Archive for August, 2008

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Aug 30 2008
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Amazon To Acquire AbeBooks, And With It A Stake In Library Thing

Amazon has acquired twelve year old Canadian company Abebooks (formerly the Advanced Book Exchange), the companies just announced. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books focusing on used, rare and out of print titles for sale by independent booksellers - it currently has 110 million books for sale from 13,500 sellers. The company has been around since 1996 and fills a niche for Amazon in hard-to-find or out-of-print books. Rather than hold its own inventory, it acts as a digital marketplace for established booksellers. AbeBooks also owns 40 percent of LibraryThing (a social app for keeping track of your books and finding other like-minded book lovers). Whereas Amazon is an investor in Shelfari. Now Amazon will own a piece of both of those competing startups. AbeBooks CEO Dr. Hannes Blum ...
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Aug 30 2008
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The Reports of Usenet’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated

Sascha at PCMag writes a charming little piece on the death of Usenet as a method of discourse and its eventual rebirth as a repository for porn, spam, and pirated warez. He recalls the days of “serious conversations” on 8-bit Atari architecture and the rise and fall of net.manners as more and more n00bs came on to mess up in-depth threads on symbolism in Bob Dylan’s Street Legal. Is Usenet dead, as Sascha posits? I don’t think so. As long as there are folks who thing a command line is better than a mouse, the original text-only social network will live on. Sure, ISPs will shut down access out of mislaid kiddie porn fears but the real pros know where to go to get their angst-filled, nit-picking, obsessive fix. In a ...
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Aug 30 2008
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Skyfire Brings Full Browser Experience To Nokia S60 Phones (200 Private Beta Invites)

Throw out that WAP browser on your cell phone. We are quickly approaching a point where a full browser experience is available on our mobile devices. And it is not just the iPhone. A startup called Skyfire is in some respect even further along than Apple in bringing the entire Web to your phone. Its mobile browser lets you slide Web pages around and zoom in like with the mobile version of Safari. But it also supports Flash and Ajax sites. (It does this by offloading most of the heavy lifting to its servers rather than the mobile client). That means you can watch Youtube videos and go to Google Maps right in the mobile browser instead of having to download separate apps. ...
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Aug 30 2008
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Yahoo Turns Yelp, Yahoo Local and LinkedIn SearchMonkey Apps On In Search

Yahoo is making a number of changes to its default search experience tonight to add more structured data to results. Yelp, Yahoo Local and LinkedIn SearchMonkey widgets are being added to search results automatically, eliminating the need for users to go into the search gallery and add them manually. SearchMonkey is a key part of Yahoo’s attempts to embrace the semantic web and open standards in general. With SearchMonkey, site owners create “applications” for Yahoo search that can be installed by users in the same sense that Facebook applications can be installed. Each application modifies results for a certain URL specification (for example, all reference pages on Wikipedia or product pages on Amazon). Modifications include both changes to the basic elements of a search result (the title and description) and additions such ...
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Aug 30 2008
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Tethering Briefly Comes To The iPhone, Tempers Flare

Macrumors reports that Apple’s App Store was selling a tethering app compatible with the iPhone (both 3G and EDGE) for a brief period earlier this evening. The $10 application, called NetShare, was developed by Nullriver software, and would be a godsend for many iPhone owners. After going up around 8PM EST to the elation of a lucky few, the application was pulled down around 20 minutes later. Phone tethering allows users to access the internet from their laptop computers wherever they get service on their cellphone carrier’s data network. The feature is common on many phones with high speed (namely 3G) data access, and has been noticeably absent from iPhones. While 3G is typically slower than most Wi-Fi access points, having internet connectivity on the go is ...
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Aug 30 2008
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Tap Tap Revenge Approaches 1 Million Users, Music Industry Takes Notice

Tapulous, the company behind Tap Tap Revenge, has announced that the popular iPhone app will hit 1 million installs some time this weekend. The app is the second we’ve heard from to hit the milestone (Facebook reached it last week), and is another testament to the extremely rapid growth some applications have seen on Apple’s newly launched App Store. Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem says that the application has been downloaded about 900 thousand times since its launch, and expects to hit the 1 million user milestone over the weekend. Tapulous’s iPhone Twitter client Twinkle is significantly less popular, with around 80,000 installs, but it was released after Tap Tap Revenge. Decrem notes that there is a total install base of about 5-6 million iPhones and iPod Touches running ...
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Aug 30 2008
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NBC Launches On-Demand Olympic Coverage In HD

NBC has launched its online video hub for the 2008 Olympics, which features free on-demand video for over 20 sports. In order to maximize quality, the videos are available as downloads (you can start watching before the download finishes) and will be in “up to HD” quality. Unfortunately, the video downloads will only be available on Windows machines running Windows Media Center - once again Mac users are left in the cold, likely because of DRM issues (and the fact that Lenovo and Microsoft are sponsors). While the Olympic ceremonies don’t kick off until August 8, NBC has already posted footage of Olympic trials. Once the games begin, NBC expects to have the footage available around 12 hours after each competition (which shouldn’t be too annoying given the ...
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Aug 30 2008
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Philip Rosedale Doesn’t See Browser-Based Virtual Worlds As A Threat to Second Life. Is He In Denial?

Recently, there’s been a growing wave of startups and products appearing that are bringing 3-D virtual worlds to the browser. These include Vivaty, Google’s Lively project, and the Electric Sheep Co.’s WebFlock. And I’ve seen a few stealth companies working the same vein. None of these are as fully featured or immersive as Second Life, which requires a separate desktop client download. But it may not matter because a good-enough experience available via standard browsers may eventually qwn Second Life. Linden Lab, which operates Second Life, is working with IBM and others to make virtual worlds interoperable with each other. Still, for the most part, they don’t play nicely with the Web. Last week I caught Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale on video at Fortune’s Brainstorm ...
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Aug 30 2008
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GumGum Rethinks Its Approach. Drops Flash

Music and movies may grab the most headlines when it comes to piracy, but many content providers on the web are also having trouble managing their images, which are easy to crop, resize, and copy. Some services, like Attributor, try to monitor and track offending images, but the ultimate solution may well lie in removing the temptation in the first place by offering cheap and easy to find legal images. Earlier this year, GumGum launched an image licensing platform that was designed to help publishers quickly locate and license images. The site served as a content hub, offering a searchable database of images that could be licensed on a CPM basis or for free alongside an ad. Unfortunately, every one of GumGum’s images was served as an embeddable Flash widget, which ...
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Aug 30 2008
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New Recommendation System = 40 Percent More Diggs

One month after launching its new recommendation system, Digg is already reporting positive results. Digg recommends stories based on other members with similar voting patterns and interests. Chief scientist Anton Kast writes on the Digg Blog: - Digging activity is up significantly: the total number of Diggs increased 40% after launch. - The Recommendation Engine is running strong: at any given point in time, the system is generating over 54 Million Recommendations, with the average Digger having nearly 200 Recommendations from an average of 34 “Diggers like you”. - Friend activity/friends added is up 24%. - Commenting is up 11% since launch. Digg’s recommendation engine takes a Last.fm approach to finding people’s whose tastes overlap with yours and then suggesting stories they’ve Dugg up but that you’ve missed. It is collaborative filtering ...
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