Anytime you sign up for a new product or service online, you need to ask yourself these three questions, says Google’s Brian Fitzpatrick:
1. Can I get my data out in an open, interchangeable format?
2. How much will it cost me to do so?
3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?
Of course, most of us neglect to ask…
It’s been about a year since Google launched its Android App Inventor, its DIY tool for building Android apps. The object of one of the most scathing reviews in the history of tech journalism, App Inventor was nonetheless a much-anticipated tools among educators, many of whom were keen to use App Inventor to help teach programming.
At OSCON…
“Everybody loses” with the enforcement of Apple’s new in-app payment rules, argues The Atlantic Wire’s Rebecca Greenfield in a post chronicling how consumers, e-reader companies and perhaps even Apple might suffer. As we wrote about yesterday, Apple made the move over the weekend to enforce e-reader apps’ compliance with its new in-app payment…
Although we often invoke “Hollywood” when we talk about the movie industry, many of the world’s greatest films and much of the world’s film history comes from outside that Los Angeles district. A nod here goes to the Lumière Brothers, of course, two of the earliest filmmakers. But rousing applause should go to the European Film Gateway, which is…
The Humble Bundle is set to launch its latest package deal today, continuing its successful “pay-what-you-want” business model with the release of a new bundle containing 5 indie games.
This bundle includes: Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, Hammerfight, and And Yet It Moves. As with the previous Humble Bundles, these games are all…
We’ve covered Sprouter several times here at ReadWriteStart, recommending the Toronto-based startup as a great resource for entrepreneurs – as both a professional social network and, more recently, as a Q&A site. So it’s sad to hear the news today that Sprouter will be closing its doors.
According to the Sprouter blog, the site will close on…
New rules governing how iOS apps handle in-app purchases went into effect on June 30, and the date passed without much fanfare and seemingly without much compliance from many apps that continued to offer content for sale. These apps included e-reader apps with links to their associated online bookstores, as well as a variety of others that offered…
Online dating services promise you help finding your “perfect match.” Complete your profile, answer a series of questions, choose a few filters as you search and you’re given a list of singles in your area who are most likely to be a suitable date.
But providing these search results is no easy task. It isn’t simply a matter of identifying…
I’ve had a chance to test-drive a Chromebook already, but having received my very own this week (See disclosure at the end of this post), I decided to see if, indeed, I could make the Web-only netbook work for me. I mean really work for me. Many of the early reviews of the Chromebook suggested that, while it was a great idea and a decent netbook…
Since the release of Google’s new social network, there’s been a lot of speculation about when and if Google Plus would get a gaming component. Early inquiry into the site’s code certainly hinted at the possibility, and now more signs have been uncovered.
Slashgear reports that the Games Stream has been confirmed, pointing to wording on the…
Wolfram, the company behind the Mathematica computational software and the Wolfram Alpha “computational knowledge” search engine, has released a new document format today – the Computable Document Format (CDF). As the name suggests, the CDF aims to bring real-time interactivity and computational power to documents, by enabling them to include a…
An archive containing over 18,000 scientific papers, downloaded from the academic journal database JSTOR, has been uploaded to The Pirate Bay, where they’re now available as a torrent.
The papers were uploaded by a user named Greg Maxwell who says that his decision to make the large quantity of scientific papers available was a response to the…
The explosion in the number of health-related apps has opened many interesting possibilities for rethinking both mobile and personal medicine. But when the Food and Drug Administration starts a blog post by invoking the Apple slogan “there’s an app for that,” you know the results may well be “there’s a regulation for that.”
Indeed, the FDA is…
If there’s one thing that keeps me coming back to Facebook, it’s the photos. Admittedly, I’ve largely abandoned Facebook as my social network of choice, but it’s still the primary way I can see what all my old high school buddies are up to. But photos often get lost in the shuffle of Facebook status updates, and there’s been no easy way to…
JK Rowling’s announcement last month that she would finally be releasing digital versions of the Harry Potter novels was met with great excitement. That’s no surprise as the series is much beloved and Rowling’s announcement timed with the release of the final Harry Potter film. Fans, feeling nostalgic perhaps for the books themselves, are keen to…
When U.S. District Judge Denny Chin threw out the proposed Google Books Settlement earlier this year, he sent authors, publishers and Google back to the negotiating table in order to hammer out an agreement that would allow Google’s digitization efforts to move forward.
But it seems those negotiations are taking too long, and at a conference…
It’s quarterly earnings season, and following Google’s solid report last week, all eyes were on Cupertino today as it was Apple’s turn to boast. And boast it did, announcing an all-time record revenue ($28.57 billion) and record quarterly profit ($7.31 billion).
No surprise, these numbers were fueled by the continuing popularity of the iPhone and…
For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual.
Demand…
Young women face the highest rate of dating violence and sexual assault, with nearly 19% – one in five – women reporting they have experienced sexual assault while in college. The Obama Administration believes that one way to help combat sexual abuse on college campuses may be through mobile phone apps, and with the Department of Health and…
Amazon unveiled a Kindle Textbook Rental, giving students the ability to rent instead of buy digital textbooks. Amazon says that, “tens of thousands” of titles from some of the major textbook publishers – including John WIley & Sons, Wlsevier, and Taylor & Francis – will be available for this school year.
It’s not just the selection that the…