iGoogle Artist Themes NYC Launch Event




What if the Google homepage had been designed by Dolce & Gabbana? Or Philippe Starck? Or the Beastie Boys? Get a behind the scenes look at our iGoogle Artist Themes NYC Launch Event.

Live-blog from your phone with Jott


Live-blog from your phone with Jott Free voicemail-to-text service Jott can help you nail down post material while you're on the go with a phone call, but you can also use the service directly with a number of blogging platforms, including Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, Tumblr, and WordPress. If you're hosting your own blog, you can still use Jott's voice-to-email service in conjunction with your platform's email-to-post function to indirectly get your thoughts up online, even while you're miles from your keyboard.

Wetpaint might be one to watch

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has alerted us to a dark horse candidate in the race to dominate the land of wikis. Wetpaint, is a Seattle-based service it's positioning itself to be a player in niche social networks, not just mini-Wikipedias.

The easy-to-create wiki service pulled in 3 million page views in March, according to ComScore numbers, compared with 3.8 million for Ning, the well-funded social-network creator helmed by Marc Andreessen. Wetpaint also claims 900,000 wikis have been created, far more than the 263,000 that Ning counts (though who knows how many of those are legitimate and/or active). While Ning's way ahead in traffic, a few months ago Wetpaint released a set of features to ramp up social-networking activity on the site, with friends lists, news feeds, member profiles, and Yelp-style "compliments" now in the mix.

One stop photo captions made simple with SuperLame

Here's a fun tool for play around with over the long weekend. It's called SuperLame, and it's a simple tool for adding speech bubbles over photos. It's missing out on some of the special effects found in other similar tools like Comeeko, but what it lacks in versatility it makes up for in flash and user experience. It's simply a joy to tag up a photo with captions, speech and thought bubbles. Best of all, the end result is total eye candy.

Control BitTorrent downloads from Facebook with Morret

So much for Scrabulous being an end-all diversion on Facebook. Try Morrent instead, a simple tie-in to the popular BitTorrent software uTorrent that runs right in Facebook (read: sans software) and lets you monitor your torrent downloads and uploads from wherever.

Big Blue Embraces Social Media

IBM has been encouraging social networking among its employees with in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits such as Facebook and Twitter.

The (Virtual) Global Office

Moving beyond Second Life marketing, many companies are infiltrating virtual worlds for employee meetings, mixers, and recruiting.

Virtually Bridging Corporate Gaps

Setting Sun

In light of a surprising third-quarter loss, analysts sound cautionary notes and CEO Schwartz announces plans to lay off up to 2,500 employees.

7 Cool Bluetooth Gadgets

Bluetooth revolutionized electronics 10 years ago with its wireless technology that enables devices to communicate with each other. Here's a look at some of the latest. more

Where does Google go next?

Yes, it's making gobs of money. Yes, it's full of smart people. Yes, it's a wonderful place to work. So why are so many people leaving?

Meraki is offering free Wi-Fi to San Francisco. Why?

There is no business model behind it, but mesh Wi-Fi company Meraki is offering free Wi-Fi access to San Francisco, one neighborhood at a time, as I discovered when I passed by the company's folksy demo table at my local farmers' market last month (see report from local newspaper). But Meraki is not in the business of just blasting money out the door, which it appears to be doing in San Francisco, and there is a method to this program.

Read the article here at CNET.

Places for iPhone

iPlazer, the upcoming iPhone client for the geo-tagging social networking site. The app will be available when Apple’s official App Store launches in mid June.

Google Maps Integrates Panoramio Geo-tagged Phots and Wikipedia

It’s great to see them adding more open content to Google maps.

Inside Microsoft's War Against Google

With Yahoo off the table, Microsoft plans to challenge Google's online-ad juggernaut alone. A behind-the-scenes look at its provocative strategy.

All About Microsoft by Mary Jo Foley

Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 20 years for a variety of publications, including ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline. She has kept close tabs on Microsoft strategy, products and technologies for the past 10 years. In the late 1990s, she penned the award-winning "At The Evil Empire" column for ZDNet, and more recently the Microsoft Watch blog for Ziff Davis.

Web 2.0 and consumers

Consumers are rapidly adopting new behaviors powered by Web 2.0 technologies including social networks, blogs, tags, ratings, user-generated content, news feeds, shared bookmarks, online photos, and videos.

The Twitter trend

A look at Twitter.com, which hopes its audience will move beyond tech geeks and into the mainstream.

Check out Twittervision. Once in, select the Twittervison logo in the upper right hand corner to get more information.

Looking for the next Facebook

Jim Breyer of venture capital firm Accel Partners discusses what he thinks makes a company worthy of investment.

Why Microsoft isn't buying Facebook

The popular social networking service is tempting to Microsoft in the wake of its failed Yahoo assault, but there's no urgency to do a deal now.

GSP is the premier conference for developers and marketers building and distributing apps for MySpace, Facebook, OpenSocial and other social networking platforms.

Brightkite: A bright future for mobile social networking?

"Do you have a Brightkite invite yet?"

Brightkite, a Denver-based start-up that uses both a Web interface and SMS text-messaging to log your location and broadcast it to your friends. It's a lot like a more feature-intensive version of Dodgeball, a mobile networking site that debuted in 2004 and was eventually acquired by Google.

Go to Brightkite's blog for more information.

Facebook launches Chat

Facebook has just turned on Chat in a “few networks” this morning and I think it’s a great implementation. While Facebook hasn’t announced an official rollout schedule, Chat will be gradually rolling out over the coming days.

The iPhone Gets It's Own Photo Sharing Site

Natuba is a new photo sharing site that targets iPhone users with an emphasis on mobile uploading. It comes from Richard Yoo, a former CEO of Rackspace and Serverbeach.

iPhone users with Natuba accounts can add their snapshots to the site by emailing them to a special address. Descriptions can be included in the subject line and all photos are injected into a public activity stream. They are also included on one’s profile page and are candidates for the “Surprise Me!” page that randomly displays one photo at a time from the site.

The idea and execution are simple, perhaps a bit too simple. There’s no tagging, not to mention no geotagging (which would be a natural feature for such a service, if only iPhones had GPS already). I’d like to see the site add rating

Sticky now is a Quickie

Post-its are great to jot down quick notes and messages; and important phone numbers; and meeting locations; and the zillions of passwords. Great that is, until they lose their stick and end up buried in piles of work or behind the desk. Now, researchers at MIT have solved that pressing problem with the demoed “Quickies,” a new application to digitize handwritten sticky notes and allow you not only to browse through an archive of notes, but set up to-do lists, send reminders, and even find that sticky note you lost in the middle of a textbook.

The system uses commercially-available digital pens and special writing pads. As users jot on a typical Post-it note, the handwriting recognition software captures the message and stores it on the computer. These notes are then processed by the software and sorted into different types of notes. For instance, a note about the meeting would be added to a calendar; a note left for a friend would be sent as a text message (the computer searches through your address book to find name matches).

An additional feature of the Quickie is an RFID tag on the back of the sticky note. This helps readers track where they posted their sticky note—and help find it. In the video, the Quickie helps find a book with a RFID tagged sticky note—after searching for the note the program tells the user its location “2nd rack in the office.”

Now if only it will find the keys . . .

No word on when it could hit the market, but learn more at pranavmistry.com

Moving oral history online


Miomi is a new frontier on the Internet, taking all the world’s information, including the personal history of as many people as we possibly can, and putting them together in a useful, easy-to-use way.

Google diving into 3D mapping of oceans

We've got Google Earth and Google Sky. Next up will be a map of the world below sea level--Google Ocean. The company has assembled an advisory group of oceanography experts, and in December invited researchers from institutions around the world to the Mountain View, Calif., Googleplex.

Podcasting in Plain English