News Archive: April 2010
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New York Times Juices Up Its Document Viewer
1st April 2010 00:00
The New York Times' new Doc Viewer 2.0 is, depending on what you value, either a pasted-on ornament of no real use to a typical news consumer, or it's an open-source, crowd-sourcing game changer. With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader's fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer's ability to annotate a story with "raw" information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer's code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an…
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YouTube Migrates Videos to New Design
1st April 2010 02:00
Today, YouTube migrated its user videos over to a new design. The design was available before now, and has been in development for months, but today was the day all the videos got their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes on. In a January post, Julian Frumar, a YouTube user experience designer, commented on YouTube's blog that the old design could appear "cluttered and a little overwhelming." (Julian, by the way, is up for an Understatement of the Year Award.) Sponsor In the…
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Google Introduces Sales Funnel, Ad Innovations
1st April 2010 03:00
Today Google introduced two new elements to its popular advertising system, a Search Funnel and something it is calling Ad Innovations. The company's VP of product management, Susan Wojcicki, described the Search Funnel as a "set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion." Sponsor The idea is that users of the Sales Funnel will, over time, tighten and focus their use of Google Ads to such a degree that they will…
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Wolfram Alpha Admits Mistake: Mobile Site is Back; iPhone App Down from $50 to $1.99
1st April 2010 05:01
Once upon a time, Wolfram Alpha tried to charge $50 for its iPhone app while, at the same time, offering a free iPhone-optimized mobile site. Then, the company shut down the mobile site of its "computational knowledge engine" altogether. Now, however, Wolfram is reversing this strategy and is not just bringing back a new and improved version of its mobile site, but the company also just announced that it will reduce the price of its iPhone app to $1.99 on…
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It's All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web
1st April 2010 07:00
Yesterday we summarized some of the main developments in the Linked Data world over the past year. Linked Data is a W3C-backed movement that is all about connecting data sets across the Web. It can be viewed as a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, which is about adding meaning to the Web. However, there is some confusion in the Semantic Web community about the crossover. To add to the confusion, there is a term called 'Open Data' that…
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The Mobile Phone Becomes Self-Aware: Introducing Nokia's Mobile Bots
1st April 2010 14:42
Despite the heavy press coverage of smartphone operating systems like iPhone and Android, sometimes the most intriguing mobile innovations come from other companies. Case in point: Nokia's newly released "bots" for its Nokia N97 line of handsets. These four individual software programs run in the background, learning your mobile habits by passively collecting data on how you use your phone. After gaining a sense of your daily tasks and routines, the bots personalize your phone, doing everything from rearranging your…
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Exclusive Preview: AppStarAwards Finalists - Unreleased Apps for iPhone, iPad
1st April 2010 15:16
The App Star Awards is a contest that highlights brilliant and innovative upcoming applications for the iPhone (and now the iPad, too). Created by AppsFire, the service for sharing iPhone applications, the event draws submissions from all over the world. This year's group, for example, included 80 unreleased applications from 20 different countries including Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Spain and Italy, in addition to the U.S. The finalists, 33 in total, have been broken down into three main categories: "Games,"…
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Netflix For the iPad: April Fools Joke or Breaking Story?
1st April 2010 16:55
The news is all over the Web - Netflix is coming to the iPad! For all of you doubters and naysayers, you can put away your beloved netbooks, laptops and miniature iPads (iPhones) and...oh, wait, is this true? It might all be an April Fool's Day joke that's getting repeated by trusted media around the Web? But this Netflix on the iPad thing is the perfect example of how half-believable information can be put out there and repeated and repeated…
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Twine CEO to Startups: Be Modest With Your Money
1st April 2010 17:00
The semantic web is one of the leading trends we track here at ReadWriteWeb, so it was big news to us earlier this month when Evri announced it was acquiring Twine creators Radar Networks. Following the announcement, Twine CEO Nova Spivack wrote an inspiring and lengthy farewell blog post detailing the acquisition, and the story behind the development and growth of Twine. Towards the end of the post, Spivack outlined some lessons for budding entrepreneurs based on what he learned…
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Worried About Flash on the iPad? Apple Tries to Ease Your Fears
1st April 2010 17:28
Will popular websites, especially those from news and entertainment companies, work on the iPad? Apple, in an arguably brilliant PR effort now has an answer: an online collection of iPad-Ready sites. The Cupertino-based maker of iPods and iPhones made a bold, potentially Internet-changing decision when it decided that the upcoming slate computer known as the Apple iPad would not support Adobe Flash technology. This browser plugin, used across the Web for everything from streaming video to casual games, displaying online…
