This month, the Library of Congress formally announced a plan to digitally store every single tweet ever twittered. Due to it’s use as a news reporting tool and event record, a twitter archive could serve as an fantastic resource for future generations to look back to us and study our social culture.
Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets per day. The Library will receive all public tweets-which number in the billions-from the 2006 inception of the service to the present.
“The Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington.
Hugo Chavez, the current President of Venezuela has joined the rest of us on Twitter despite trying to block the website just a month ago. His political influence in South America (partly due to his use of Venezuela’s oil wealth and his adversarial relationship with the United States) have given him a comparatively high geopolitical profile.
Chavez has not announced what his new account will be, but unfortunately for him it looks like the screen names @hugo, @chavez and @hugochavez are all being used. Chavez said: “I’m going to have my online trench from the palace to wage the battle. I’ll provide information and even respond to my enemies.”
Other heads of state on Twitter include President Barack Obama (with 3.7 million followers!), the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, although ironically Twitter makes the extra effort to verify the accounts of western leaders (a service that isn’t available to dictators).
With Remoteless you can search and browse all Spotify music, store favourite artists, albums and tracks, start songs or playlists, skip songs, change the volume. It also displays the song you are currently listening to and has a handy toggle shuffle & repeat. It is password protected & simple to set up.
It lets you control your Windows PC Spotify client from afar over Wi-Fi. But you need to install a small program on it first so there’s no OS X version yet but the developer says a Mac port is coming.
We must remember that this app actually has nothing to do with Spotify so will we now see Spotify improve on their initial app offering and bring out Spoti-trol?! Or is that just counjering a bad image!! Whatever happens, we think they will be able to improve and upgrade on this good idea.
Ah, the sea. The big blue. From sharks to shipwrecks, from the perfectly formed pipes of Hawaii’s waves to the dark and chilly depths of the deepest sea trenches, it’s one of Earth’s most fascinating habitats – one that people love watching and exploring.
Tonight, Google is bringing Internet-bound ocean lovers a new portal to the amazing biological and topographical diversity that lies beneath the waves. If you’re into underwater environments and you’re down with Google Earth,
we highly recommend checking out Ocean Showcase, Google’s latest product release.
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“Anyone can be a desktop Cousteau,” writes Googler Jenifer Austin Foulkes. The Google Earth browser plugin allows users to browse through a selection of highlighted tours. Users of Google Earth 5 can go on to explore more, downloading tours and viewing photos and videos by checking the Ocean folder in the left-hand layers panel.
National Geographic ocean explorer Sylvia Earle narrates the highlights tour. The smattering of categories in the plugin-enabled tours include research discoveries, shipwrecks, dive spots, surf spots, underwater terrain and the Great Lakes. The tours are dotted with YouTube videos and more information from carefully curated websites.
Google’s put together some entertaining and high-quality content that integrates different technologies, including Google Earth and YouTube. We also think that Ocean Showcase is going to be a huge hit in the classrooms, as it gives brief and educational content snippets in a visual, interactive context that kids can appreciate and learn from.
One company that would be negatively affected would be Storm Media Innovations. The Vancouver company hopes to become the little ad engine that powers the monetization of the geo-local web. The company offers a white label API where restaurants send out venue-based deals via services like Gowalla, Foursquare, Open Table and Twitter. The difference between setting up a deal in Storm and setting up a deal with Foursquare independently is the fact that Storm is based on real-time needs. Rather than offering a 50% discount on meals throughout entire week, a restaurant owner signs in during slow hours to prompt deal offers. Storm does its best to ensure steady traffic without lulls or the stress of an unnecessary fire sale. In essence, the company’s CEO Craig Baker is attempting to build the AdSense of geo-locational apps.
If Apple chooses to restrict advertising, this may be a crushing blow to Baker in the North American market. Nevertheless, if he manages to bridge good partnerships with those developers who have pre-existing advertising programs, he might still have a chance to realize his vision.
Siri is one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years. Imagine if you could just talk to you phone and tell it to call you a taxi, reserve a table at your favorite restaurant or tell you what the weather in New York City will be like tomorrow. If you have an iPhone, you will be able to start doing that tonight. Siri, a virtual personal assistant, will recognize your voice query and either give you the answer to your question or connect you to the right web service.
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When we first encountered Siri 2 years ago, it was an extremely stealthy startup and the company only started to release more information about the product in the middle of last year. Siri was spun out of SRI International and its core technology is based on the ambitious CALO artificial intelligence project. CALO stands for “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes” – and that’s exactly what Siri does.
Using Siri
The app transcribes spoken text and then takes these commands and routes them to the right web services. If you try to book a table at a Thai restaurant (”get me a table at a good Thai restaurant nearby”), for example, Siri will check where you are, query Yelp for reviews of nearby Thai restaurants, show you the options and then pre-populate a reservation form on OpenTable with your information. All you have to do is to confirm Siri’s selection.
Works Best on an iPhone 3GS
We should note that Siri recommends using the app on an iPhone 3GS, as the app is a bit sluggish on older versions of the iPhone. You can still install it on any iPhone, but your experience might not be quite as good as on a 3GS.
When we talked to the company last month, Siri’s CEO Dag Kittlaus described Siri as “the mother of all mashups.” To make this personal assistant work for enough of the most likely queries that people will enter, Siri needed to make sure that it connects directly to as many web services as possible. The company, for example, pulls concert data from StubHub, movie times from MovieTickets, movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, restaurant data from Yelp and you can order a taxi through TaxiMagic. In total, Siri current has partnered with 16 different companies and expects to expand this number continuously over the next few months. Siri will also plans to offer an API for developers.
Siri’s mobile app will be free. The company’s business model relies on getting affiliate and referral fees from these partners whenever somebody buys something through the service. This also explains why Siri is currently only available in the U.S., though given that adapting the speech recognition and semantic analysis to other languages will take a while, we don’t expect to see Siri in other languages anytime soon.
Our own tests of Siri have been limited so far, but the software is surprisingly good at translating voice queries into text. As the Siri team told us last month, the application works so well because it is able to recognize the context of your queries. This kind of semantic analysis is a very computing intensive problem, so most of the actual number crunching happens on Siri’s servers. Siri outsources the voice recognition to Nuance and if you are not comfortable with speaking into your phone, you can always use a regular text query as well.
Obviously, Siri won’t be able to answer every query – and sadly the app doesn’t use Wolfram Alpha to give you answers to factual questions (yet). Should that happen, Siri will just route your query to a search engine and display the search results. As the Siri team told us, however, users tend to learn which queries work best pretty quickly (just like we learned how to structure effective queries for Google).
If you want to give Siri a try, just head over to the App Store. Just remember to come back and tell us how well (or not) it worked for you.
Last fall, we told you about an exciting and innovative competition to find – and fun – civic-focused web abd mobile apps in New York City.
Tonight, after an all-star panel of judges had reviewed more than 80 apps over a month-long period, a handful of winning applications were announced.
These apps include WayFinder, a resource for navigating around the city; Taxihack, a live-feed commentary on New York City taxis; Big Apple Ed, a guide to New York City schools; and seven others.
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Judges for the competition included such media and technology luminaries as NY Tech Meetup co-founder Dawn Barber, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, Mahalo co-founder Jason Calacanis, EDVentures Founder Esther Dyson, FirstMark Capital CEO Lawrence Lenihan, AlleyCorp co-founder Kevin Ryan, DFJ Gotham Ventures managing partner Danny Schultz, and Union Square Ventures managing general partner Fred Wilson.
The BigApps prizes also included a Popular Choice Award, which was decided by an online public vote from people around the world.
The grand prize winner for the competition, Wayfinder, is actually an Andoird app that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations. It was also selected as the Grand Prize winner for the Data Visualization Award. That team received a total of $7,500 for both prizes.
Other winning applications include:
Actuatr, a platform that simplifies opening up data to developers;
NYC Way, an iPhone application that bundles a variety of NYC resources for tourists and locals (also the Investor’s Choice for monetization potential and Popular Choice winner, a $5,000 prize altogether);
“We opened up the 170 datasets of City information to unleash the creativity and ingenuity of New Yorkers, and we were not disappointed,” said Mayor Bloomberg, who announced the awards at a dinner tonight. “The apps submitted offer a range of unique capabilities, many of which use the data in ways we hadn’t considered. We want New York City to stay ahead of the innovation and technology curve, and we’ll continue to capitalize on our greatest asset – New Yorkers – to make sure we do. Thank you to all of those who submitted apps, and congratulations to the winners.”
The New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications worked with around 30 agencies to provide more than 170 datasets for the competition. The data included geographic locations of all sidewalk cafés, laundry facilities, playgrounds, dog runs, city landmarks, as well as census data, extensive property valuation and assessments, the results of restaurant inspections, lists of permitted citywide events and even side parking and traffic updates.
Apple has posted a shocking, if vague, warning to iPhone app creators in its developer forums: submit an app that uses user location data “primarily” for targeting advertisements and that app will be sent right back to you to be changed.
Many mobile developers are planning on monetizing their apps precisely through location-based advertising. There’s no clear criteria for how much advertising is too much, and perhaps Apple will exercise discretion in recognizing advertisements as merely supplemental to other features in many apps, but the language used by the company is wholly disconcerting and is another great example of the perils of developing on a closed platform like the iPhone. This is crazy.
If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.
Some people immediately accused Apple of implementing this policy so that it alone could use location-based advertisements on the platform.
But what’s with this language about how location can only be used to “provide beneficial information?” Who makes this decision and where on earth does Apple get off making a policy like this? The company says earlier that location may be used to tell phone owners about “nearby restaurants, ATMs, and other location-based information.” What if the restaurants serve unhealthy food, though? What are you going to spend that ATM cash on if this iPhone app helps you find it? How does Apple determine that advertisements, particularly ones for things you could buy in the place where you are, are not beneficial?
What this means for location based social networking, Augmented Reality, mobile eCommerce and other types of applications is unclear. Apple is going to have to do something about this. Location-based advertising has been expected to make economically feasible a universe of new mobile applications. The prospect of Apple taking an anti-advertising stance in selecting which iPhone apps to allow into the App Store is pure insanity.
I’ve used a number of apps in the past few days that are great apps, but ask for my location so they can serve me up locally-based ads from the recently Google-acquired AdMob ad network and that was just fine by me. Show me ads for businesses in my town, please! Why can’t even apps without other location-based features not be monetized by local ads? This seems totally unfair.
Above: One extreme example of location used to deliver ads on an iPhone. Back to the depths of Hell, iButterfly! Discuss
This month, the Library of Congress formally announced a plan to digitally store every single tweet ever twittered. Due to it’s use as a news reporting tool and event record, a twitter archive could serve as an fantastic resource for future generations to look back to us and study our social culture.
Hugo Chavez, the current President of Venezuela has joined the rest of us on Twitter despite trying to block the website just a month ago. His political influence in South America (partly due to his use of Venezuela’s oil wealth and his adversarial relationship with the United States) have given him a comparatively high geopolitical profile.
Ah, the sea. The big blue. From sharks to shipwrecks, from the perfectly formed pipes of Hawaii’s waves to the dark and chilly depths of the deepest sea trenches, it’s one of Earth’s most fascinating habitats – one that people love watching and exploring.
The tech world has gone geo-loco for geo-locational apps. As per our article entitled 
Last fall, 
Apple has posted a shocking, if vague, warning to iPhone app creators 
