. /p pThe move follows a number of recent steps by Facebook to redefine its Credits, from getting rid of its a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/closing_the_gift_shop_facebook_redefines_credits.php"virtual gift shop/a to a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_giving_out_free_facebook_credits_to_greas.php"handing out free Credits/a to grease the wheel a bit. Now, Facebook Credits will be something you can buy your kids for Christmas./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21584amp;cb=21584' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21584amp;n=21584' border='0' alt='' //a/p pStarting this Sunday, Facebook will be getting into the real, instead of virtual, gift giving business with gift cards available for purchase at all of Target's 1,750 stores and on a href="http://www.target.com"Target.com/a. The cards will come in $15, $25 and $50 denominations and the timing is perfect, of course, for the upcoming holiday season./p p"We think (the cards) will be incredibly popular as a holiday gift," Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook, told a href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-09-01-target01_ST_N.htm"USA Today/a. /p pRight now, Credits can be used on more than 150 games and applications and already 200 million people play free social games on Facebook each month. The next step, we expect, might be for Facebook to begin offering an app market of its own, as we've seen with numerous other major platforms and companies. We also have to wonder when Facebook Credits will make the switchover into purchasing not virtual but real-world goods, such as tickets to events. /p pNow that we have a Facebook gift card, how long can it be until we see a Facebook credit card? /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_credits_coming_to_a_target_near_you.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Pj1yPaHCqBXitqY2jnkOjl9JbW8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Pj1yPaHCqBXitqY2jnkOjl9JbW8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Pj1yPaHCqBXitqY2jnkOjl9JbW8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Pj1yPaHCqBXitqY2jnkOjl9JbW8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=kgUAf1ggE_E:14Qh7Qx3Xek:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/kgUAf1ggE_E" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="apple_guitar_logo_sep10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/apple_guitar_logo_sep10.jpg" width="150" height="132" /a href="http://apple.com"Apple/a is holding its annual Fall event today. Historically, these events have always focused on the iPod line. While we definitely expect to see a revamped iPod lineup, the rumor mill also points towards a new Apple TV and a major update for iTunes. A number of pundits also expect Apple to release iOS4 for the iPad today./p pTo find out what really happens, check out our live blog below. The event is scheduled to start at 10am PT/1pm ET./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21579amp;cb=21579' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21579amp;n=21579' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2Live Streaming/h2 pFor the first time in years, Apple plans to provide a a href="http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1009qpeijrfn/event"live video stream /aof today's event. By default, this stream will a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_only_mac_users_can.php"only be available/a to Mac, iPod and iPad users. There are some workaround for this for Windows users, however, and we also expect to see numerous rogue streams on sites like a href="http://www.ustream.tv/"USTREAM/a and a href="http://www.justin.tv/"Justin.tv/a. h2Live Blog/h2 pb9:42 AM:/bThe live video stream will be available a href="http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1009qpeijrfn/event"here/a./p pimg alt="apple_event_setup.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/apple_event_setup.jpg" width="610" height="408" class="mt-image-none" style="" //p pb9:55 AM:/b Audience is settling in. Eric Clapton playing in the background./p pb10:00 AM:/b Steve Jobs takes the stage.Perfectly on time./p pb10:01 AM:/b Steve points out that Woz is in the audience. His "old partner in crime."/p pb10:03 AM:/b Update on Apple retail. New stores in Paris, London and China. There are now 300 Apple stores. On some days, more than a million people visit Apple's stores on a single day. Apple teaches 80,000 one-on-one classes in its stores per week./p h2iOS Update/h2 pb10:05 AM:/b iOS update: Apple has shipped 120 million iOS devices. Apple activates 230,000 new iOS devices per day. Steve Jobs notes that some of Apple's competitors seem to count upgrades as well./p pb10:06 AM:/b 200 apps per second being downloaded from App Store./p pb10:07 AM:/b iOS 4.1 Coming today (iPhone and iPod): bugs fixed: proximity sensor, bluetooth, iPhone 3G speed. /p img alt="apple_newios.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_newios.png" width="610" height="326" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pstrongNew features/strong: High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos, HD uploads over WiFi, TV show rentals, Game Center./p pb10:11 AM:/b Game Center: play games with friends online. Showing how it works in Angry Bird./p pb10:09 AM:/b shows off HDR photos - very standard implementation of HDR with three different exposures. /p pComing next week./p img alt="hdr_jobs.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/hdr_jobs.jpg" width="610" height="388" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:12 AM:/b Epic on stage to demo new game: Project Sword. Role-playing game (looks great on the iPhone). Uses Game Center. Show how easy it is to find other players (friends and strangers) to play with. /p img alt="apple_games.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_games.png" width="610" height="325" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pGoing to be available in time for the holiday season./p img alt="apple_ios42preview.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_ios42preview.png" width="610" height="338" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:15 AM:/b Sneak Peek at iOS 4.2: Update for iPad/p pb10:17 AM:/b Air Play: stream audio, video and more over WiFi./p pNew feature: wireless feature and something called Air Play ("we will talk about this later")./p pDemo of printing: iPad will get an option to print - print queue will be in the multitasking bar at the bottom./p pb10:18 AM:/b Demo of iOS 4.2 on iPad. Steve shows off multitasking, folders, etc. Everything looks just like iOS 4 for the iPhone./p pRelease date for iOS 4.2: November for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad./p h2iPod Update/h2 pb10:20 AM:/b 275 million iPod's sold to date. /p pb10:21 AM:/b "We have gone wild." All-new designs for all models. /p pstrongShuffle/strong: "It's been a really big hit." Recaps history of the Shuffle. People missed the buttons on the last generation shuffle./p pNew Shuffle: buttons, voice over and playlists. Also includes Genius mixes./p pWill come in five different colors. Will sell for $49./p img alt="apple_shuffle.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_shuffle.png" width="577" height="458" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:24 AM:/b strongiPod nano/strong: "How do we make this better. The iPod nano has been super popular. We want to make it smaller and better. /p pThe nano is now a really tiny iPod touch. Space for four icons. Comes with FM radio, volume buttons and 24 hour battery life./p img alt="apple_nano.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_nano.png" width="581" height="473" class="mt-image-none" style="" / p"One of our board members plans to use this as a wrist watch./p pb10:26 AM:/b Demo of new iPad nano. /p img alt="ipad_nano_update.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/ipad_nano_update.jpg" width="610" height="308" class="mt-image-none" style="" / img alt="apple_nanodemo.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_nanodemo.png" width="610" height="343" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:30 AM:/b New nano will come in 8 different colors, including a Product RED edition. /p pPrice: $149 for 8GB and $179 for 16GBp pb10:30 AM:/b strongiPod Touch update/strong: "It's an iPhone without a contract." Also: most popular game player in the world. Now Apple's most popular iPod./p img alt="apple_touch.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_touch.png" width="610" height="340" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pOver a 1.5 billion games and entertainment devices have been downloaded to the iPod touch./p pb10:32 AM:/b New iPod touch won't get the iPhone 4 look. Instead: thinner, Retina display ("the best display in the world"), A4 chip, 3-axis gyro, iOS 4.1, front-facing camera. Support for FaceTime (also between iPhone and iPod touches)./p pAlso: rear camera with HD video, 40 hours of music playback./p pPricing: 8GB for $229, 32GB for $299 and 64GB for $399./p pAvailable next week. Pre-order starts today./p pb10:37 AM:/b Showing new ads. /p h2iTunes Update/h2 pb10:38 AM:/b "People have downloaded over 11.7 billion songs from iTunes." 100 million movies, 35 million books, 450 million TV episodes. /p p"It's clearly the #1 digital media store in the world./p pb10:39 AM:/b iTunes 10/p img alt="apple_ituneslogo.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_ituneslogo.png" width="588" height="477" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pNew logo/p pb10:39 AM:/b New feature: hybrid view - instead of long list with the same album title, you can now choose to see cover in the list view instead./p pDiscovery: "How do you find out about new stuff?" "What are my friends listening to? What concerts do my friends go to?"/p pFind out what your friends are listening to and downloading. With status updates, too./p pPing: a new social network all about music. Right in iTunes./p img alt="apple_ping.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_ping.png" width="610" height="332" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:42 AM:/b Custom Top 10 chart based on what your friends and the people you follow are downloading from iTunes. "Just for you."/p pShows Lady Gaga's Ping page. You can follow her, Twitter-style. If you want to, you can also allow anybody to follow you./p p"It's super easy to use. Most of us will live in our feeds and all the music from people we follow will be delivered to us."/p pb10:44 AM:/b Strong privacy controls: choose who can follow you, follow and be followed. "You can be as private or as public as you want." /p img alt="apple_pingitunes.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_pingitunes.png" width="610" height="342" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pAvailable immediately./p img alt="apple_pingdetails.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_pingdetails.png" width="610" height="339" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:46 AM:/b Demo time. Jobs shows how ping works. /p pb10:48 AM:/b Posts to Ping can include text, video, audio. Shows profile pages. Looks a lot like Facebook./p pb10:49 AM:/b Ping will be available on the iPhone and iPod touch. Will show up right in the iTunes store on iOS (but not the iPad yet, apparently). /p pb10:50 AM:/b iTunes 10 will be available later today./p h2One More Thing/h2 pb10:51 AM:/b "We've got one more thing. Actually - it's one more hobby." /p p"We have sold a lot of them, but it has never been a huge hit." But the people who have them tend to love them./p pb10:51 AM:/b "What do Apple TV users want? Hollywood movies and TV shows ("they don't want amateur hour" - a little swipe at YouTube), lower prices for content. Consumers don't want a computer in the living room. Don't want to manage storage. /p pb10:53 AM:/b People don't want to manage storage. Want a silent, cool and small device. /p pb10:53 AM:/b strong2nd generation AppleTV/strong. /p pExtremely small. One-fourth of the size of the original. Black. Built-in power supply, 802.11n wifi, Ethernet, HDMI./p img alt="apple_tvwideshot.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_tvwideshot.png" width="610" height="342" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:56 AM:/b No more downloads. All HD (when available). /p pstrongPrices:/strong/p pFirst run HD movies for $4.99 the day the DVD comes out./p p$0.99 cent TV show rentals. Only ABC and Fox for now. Jobs hopes others will get on board soon./p pNetflix support. YouTube streaming./p img alt="apple_tv_netflix_etc.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_tv_netflix_etc.png" width="610" height="342" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb10:58 AM:/b New UI - includes ratings from Rotten Tomatoes for movies./p pb11:00 AM:/b Jobs shows demo of Netflix (instant queue, etc.), photo slideshows, movie rentals. /p pb11:03 AM:/b Apple TV demo continues with TV rentals (Jobs apparently like 'Glee'). The user interface looks very slick. /p pb11:04 AM:/b "This is by far the easiest implementation of Netflix to use." (a swipe at Roku)/p pb11:05 AM:/b With Air Play, you can stream movies from iOS devices to Apple TV. Seamlessly switch back and forth between iPad and Apple TV. See photos from your iPhone on your Apple TV. No apps, though./p pb11:08 AM:/b Pricing: "$200-$300 price range was a bit too high" New lower price: $99. /p pb11:08 AM:/b Available in about four weeks./p img alt="apple_tvprice.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_tvprice.png" width="610" height="340" class="mt-image-none" style="" / pb11:10 AM:/b Recap of today's announcements. /p pb11:11 AM:/b Obligatory music performance at the end of the event: Coldplay's Chris Martin ("I have no new products to reveal.")/p pb11:14 AM:/b And while Chris Martin plays "Yellow," that pretty much wraps it up for today's event. Thanks for reading everybody! /p img alt="apple_chrismartin.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple_chrismartin.png" width="610" height="344" class="mt-image-none" style="" / stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/live_blog_apples_fall_event.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/E1xgUe_WvlxBErt3Jvp0XfyfPKs/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/E1xgUe_WvlxBErt3Jvp0XfyfPKs/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/E1xgUe_WvlxBErt3Jvp0XfyfPKs/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/E1xgUe_WvlxBErt3Jvp0XfyfPKs/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mg0jYrjXY4s:izRED98RurM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/mg0jYrjXY4s" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/ie8_logo_box_mar09.png"These days, even Microsoft is awaiting the demise of its nearly decade-old Internet Explorer 6. Today, the company looked at a href="http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=12qpcustom=3332sample=35"August's browser usage numbers/a according to Net Applications and announced that "Internet Explorer 6 is at or below 5% in many developed markets", calling the drop "overall goodness". /p pAt the same time, the company is a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2010/09/01/internet-explorer-usage-share-in-august.aspx"celebrating/a its continued dominance in the browser market, calling IE8 "the fastest growing browser worldwide."br / /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21583amp;cb=21583' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21583amp;n=21583' border='0' alt='' //a/p blockquoteAs Net Applications is reporting that IE6 share is now at its lowest point ever, I thought it would be a good time to address how we think about the aging browser.� As we have�said in the past, one of our main missions is to get people off IE6 as fast as humanly possible.� And while IE6 was a great browser for its time, we all need the web to move forward.� First, this is good for developers who we want to be able to write thesame markup�across their sites. It's good for consumers who should have the�protections�afforded by a modern browser. Finally, it's good for the web, particularly as we�look ahead�to IE9 and begin to see what's possible.� /blockquote pAccording to Net Applications' August numbers, Internet Explorer 8 grew by just over 1% to account for 32% of the browser market worldwide and it's growth was nearly three times that of Google Chrome. /p pAs we noted when looking at a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_explorer_8_takes_the_top_spotor_does_it.php"similar numbers/a last February, Net Applications doesn't always agree with other browser stat sites, such as a href="http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-200908-201009"StatCounter/a, which shows IE8 dropping by 1% over the past month and IE6 actually increasing its share by 1%./p pPerhaps the most interesting statistic to note from Net Applications, however, is one involving IE6 and China. There, the browser we all love to hate continues to hold 46% of the market (just over 50% if you include various editions of IE6), which the company says is "significantly skewing global share". Overall, however, Net Applications finds that IE6 has declined by 1%, bringing its share to just under 17% worldwide. /p pOf course, all of this may change when Microsoft releases the beta of its latest browser, IE9, which a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/will_microsoft_join_the_future_with_internet_explo.php"looks to bring the company into the future/a with a clean-cut, slimmed down design and a number of advanced features./p pWhat do you think - what will the browser market look like when Microsoft brings out the latest? Will Chrome continue its climb? And will IE9 take over the top spot from IE8?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_celebrates_ie6_decline_ie8_growth.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_PujnREntNAEiBXjihZD1fTzqMU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_PujnREntNAEiBXjihZD1fTzqMU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_PujnREntNAEiBXjihZD1fTzqMU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_PujnREntNAEiBXjihZD1fTzqMU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gAGTZUAR9PE:5PYMtwM60hQ:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/gAGTZUAR9PE" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://s.jtvnw.net/jtv_user_pictures/hosted_images/justintv_logo_148_40.png" style="border:0px;"a href="http://www.justin.tv"Justin.tv/a is finally breaking into the mobile broadcasting business with a href="http://blog.justin.tv/justintv-android/"today's release/a of its first a href="http://www.justin.tv/p/android"Android application/a and with an iPhone version soon to follow. The company admits that it's not the first to do mobile broadcasting - competitors like UStream and Qik have been around for some time - but it's the first company do it at this quality. According to CEO Michael Seibel, Justin.tv wanted to wait until the hardware on smartphones would be able to support their vision for what a mobile broadcasting experience should be like. And now, thanks to modern smartphones, features like support for hardware encoding, high quality cameras, sufficient CPUs and more, Justin.tv says it has been able to develop the best live streaming mobile application yet. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21580amp;cb=21580' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21580amp;n=21580' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2How Justin.tv Does High-Quality Mobile Broadcasting /h2 pThe major drawback to mobile broadcasting is having to deal with network connectivity issues. Mobile users in an area of poor network coverage or who are moving in between areas of good coverage and bad, have typically faced video quality issues like stuttering, stops and starts. But with Justin.tv's mobile applications, both on Android and the soon-to-launch iPhone version, connectivity issues have been addressed through the use of smooth streaming and adaptive bitrate technologies. What this means is that the mobile app can ping the phone to determine how much upload bandwidth you currently have available and then make adjustments to the quality of the encoded video on the fly, adaptively reducing or increasing the bitrate of your stream as the network coverage gets better or worse. /p pAlthough the app can't record high-quality video when cell towers simply aren't providing your device with a good signal, the app can seamlessly make adjustments for varying coverage. In addition, it can perform hand-off from Wi-Fi to 3G and vice versa without dropping the connection. /p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/justintv android.png"/p pa href="http://www.justin.tv/p/android"The app/a also takes advantage of hardware developments like hardware encoding, a feature common on many of today's smartphones. Your phone doesn't have to offer hardware encoding (a separate chip that handles video) in order for you use to app, it makes the experience better if you do. /p pGiven the talk of all the hardware and mobile advancements that have made the Justin.tv application finally possible, you may think that it's limited only to select devices or those running the latest version of the Android operating system, for example. But the company says that's not actually the case. The Android app runs on over 95% of the devices in the marketplace today. Justin.tv itself tested the app internally on ten different phones then ran a beta program where it was tested on a number of other handsets, too. When asked what phones it emwouldn't /emwork on, Seibel wasn't sure. Maybe the G1?, he wondered. We suppose we'll find out today as the app is released to the official market. /p h2Other Features: Social Networking, Unlimited Storage, Chat/h2 pIn addition to focusing on video quality, Justin.tv also strived to make an app that mainstream mobile users could embrace, even if they had never heard of the company. All registration and social networking integration setup, including direct broadcasting via links to Facebook and Twitter, is configured within the app itself. You never have to visit the company website. Other features introduced today include built-in chatting and unlimited video storage, at no additional cost. The app itself isn't monetized yet - it's free, has no ads and it may remain that way for good. The company says it's focused only on the product for now. The links created by the app drive traffic to the Justin.tv website which is already successfully monetized, so there may never be a need to charge for the app or insert ads within it, we're told. /p pOf course, a lot of companies claim their apps are "the best" at what they do, so Justin.tv released a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeIHmGtrl2o"this comparison video/a that positions their Android app head-to-head with its competitors. Will it perform as well for you? a href="http://www.justin.tv/p/android"There's only one way to find out./a /p pobject width="600" height="345"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/LeIHmGtrl2o?fs=1amp;hl=en_US"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/LeIHmGtrl2o?fs=1amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="600" height="345"/embed/object/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/justintv_launches_mobile_broadcasting_app_competes_on_video_quality.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YUI84f5N4pNWKip-_Vsb3Xx0Gd4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YUI84f5N4pNWKip-_Vsb3Xx0Gd4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YUI84f5N4pNWKip-_Vsb3Xx0Gd4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YUI84f5N4pNWKip-_Vsb3Xx0Gd4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=C6kmq5rQonw:WJ5yhRHkpjI:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/C6kmq5rQonw" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/skyfire-logo.JPG"Steve Jobs a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/steve_jobs_speaks_why_we_dont_allow_flash_on_iphone_and_ipad.php"doesn't like Flash/a. He says it has poor security, kills your battery and performs poorly on mobile devices. For those reasons and more, Apple doesn't allow Flash applications or video to run on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. /p pToday, a href="http://skyfire.com"Skyfire/a will try to break through Apple's Flash blockade with the submission of its mobile browser, which transcodes Flash into HTML5 in real time, to the App Store. And according to its creators, Apple is going to accept it. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21578amp;cb=21578' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21578amp;n=21578' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg alt="skyfire-iphone-screens.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/skyfire-iphone-screens.jpg" width="241" height="472" class="mt-image-none" style="float: right;" /According to an email from the company, "this submission is the tech industry's first test of whether Jobs' 'thoughts on Flash' ban is actually political rather than technical" and it will be approved for several reasons. The company maintains that the app has been developed with "significant oversight and feedback from Apple" and that "it adheres to every guideline put forth by Apple regarding HTML5 video playback for iOS". The process of transcoding Flash to HTML5, the company contends, will allow Apple users to "play millions of Flash videos on Apple devices without the technical problems for which Jobs banned flash."/p pThis a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ripcode_brings_streaming_flash_video_to_iphone_ipa.php"isn't the first time/a we've expected to see Flash on the iPhone, but aside from a a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_install_flash_on_your_iphone_the_easy_way.php"hack for jailbroken phones/a and a program that a href="http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-20006163-233.html"uses your home computer as a proxy server/a, Flash has remained off-limits for Apple's mobile users./p pSkyfire operates similarly to a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/opera_takes_a_back_seat_to_safari_on_the_iphone.php"Opera Mini for the iPhone/a, basing its Web-browsing capabilities off of a Webkit browser core shared with Safari and using cloud-computing to transcode Flash into HTML5 in real time. Flash video is translated every three seconds, with video data being compressed by up to 75%./p blockquoteSkyfire also avoids the concerns raised in Steve Jobs' recent essay regarding Flash on mobile devices. By optimizing Flash for iPhones and network conditions in the Cloud, Skyfire improves performance and maximizes battery life while playing video. The browser also avoids alternate runtime environments and other security vulnerabilities./blockquote pOpera may have already broken the non-native browser barrier, but we'll have to wait and see if Skyfire can use this sort of end-around to bring Flash video to Apple's mobile devices while thumbing their nose at Jobs all the while. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/skyfire_submits_flash-enabled_browser_to_app_store.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LIu_hpgtqWhE-K1_zFisAY0DARg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LIu_hpgtqWhE-K1_zFisAY0DARg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LIu_hpgtqWhE-K1_zFisAY0DARg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LIu_hpgtqWhE-K1_zFisAY0DARg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pe_QfvErOSI:sDmGPIaKaRw:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/pe_QfvErOSI" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="YQL.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/YQL.png" width="137" height="123" class="mt-image-left" style="float: left; margin: 0 20px 20px 0;" /If you haven't played with a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/4_google_buzz_hacks_for_users_developers_and_haters.php"YQL/a before, put down that Hot Pocket and head over the a href="https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/" target="_blank"Yahoo Developer Network/a. At the YQL console you'll find a collection of resources to quickly attack problems with cut- and-paste simplicity instead of having to digest several pages of API documentation. You'll also find examples with source code for putting your queries to work./p pBelow are five great YQL one-liners to get you thinking about the possibilities./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21320amp;cb=21320' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21320amp;n=21320' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2YQL One-Liners/h2 pemNote: For the following examples simply follow the link and select the "TEST" button to review results./embr / a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/yql-example.jpg"img alt="yql-example.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/assets_c/2010/08/yql-example-thumb-360x176-20909.jpg" width="360" height="176" //a/p ol liWe all love Techmeme. Techmeme also loves their tips. Sometimes you just want to know who Techmeme thanks for those "tip @techmeme" tweets. With YQL you can use a simple query to a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=SELECT%20content%2Chref%20FROM%20html%20WHERE%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.techmeme.com%22%20and%20xpath%3D'%2F%2Fdiv%5B%40class%3D%22mlk%22%5D%2Fa'" target="_blank"see who Techmeme thanks/a./li liOf course, you might want priority access to tips before they make it to Techmeme. Here's another very simple query to a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=select%20from_user%20from%20twitter.search%20where%20q%3D'tip%20%40techmeme'%3Benv=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys" target="_blank"isolate Twitter users sending "tip @techmeme" tweets/a./li liThere is more to life than Techmeme. In fact, there is also Hackernews. However, sometimes you just want to know if an article is worthy of your time. With this simple query you can limit your reading to a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=select%20title%2Curl%2Cscore%20from%20hackernews.frontpage%20where%20score%20%3E%3D200%3Benv=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys" target="_blank"high-scoring Hackernews articles/a/li liThere are a lot of ways to find out the location information of a given IP address. YQL provides a resource for geolocation by IP address as well. With this simple query you can find the a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=select%20City%2CRegionName%2CCountryName%20from%20ip.location%20where%20ip%3D'8.8.8.8'env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys" target="_blank"city, state, and country associated with 8.8.8.8/a/li liLast but not least, YQL is there for you after you step away from your computing haven. Now you can keep track of those memorable times at the pub when you a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=select%20*%20from%20craigslist.search%20where%20location%3D%22raleigh%22%20and%20type%3D%22mis%22%20and%20query%3D%22spilled%22env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys" target="_blank"spill something on someone/a./li /ol pThe last few examples are made possible by a href="http://datatables.org/" target="_blank"Community Open Data Tables for YQL/a./p pHopefully, if this was your fist time seeing YQL it won't be your last!/p pIf you were already familiar with YQL, what are your five favorite examples? Let us know in the comments below./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/09/10-great-yql-one-liners.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aXsmvRVrkoXks9q3m6iamBDdxcY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aXsmvRVrkoXks9q3m6iamBDdxcY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aXsmvRVrkoXks9q3m6iamBDdxcY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aXsmvRVrkoXks9q3m6iamBDdxcY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6TyGitJ2QA:HMbX9FLtn2Q:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/I6TyGitJ2QA" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/webos_2_logo.png" /It looks like HP's investment in Palm is starting to pay off. Today, Palm's mobile operating system a href="http://developer.palm.com/blog/2010/08/announcing-early-access-for-webos-2-0"has been updated/a to a new version: a href="http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_contentamp;view=articleamp;id=2107"webOS 2.0/a. The refreshed OS, now released to the Palm developer community via a beta version of the webOS 2.0 SDK (software development kit), includes a number of updates and new features - features that already have a href="http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/204617/why_webos_20_should_have_rivals_worried.html?tk=hp_new"some claiming/a that webOS rivals should "be worried." /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21577amp;cb=21577' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21577amp;n=21577' border='0' alt='' //a/p pVersion 2 features, now available to developers in Palm's Early Access Program, introduces support for HTML5, an improved multi-tasking interface through use of "stacks" - a feature for stacking related screens like a deck of cards, plus more advanced universal search capabilities, support for JavaScript services and a new set of APIs (developer tools) for Palm's "Synergy," the popular webOS feature which automatically pulls contact data from social networks like Facebook and webmail services into your phone for use with contacts, calendar and messaging programs. /p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/webos2.png" //p h2What's New in webOS 2.0/h2 pThe release of webOS 2.0 represents the biggest update yet, notes the page on a href="http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_contentamp;view=articleamp;id=2107"Palm's Developer Center/a detailing the new features. And, by the looks of it, the list does include several compelling upgrades: /p h2Stacks/h2 pThe new Stacks feature extends Palm's "card" metaphor that allows users to interact with screens as if they were individual cards. To close an app, for example, you just drag the card off the screen and "poof!" the program is closed. With Stacks, webOS 2.0 will automatically group related cards in an effort to reduce clutter and to allow for quickly switching between tasks. Users can also manually create stacks via drag-and-drop to manage them outside of operating system control. Developers don't have to do anything special to use Stacks - new cards resulting from user actions within an app will be automatically grouped with the app's main card./p h2Just Type/h2 pJust Type is the new name for webOS's Universal Search feature which allows users to search for things both on the device and the Web. One of the new enhancements to this feature is something called "Quick Actions." This lets users perform routine tasks like updating their Facebook status, setting reminders, adding items to a shopping list, start an email and other common tasks. Also new is an ability for developers to expand their app's capabilities by hooking into Just Type either through indexing of data stored on the device or through the creation of their own custom Quick Actions. /p h2Exhibition/h2 pExhibition is a screensaver-like program that runs when the phone is docked. It can display slideshows, a clock, stock updates, news, or sports tickers but can also be customized through apps created by developers. /p h2Synergy APIs/h2 pSynergy is remembered as the feature which merged Facebook contacts into the Palm Pre's address book, but it also supports Google, Microsoft Exchange, LinkedIn and Yahoo. Contacts are pulled into the phone's address book to show things like birthdays, work and personal calendars side-by-side, IM and text messages combined into a single conversation and more. In webOS 2.0, Synergy APIs are being made available to developers for use with connectors for contacts, calendar and Messaging and later for other webOS data types too. For example, developers can use the connectors to connect a chat or IM app with the webOS Messaging app, access contacts stored on a social network or online community into the Contacts app, or access other calendars or online events within the built-in Calendar app. /p h2Under-the-Hood: HTML 5, JavaScript, PDK Plug-ins/h2 pOther advances in under-the-hood technologies include support for HTML5 features like enhanced canvas, Web storage, geolocation and application cache. Also new is built -in support for the Node.js runtime environment and PDK Plug-ins, which allow developers to build games and other immersive apps in C/C++. This latter feature is currently in beta, but with webOS 2.0 the beta period will end and developers can begin to distribute apps that use these plug-ins. /p h2Does HP Have a Shot with webOS? /h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/palm-logo1.jpg" align="right"Before Google's Android a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/android_mobile_web_use_up_400_percent_outpacing_apple_blackberry.php"emerged as/a a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/android_shipments_up_nearly_900_research_firm_reports.php"the iPhone rival it is today/a, many saw Palm's WebOS as a possible contender to take the iPhone down a notch from its dominant position among smartphones. a href="http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090603/palms-new-pre-takes-on-iphone/"Wall St. Journal's Walt Mossberg/a even called the Pre "a powerful competitor" to the iPhone when it launched as well as a "beautiful, innovative and versatile hand-held computer." a href="http://social.venturebeat.com/2009/06/12/has-the-palm-pre-already-beaten-the-iphone/"He/a a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/palm-pre-can-it-trump-the-iphone-will-it-matter/11534"wasn't/a a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/cell-phones/early-palm-pre-and-iphone-comparisons-give-advantage-to-the-pre/449"alone/a in this sentiment. /p pThe idea of the Pre as an upstart "iPhone killer" soon lost its appeal, though, when the webOS-powered phone and its smaller sibling the Pixi, simply didn't sell. It was said that the lackluster sales may have had more to do with the a href="http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/rip-palm-its-over-and-heres-why.ars"hardware used/a, a href="http://gigaom.com/2010/04/06/could-a-better-carrier-have-saved-palm/"the carrier/a or the a href="http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/18/the-pre-app-catalog-is-tracking-way-way-behind-apples-app-store-and-its-palms-fault/"lack of developer buy-in/a, and not the OS itself, however. /p pBut HP, desperately needing to re-enter the mobile game, clearly thought webOS still had potential, and not just for mobile, but for tablet computing as well. In July, HP registered the trademark "PalmPad" and, earlier this month, a href="http://www.reghardware.com/2010/08/20/hp_webos_tablet_timeframe/"confirmed/a its plans to ship a webOS-based tablet early next year. For the most part, the tech community's a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/post_4.php"initial reaction/a was positive, upon hearing the acquisition news this April, with most hoping that HP could be the company to breathe new life into the dying, but delightful, webOS platform. /p pWhat remains to be seen, however, is whether or not tablet computing will actually take hold as a new trend in computing, regardless of the operating system powering the device, or if the iPad is simply another example of Apple releasing a product (like its iPod) that dominates a market. Android, although now outpacing iPhone shipments in many markets, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/android_shipments_up_nearly_900_research_firm_reports.php"most notably the U.S./a, has yet to emerge as the OS of choice on any iPad rival. There are many Android tablets in the works and some for sale in limited markets, but no major releases as of yet. It's far too soon to say if an Android tablet will overtake the iPad or vice versa. In fact, it's just as possible that HP's "PalmPad" could be the emreal/em iPad competitor, for that matter. That's what HP is hoping for, of course. But it is notable that HP, a personal computing powerhouse in this industry, has embraced a new operating system that's not Microsoft Windows. If marketed well, priced appropriately and - most importantly - if HP's brand name clout can attract developer attention, it's fair to say the "PalmPad" has a real shot. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/webos_20_now_available_for_download.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/A_ThWMPXjFdaEhHttA42TPyImk0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/A_ThWMPXjFdaEhHttA42TPyImk0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/A_ThWMPXjFdaEhHttA42TPyImk0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/A_ThWMPXjFdaEhHttA42TPyImk0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=X29vMlL7sEo:BP1avNF07NY:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/X29vMlL7sEo" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/moving_tales_logo.jpg" /Recently we've been exploring how a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/5_ways_that_paper_books_are_better_than_ebooks.php"the book industry/a is a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/5_ways_that_ebooks_are_better_than_paper_books.php"adjusting to electronic books/a. There are pros and cons to eBooks, but regardless the industry is moving to digital formats fast - even to the point of the Oxford English Dictionary considering a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/oxford_english_dictionary_may_never_be_published_a.php"not publishing another print edition/a./p pSome book publishers aren't just adjusting to eBooks, they're emembracing/em them with open arms. a href="http://moving-tales.com/"Moving Tales/a is one such publisher. It recently released a book as an iPad app, called a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pedlar-lady/id380527812?mt=8#"The Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross/a. Moving Tales, as the name implies, is a producer of animated books. It's a mix of movies and books, but does it work?/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21576amp;cb=21576' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21576amp;n=21576' border='0' alt='' //a/p pMoving Tales aims to quot;bring stories to life,quot; through multimedia features such as 3D animation, music, voice overs, sound effects, alternate views and animation of text quot;using the iPad's accelerometer.quot; The company also makes use of features native to a tablet-like device, such as page swipe or tap for page turning and what it describes as quot;extras to ensure no two viewings [are] alike.quot;/p pThe Pedlar Lady is a book about quot;the journey of a poor pedlar woman who, guided by the shifting line between the real and the unreal, discovers a surprising and wonderful treasure.quot; It costs $4.99 in the App Store./p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/movingtales2.jpg" //p pThe story is told almost as if it's an animated film, with voice over and sound affects optionally accompanying the animation. The words are also present of course, allowing you to read the text sans sound if you prefer./p h2Novelty, or The Future of eBooks?/h2 pThe overall effect of The Pedlar is akin to a graphic novel, in that the animation is a core part of the experience. /p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/pedlar_lady2.jpg" align="right" /With traditional works of fiction, the reader uses her imagination to bring the text to 'life.' And that's much of the fun, as anyone who has seen a movie version of a novel before reading the novel will attest. If you see the movie first, when you read the book you then have a set picture in your mind about what the characters look and act like. Whereas if you read the book first, you fill in those details in your own mind - even adding bits of yourself or people you know to the fleshed out characters in your head./p pReading this iPad book took some of that internal magic away from me, but arguably added enough magic of its own to compensate. /p pSo is this the future of eBooks? My answer is that it's emone/em future. There are certain works of fiction that would lend themselves well to animation and sound effects: childrens books, poetry books where the poet wants to augment their words with the help of animation, books with strong imagery where animation would enhance the experience (the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, for example)./p pMany other books will be best left to the reader's visual imagination, or are simply too wordy or complex to convert into an animated story./p pThis form of eBook also is very insular, in that it has no social features and no links to external Web content. This perhaps says more about what Apple allows an iPad application to easily do. Still, it's worth noting that eBooks are capable of a much more expansive experience than what Moving Tales presents./p pThe Pedlar Lady is an impressive eBook though, visually stunning and stylishly delivered. What are your thoughts on animated eBooks? Also let us know in the comments if you've come across similar eBooks - on the iPad, PC, or other devices./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/moving_tales_animated_ebooks.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9vYsZoOyD_G_c0uuN4ZZ5ChBrBM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9vYsZoOyD_G_c0uuN4ZZ5ChBrBM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9vYsZoOyD_G_c0uuN4ZZ5ChBrBM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9vYsZoOyD_G_c0uuN4ZZ5ChBrBM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=5afDa5kyb-o:B1cBfGcFhsU:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/5afDa5kyb-o" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://readwriteweb.com/images/OpenPluglogo-20100901-021348.jpg" alt="OpenPluglogo"/strongMobile App Compiler OpenPlug Joins Alcatel-Lucent/strong/p pMaybe you love mobile apps - or maybe you build them yourself. Either way, it's big news that international mobile infrastructure conglomerate Alcatel-Lucent has acquired cross-platform mobile app development tool and compiler a href="http://www.openplug.com"OpenPlug/a. /p pa href="http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/"Alcatel-Lucent/a, a company with a nearly $6 billion market cap, will soon begin offering OpenPlug's Adobe Flex application development tool that compiles apps into native code. It will be offered both direct to developers (freemium) and to telephony service providers around the world interested in exposing their technology to build a developer community. Telephony could be just the beginning as well, as Alcatel has DVRs and other connected devices in its long-term sights. As part of a platform play, this acquisition is like a seed; densely packed with promise, aiming to power the reinvigoration of the world's telephone companies. It may or may not work. Enabling apps to drive consumer demand for data is the strategy./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21575amp;cb=21575' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21575amp;n=21575' border='0' alt='' //a/p p!--start:nonyt--div class="super-pullquote"h2The Big Picture on Mobile Apps/h2/p pWhen you hear "mobile apps" don't just think about you and your friends downloading a few apps to your iPhone or Android. /p pLeading mobile tech blog a href="http://www.msearchgroove.com/2010/06/01/apple-app-store-model-is-not-the-blueprint-for-success-app-store-providers-will-need-to-offer-more-billing-mechanisms-more-choice/"MSearchGroove/a cites leading mobile analyst a href="http://chetansharma.com"Chetan Sharma's/a estimate there were over 7 billion mobile app downloads in 2009, 37% of which were in Asia. That number is expected to grow to almost 50 billion by 2012. Revenue is forecast to increase from $4.1 billion in 2009 to $17.5 billion by 2012. /p pMobile apps aren't just about you poking an app store on your phone, either. Sharma was a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/objects_outpace_new_human_subscribers_to_att_veriz.php"cited by Gigaom last month/a, reporting that more non-human internet-connected devices came online with ATT and Verizon last quarter than did new human mobile subscribers. /p pYour kitchen refrigerator's analytics service? There will be apps for that. Maybe they'll even be written in native code across multiple platforms for devices from different providers./div!--end:nonyt--br / OpenPlug is an eight-year old company that originally focused on enabling application developers to build apps for feature phones. Today it offers an Adobe Flex app authoring tool that compiles to native code in iOS, Android, Symbian, leading feature phone operating systems and other platforms. /p pApp platforms are big today, but they are expected to be even bigger in the future. If telephony service providers begin offering easy tools for publishing cross-platform native mobile apps, that could set fire to the mobile app world all the more./p h2The Strategic Fit/h2 pAlcatel-Lucent is a major telephony infrastructure provider headquartered in Paris, but consisting of a number of big technology players including the historic Bell Telephone Laboratories. What does the company do? They sell pipes, essentially, to telephone service providers. This Summer, for example, ATT customers were experiencing slow upload speeds on their brand new iPhones and ATT a href="http://www.techmeme.com/100707/p30#a100707p30"said it was the fault of Alcatel-Lucent technology/a. Alcatel-Lucent sells a wide variety of middleware technologies to almost every major telephone service provider you could name and many you probably couldn't./p pAlcatel serves telephone companies. And telephone companies know that the times are changing. The days of "Ring, ring, operator? Please connect me to Grandma Ginnie" are over. Billions of mobile phone devices are now in the pockets of people all around the world - more people have access to mobile phones than have access to clean drinking water - and value-added applications are a prime selling point and likely source of bandwidth-driven revenue generation in the future./p pEnter the company's API strategy. Alcatel is now investing substantial resources into what it calls "application enablement." It acquired the web's leading directory and tracking service for APIs, a href="http://ProgrammableWeb.com"Programmable Web/a. (Pick an API on ProgrammableWeb, Alcatel says, and imagine an interface built in OpenPlug to compile apps written against it, to any mobile platform.) It is doing outreach to developers all around the world. It is telling its telephone service provider customers that they should purchase its support for exposing new technical capabilities to outside developers through APIs. /p h2What a Mobile App Authoring Platform Means/h2 pAlcatel-Lucent says its customers have identified not just the big-picture telephony service capabilities like voice, quality of service, analytics, telepresence, user identity and user activity streams (hello, that's a lot of capabilities aka development platform hooks) but in fact "hundreds" of data and service types it could expose to 3rd party developers to build apps on top of. ("Hundreds?" I asked the company, "If there are hundreds, I want to see that list.")/p pGot that? The explosion of mobile devices around the world has corresponded with a shift in the telephony economy, such that phone service providers now seek to expose the many different characteristics of their pipes (really just very reliable data) to a splintered ecosystem of tiny, independent software developers. That's intended to offer customers upsold multi-media, self-publishing based, long-tail, real-time communications capabilities (for consumer, enterprise, education, medical markets etc.) that would probably have been unimaginable when these phone company giants were founded, usually just decades ago. (Eg. "I want to enable companies to build a service that lets their customers see the online activities of multiple co-workers, speaking together in real-time, from different locations, on a device they carry casually in their pockets.")/p pBut there is enough variety in the mobile market that killer apps have got to be cross-platform./p p"We've seen a lot of RFPs from carriers asking for a cross-platform development solution," Laura Merling, vice president of Alcatel-Lucent's global developer strategy, told us. "As a service provider, tell me how you solve that problem, they say. One way to do this will be to license a tool to carriers to offer to their developer community."/p pOpening up the ability for a much larger number of developers to author applications that can run natively across multiple mobile device platforms, accessing new communications capabilities from telephony service providers? That sounds like a logical reason for a company like Alcatel-Lucent to buy a company like OpenPlug - and reason for even end users to take note of what it could mean for the future of their experiences with their phones./p pem Disclosure: Alcatel-Lucent happens to be a sponsor of ReadWriteWeb and the author of this post was commissioned to write the forward to the company's new book about application enablement ("a href="http://www.theshiftonline.com/"The Shift: The Evolving Market, Players and Business Models in a 2.0 World/a") but honestly, show us any acquisition in service of a telephony middleware provider shifting to adopt a major mobile API strategy and we're going to cover that with great interest no matter what company is involved. We love that kind of stuff. Also, the book is a great read, if you're a nerd who likes original ethnographic research about the different customer requirements for telephony APIs across various market segments. I mean a really good read./em/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/openplug_alcatel_lucent_mobile_api.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GMOEqqz4o3ZMES4UXy1ocnDFOkw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GMOEqqz4o3ZMES4UXy1ocnDFOkw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GMOEqqz4o3ZMES4UXy1ocnDFOkw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GMOEqqz4o3ZMES4UXy1ocnDFOkw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=4Q6dX2uLttU:onZ3fHIrmW4:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/4Q6dX2uLttU" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="buzz_logo.gif" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/assets_c/2010/09/buzz_logo-thumb-150x29-21362.gif" width="150" height="29"/They say that the worst part of a dying relationship has nothing to do with love or hate. It's the indifference that can be excruciating. When the other party does not care. /p pThat may be the sad lesson we are seeing with Google Buzz. Services that are soaring in popularity will get oodles of attention for every feature that is added. Services that are fading get almost no buzz at all./p pGoogle Apps, GMail and Google Maps garner excitement for new features. We write about them here on the pages of ReadWriteWeb as do other blogs and news organizations. Google Buzz is getting no attention at all. No one cares when it launches a new feature for developers./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21574amp;cb=21574' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21574amp;n=21574' border='0' alt='' //a/p pGoogle Buzz Track is a case in point./p pLast week, Google Buzz introduced Track in a a href="http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-buzz-api-adds-track-and-some.html"blog post/a by Ivaylo Popov of the Google Buzz team. Track is offered through the Google Buzz API. It provides a way for developers to add a search feature that gives the user the ability to find Google Buzz updates on a particular topic such as coffee or tea. The updates come in real-time. It uses a href="http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/"Pubsubhubbub/a. /p pThe post goes on to explain the feature and its use. You can give it a test run in Google Reader to see how it works:/p blockquoteFor example, if you'd like to receive all the new public Google Buzz posts about coffee or tea, simply open Google Reader, click "Add a subscription," and paste in the following URL: pa href="https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/track?q=coffee+OR+tea"https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/track?q=coffee+OR+tea/a/blockquote/p pThis seems kind of interesting but nothing truly super fantastic. But the interest in Google Buzz is so low that not one major technology blog or news organization picked up the story. That says a lot about the degree of interest in Google Buzz, a service that had one of the rockiest starts of any app we have seen in the past year./p pGoogle launched as part of GMail to get more users. It auto-followed people based on who users most often communicated with in Gmail. It ended up revealing all kinds of private information such as email and chat habits. /p pGoogle desperately wanted Google Buzz to match the deep swell in popularity that Twitter had enjoyed. It did not work. Instead, it lead to distrust./p pCan cloud developers learn something from Google Buzz? It seems so. /p pGoogle tried to engineer interest in Google Buzz. It did not beta test the service. It made trade offs that created major privacy issues. Google Buzz became a symbol of what can happen when a service crosses the line. /p pGoogle wanted success too bad. It tried to leverage GMail like Microsoft used its operating system to garner interest in its online services. That practice haunted Microsoft. /p pAnd the practices Google used to launch Google Buzz is now coming back to haunt as well./p pCloud providers walk a thin line. The goal is to develop a great service that excites developers. But it's also important to make it compelling. Users hang in the balance. Cross that line and you will see the results. The issues may not appear immediately but over time the results will be clear.br / /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/09/lesson-for-developers-google-b.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/kyQA3S7g1bOHHN_5dkI5lqMZ4aE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/kyQA3S7g1bOHHN_5dkI5lqMZ4aE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/kyQA3S7g1bOHHN_5dkI5lqMZ4aE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/kyQA3S7g1bOHHN_5dkI5lqMZ4aE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=S4LU-i3cawI:7khTKX7fKrI:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/S4LU-i3cawI" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="itic.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/itic.jpg" width="110" height="114" class="mt-image-none" style="" /A an industry group made of dozens of high-profile technology companies including Apple, Microsoft and Nokia, a href="http://www.itic.org/index.php?src=newssrctype=detailcategory=Press%20Releasesrefno=359"announced/a "significant progress" on its recommendations on how the Internet should be regulated./p pIt will be interesting to see in what ways how the recommendations from the Information Technology Industry Council will differ from the "policy framework" a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_verizon_propose_enforceable_net_neutrality.php"put forth/a by Verizon and Google last month that reaffirmed basic principles of an indiscriminate wireline Internet but made an exception for wireless./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21572amp;cb=21572' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21572amp;n=21572' border='0' alt='' //a/p pITIC is working on terms it says will "reflect a broad representation of providers and stakeholders" in the debate over net neutrality that broke out in May after a court case challenged the government's authority over Internet service providers. The Federal Communications Commission is considering a regulatory change that will determine whether providers can prioritize data sent over the Internet./p h2Weighted toward a neutral Internet/h2 pBased on the ITIC's member list, we're expecting its proposal to be more - ahem - in the corporate interest than the one put forth by Google and Verizon, which at least called for enforceable neutrality rules. But there are a few companies in the group that could push the recommendations the other way./p pITIC includes cell phone handset makers Nokia and Research in Motion, which have an interest in a less-regulated wireless Internet, and Cisco Systems, which is likely to vote the same way due to its stake in networks that support wireless connections for objects and devices. Both companies a href="http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/17129/cisco-ericsson-nokia-others-oppose-net-neutrality-plans/"signed a letter/a last year saying formal net neutrality regulations punish innovators, kill jobs and are generally more trouble than they're worth./p pThe group also includes Apple, which has an established a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9889159-46.html"fondness/a for restricted channels. Another member is Microsoft, which last year told the FCC that broadband access providers should be able to offer tiered services, as long as the market is competitive. "The adoption of unnecessary or insufficiently tailored regulations, such as a prohibition on all types of discrimination, could have 'the unintended consequence of limiting innovation and investment going forward,'" Microsoft wrote in a a href="http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7020437472"filing/a, citing the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation./p pThe group also includes infrastructure owners Qualcomm, Intel and Ericsson. /p h2Skype, eBay may push things the other way/h2 pBut there are a few more populist companies in the group. eBay has a href="http://www.ebaymainstreet.com/policy-papers"supported/a legislation in the past that would prohibit network operators from "replacing the robust open Internet with 'Pay to Play' private networks that will force out and discriminate against content and service providers that refuse to pay new tolls."/p pAnother member, Skype, has been a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2009/09/skype_net_neutralitys_corporat.html"called/a "one of the loudest voices for net neutrality from within the high-tech industry," advocating for rules that ensure users can get access to whatever content and services they want on the Web, unfettered./p pLobbyists for ITIC a href="http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Networking/Lobbyists-Spur-Network-Neutrality-Talks-With-Verizon-Not-Google-452003/"started/a developing their own recommendations after talks between the FCC and the industry stalled and Google and Verizon released their proposal./p pWhat do you think? Will ITIC's recommendations end up being better for users than Google/Verizon's recommendations - or worse?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/information_technology_industry_council_net_neutrality.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LubS5if1F3egi9VoLuN2Cn2Ot5Y/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LubS5if1F3egi9VoLuN2Cn2Ot5Y/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LubS5if1F3egi9VoLuN2Cn2Ot5Y/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/LubS5if1F3egi9VoLuN2Cn2Ot5Y/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=KcFoECMmK0c:2qEkLDjYXfM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/KcFoECMmK0c" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="apple-logo1.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple-logo1.jpg" width="79" height="96" class="mt-image-none" style="" /You can watch a live stream of Apple's fall event tomorrow, the company has a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/08/31alert.html"announced/a - but only if you're using an Apple device./p pApple will broadcast the event using its internally-developed HTTP Live Streaming Protocol, which requires either a Mac running Safari on Mac OS X version 10.6, an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or higher or an iPad. It's not because Apple only wants its fans watching, however./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21571amp;cb=21571' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21571amp;n=21571' border='0' alt='' //a/p div class="pullquote""QuickTime X, a major leap forward that advances modern media and Internet standards"br/ -Apple/div pThe HTTP live streaming protocol is a feature of the latest version of Apple's multimedia player and framework, QuickTime X. The new protocol lets users stream audio and video over HTTP. This makes things easier for broadcasters, who can use a standard Web server instead of a special media server to stream in almost-real time. Apple claims the protocol also avoids common problems with other streaming protocols./p pThe protocol also dynamically adjusts playback quality based on the speed of the connection, making it ideal for mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch./p pa href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/"QuickTime X/a is included in the latest version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but it's not been ported to Windows yet. The most recent version of QuickTime available for Windows users is the second-newest version, 7.6, released in January of last year. /p pApple praised its new protocol in June 2009 for being "based on open standards" which should make the technology more accessible. Apple even a href="http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/apple-proposes-http-streaming-feature-as-a-protocol-standard.ars"submitted/a the a href="http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/networkinginternet/conceptual/streamingmediaguide/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008332-CH1-DontLinkElementID_29"protocol/a to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for consideration as a universal standard./p pBut more than a year later, the standard is effectively proprietary. It's been a href="http://crowdigitalmedia.com/http-live-streaming-with-quicktime-x-not-for-the-average-joe"criticized/a for being more a href="http://www.davidmartinwhite.com/2010/04/05/apple-http-live-streaming-a-nightmare/"complicated/a to implement than advertised. And Microsoft has not said anything about when or whether Windows will support QuickTime X - meaning the vast majority of Web users are not yet on the receiving end./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_only_mac_users_can.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bdAOcMqZxjxYpgtgS6IEjJbKwnM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bdAOcMqZxjxYpgtgS6IEjJbKwnM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bdAOcMqZxjxYpgtgS6IEjJbKwnM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bdAOcMqZxjxYpgtgS6IEjJbKwnM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EDkYgEeGatk:8yfMFr5h83I:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/EDkYgEeGatk" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="Focus logo" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/focus-logo.png" width="104" height="30" class="mt-image-none" style="" /Need to know which Web-based project management platform is the best? Looking for CRM software advice? SEO tips? Still deciding whether to start a small business in the first place? /p pSure, you could head over to your favorite search engine and spend the rest of the day digging up an answer. But if you need insight faster than that, one reliable option is a href="http://focus.com" target="_blank"Focus.com/a, a rapidly-growing site for SMBs that offers free how-to's, reports and real-time QA with over 5,000 industry experts./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21570amp;cb=21570' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21570amp;n=21570' border='0' alt='' //a/p pIn addition to a wide range of white papers, tech buying guides and research briefs, Focus.com includes a very useful QA forum. It's a little like a href="http://www.quora.com" target="_blank"Quora/a for small businesses, but with designated experts in a variety of fields. In addition to asking or replying to a question, you can opt to "Follow" it and receive follow-up emails each time somebody else chimes in on the thread. Like other QA products, individual comments can be voted up or down. /p pimg alt="focus-question.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/focus-question.jpg" width="600" height="414" class="mt-image-center" //p pIn our test run, we responded to an inquiry about project management software and threw in a follow-up question. Before long, really good responses started rolling in. Since the site is members-only (sign-up is free) and relies heavily on established experts, the conversations tend to be on-topic and rather insightful. /p pThe site's design is clean and intuitive, with nine main sections broken down by discipline, as well as one general "Small Business" landing page. Each section contains the latest guides and briefs, along side the most recent responses to questions in that section. The use of user avatars and down-to-the-minute timestamps give the recent activity stream a social, real-time feel. /p pFocus.com boasts a recent 260% quarterly increase in its membership, with a total of over 750,000 members. The site, which is free to use, makes money from advertising from eight of the largest tech companies in the world. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2010/08/get-quick-answers-to-small-business-questions-on-focuscom.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/T5xSXb7rR7XdSw2XiWXI59DMRGc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/T5xSXb7rR7XdSw2XiWXI59DMRGc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/T5xSXb7rR7XdSw2XiWXI59DMRGc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/T5xSXb7rR7XdSw2XiWXI59DMRGc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=itR25I0O6nw:2S9r5mOwR44:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/itR25I0O6nw" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="10questions.gif" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/10questions.gif" width="150" height="18" /The 2010 U.S. midterm elections are coming up. On November 2, 36 of the 100 Senate seats, 26 of the 50 gubernatorial and all of the House seats will be contested. a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_questions.php"As they did/a for the 2008 presidential elections, the a href="http://personaldemocracy.com/"Personal Democracy Forum/a is working with a href="http://www.youtube.com"YouTube/a to ask voters to post videos of a href="http://www.10questions.com/2010/"10 Questions/a they have for the candidates in a race, or submit text versions./p p10Questions is focusing on what they consider the 46 most competitive of these races. For each of them, viewers can, via their website or an embeddable widget, anyone can upload videos of their questions, view those of other users and vote on whose questions should be asked. /p pView uploading and voting widgets with videos after the jump./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21563amp;cb=21563' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21563amp;n=21563' border='0' alt='' //a/p pstrongHow It Works/strong/p pOn September 21st the top 10 questions for each race will be given to the candidates involved and they will have two weeks to upload their answers to YouTube. Viewers will then vote on whether those candidates have actually answered the questions, or if their responses were just circumlocutions, legerdemain, spin and talking points. /p pThis time, 10Questions is going out with a host of media partners, from the Miami Herald to WNYC to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In addition to their site and widget, they are reaching out via a href="http://twitter.com/10questions"Twitter/a and Facebook. /p pI asked Daniel Teweles, VP of Business Development and Marketing at the Personal Democracy Forum to address the possibility that the system might be gamed by groups of users. /p blockquote"Votes are limited to one per Google Account, and the the top ten questions will have their votes audited to further guard against ballot box stuffing. On the answer side of things, it is certainly possible for people to rate the candidates rather than their responses when they vote on the answers. This is an experiment, and that phase is directed at creating a feedback loop that rewards substance over soundbites, which is a major difference between 10Questions and the pre-existing debate structure."/blockquote pstrongPeople in Glass Houses/strong/p pConversation is something that's grown up with the social web, though it is never as perfect, or as imperfect, as its partisans and detractors insist. Teweles's group isn't alone in the attempt to create mechanisms intended to "(reward) substance over soundbites." Another example is a href="http://glasshouseconversations.org/"Glass House Conversations/a, an online version of the Philip Johnson Glass House salon that focuses more on design and architecture. /p blockquote"Each Monday, a host posts a provocation. People have only five days to respond . . . After comments have closed a "Final Word" is chosen from the replies."/blockquote pemHave you participated in a purpose-made online conversation series? What do you like about it? What needs to happen for this sort of conversation to reach its full potential? /em/p div style="float:left"iframe src='http://www.10questions.com/2010/forum/embed2.cgi?market=forum=add=1qoa=qwholesite=1' style='width:290px;height:493px;border: #d0d4d6 2px solid;' scrolling='no' frameborder='0'/iframe/divdiv style="float:right"iframe src='http://www.10questions.com/2010/forum/embed2.cgi?market=forum=wholesite=1' style='width:290px;height:493px;border: #d0d4d6 2px solid;' scrolling='no' frameborder='0'/iframe/div stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10questions_uses_video_to_grill_midterm_election_c.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/u_V9bNvZm7LXujaAzSKCjcSxr8U/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/u_V9bNvZm7LXujaAzSKCjcSxr8U/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/u_V9bNvZm7LXujaAzSKCjcSxr8U/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/u_V9bNvZm7LXujaAzSKCjcSxr8U/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=jvM7HWILzGQ:2NuWQHkvfiE:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/jvM7HWILzGQ" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/google_logo.gif"Google has quietly launched a new feature: search for blogs on any topic. The company announced the new type of search in aa href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/this-week-in-search-82710.html" weekly round-up of search updates last week/a, and respected SEO blogger Bill Slawski a href="http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=4238"argues/a that the launch may be related to a new Google patent./p pThis has the potential to be a wildly useful service. How many of you have had professional or personal reasons to seek a list of the top blogs on a new topic? I know I, and many people I talk to, find themselves in such need frequently. How do you access the new search? How well does it work? Read on./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21568amp;cb=21568' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21568amp;n=21568' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg src="http://readwriteweb.com/images/academic_technology_incubators_-_Google_Search-20100831-171638.jpg" alt="academic%20technology%20incubators%20-%20Google%20Search"//p h2How to Search Google for Blogs by Topic/h2 pThe a href="http://blogsearch.google.com"Google Blogsearch/a service has for a long time surfaced a small number of blogs related to any search query, above the list of results from a search of blog posts, or entries. strongemThis new search is different, though, and surfaces different results./em/strong/p pDo a search on the general web search interface, google.com. Then, click on the "more" link in the left-hand sidebar if "blogs" doesn't already appear as an option. Once you're looking at blogs from this perspective, then a new option will appear in the sidebar: search for posts or blog home pages related to your query./p pI searched for ceramics blogs, semantic web blogs, cloud blogs, social media blogs and more. All those searches brought up pages and pages of clearly topical sources. I imagine that different searches may have different degrees of success, but this is Google - so it ought to work well./p h2How Good Are the Search Results?/h2 pThe search results in this new search by blog feature look pretty good to me. The ranking of those results, however, seems questionable. The more closely tied the title of the blog is to your search query, the higher the blog shows up in search results. That's not the best indicator of quality or authority./p pThat said, in as much as I know about the topics I searched for, the top blogs in those fields definitely peppered the search results, to greater or lesser degrees./p pWhat would I do with these search results? To be honest, I'd ask our fabulous staff developer (whom you may not steal from us) to whip up some scripts that pulled down the first 300 search results (or more) from any query I searched for, grab the RSS feeds from those sites using another script and autodiscovery, turn the feeds into an OPML file, upload them to a href="http://postrank.com"Postrank/a, sort them by degrees of reader engagement, then chop off the top number from that list as suits your needs. Your mileage may vary, of course. I'd likely then use some other processes to make sure I wasn't missing too many obvious sites or including too many false positives. (And then I'd do some other stuff with it too.)/p pNow that the sun has set of the a href="http://technorati.com"Technorati/a blog directory, and no one has done as good a job in its place as it once did, it's great to see a new option at all. The fact that full-text search is the method employed here, along with some patented analysis of the sites, is great. The patent that Slawski points to, (a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2Sect2=HITOFFu=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htmr=1p=1f=Gl=50d=PTXTS1=7,765,209.PN.OS=pn/7,765,209RS=PN/7,765,209"Indexing and retrieval of blogs/a, filed September 2005), "describes how it may create a 'hybrid document' about a blog out of information from both XML feeds, blog posts, and pages linked to from those feeds and posts such as profile pages," he writes./p pThat great. Add some ranking, some OPML export, and then we're really talking./p pLong live blog search!/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_launches_blog_finder_for_any_topic.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3pKvp8rckk1sYsZB2x1FbMe-TpM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3pKvp8rckk1sYsZB2x1FbMe-TpM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3pKvp8rckk1sYsZB2x1FbMe-TpM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3pKvp8rckk1sYsZB2x1FbMe-TpM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=y0oXhsHCyj8:H2P0MlfSn6M:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/y0oXhsHCyj8" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="vmworld.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/assets_c/2010/08/vmworld-thumb-150x150-21349.png" width="150" height="150" /a href="http://vmware.com"VMware/a is moving up the stack with an ambitious plan to offer an IT services environment that connects the end points between the data center and the cloud./p pIt's a strategy that we see emerging with other vendors in the space. Virtual computing has passed the inflection point. Virtual machines are now beginning to outnumber physical servers. Without a doubt, the future of the data center is virtual./p pThe effects are numerous. The enterprise is witnessing a totally new app infrastructure. If you are a leader in enterprise IT you have to take into consideration the rapid acceptance of technologies such as Ruby on Rails and lightweight Web services that provide the capability to offer a Web-oriented architecture./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21555amp;cb=21555' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21555amp;n=21555' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg alt="vmw083110c.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/assets_c/2010/08/vmw083110c-thumb-610x471-21346.png" width="610" height="471"//p pThat's what gives VMware the apparent confidence to offer up an agenda as ambitious as it did today at VMworld. /p pFrom a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/vmwares-maritz-innovation-efforts-will-focus-on-it-as-a-service/38666?tag=nl.e589"ZDnet:/a/p ulliThe company launched its VMware vFabric, which is a cloud app platform that combines its Spring Java development framework and data management, app servers and load balancing. The product is targeted at heterogeneous IT shops./li liVMware announced six new vCloud products. The headliner here is the vCloud Director, which is designed to model and deliver IT infrastructure services. The idea here is to create virtual data centers and computing pools. There were other security products such as vShield and vShield Edge as well as vCloud Datacenter Services, interoperable clouds./li liDesktop virtualization was also a key theme. VMware pitched a vision where legacy desktops would be shed for more cloud delivery. The key theme was a "cloud experience for the enterprise." The big pitch here was VMware View 4.5. Desktop virtualization was a key theme on both the Citrix and VMware earnings conference calls./li liVMware also said that its ThinApp 4.6 is now available. VMware ThinApp is designed to deploy Microsoft Windows 7 virtual desktop environments./li liThe company also outlined its consulting services and partnerships with the likes of Hewlett-Packard to create private clouds. Verizon will also include VMware's applications in its computing as a service lineup./li /ul pVMware is challenging Microsoft with a stack that moves enterprise from client-based apps to a virtualized and multi-tenant world./p pTo do that you need simple app integration, a cloud infrastructure and security./p pIn this respect, what interests us is the a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=tsource=webcd=11ved=0CEgQFjAKurl=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FBT-CO-20100831-709784.htmlei=z4B9TMOpGIWCsQPO5e2CBwusg=AFQjCNGZ_Bvr8_q9KOWxnPVzTLCcizdkbA"acquisition of TriCipher/a, which VMware announced today. TriCipher provides OpenID services with MyOneLogin. In March, we wrote about how OpenID will transform the a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=tsource=webcd=1ved=0CBIQFjAAurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.readwriteweb.com%2Fenterprise%2F2010%2F03%2Fwill-openid-transform-the-ente.phpei=IYF9TLqXDIm8sAPJotmCBwusg=AFQjCNHHrcwfrt8xU5VA_9sHPZCJ-Y4VtQ"enterprise ecosystem/a. The acquisition proves how this is playing out. /p pThe acquisition fits into VMware's Spring platform, which it touted as an on-ramp for IT to launch apps. The apps on Spring leverage the pooled resources that come with a virtual infrastructure. They can migrate from there to a cloud infrastructure. User name and passwords do not provide adequate security for apps in this kind of environment. MyOneLogin helps fill that gap. /p pServices like MyOneLogin provide infrastructure for security authentication markup language a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Assertion_Markup_Language"( SAML)/a integration and single-sign on with multi-factor authentication. It positions VMware as an identity provider. With TriCipher, VMware can become a hub that keeps track of updates, new protocols and the other issues that come with keeping up to date with federated identity technicalities. /p pWith the services in place, VMware can host third-party apps much like Google Apps Marketplace, which also supports OpenID. On that kind of platform an enterprise customer can also become a service provider. It serves as a platform for adopting SaaS technologies, fast becoming a fixture in the enterprise. Customers, be they employees or others, will be ready to buy without concerns about registering new user names and passwords. As we said in a previous post, it's like a club: You join once. That's it./p pSpringSource is proving to be an important acquisition. Without it, VMware would not be in the position to make this identity play. SpringSource opened up the opportunity to partner with Google anda href="http://vmforce.com" Salesforce.com/a. /p pIt also ties into the news about VMware's development of cloud platforms that are being offered through a network of third-party service providers. The service providers will adopt VMware technology. The same VMware virtual machines that run in the enterprise data center will also run on the platforms of third-party service providers./p pIt represents what VMware calls its VFabric, a set of integrated application services that include a lightweight application server, global data management, cloud-ready messaging, dynamic load balancing and application performance management. According to VMware, "The result is a complete cloud application platform that ensures performance and portability across heterogeneous cloud environments."/p pAn OpenID infrastructure makes this kind of network a reality. VMware now can offer federated identity across a network that may be internal or extend into the cloud./p pThe TriCipher acquisition also points to VMware's new push to provide security services. It is now offering its own systems to prevent the infection of virtual machines. This is a new area of concern that we should hear more about as apps scale on virtual platforms such as what VMware is now providing./p pVMware is extending its capabilities. Virtual machines are becoming a dominant part of the enterprise landscape. It is a logical time for VMware to be as ambitious as it is - even though it does have a few definite blind spots./p pThe VMware hypervisor can not be extended to different cloud platforms such as OpenStack and other competing providers. Citrix Systems, which today made its own a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/30/citrix_vmlogix_opencloud/"acquisition/a, has an opening to extend Xen for companies seeking to use an open-cloud infrastructure./p pThe difference for customers will come down to trust. And of course there's the price factor. VMware has brought its prices down and has even started offering models that are based on the usage of virtual machines, a concept borrowed from the world of the cloud./p pWe'll see how this ambitious plan turns out. But if you were Microsoft, would you be worried?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/08/vmware-is-moving-up-the.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ju-HDbTO4L2NoEi4sO9Lj9YxUz8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ju-HDbTO4L2NoEi4sO9Lj9YxUz8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ju-HDbTO4L2NoEi4sO9Lj9YxUz8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ju-HDbTO4L2NoEi4sO9Lj9YxUz8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=0XOUxDgpdkc:biSwwShTx3I:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/0XOUxDgpdkc" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="changegov_logo.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/changegov_logo.png" width="150" height="54" class="mt-image-none" style="" /Next month, the federal government will launch a new .gov website with a big idea behind it and high hopes that there will be big ideas generated iwithin/i it. Challenge.gov is the latest effort in the evolution of a href="http://gov20.govfresh.com/collaborative-innovation-in-open-government-is-there-an-app-for-that/"collaborative innovation in open government/a. Should the approach succeed, challenges and contests have the potential to leverage the collective expertise of citizens, just as a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/government-innovation-from-the.html"apps contests have been used to drive innovation/a in D.C. and beyond./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21567amp;cb=21567' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21567amp;n=21567' border='0' alt='' //a/p piGuest author a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/alexh"Alexander B. Howard/a (a href="http://twitter.com/digiphile"@digiphile/a) is the Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O'Reilly Media, where he reports on technology, open government and online civics. He'll be reporting live from the upcoming a href="http://gov2summit.com"Gov2.0 Summit/a in Washington, D.C., on September 7-8./i/p pIn August, senior government officials and private sector enjoyed a preview of Challenge.gov at the Newseum at the second annual a href="http://fedscoop.com/"Fedscoop/a forum on a href="http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/170705"reducing the cost of government/a. Challenge.gov is already live to federal employees for exploration and contribution. The next step for the site, where the Americans are invited to share, vote and contribute ideas, is likely to happen this September, potentially as soon as next week at the a href="http://gov2summit.com"Gov 2.0 Summit/a in Washington, when federal CIO Vivek Kundra and U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra speak about a href="http://www.gov2summit.com/gov2010/public/schedule/detail/16203"closing the innovation gap/a./p pIn the interview below, Bev Godwin and Brandon Kessler explain what Challenge.gov is and what it might do. Godwin is director of new media and citizen engagement at U.S. General Services Administration. Kessler is the founder of a href="http://www.challengepost.com/"ChallengePost/a, the platform that Challenge.gov is built upon./p object width="610" height="368"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kVILhbHtW8U?fs=1amp;hl=en_US"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kVILhbHtW8U?fs=1amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="610" height="368"/embed/object pChallengePost is also the foundation for First Lady Michelle Obama's a href="http://appsforhealthykids.com"Apps For Healthy Kids/a contest site. As Kessler points out, that contest now has over 40,000 supporters and around 100 apps that Kessler estimated are worth over $5 million dollars, in exchange for $60k in prizes. Aggregating challenges at Challenge.gov could generate online activity, like eBay did for auctions or YouTube for video, said Kessler./p pDoes building Challenge.gov make sense? "It goes to the question of how visible [networks like these] are," said Dr. Jeffrey Davis, director of space life sciences at NASA. "The more networked they are, the more visibility there is. It's important to have platforms interconnected."/p pAnother issue is whether people are aware of challenges or contest, or can find them through search. "Finding challenges is very difficult, said Dean Halstead, collaborative visualization architect for government at Microsoft Federal. If you search for 'health challenge,' you don't find much on Twitter or Google. Regardless of how much you centralize, the word won't get out. You need multiple mechanisms. Challenge.gov is just the first of many steps."/p h2What are Challenges Useful For?/a/h2 pCrowdsourcing has been receiving high-level attention in D.C. in recent years as case studies in the private sector accumulate. A recent Senate hearing featured testimony on the potential of crowdsourcing and other technical innovation, like a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/08/exploring-technological-innova.html"transparency and data mining to reduce fraud/a./p p"The power of crowdsourcing a solution should never be underestimated," said Michael Donovan, chief technologist for strategic capabilities at HP Enterprise Services. "If people can start to see solutions, then a community can help and be part of the solution. It's not government or companies doing something to you - you're part of the solution that contributed to that end result. At the end of the day, you feel ownership."/p emstrongNext page: /strong"How do you put a value on something that's being invented?"/em !--nextpage-- pimg alt="lprize_logo.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/lprize_logo.jpg" width="200" height="44" class="alignright" /There are some challenges with challenges, however, in how they are architected, implemented and managed. "How do you put a value on something that's being invented?" asked Godwin, pointing to the "a href="http://lightingprize.org"L Prize/a" competition to invent a better lightbulb sponsored by the Department of Energy./p pAs she observed, to date only DARPA, NASA and the Department of Energy have been cleared to run challenges, although other agencies will follow. That ability was made substantially easier thanks to a memo issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this year that provided "a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-11.pdf"Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes to Promote Open Government/a." [PDF]/p pTo make a challenge work, "You need to go back to portfolio mapping," said Davis. "You need to fit the challenge to a category." Davis suggested analyzing whether a challenge was something that fit internal expertise. If not, then expose that to the public, and build consortia. "If you do that process first, you can analyze problems first," he said./p pWhether a href="http://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2010/07/steve-kelman-public-contests-government-performance.aspx"contests can improve government performance/a (or not) has come under criticism from members of Congress and a public concerned about the use of taxpayer funds./p pWhen asked about results by Godwin, Davis noted that even if government agencies leverage internal resources, there will always be gaps in the portfolio. "The speed and relative costs of the challenges are effective," he said. "TopCoder was open for 10 days. Most are open for 60 days. Those are fast results, certainly more so that standard procurement for a given problem."/p pAfter portfolio mapping, said Davis, the "hardest part is getting acceptance of the tool. We did pilot projects and now have results that are the best source of internal education we might have."/p pThe kind of output a given challenge requires also matters. When it comes to data analysis - using, for instance, Data.gov or data catalogs - apps are more common, said Kessler. For experiences and ideas, video are more common, like the a href="http://www.ssa.gov/open/contest/"Social Security open government contest/a. "Challenges could be used to replace certain kinds of procurement," said Kessler, pointing to logo or website design, naming an initiative or even a certain a href="http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/090824-treadmill-colbert.html"space station module/a./p pBeing specific about what the crowdsourcer is asking is also important, as NYU professor a href="http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/pdf-10-clay-shirky-argues-raising-bar-online-politics"Clay Shirky's talk on redefining politics/a at PDF 2010 highlighted. His analysis of how Change.gov could have used crowdsourcing more effectively by categorizing submissions is of particular relevance./p object width="610" height="368"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/P2GyPniW2eM?fs=1amp;hl=en_US"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/P2GyPniW2eM?fs=1amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="610" height="368"/embed/object h2Can Contests and Crowds Lead to Better Policy?/a/h2 pAfter some of these contests close the next questions will often not be driven by legal or technological challenges. Instead, the results will have to be used to drive acquisition, civic empowerment or even more data-driven policy./p p"How can we challenge the public not just to drive awareness but drive action?" asked Halstead, pointing to the a href="http://apps4climateaction.gov.bc.ca"Apps For Climate Change/a a Canadian government contest. "Inside Microsoft, we have 'Think Week,' where we propose and think about different problems, solutions and how to solve them, which we submit to the community at large," said Halstead./p pHalstead also noted that Microsoft has been working with Republicans in the House on a href="http://www.americaspeakingout.com/"AmericaSpeakingOut.com/a, which was built on the a href="http://www.microsofttownhall.com/"TownHall platform/a. To date, said Halstead, over 500,000 people have given feedback on how they think the country could be improved. In other words, trying to crowdsource feedback for contests, challenges and policy is an experiment that's being carried out on both sides of the aisle./p pThe framers of the United States constitution built republican ideals of representative government into the nation's laws - its a href="http://resource.org/law.gov/"operating system/a, as Carl Malamud has put it - for good reason. What even Jefferson and Hamilton never anticipated was the possibility of real-time online platforms that allow engaged citizens to submit and vote upon ideas. Whether such systems bring better government in the 21st Century may be the greatest challenge that the launch of Challenge.gov will answer./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowdsourcing_national_challenges_with_the_new_challengegov.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/P4VK6PdHpcN9ckBq5tzcriBunDM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/P4VK6PdHpcN9ckBq5tzcriBunDM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/P4VK6PdHpcN9ckBq5tzcriBunDM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/P4VK6PdHpcN9ckBq5tzcriBunDM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=I6h1WrHz-FY:t2ukHOZtZVQ:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/I6h1WrHz-FY" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="logo_revolutionanalytics.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/logo_revolutionanalytics.jpg" width="150" height="30" class="mt-image-none" style="" /If iThe Graduate/i were remade today, the advice to young Benjamin Braddock might be "just one word... statistics." /p pThe a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_coming_data_explosion.php"explosion of digital data/a has generated a need for technology to store, serve, and analyze petabytes of data. But it's also creating a lot of opportunities for people who are trained in the field of statistics. And more and more, that training involves learning a href="http://www.r-project.org/"R/a, the open source statistical programming language. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21565amp;cb=21565' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21565amp;n=21565' border='0' alt='' //a/p pR was developed in the 1990s and has become the a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html"de facto standard/a for computational statistics and predictive analytics. Boasting over 2 million users, R has seen widespread adoption in part because it allows statisticians to do complex analyses without knowing other programming languages. Furthermore, as an open source project, R encourages users to add to the code, and there are over 2000 people who regularly write packages that others can use to help solve particular data analytics. "There is no statistical concept that cannot be rendered in R," according to Norman Nie, inventor of a href="http://www.spss.com/"SPSS/a (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) and now CEO of a href="http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/"Revolution Analytics/a, a company that offers a commercially supported, open core variant of R for its enterprise and academic customers./p h2Revolution Analytics Brings R to Big Data/h2 pRevolution Analytics released a new version of its Revolution R Enterprise package earlier this month which becomes generally available today. This new version contains an add-on package called RevoScaleR that is designed and optimized specifically to handle terabyte-class data sets without the RAM barriers of standard R. It also includes a collection of the widely-used statistical algorithms optimized for big data./p pCurrently, R offers command line programming. But in early 2011, Revolution Analytics plans to release an enhanced graphical user interface to open up these statistical tools even more. /p pEnterprise statistical software tools were once the purview of the financial and pharmaceutical industries. But data mining, business intelligence and statistical analysis are becoming more common business practices for many more industries - retail, gaming, information services, entertainment. /p pAnd while a href="http://www.sas.com/"SAS/a claims it remains the leader in business intelligence, Nie says that the students who graduate today with advanced degrees in statistics are trained in R, something that creates a very strong ecosystem around the open source language. And Revolution Analytics hopes it can bridge the academic and the enterprise worlds of statisticians./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/08/the-big-data-explosion-and-the.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/C8NzBZ3at3b9QwwdpFjxQEAC73I/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/C8NzBZ3at3b9QwwdpFjxQEAC73I/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/C8NzBZ3at3b9QwwdpFjxQEAC73I/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/C8NzBZ3at3b9QwwdpFjxQEAC73I/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FyssMnp7c-o:Yw-ljA4xGHI:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/FyssMnp7c-o" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://readwriteweb.com/images/emailmeheart-20100831-141403.jpg" alt="emailmeheart"/Email is old fashioned, right? Not so fast - that rich source of data about your personal connections and interests is finally emerging as a platform for some really innovative services./p pYesterday we saw the launch of a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_launches_priority_inbox_to_fight_email_overload.php"Gmail's new Priority Inbox/a, which automatically sorts inbound messages by priority. That's something we've been expecting since a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/will_gmail_get_a_magic_inbox.php"hints of it emerged/a 18 months ago. This Spring, Gmail began offering a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ready_for_gmail_mashups_google_adds_oauth_to_imap.php"secure, programatic access permission/a for the contents of your inbox - a move we said heralded a new era of inbox applications. Now we're finally seeing that flood of services emerge. Here are three of the best new email apps that you don't want to miss. Following screenshots and a screencast, we discuss what it all means and how these are just the beginning of the coming era of email as a platform./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21562amp;cb=21562' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21562amp;n=21562' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2Rapportive/h2 pa href="http://rapportive.com"Rapportive/a is a browser plug-in a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/gmail_social_crm_plugin_rapportive.php"we wrote about this Spring/a, but we still see people saying "I don't know how I lived without this" months later. For now it's simple: the program looks at the adress you've received an email from and displays social network data, job titles and locations in the sidebar of your browser. Rapportive has a lot more planned, but you'll be amazed to see how much even this adds to your email experience. The one down side? It's not very easy to correct the information Rapportive shows about you or other people./p pYou may have already added Rapportive, though. Read on for more applications you probably haven't begun using yet. /p pstrongHow This Leverages Email as a Platform/strong/p pEmail as identity indicator, plus that identity as hub for data aggregation, equals awesome./p pimg src="http://img.skitch.com/20100304-jt9h3km9smyrhnd3qkkey97dku.jpg" /p h2WiseStamp/h2 pa href="http://wisestamp.com"WiseStamp/a is a browser plug-in that makes it easy to automatically add dynamic content to your email signature. a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/wisestamp-signs-your-emails-with-tweets-stumbles-and-plans"TechCrunch/a just wrote about the service opening up to the public today./p pIn five minutes, I set up WiseStamp to automatically add a link to the most recent article I've written here on ReadWriteWeb, the most recent post I've written on a href="http://marshallk.com"my personal blog /a, my most recent message from Twitter and my next published plan via a href="http://plancast.com/marshallk"my Plancast account/a./p pstrongHow This Leverages Email as a Platform/strong/p pWiseStamp mashes up the communication platform of email with streams of our personal syndicated published content. This is a great example of how feeds of content can enrich our everyday lives. In this case, there's nothing emin our emails/em being analyzed, but email's communication capabilities (and what really beats email for communication, still?) are built upon and added to by WiseStamp./p pimg src="http://readwriteweb.com/images/wisestamp-20100831-130140.jpg" alt="wisestamp"//p h2The Killer App: Greplin/h2 pAlso first written about on a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/greplin-ycombinator-personal-search/"TechCrunch/a today (grrrr....) is a href="https://www.greplin.com/"Greplin/a, an incredible cloud-based search service that indexes and adds to a universal personal search box the contents of your emails, calendar, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, BaseCamp, Evernote, Salesforce and more. /p pIt is, if it works as well as it says it does, a dream come true. Don't remember which communication service a message came through? Greplin will solve that problem./p pUber-geek Stephan Wolfram a href="http://stephen.wolfram.usesthis.com/"has/a a service he had built for him personally that allows him to search through 25 years of emails and 20 years of his clicks around the web, papers written and more. That sounds incredible. If Greplin indexed the full page text of every link I clicked on and the messages sent by all my friends on services like Twitter and Facebook, then organized search results in a way that was easy to use - I would totally pay for that. /p pFor now, I'm just waiting for my access to be granted to the basic service./p pstrongHow This Leverages Email as a Platform/strong/p pSearch may not be the ultimate platform - recommendation probably is. This service reminds me of a href="http://www.systemone.net/en/products/"SystemOne/a, an incredible product that analyzes the semantics of text that you're typing and recommends related content from your email, documents and selected RSS feeds. That product was probably ahead of its time, it's not fully in the cloud and it's not free./p pGreplin searches a whole lot for free, and if it can do this much at launch - it's exciting to think about what it could do in the future. Recommendation would be my request, in a browser plug-in. Imagine typing out an email and getting a little notice somewhere that Grepplin has found some emails that are genuinely relevant to what you're typing at the moment. That would be awesome. The sky's the limit when you can quickly process huge stores of your own personal data, though./p centerobject width="400" height="225"param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=14579806amp;server=vimeo.comamp;show_title=1amp;show_byline=1amp;show_portrait=1amp;color=00ADEFamp;fullscreen=1amp;autoplay=0amp;loop=0" /embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=14579806amp;server=vimeo.comamp;show_title=1amp;show_byline=1amp;show_portrait=1amp;color=00ADEFamp;fullscreen=1amp;autoplay=0amp;loop=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="225"/embed/objectpa href="http://vimeo.com/14579806"Greplin Demo/a from a href="http://vimeo.com/user4619597"greplin/a on a href="http://vimeo.com"Vimeo/a./p/center h2Why These Are Only the Beginning/h2 pWe've been waiting for years for email to emerge as a platform. The key enabling factor that has now emerged is a secure way to grant temporary access to the contents of your email to trusted developers out in the larger ecosystem of people and companies who want to build these new services - emall without ever giving them your precious email password./em/p pThat's what a href="http://oauth.net"OAuth/a (the Open Authentication Standard) has enabled: it provides one standardized way for any email provider and any application developer to grant or request secure, temporary access to your personal information without giving away your password. OAuth lets your email provider, in this case, vouch for you to these other apps and give them your info, while never exposing your password./p pOAuth is an incredible platform enabler. Just yesterday a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/never_hand_out_your_password_again_twitter_goes_oa.php"Twitter began enforcing/a the requirement that its ecosystem of developers use it instead of ever asking for your account password. Gmail has OAuth for IMAP email access and Yahoo! is working with them to turn that, too, into a standard./p pOauth has been in development for some time and in the Spring of 2009, the protocol had a close scrape with a big security vulnerability related to Twitter's initial implementation. Fortunately, the technical community acted fast and fixed the problem before it blew up in the faces of OAuth's advocates./p pThe man who led those efforts to save OAuth from that problem was a href="http://hueniverse.com"Eran Hammer-Lahav/a, at Yahoo! ("a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_the_oauth_security_battle_was_won_open_web_sty.php"How the OAuth Security Battle Was Won, Open Web Style/a")/p pHammer-Lahav took a step back from his key work on OAuth earlier this year - and can you guess what he's working on now at Yahoo? /p pemEmail as a platform./em/p pHammer-Lahav is one of the smartest developer advocates in the consumer web business, and here's how he explains the potential and the pitfalls of email as a platform:br / blockquoteIt's pretty clear that email provides a huge potential for extensibility, given the wide range of ways people use it. The inbox is much more than just a place for incoming mail, it is the primary dashboard for many web users - it is how they manage their lives./p pSo when looking at email as a platform, the opportunity of making it more useful and productive reaches most areas of online activities./p pSo far the focus has been on taking social information to help better manage email overflow, but the platform has much more potential beyond that./p pWe are constantly looking at how we can help Y! Mail users be more productive and connect to the people they really care about. For example, sharing photos is a big email experience - using email as a platform to make private photo sharing easier (as easy as sharing photos on Flickr or Facebook) is the tip of the iceberg./p pThe tricky part, like any platform, is how to manage your developer community, and how to safely distribute applications. This is particularly tricky in mail which is the most critical and private part of your online identity (all password resents, most private communications, etc.)/p pIn addition, the lack of a standard way to extend email leads to a fragmented market - one which has yet to emerge as a profitable destination for third party developer./p pAt Y!, we are constantly looking for ways to provide deeper access to our mail platform, both using APIs and as an application framework for extensions. It is also how we develop mail experiences internally, such as inline image and video views, image sharing, invites, and many other use-case specific applications./blockquote/p pPersonal data, securely shared, is an untapped gold mine for both literal business development and incredible new user experiences. The services highlighted here are exciting - but they're just the beginning./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/greplin_wisestamp_email_apps.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/eiuLn7lHZVXTLx23lUO-EZeRqpQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/eiuLn7lHZVXTLx23lUO-EZeRqpQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/eiuLn7lHZVXTLx23lUO-EZeRqpQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/eiuLn7lHZVXTLx23lUO-EZeRqpQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=WolmOxMQloQ:QwyqMaOQQJE:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/WolmOxMQloQ" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="otglogo_aug10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/otglogo_aug10.jpg" width="150" height="77" /When social networking behemoth a href="http://facebook.com/"Facebook/a launched its a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/live_blog_facebook_location_announcement.php"foray into the location game/a with Places, some declared that apps like a href="http://foursquare.com/"Foursquare/a and a href="http://gowalla.com/"Gowalla/a would be rendered obsolete. The result, so far, has been quite the contrary, as the megaphone of Facebook has helped spread the word about location apps to the laypeople. Today, the mobile location app market got another big boost as iTunes launched a href="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewRoom?fcId=387730022id=25204mt=8""On the Grid,"/a (iTunes Link) a special showcase featuring geosocial iOS apps on the front page of the App Store./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=21564amp;cb=21564' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=21564amp;n=21564' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg alt="otgiphone_aug10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/otgiphone_aug10.jpg" width="251" height="377" class="alignright" /You can find the new section both in the App Store tab within iTunes, or in the "What's Hot" section of the App Store on iOS devices. Disappointingly, however, iTunes is shining the spotlight on just 12 applications, some of which use location as merely an added feature to its main function. The usual suspects - Foursquare, Gowalla, a href="http://brightkite.com/"Brightkite/a and a href="http://loopt.com/"Loopt/a - are all present and accounted for, and others like a href="http://foodspotting.com/"Foodspotting/a and a href="http://yelp.com/"Yelp/a are featured as well. /p pApple also decided to include a href="http://twitter.com/"Twitter/a, an app whose location functionalities are quite secondary (if not tertiary) to its primary function as a microblogging service and social network, among the list of featured apps. Sure, the app keeps track of where you are when you tweet, but not many people are really using Twitter to track the location of their friends./p pFacebook's updated app, which now allows users to check-in both themselves and their friends at various locations, is also included. Though Facebook is primarily a social networking app, the check-in functionality of the app makes their presence on this list fair./p pAll of the apps listed in the "On the Grid" section are free with the exception of one, a href="http://www.geofencesapp.com/"GeoFences/a - a $0.99 app that allows users to configure push alerts based on geographic areas. While all of the apps on the list include some sort of social location functionality, I worry that the average App Store browser may find the list confusing. They may fail to connect the dots on why an app like Twitter is listed beside Yelp and an app like GeoFences which they may not have even heard of./p pimg alt="otgscreen_aug10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/otgscreen_aug10.jpg" width="610" height="463" //p pThe creation of a special iTunes location-based app section is important for the industry. One could even argue that location has finally "made it," but perhaps the iTunes list could have used more curation. Oddly, there is no subhead description of the "On the Grid" section like there are for many other sections. Even the "Hardcore Games" section has a few lines of text explaining a bit about the games that made the cut./p pIt also would be nice to see some more apps fill the section out. Where are apps like a href="http://geolorean.com/"GeoLorean/a and a href="http://check.in/"Check.in/a? They would have made solid additions to "On the Grid." What other apps do you think are missing? Let us know in the comments below!/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/itunes_features_location_apps_with_new_on_the_grid_section.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ivhmYY01zVa7twFI6PPviTHlnbw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ivhmYY01zVa7twFI6PPviTHlnbw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ivhmYY01zVa7twFI6PPviTHlnbw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ivhmYY01zVa7twFI6PPviTHlnbw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=d8FrLkC2Opk:sI7MlXvrjqo:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/d8FrLkC2Opk" height="1" width="1"/