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pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/flash_jan_09.jpg"Adobe Systems announced today that its Flash Player 10.1 software for mobile devices is now being released to its platform partners. The plugin-based technology, which allows for a range of interactive elements including video, games and even advertising, is already available for Google Android phones running the latest operating system revision, code-named "Froyo," but technically known as Android version 2.2. This OS now runs on Google's Nexus One and is expected to arrive on other Android phones like the Motorola Droid, Motorola Milestone, HTC Evo, HTC Incredible, HTC Desire and the Samsung Galaxy S. /p pAdobe has also now shipped Flash Player 10.1 for mobile to its device partners who will then prep the software for launch on Blackberry (RIM), webOS (Palm), Windows Phone 7, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian smartphones. /p pThe one notable exception to this list is, of course, Apple's iPhone./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20278amp;cb=20278' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20278amp;n=20278' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2To Flash or Not to Flash?/h2 pFor some Android users, the promised ability to run Flash on their mobile phones was just as big a selling point in their purchasing decision as the lack of Flash on Apple's iPhone was to others, or so they claim. /p pThe debate about the technology and its place in the mobile ecosystem has been publicly aired, dirty-laundry style, with a a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/steve_jobs_speaks_why_we_dont_allow_flash_on_iphone_and_ipad.php"long-form memo posted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs/a, who said the Adobe technology "falls short" in a mobile era that's all about "low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards." Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen then shot back via a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/"an interview with the Wall St. Journal/a calling Jobs' missive at times "patently false," and "a smokescreen," and then concluded that the Apple CEO and himself simply have very different world views. "Our view of the world is multi-platform," he explained. /p pWith today's "multi-platform" shipment of Flash for mobile, it appears that view is close to being realized. /p pBut will consumers really want Flash, once it arrives? /p pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/flash graphic.png"/p h2Flash for Mobile: Not a CPU Hog, Says Adobe/h2 pAdobe claims they will. The company says this new version of the Flash Player has been completely redesigned for mobile use, making "efficient use of CPU and battery performance," a direct shot against one of Jobs' complaints that Flash was, in layman's terms, a CPU hog that too quickly drained a phone's battery./p pTo showcase what mobile users have been missing out on, Adobe has also launched a mini-site at a href="http://m.flash.com "m.flash.com/a, which features dozens of sites optimized for Flash, including those from Warner, Sony Pictures, Nickelodeon, PBS Kids, TBS, Sundance, USA Today, BBC, Macy's, Prada, FAO Schwartz, MLB, NBA, NHL, Sky Sports, Formula 1, FIFA World Cup and others. /p pThen, in what feels almost like press release overkill, the company sent out details of the announcement to news outlets such as this one with no less than 32 attributable quotes from a range of analysts, content partners and technology and device partners. There are no small names on this lineup, which includes the likes of HTC, Google, RIM, ARM, Samsung, Dell, Intel, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Brightcove, HBO, Viacom, Turner, MSNBC, CNET and several others. /p pThe message, or at least the one Adobe wants you to hear, is that many if not most of today's biggest names support Flash. /p h2Flash to Impact Sales?/h2 pAnd yet.../p pDespite not running Flash technology when it was well known that Flash support was arriving soon for Android and others, Apple's mobile device lineup has been selling well. And that's putting it mildly. According to a href="http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/iphone-vs-android/"recent data/a from the Nielsen Company, the iPhone retains a 28% smartphone market share in the U.S. to Android's 9%, and is still growing./p pAnd recently, a Piper Jaffray analyst a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gZGhaBQh2QMNgPpxMiPkN4ZgYcXgD9GCIUE80"upped/a his estimate for iPhone 4 sales by 1 million units, pegging the Cupertino-based company to now sell 9.5 million units before the quarter's end on June 30th. /p pThe message here, in the numbers at least, is that a phone's ability to support Flash may or may not really matter when it comes to OS choice. Picking a smartphone is a more complex decision, one based on carrier contracts, design, available applications, ease of use and thousands of other user requirements. Will em"does it run Flash?"/em ever make it on the list that exists in the consumer's mind? And even if it does, will it matter in the end? emWill Flash sell phones? /em/p pNow that Flash has arrived for Android and soon elsewhere, we'll finally be able to answer that question. And the answer will impact Adobe's mobile strategy for years to come. Today is truly a make-it-or-break-it moment for the company. They've put up. Time to see if Flash will deliver. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/on_mobile_flash_apple_stands_alone.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/iKu3pijvzdZHKuxoJZdOfvvCLiE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/iKu3pijvzdZHKuxoJZdOfvvCLiE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/iKu3pijvzdZHKuxoJZdOfvvCLiE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/iKu3pijvzdZHKuxoJZdOfvvCLiE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=mRR5c4JLk78:igoqE0KAbHI:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/mRR5c4JLk78" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/assets_c/2009/11/paloalto-thumb-150x41-10473.jpg" GlobalProtect is a new VPN-like solution from a href="http://www.paloaltonetworks.com"Palo Alto Networks/a for managing network access on enterprise laptops. Unlike a traditional VPN client, GlobalProtect locates and connects through an organization's geographically closest firewall./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20273amp;cb=20273' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20273amp;n=20273' border='0' alt='' //a/p pFor instance, someone from your Cincinnati office working from a hotel in Seattle could route traffic through a secure tunnel to the San Francisco office's firewall - without changing any configuration settings. This would reduce latency for the end-user and the network load of individual firewalls while still maintaining enterprise security policies./p pAs we a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/06/read-only-facebook-coming-to-y.php"wrote earlier/a this month, Palo Alto Networks offers firewalls that protect from threats at the application level rather than the port or protocol level. The company's firewalls are able to detect over 1,000 specific apps regardless of what port they use, even if they're tunneling through SSL, and assign permissions at the user or group level./p pAccording to Chris King, Palo Alto Networks director of product marketing, the company doesn't have plans at this time to offer a hosted firewall solution./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/06/palo-alto-networks-globalprotect.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/UfAzTJXbbohDmf0GofNRAX5ZYB0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/UfAzTJXbbohDmf0GofNRAX5ZYB0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/UfAzTJXbbohDmf0GofNRAX5ZYB0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/UfAzTJXbbohDmf0GofNRAX5ZYB0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=uekO-DSTIJw:a2eS-HWAmE4:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/uekO-DSTIJw" height="1" width="1"/

pspan class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/chatterLede.jpg"img alt="chatter Lede" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/assets_c/2010/04/chatterLede-thumb-150x131-16152.jpg" width="150" height="131" class="mt-image-none" style="" //a/spana href="http://salesforce.com"Salesforce.com/a is launching a href="http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/"Chatter/a to its entire customer base today. The adoption means that Chatter will now be part of the entire Salesforce.com stack, available as a stand alone application and as a platform for application development./p pChatter is now integrated into the entire Salesforce.com product line, including its sales and support offeirngs; Force.com and AppExchange, its marketplace for enterprise cloud computing offerings./p pWe hear a lot these days about Facebook and its connection to the enterprise. Salesforce.com seems to have imprinted Facebook into its DNA. That may infruriate many who see Facebook as something entirely different, compared to an enterprise service. But for Salesforce.com it's Facebook that we hear about over again in its briefings./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20275amp;cb=20275' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20275amp;n=20275' border='0' alt='' //a/p pIt's the activity stream that matters here. An activity stream that is also an application stream. That is the fast moving trend. The ability for people to communicate effectively in the deep stream of data. We are in a time where machines communication is a must in order to organize and share information in the flow of a dynamic supply chain. /p pimg alt="chatter-groups (high res).jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/assets_c/2010/06/chatter-groups (high res)-thumb-610x488-18567.jpg" width="610" height="488" class="aligncenter"//p pa href="http://sugarcrm.com"Sugar CRM/a has an activity stream.a href="http://successfactors.com" Success Factors/a recently acquired a href="http://cubetree.com"CubeTree/a for its contact centered service built with an activity stream environment. The Enterprisre 2.0 world has its share of companies with activity streams. a href="http://socialtext.com"Soclaltext/a is moving its concept of the activity stream forward with its a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/06/socialtext-brings-the-twitter.php"adoption of the Twitter Annotations spec/a. a href="http://socialcast.com"Socialcast/a, one of the earliest adopters of real-time activity streams, has been making headway with its service that combines real-time conversations with intergration into back-end legacy applications./p pChatter has had its fair share of skeptics. But customers do speak for themselves. Going into the launch, Salesforce.com has 5,000 customers in private beta and more than 50 applications that have built Chatter into its product infrastructure.a href="http://www.lesssoftware.com/"Less Software/a has built an app that enables customers to bring in FedEx package updates to their Salesforce CRM and Chatter when its status changes./p pBMC is using the Chatter platform for a real-time feed designed for IT departments and with internal users. /p pFor the launch, Salesforce.com has implemented the capability for anyone to create groups inside the Chatter environment. That's already a primary feature with services like a href="http://status.net"Status.net/a and a href="http://yammer.com"Yammer/a. People need to break out streams into smaller trickles that apply to their own group./p pSalesforce.com has come to dominate the CRM category. But it has not created its own category in the market like a company such as Success Factors, which has a place on every employees desktop. It has done that by positioning itself as a employee production service./p pThe company has a host of competitors, including Microsoft Sharepoint and IBM Lotus collaboration services. But with Chatter, Salesforce.com is increasing its odds of being more universal, providing real-time feed to employees across the organization. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/06/salesforcecom-has-facebook-in.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Z_mqBmCZ2MbkPJgjlwVmPxHCCx8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Z_mqBmCZ2MbkPJgjlwVmPxHCCx8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Z_mqBmCZ2MbkPJgjlwVmPxHCCx8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Z_mqBmCZ2MbkPJgjlwVmPxHCCx8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=XE-xGoY5JLU:wGRD5BkLbC8:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/XE-xGoY5JLU" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="windows-live-messenger.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/windows-live-messenger.png" width="150" height="150" / a href="http://www.microsoft.com"Microsoft/a has introduced its a href="https://login.live.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0rpsnv=11ct=1277175633rver=6.1.6195.0wp=LBIwreply=http:%2F%2Fexplore.live.com%2Fwindows-live-messenger%3Fos%3Dotherid=269505lc=1033"Windows Live Messenger/a to a href="http://www.apple.com"Apple/a. The a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/windows-live-messenger/id376196406?mt=8"Messenger app/a is designed for iPhone and iPod Touch. /p pThe app allows users to instant message their friends list, view and comment on friends' photos and status updates from Windows Live, Facebook, and MySpace,see what their Messenger friends are sharing via Flickr, YouTube, and other social sites. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20274amp;cb=20274' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20274amp;n=20274' border='0' alt='' //a/p pFeatures include: /p pul liSpace to update status, follow friends and change profile picture/li liEmail in-box button/li liBuddy list/li liChat screen/li liNew chat notification/li liPhoto and gallery screen/li /ul/p pAccording to a href="http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-20008351-233.html?part=rssamp;subj=newsamp;tag=2547-1_3-0-20"CNET Reviews/a, an initial foray into WLM use on the iPhone was stymied by intermittent crashes. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/windows_introduces_windows_messenger_for_iphone.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/MASYzvvD6wTKiBHVwC4hrArc2SM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/MASYzvvD6wTKiBHVwC4hrArc2SM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/MASYzvvD6wTKiBHVwC4hrArc2SM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/MASYzvvD6wTKiBHVwC4hrArc2SM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=9nAHeluiVlA:OMvudV9jrzE:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/9nAHeluiVlA" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="apple-logo1.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/apple-logo1.jpg" width="100" height="126" /Location-based computing is a trend a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/location/"ReadWriteWeb has been tracking/a for some time. But Apple's update of its a href="http://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/"privacy policy/a this week emphasizes location's arrival in mainstream of consumer communications. /p blockquote"To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services."/blockquote p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20272amp;cb=20272' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20272amp;n=20272' border='0' alt='' //a/p pApple's CEO a href="http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/?mod=ATD_search"Steve Jobs spoke/a about the company's relationship to privacy and location information at the a href="http://d8.allthingsd.com/"D8 Conference/a at the first of June. /p blockquote"We take privacy extremely seriously...Privacy means people know what they're signing up for."/blockquote pThat said, it would be nice if Apple were more specific on how long its partners are allowed to retain your information. /p pThis process, of passing a user's information to an app like a href="http://gowalla.com/"Gowalla/a, for instance. But by expressing it as part of Apple's explicit privacy information gives location the company's imprimatur. Location is here to stay. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apple_updates_privacy_notice_with_location.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XwbYGwgwVYHNxLDER4RwQk3NI90/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XwbYGwgwVYHNxLDER4RwQk3NI90/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XwbYGwgwVYHNxLDER4RwQk3NI90/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XwbYGwgwVYHNxLDER4RwQk3NI90/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=JuT7BWOe7hI:h_RVgxnkbFw:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/JuT7BWOe7hI" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="Thumbnail image for Hadoop-logo.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/assets_c/2009/08/Hadoop-logo-thumb-150x35-7607-thumb-150x35-7608.jpg" width="150" height="35" /a href="http://cloudera.com"Cloudera/a is working with a href="http://www.quest.com/"Quest Software/a to provide a connector into Oracle for a href="http://hadoop.apache.org/"Hadoop/a, the open-source, distrbuted data management platform./p pThe connector, called "Ora-Oop," provides a way to transfer data between Oracle and Hadoop. The service will be available in the fourth quarter for download through Cloudera and Quest. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20271amp;cb=20271' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20271amp;n=20271' border='0' alt='' //a/p pQuest is a tools provider for Oracle while Cloudera is known as the leading commercial Hadoop provider./p pHadoop is increasingly used by companies to keep data efficiently managed over an extended, distributed environment. It is known for its robust analytics. Yahoo! uses Hadoop to manage much of its infrastructure, optimize content and place advertisements. Facebook and many of the largest technology companies use Hadoop to manage the vast amounts of data in in its networks. /p pThe enterprise faces its own issues as the social Web is making it vital for companies to deal with its information such as blogs, video and other media such as audio and images. This data is not easily fitted into a relational database. That's where Hadoop comes into the picture. By allowing for the bi-directional transfer of information, users can transfer the data between Hadoop and Oracle./p pOra-Oop will complement Sqoop, an open source tool designed to import data from relational databases into Hadoop./p p/p p/p p/p p/p p/p p /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/06/post-1.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aDGCOLvFC1Jlw0J391ZCy0v1Ug4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aDGCOLvFC1Jlw0J391ZCy0v1Ug4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aDGCOLvFC1Jlw0J391ZCy0v1Ug4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/aDGCOLvFC1Jlw0J391ZCy0v1Ug4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=SrEKmvzmkp0:XHh_jtXf6Fs:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/SrEKmvzmkp0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="nomrflogo.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/nomrflogo.jpg" width="150" height="150" /"It's almost impossible to describe how important the Web was for getting the a href="http://www.nomrf.org/index.html"New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund/a off the ground," said co-founder a href="http://twitter.com/kbeninato"Karen Dalton-Beninato/a. Karen and her husband Jeff, who grew up playing music in the Ninth Ward, used Web technologies and social media to reach out to music fans in the wake of a href="http://www.nola.com/katrina/"Hurricane Katrina/a. Now, almost exactly five years later, another crisis is hitting the shore, the a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mapping_the_oil_spill_in_real_time.php"Gulf/a a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/oil_spill_social_media.php"oil spill/a. /p blockquote"With the current state of the economy, we get more used instrument donations than anything else these days, but it's been an amazing ride. New Orleans is going to have a rough summer with Gulf Coast tourism dropping already after the oil spill. Hopefully people will keep the city and its music in their hearts."/blockquote p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20270amp;cb=20270' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20270amp;n=20270' border='0' alt='' //a/p pKaren and Jeff started the fund in a Chicago FEMA room when it became clear that many musicians and others wouldn't be able to return to New Orleans for weeks if not months. Jeff, who grew up playing in the Ninth Ward and was a member of the 80s pop band the dBs, as well as playing with roots and jazz outfits, turned to the Internet. He and Karen put together a a href="http://www.nomrf.org/"Website/a with an a href="http://www.nomrf.org/donations.html"online donation function/a. /p pa href="http://web.mac.com/nomrf/iWeb/NOMRF/NOMRF/8A9AF643-82E4-450E-8C95-9B6FD490BE29.html"Podcasts/a were a powerful way to reach out to both a distributed public and a fractured musical scene, as was a href="http://neworleansmusiciansrelief.blogspot.com/"the blog they started/a. They used social media and more old school Web tools to beat the bushes and pass the hat. Straight out donations, walkathons, a href="http://www.nomrf.org/Redefine829Download.html"downloads/a and a href="http://www.cafepress.com/nomrf"t-shirt sales/a. Money came in to help get people home, to help them repair storm damage and to pay rent and, above all, to give them back their means of making a living: get them back their bones. In addition to money, people donated trumpets and trombones, traps and guitars and even pianos. /p pa href="http://chsl.webs.com/"Joannie Hughes/a, a New Orleans native who became a volunteer with NOMRF, said after Katrina, the most disconcerting thing was the absence of music. /p blockquote"The one thing that struck me in my heart and soul when I returned was the silence. Having lived here all of my life and grown up in a music household I just was not prepared for the lack of live music that usually poured into the streets. The entire city owes (Jeff and Karen) a great deal of gratitude for bringing back our cherished music."/blockquote pimg alt="SylviaNOMRFpiano.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/SylviaNOMRFpiano.jpg" width="357" height="270" class="alignright" //formThere's a feeling that once a certain amount of time passes after a disaster, people should have the decency to be OK. Unfortunately, given the sheer bulk of the mess, both physically and politically, that's just not been the case with New Orleans, as co-founder Jeff Beninato reminds us. /p blockquote"If you think this tragedy is over think again. There are still families out there in corners of this country trying to figure out what they are going to do to get their lives back to some normalcy. There are so many musicians who were well known in New Orleans that are totally unknown where they are now. Imagine building your fanbase or your work base in your workplace and suddenly it all disappears."/blockquote pAnd now what promises to become the single largest a href="http://www.reuters.com/subjects/gulf-oil-spill"ecological catastrophe/a in the nation's history, the Gulf oil spill, is bearing down on the city. The travelers and the money they bring are starting to dry up again. The resource economy, fishing, shrimping and crabbing, that all funnels into the city, is faltering. The need to plug in to this newest of technologies - the Web - to save the oldest - music - is pressing, again. There is some truth to the notion that this technology we cover levels and democratizes. NOMRF is using it to make the process of helping the men and women who provide the soundtrack to your hopes and dreams more egalitarian and more direct. /p pThink trading tracks and files is "peer-to-peer"? Pass the hat at the a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/green-dragon-bistro-and-brewpub-portland"Green Dragon/a and buy a guy a trumpet so he can gig and get his kids new shoes. emThat's/em peer-to-peer, brothers and sisters. Can I get an amen? /p pI said.../p pemstrongCan I get an amen?/strong/em/p pAlright, then./p pimg alt="wilcoNOV05-4-36_1.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/wilcoNOV05-4-36_1.jpg" width="600" height="352" / /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_makes_the_difference_for_new_orleans_musicians.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3FNTnBHDiE5YsTUMqXif9iOYzw0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3FNTnBHDiE5YsTUMqXif9iOYzw0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3FNTnBHDiE5YsTUMqXif9iOYzw0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3FNTnBHDiE5YsTUMqXif9iOYzw0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=UK4ABW4HmmQ:E1fCZwNDeRk:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/UK4ABW4HmmQ" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="ferriswheel_jun10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/ferriswheel_jun10.jpg" width="150" height="112"Last week on his blog, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz diagnosed "a href="http://bhorowitz.com/2010/06/14/second-startup-syndrome/"Second Startup Syndrome/a," a condition that many successful entrepreneurs often suffer from. Second Startup Syndrome, says Horowitz, can derail entrepreneurs as they move from one successful startup to founding their next company. Second Startup Syndrome places too much emphasis on business models and not enough on developing the core product, says Horowitz. The company glosses over important details "assuming that what worked the first time will automagically work the second time."/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20269amp;cb=20269' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20269amp;n=20269' border='0' alt='' //a/p pBut even without suffering from Second Startup Syndrome, a second startup can simply fail to get off the ground. Markets, technologies can quickly change./p h2Past Results Not Indicative of Future Performance/h2 pSuch was the case with Jeff Ready's company Volt Capital. Ready had planned for Volt Capital to take advantage of some of the natural language processing technology of his past company Corvigo, a successful anti-spam service that he'd just founded and sold. Volt Capital was designed to be a hedge fund, utilizing some of the AI expertise to analyze the stock market. But due to a combination of factors - even before the economy took a nosedive - Volt Capital never got off the ground. Ready was stuck with a major technology investment that he used to successful launch his most recent company, a href="http://www.scalecomputing.com/"Scale Computing/a, a data storage vendor./p pVolt Capital had built a supercomputer in order to store and process the information it would receive daily from the markets -- around 40-60 GB per day. At first, says Ready, he and his business partners thought they would use this hardware to start a virtualization service. After all, a href="http://www.vmware.com/"VMWare/a had just gone public and it seemed a good market. But as Ready started to do some research, he found that he'd be better off working to address a storage, rather than a virtualization, solution. /p h2Listen and Learn/h2 pAlthough it's easier, perhaps, to learn from a mistake, Ready says it's just as important for entrepreneurs to learn from their successes as well. You cannot simply assume that because something worked in one company that it will transfer to another./p pEvolve your idea "before you write a line of code," urges Ready. He stresses the importance of doing the right research before your engineers get to work. /p pAnd while plenty can be found via Google, sometimes it's best to go to people directly. "Cold calling," recommends Ready, who picked up the phone himself and surveyed a variety of businesses in order to gauge where to develop his next business. It sounds intimidating, perhaps, but these aren't sales calls. You're asking for advice, says Ready, and you can earnestly tell the recipient of your call that it'll be "the most interesting phone conversation you have that day." /p pThese phone conversations can provide you with a good glimpse into the direction of the industry and into the minds of your potential customers. The conversations can provide powerful anecdotes when you make pitches to investors, adds Ready. And these people make great call-backs when you can offer them beta access to your new product or service./p pThe approach that Ready took with forging the direction for Scale Computing placed a lot of value on being "genuine, candid, and useful." It seems as though these qualities might be good antidotes to Second Startup Syndrome./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/06/avoiding-second-startup-syndro.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7kPVgpn-l_vyhaWE6XNYgSnI3tE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7kPVgpn-l_vyhaWE6XNYgSnI3tE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7kPVgpn-l_vyhaWE6XNYgSnI3tE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7kPVgpn-l_vyhaWE6XNYgSnI3tE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eD-Yko3Batc:5QOJopX8csM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/eD-Yko3Batc" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/quoralogo150thx.png"Real-time social Question and Answer service a href="http://quora.com"Quora/a has opened to the public after months of high-profile development in closed beta. The service was started by a group of early Facebook employees, most notably Facebook's first CTO Adam D'Angelo. It's a beautifully designed site but is entering a very crowded QA market./p pThe company has raised millions of dollars in venture capital, at a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchmark-invests-at-86-million-valuation/"a very high valuation/a, and is rumored to be in a nasty spat behind the scenes with Facebook leadership. It's also been a great place to get inside dirt on Silicon Valley startups. Ready to take a peak inside? The site is open to new users today./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20268amp;cb=20268' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20268amp;n=20268' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg src="http://readwriteweb.com/images/Quora_-_Startups-20100621-154602.jpg" alt="Quora%20-%20Startups"//p pReadWriteWeb a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_1st_cto_launches_his_next_company_screen.php"posted the first screenshots of the service/a in January, but Quora has been subject of intense press scrutiny ever since - while remaining accessible only through a loose invitation system./p pMeanwhile, Facebook itself is developing a QA system and is rumored to be engaged in a href="http://gigaom.com/2010/06/18/is-quora-blocking-access-by-facebook-employees/"a back-and-forth war of IP blocking/a between its employees and Quora's. We've heard that there's more animosity than that going on behind the scenes as well./p pMeanwhile, Quora has remained a small site building itself to ensure scalability when this time finally came. Public launch day was marked by a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704256304575321070429328364.html?mod=e2tw"a very nice write-up in the Wall St. Journal/a. Quora is a good little site, but it's hard not to wonder if the hype, funding and press coverage is warranted given the traction-to-pedigree ratio./p pThose of us who have enjoyed using it among a select group of early adopters may find the new public Quora to be a different animal. That's certainly what happened when the marginally-related a href="http://vark.com"Aardvark/a went from red-hot to a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_i_loved_and_lost_an_aardvark.php"Google acquired/a to uselessly swamped with half-baked questions from the Google-using public. (Sorry, it's true!) /p pQuora is closely tied in to the Facebook "social graph" of its users, something that may help it avoid Aardvark's fate if if ever gets in front of a large number of people./p pLet's see what you've got, Quora. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/early_facebook_employees_new_project_quora_opens_t.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZDRIV2nDTNv1zLs0erPTd9_GrR8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZDRIV2nDTNv1zLs0erPTd9_GrR8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZDRIV2nDTNv1zLs0erPTd9_GrR8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ZDRIV2nDTNv1zLs0erPTd9_GrR8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_-jlMM5UZQc:T9pGG44e6pk:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/_-jlMM5UZQc" height="1" width="1"/

div style="float: right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 15px"script type="text/javascript"tweetmeme_service = 'bit.ly';tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowdfunding_can_the_wisdom_of_crowds_work_for_funding_startups.php';tweetmeme_hashtags = 'SpnsrdByLexus';tweetmeme_source = 'rww';/scriptscript type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"/script/divpimg alt="crowd_party.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/crowd_party.jpg" width="150" height="113"Whether or not you believe that venture capital is a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/06/is-venture-capital-broken.php"broken/a, the necessity of funding startups still exists. One alternative to traditional funding models is "crowdfunding" - crowdsourcing the fundraising process. pLike crowdsourcing, crowdfunding is based on the idea of the "a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706"wisdom of crowds/a." And crowdfunding contends that "the crowd" can be a better source for financial support than traditional funding avenues. As these traditional avenues are often criticized for being based on "who you know" as much as "what you do," crowdfunding promises fundraising that is more transparent, more collaborative, more accessible, and more global./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20267amp;cb=20267' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20267amp;n=20267' border='0' alt='' //a/p divdiv style="float: left; width: 150px;"script type="text/javascript" src="http://thirdparty.fmpub.net/placement/327074?fleur_de_sel=?php echo time();?"/script/div div style="float: left"pemThis Innovation Series is brought to you by a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;225767022;49467293;q" rel="nofollow"Lexus/a./em/p/div br style="clear: both" / /divh2Disrupting the Relationship Between Investor and Entrepreneur/h2 pBut as it is a different funding model, crowdfunding means a different sort of relationship between the investor and the entrepreneur. With many (but not all) crowdfunding sites, startups retain full ownership of their projects. Investors receive credit on the website, and sometimes a thank-you gift (a commemorative t-shirt, a free subscription or software copy, and the like). But there are no stock certificates, no seat on the Board of Directors, no equity./p pWhile crowdfunding does provide entrepreneurs with needed funding, startups who raise money this way might miss out on some of other things that investors bring to the table, including business advice and connections. But arguably this is a vicious circle: In order to get that investor backing and to take advantage of investors' connections, you often need pretty strong connections in the first place. According to John Rooney, CEO for the startup a href="http://www.jakaya.com"Jakaya/a, which is seeking funding for its collaboration tool via a href="http://www.indiegogo.com/jakaya"IndieGoGo/a, finding investors can be very challenging for those outside the tech world's "inner circles." /p h2Crowdfunding, with Due Diligence/h2 pa href="http://www.growvc.com"GrowVC/a is one crowdfunding site that aims to foster both the startup and the investor community. GrowVC is run on a subscription-based model, where subscribers make the decisions about what gets funded. Unlike some of the other crowdfunding services, GrowVC does due diligence on the companies that are listed there./p pAnd this diligence is often pointed to as a flaw of the crowdfunding process. While a startup might be able to raise money using crowdfunding sites, these services do not necessite that these companies have a business plan or a viable product. /p pThis is among the criticisms lobbed at what is perhaps crowdfunding's most well known success story, the a href="http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html"Diaspora Project/a. Although Diaspora was able to raise well over its initial $10,000 goal using the popular a href="http://www.kickstarter.com"Kickstarter/a crowdfunding platform - it's actually raised more than $200,000 - this is still no guarantee that Diaspora can build a viable alternative to Facebook. And while Diaspora certainly capitalized on the anti-Facebook sentiment, arguably its project would have not received such a positive response had it not been for the a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/diaspora_project_building_the_anti-facebook.php"press coverage/a they've received. Several other alternatives to Facebook, for example - many of which actually have a product - also appear on crowdfunding sites, but have received neither the press nor the money that Diaspora has./p p"Fund us if you believe in us," says Jakaya's John Rooney. And while "believing in a startup" is a prerequisite before any investor writes a check, crowdfunding does offer a chance for startups to expand that investor base outside the traditional investment circles. And as there can't possibly be as many VC managers as there are good ideas, that's not necessarily a bad thing./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowdfunding_can_the_wisdom_of_crowds_work_for_funding_startups.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FESb3CjhXrhp-uXNvHCV3IoU7xE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FESb3CjhXrhp-uXNvHCV3IoU7xE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FESb3CjhXrhp-uXNvHCV3IoU7xE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/FESb3CjhXrhp-uXNvHCV3IoU7xE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=_sL-3Wi6d-A:i5Paz27IHrA:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/_sL-3Wi6d-A" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/gulfresponse_spillphoto.jpg" width="140" /In the wake of the BP oil disaster, real-time mapping technologies have been recruited to improve communication and promote collaboration between people in local communities, as well as federal, state and local responders. Last week a href="http://www.noaa.gov/"NOAA/a released a href="http://www.geoplatform.gov/gulfresponse/"GeoPlatform.gov/a to provide near-real-time mapping data to those connected to the crisis./p pThe site lets you track everything from daily spill positions to the locations of ships responding to the crisis. State and non-governmental organizations are also collecting and mapping real-time information. In some instances the efforts include citizen-generated data from iPhone apps and photos mapped on sites like Flickr./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20248amp;cb=20248' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20248amp;n=20248' border='0' alt='' //a/p pa href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/ERMA-1.jpg"img alt="geoplatform_gulf_oil" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/assets_c/2010/06/ERMA-1-thumb-300x252-18516.jpg" class="alignright" width="250" //aGeoPlatform.gov, which is designed to be a one-stop access point for location data, uses a Web-based mapping system called ERMA (Environmental Response Management Application). Its a href="http://www.geoplatform.gov/gulfresponse/ERMA_Data_Summary.pdf"list of data layers/a includes spill trajectories, shoreline conditions, and the current positions of ships registered as responders. NOAA hopes to add things like wildlife impacts, field photos, and agency analysis to the site in the near future./p pLA Earth (a href="http://gohsep.la.gov/oilspill.aspx"Louisiana Earth/a) is a a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_earth_on_ipad_wow.php"Google Earth/a Enterprise Server operated by the state of Louisiana that provides daily oil spill trajectories, closures, and many other maps as a a href="http://laearth.la.gov/SE_Flood/PublicOilRig.kmz"Google Earth layer/a (kml). (Download the Google Earth a href="http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html"Client/Plugin/a to use the date.)/p h2Crisis and Crowd-sourced Mapping/h2 pThere are several ways that that Gulf locals are mapping and reporting spill related incidents. The a href="http://oilspill.labucketbrigade.org/"Oil Spill Crisis/a map was created buy the a href="http://www.labucketbrigade.org/"Louisiana Bucket Brigade/a and students at Tulane University. The map shows hundreds of reports sent through SMS messages, Twitter and the Internet. The map was built using open-source crisis mapping software developed by a href="http://ushahidi.com/"Ushahidi/a./p pa href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/Oil_Spill_Crisis%20Map.jpg"img alt="Oil_Spill_Crisis Map.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/assets_c/2010/06/Oil_Spill_Crisis Map-thumb-600x380-18537.jpg" width="600" height="380" //a?php include('/opt/data/MovableType/current/htdocs/includes/oilspill.php'); ?br / The sensors built into smartphones are collecting a rich stream of spill-related data for mapping. The iPhone app Oil Spill Response (a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oil-spill-response/id371743298?mt=8ign-mpt=uo=6"iTunes download/a) allows you to file mobile reports on wildlife, oiled shorelines and other types of spill-related damage. a href="http://oilreporter.org/tools"Oil Reporter/a was created by a href="http://crisiscommons.org/"Crisis Commons/a and is available for both iPhones and Android smart-phones. It a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging"geotags/a photos, files reports, and provides information on how to contact authorities or volunteer./p pBeyond the information collected by the government and oil industry, people are documenting their own stories. Communities are forming on photo sharing sites like Flickr where location-tagged images can be visualized using a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/gulf_oilspill/pool/map?mode=group"Flickr Map/a./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mapping_the_oil_spill_in_real_time.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HVXc06Jdkr114RYd5JZEN0Y1xZk/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HVXc06Jdkr114RYd5JZEN0Y1xZk/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HVXc06Jdkr114RYd5JZEN0Y1xZk/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HVXc06Jdkr114RYd5JZEN0Y1xZk/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=iMc-goWHsL0:oKn_CE1YTYw:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/iMc-goWHsL0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/facebook_tc50.jpg"When the popular iPhone application for a href="http://Facebook.com"Facebook/a got a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_the_facebook_iphone_app_according_to.php"a dramatic refresh last summer/a, lead designer Joe Hewitt said that the inability to view Facebook videos was a real disappointment. This weekend that changed, and Facebook iPhone users now have a very nice experience viewing videos on their mobile devices./p pA quiet update to the application on Friday fixed a number of small bugs but the biggest change was the introduction of video. Facebook sees a href="http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/06/facebook-surpasses-2-billion-monthy-video-views/"2 billion video views each month/a, which is the same number YouTube sees every single day. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20266amp;cb=20266' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20266amp;n=20266' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg src="http://readwriteweb.com/images/fbvideo-20100621-151845.jpg" alt="fbvideo" align="right"/This Spring Facebook began displaying native Facebook videos full-screen on the iPad, by switching to h264 encoded video files when appropriate. A Facebook spokesperson didn't tell us what the technical implementation was in the new version of the iPhone app, but did point to a number of ways that users can now find the videos. /p pIncluded in the drop-down of Newsfeed viewing options is a new link to see all the videos uploaded by your contacts. If you haven't subscribed to a href="http://www.facebook.com/kristof"Nicholas Kristof on Facebook/a, now could be a good time. His 5 minute-long videos uploaded to the social network are a great way to get a quick education about the world. a href="http://www.facebook.com/GeekTV"Geek emExploration/em TV/a? Perfect for Facebook mobile. Heck, I just watched a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/george_w_bush_has_joined_facebook.php"a Facebook video from George W. Bush/a on my iPhone!/p pMost of the videos in my stream are of babies doing (ostensibly) cute things. Millions of people will now be able to view videos from friends and family on their phones, as well. /p centerimg src="http://readwriteweb.com/images/fbvideo-20100621-152001.jpg" alt="fbvideo"//center stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_videos_now_viewable_on_iphone.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ARJE43gFzOoI_7bpyS9iU7Gii_s/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ARJE43gFzOoI_7bpyS9iU7Gii_s/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ARJE43gFzOoI_7bpyS9iU7Gii_s/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ARJE43gFzOoI_7bpyS9iU7Gii_s/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=78ea1eRcrGc:VB31i030-EM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/78ea1eRcrGc" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/google_docs_logo_jun10.jpg"/OCR (optical character recognition) fans that are frustrated with the current offering of online services may be pleased to learn that a href="http://docs.google.com/"Google Docs/a will now grab text from images and PDFs quickly and cost free. According to the blog a href="http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/06/google-adds-ocr-for-pdf-files-and.html"Google Operating System/a, the new feature has quietly been pushed live by Google after several months of experimentation and development, but will it replace commercial software or online solutions?/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20263amp;cb=20263' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20263amp;n=20263' border='0' alt='' //a/p pWhen uploading files to their account, Docs users will now see an option to run an OCR scan, which will extract characters and place them within a new text document. As far as accuracy goes, PDFs fair much better than images, especially basic black text on a white background./p pimg alt="googleocr_jun10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/googleocr_jun10.jpg" //p pI uploaded a picture of my business card and Google Docs had trouble recognizing the largest text and clearest text on the card, but surprisingly did better with smaller text. A test of a PDF document turned up nearly perfect recognition results, but Google Docs strips nearly all of the formatting out, spewing out the text in a stream of letters and spaces. Other examples from Google Operating System produced decent results, but far from perfect or useful./p pAdditionally, when scanning a PDF, Google Docs does not save a copy of the PDF, so scanning to text and saving an original file requires two separate uploads. This feature is great for casual OCR users that want to quickly grab text from PDFs and some images or business cards. Those who rely on OCR heavily will likely be disappointed with the features and may have better results with commercial solutions./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_docs_now_does_ocr_for_images_pdfs_sort_of.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qn0gnsBjYS05bhJZ1n6gLmPMgt8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qn0gnsBjYS05bhJZ1n6gLmPMgt8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qn0gnsBjYS05bhJZ1n6gLmPMgt8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qn0gnsBjYS05bhJZ1n6gLmPMgt8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=pg8TmOqKiPU:QOszbPGUxY4:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/pg8TmOqKiPU" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://readwriteweb.com/images/mobile_3d_city-20100621-135451.jpg" alt="mobile%203d%20city"/Google Earth's new iPad application is a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_earth_on_ipad_wow.php"simply fantastic/a, but what if it was in 3D? A limited preview of that kind of functionality is promised by a forthcoming iPad app called a href="http://www.mobile3dcity.com/"Mobile 3D City/a. /p pBuilt by a French company called a href="http://www.newscape-technology.com"Newscape/a, as a demonstration of its technology that allows mobile devices to process large quantities of data, Mobile 3D City appeared on our radar today via a video posted to design blog a href="http://www.psfk.com/2010/06/3d-city-on-the-ipad.html"PSFK/a./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20262amp;cb=20262' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20262amp;n=20262' border='0' alt='' //a/p centerobject width="640" height="385"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rZtveCkW9Dccolor1=0x402061color2=0x9461cahl=en_USfeature=player_embeddedfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rZtveCkW9Dccolor1=0x402061color2=0x9461cahl=en_USfeature=player_embeddedfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="385"/embed/object/center pIt appears that this app will cover just one city, and it certainly is a far cry from where Google Earth is today, but can you imagine if this kind of 3D experience was part of what Google's global ball of zooming, spinning and Wikipedia entries offered in the future? That would be pretty cool. It would likely take some serious, serious technology to be possible though. Thus the technology demonstration./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_google_earth_mobile_3d_city_for_ipad.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ES33Pb_XtAMVrPcSnnTAxaOJpls/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ES33Pb_XtAMVrPcSnnTAxaOJpls/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ES33Pb_XtAMVrPcSnnTAxaOJpls/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ES33Pb_XtAMVrPcSnnTAxaOJpls/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=c7kxu7SjYFc:6hotJyZuth4:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/c7kxu7SjYFc" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="kindle_logo_mar09.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/kindle_logo_mar09.png" width="116" height="52" /Amazon just dropped the a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation/dp/B0015T963C/ref=amb_link_340329822_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DERpf_rd_s=center-1pf_rd_r=1XCVC0C3JQQGYEX3T2ZQpf_rd_t=101pf_rd_p=1258435222pf_rd_i=507846"price of its Kindle e-reader to $189/a. This move comes just a few hours after Bamp;N a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/barnes_nobile_launches_149_wifi-only_nook_drops_pr.php"announced/a the launch of its WiFi-only Nook for $149 and reduced the price of its 3G-enabled version of the Nook to $189. No doubt, Amazon's price drop is a direct reaction to Bamp;N's attack on Amazon's Kindle business and it will be interesting to see how BN will react to Amazon's new challenge. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20261amp;cb=20261' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20261amp;n=20261' border='0' alt='' //a/p pIn its press release, Amazon doesn't address Bamp;N's Nook directly. Instead, Amazon takes a thinly veiled swipe at Apple's iPad and stresses that the Kindle can be used in "bright sunlight" and that it is light enough for "one-handed reading." In addition, Amazon stresses that even though the Kindle is a 3G device, users won't have to pay monthly fees or sign annual contracts. /p h2For Half a Day, the Nook was the Cheapest 3G-Enabled E-Reader/h2 pimg alt="kindle_price_189.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/kindle_price_189.jpg" width="330" height="169" class="alignright"/Now that the Kindle is $10 cheaper than the Nook 3G, Amazon's e-reader is now the cheapest 3G-enabled standalone e-reader on the market - a claim that BN was still able to make in its announcement this morning. The WiFi-only Nook is still $40 cheaper than the Kindle, but with its 3G connection, the Kindle offers a very significant extra feature for what is only a slightly higher price. /p h2How Will BN React? Another Price Drop or Focus on Unique Features?/h2 pIt will be interesting to see how this race to the bottom will play out. Amazon has already shown that it is willing to a href="http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10002566/amazons-inverse-kindle-strategy-hardware-subsidizes-media/"take a loss/a on the Kindle business in order to gain market share. If BN decides to undercut Amazon's price again, chances are that Amazon will pull even within hours./p pIf BN decides to keep its current pricing scheme, chances are that the company will focus its marketing on the unique features of the Nook ecosystem, including the ability to lend e-book to friends for up to two weeks and BN's in-store reading program. In addition, the Nook's small touchscreen at the bottom of the device gives BN's e-reader an additional hardware feature that the Kindle doesn't offer yet./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_e-reader_price_war_heats_up_kindle_now_189.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/G34WbdMw1WDsUn0v6WQMt1uZgHg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/G34WbdMw1WDsUn0v6WQMt1uZgHg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/G34WbdMw1WDsUn0v6WQMt1uZgHg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/G34WbdMw1WDsUn0v6WQMt1uZgHg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=eup0JUKHi2k:evCLQkclw6Y:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/eup0JUKHi2k" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="sharehappy_150_jun10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/sharehappy_150_jun10.jpg"/As seen in the a href="http://google.com/"doodle on the Google homepage/a this morning, today is the first day of summer - a time when families pack up their cars and get away from the real world for a few days. One of the staples of the quintessential summer experience - the beloved ice cream truck - is getting a new spin this year. International brand conglomerate a href="http://www.unilever.com/"Unilever/a has introduced a href="http://www.mobilebehavior.com/2010/06/21/unilever-ice-cream-machine-detects-emotion-and-shares-happy/"an interactive social kiosk/a that dispenses tasty treats to passers by. The fee? Ice cream lovers need only provide a smile./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20260amp;cb=20260' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20260amp;n=20260' border='0' alt='' //a/p pobject width="610" height="367"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DI-IO3kmxVchl=en_USfs=1rel=0hd=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DI-IO3kmxVchl=en_USfs=1rel=0hd=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="610" height="367"/embed/object/p pUsing facial recognition technology, the kiosks, which encourage users to "Share Happy," can tell a person's age, gender and emotion. When the machine determines a person is happy and has a large enough smile, the user is rewarded with an ice cream bar. Happy users can even share their smiles online by uploading the photo to Facebook directly from the kiosk./p pimg alt="facetracking_jun10.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/facetracking_jun10.jpg" class="alignright" /The kiosk is currently only available in the French city of Cannes, known for its world famous yearly film festival. As facial recognition technology evolves to become more accessible to more companies, kiosks like these are going to pop up in many more places. Augmented reality has taken advantage of the public kiosk medium for a several years, but the majority have been at auto shows and other specialized events./p pI would expect that locations more generally open to the public, like shopping malls and storefronts, will start to incorporate these interactive displays more and more. AR vendors like Total Immersion have used kiosks to draw attention to shops with enhanced window shopping, and to new movies with augmented movie posters. American ad agencies are slowly catching up to the largely Europe-based AR ad market, so don't be surprised when you see shopping mall maps start to interact with you./p pWhile this example from Unilever isn't exactly augmenting anyone's reality (except for the fact that it gives you ice cream), it is an interesting example of how these technologies are merging. These kiosks could point to an evolution of social experiences away from desktops and mobile devices as AR and related technologies mature in the near future./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/face-tracking_kiosk_trades_ice_cream_for_smiles_video.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/CloTeghmaDhqP-5bwNBUTSPFB8o/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/CloTeghmaDhqP-5bwNBUTSPFB8o/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/CloTeghmaDhqP-5bwNBUTSPFB8o/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/CloTeghmaDhqP-5bwNBUTSPFB8o/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=exPn_NCSxK0:L9hKxRsY1J0:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/exPn_NCSxK0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/loopt-fancy.jpg"It looks like the first runner has crossed the finish line in the race to bringing background location functionality to the iPhone, and the winner is a href="http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/06/21/loopt-iphone-background/"Loopt/a, an early entry in the location-based services arena./p pAside from multitasking (or pseudo-multitasking, if you will) and those helpful organizer folders, background location was one of the most anticipated features of iOS 4, and Loopt clearly shows us why - even though it's just the tip of the background-location iceberg./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20259amp;cb=20259' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20259amp;n=20259' border='0' alt='' //a/p pPersistent location means one thing - you don't need to interact with your iPhone and let it know that you want it to check your location and give you information based on that data. Instead, you can allow your iPhone to consistently monitor your location in various apps and when it comes across a certain set of conditions, notify you. /p pIn the case of Loopt, this means that you don't have to walk around town checking in at every location you go. As a href="http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/06/21/loopt-iphone-background/"Kim-Mai Cutler/a of Venture Beat writes, "users can now continuously share where they are with specific friends so they don't have to constantly "check-in" to places. If a friend happens to be nearby, the app will send you a push notification alerting you. (They can still do check-ins for acquaintances and a broader group of friends, however.)"/p pAs we a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_background_location_brings_to_the_iphone.php"wrote when we first heard about background location/a, the "list of ideas for background location are endless", from time- and place-specific advertising to the types of notifications we'll see from Loopt. /p pSomething like a href="http://www.urbanspoon.com"Urbanspon/a, so you can know when deals pop up around you for happy hour? Or maybe a traffic notification app that can alert you to a jam on the highway your driving ahead? What if a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/craigsphone-craigslist-for/id297870221?mt=8"Craigsphone/a could look up apartments as you travel around town and let you know when you near one meeting your requirements? /p pOutside of the LBS arena, what apps are you excited about having access to your location in the background?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/loopt_brings_background_location_to_the_iphone.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/eWFWGvgdcG0QdmIy0KxFupvPJIw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/eWFWGvgdcG0QdmIy0KxFupvPJIw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/eWFWGvgdcG0QdmIy0KxFupvPJIw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/eWFWGvgdcG0QdmIy0KxFupvPJIw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=lwu5JPMFa0k:j1nAY3KqNzE:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/lwu5JPMFa0k" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="JackBe logo" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/images/jackbe_logo_0610.gif" width="150" height="100" / a href="http://jackbe.com"JackBe/a is releasing technology to allow enterprises to to create their own internal "app stores" on June 30. Complementing JackBe's existing line of mashup and app making tools, the JackBe App Store will enable users to share the AJAX apps they've created with other uses within the enterprise. The apps are portable and can run as standalone apps, on dashboards, in Sharepoint, on mobile devices, and pipe data into Excel./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20237amp;cb=20237' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20237amp;n=20237' border='0' alt='' //a/p pJackBe's tools, such as Presto Wires and Mashboard, enable the creation of mashups and simple custom apps by end-users without the need for the IT department to get involved, thus speeding up development and deployment. The tools are designed with security and compliance in mind and run inside the firewall, so enterprise-ready applications can be created on the fly./p pThe company says Random House uses JackBe products to map items from their inventory to current trending search terms from Yahoo! and other sources of real-time data. The Random House marketing team uses this information to create timely web marketing campaigns by on current events./p pThe JackBe App Store aims to improve the sharing of these sorts of custom apps within the enterprise by allowing app creators to share their creations across silos or within departments. End-users can then easily modify the apps - by adding or removing data or changing the way it's visualized./p pa href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/forrester_enterprise_mashups.php"In 2008/a Forrester estimated the market for enterprise mashups would reach $700 million by 2013. Other companies competing for a chunk of this market include a href="http://www.dapper.net/"Dapper/a, a href="http://kapowtech.com/"Kapow/a, a href="http://kivati.com/Pages/default.aspx"Kivati/a and a href="http://www.mindtouch.com/"Mindtouch/a./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/06/jackbe-bringing-internal-app-s.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/0o68ka4BHOED1OXW0kMVUSLr8Nk/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/0o68ka4BHOED1OXW0kMVUSLr8Nk/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/0o68ka4BHOED1OXW0kMVUSLr8Nk/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/0o68ka4BHOED1OXW0kMVUSLr8Nk/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GjmuAseF9G4:kvt_zWg2_Q0:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/GjmuAseF9G4" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="opscode_logo.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/opscode_logo.png" width="135" height="75"a href="http://www.opscode.com/"Opscode/a, a cloud infrastructure automation company, announced today that it has closed an $11 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by a href="http://www.battery.com"Battery Ventures/a and brings the total raised for the company to $13.5 million./p pProceeds from the new funds will be used to expand the company's engineering staff, research initiatives, and sales and marketing efforts./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20258amp;cb=20258' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20258amp;n=20258' border='0' alt='' //a/p p"We are witnessing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make world-class IT infrastructure available to the masses," says Sunil Dhaliwal, a general partner at Battery Ventures and now a member of Opscode's Board of Directors. "The future belongs to those that can deliver simple, scalable automation to any IT user, regardless of their size or sophistication." /p pOpscode is the maker of Chef, an open source systems integration framework for managing and scaling infrastructure. Chef allows developers to manage large-scale server and application deployment by writing code, rather than by running commands by hand. Chef helps automate some of the manual tasks that have historically been required to fix server issues./p pOpscode also announced today a limited beta release of Opscode Platform, a hosted configuration management service. The Opscode Platform is a centrally managed data store into which servers publish data such as IP addresses, loaded kernel modules, and OS versions. /p pAccording to Opscode, Chef and the Opscode Platform allow developers and systems engineers to fully automate their infrastructures with re-usable code - without having to build or maintain systems management tools./p pOpscode was founded in 2008 and is based in Seattle, Washington. Since its launch, over 150 individuals and 25 companies, including a href="http://www.rackspace.com/"Rackspace/a and a href="http://www.rightscale.com/"RightScale/a have contributed to the open source project./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/06/opscode-closes-11-million-seri.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nf4A-XQEs0PWmO8PCoU09aT2V_k/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nf4A-XQEs0PWmO8PCoU09aT2V_k/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nf4A-XQEs0PWmO8PCoU09aT2V_k/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nf4A-XQEs0PWmO8PCoU09aT2V_k/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ri0oyg06Asw:407EJ2-A_O4:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/ri0oyg06Asw" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/google_logo.gif"One of the biggest dilemmas for print and mainstream media today is how to transition from a free-for-all model to one where users actually pay for the content they consume. Should each site enact its own paywall, forcing users to purchase a subscription to just that site? How about a pay-per-article solution, which would still require a separate login for each publication?/p pA report in Italian publication a href="http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2010/06/17/news/google_pay-4932905/"La Repubblica/a last week tells us that Google might launch its own solution to this problem later this year, and we have to admit, there might be few companies better positioned to take on this role than the one thought to be a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/how-to-save-the-news/8095/"the reason for the industry's decline/a in the first place./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=20257amp;cb=20257' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=20257amp;n=20257' border='0' alt='' //a/p pAccording to the article, the one-click payment solution will be called Newspass and would be available for Web, mobile and tablet platforms. Google would not confirm any specific details, but instead offered the following statement:/p blockquoteWe've consistently said we're talking with news publishers about ways we can work together, including whether we can help them with technology to power any subscription services they may be thinking of building. Our aim, as with all Google products, is to reach as broad a global audience as possible. We have nothing specific to announce at this time./blockquote pA Google-provided micropayment solution is anything but far-fetched, of course, as the company a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/google-developing-a-micropayment-platform-and-pitching-newspapers-open-need-not-mean-free/"proposeda one such platform to the Newspaper Association of America last September. The a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/pdfs/Google.pdf"system/a would come as an extension of a href="http://checkout.google.com/"Google Checkout/a and could help to reposition Google in the news business. /p pAs we've written before, sources like Google's search and a href="http://news.google.com"Google News/a have a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_news.php"given up their top position/a to social networks like Facebook as the top drivers of traffic to media sites. As more and more media outlets a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_york_times_confirms_pay_model_for_2011.php"go pay/a, a unified payment service across the Web could become increasingly important and Google, a service we already trust with so much of our information and Web activity, could be in a perfect position to provide this service./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/newspass_googles_micropayment_system_to_save_mains.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/RZz8iBoLTSYsf5OBuzZKOBrbh-4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/RZz8iBoLTSYsf5OBuzZKOBrbh-4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/RZz8iBoLTSYsf5OBuzZKOBrbh-4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/RZz8iBoLTSYsf5OBuzZKOBrbh-4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=B6jXkDw8mfU:GmI9YDG0iiU:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/B6jXkDw8mfU" height="1" width="1"/