One of the longstanding laments about our move to digital literature is how difficult and cumbersome this makes marginalia, those notes and annotations we make in the margins of printed text. A story in The New York Times earlier this year went so far as to call the future of marginalia “dim,” not only due to our inability to write comments in…
Meet This Year’s Imagine Cup Winners: Students Building World-Changing Tech
Over 400 college students from around the world gathered this week in New York City for the 2011 Finals of the Imagine Cup. Microsoft’s student technology competition. On stage this evening, the awards were handed out to the winning teams in a variety of categories. You can read the full list of winners below.
The participating students aren’t…
This Quarter in Venture Capital: Dealflow and Funding At Highest Level in 9 Quarters
The venture capital database CB Insights has just released its report of investment from the second quarter of 2011, and based on the deals it’s tracked, venture capital funding is at a nine-quarter high – both in terms of the amount of funding and the number of deals. Compared to this time last year, deals are up 25% and funding up 29%.
Of…
Google Announces the Winners of Its First Science Fair (Go Geek Girls!)
In January, Google announced what it called the world’s first global science fair, a competition for students age 13 to 18 that brought the traditional science fair online. Over 10,000 students from over 90 countries submitted their projects for review, and last night at the Googleplex, the 15 finalists showcased their experiments.
These…
The Imagine Cup: Student-Built Technology Tackles the World’s Most Pressing Problems
This is the ninth year for the Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s student technology competition. Teams from all over the world, representing 70 countries, have gathered this week in New York City for the Imagine Cup finals. It’s down to the final round today with those making it to the very last round of the finals presenting the projects they’ve designed…
No Pseudonyms Allowed: Is Google Plus’s Real Name Policy a Good Idea?
Tying your real name to your online identity was one of the key differentiators that set Facebook apart early on from other online sites. Facebook (and others) argue that a real name policy helps keep bad behavior online in check by linking online actions to offline identities and relationships. But there are plenty of people who are less than…
HistoryPin Links Past, Present, Place, & Photos in a Powerful New Location App
There’s an exhibit on display at the Museum of the City of New York currently, a series of photographs that chronicle some of the history of food carts in the Big Apple. It’s an interesting retrospective, a way to think about the “then and now” – the immigrant experience, our changing (and unchanging) dietary habits, the history of New York…
Storytelling and Social Networks: Why Twitter Beats Google Plus
Starting next week, SpongeBob SquarePants will come to Twitter with a story specially made for the micro-blogging platform. Here’s the pitch from Nickelodeon: “The Ice Race Cometh: A Twitter-Tale, was conceived and developed for Twitter by the SpongeBob SquarePants writing team and will run from Tuesday, July 12, to Friday, July 15. The story…
Robots for Everyone: Getting Kids Interested in Programming with Legos
It’s been over a decade since the beloved brick-building toy company Lego introduced Mindstorms, its robotics system designed to help kids learn programming, along with other science, technology, engineering and math concepts. We’ve featured Lego Mindstorms previously in our series on tools for teaching kids to code, and Mindstorms is part of…
Do Consumers Really Want Video Calling?
Once a communication device for futuristic Sci Fi, now it seems as though video calling is ubiquitous. On the heels of the video conferencing component of the new Google Plus comes the announcement today from Facebook headquarters that video calling will now be available on the social networking site as well. Google Plus Hangouts and the new…
Google Rebrands Blogger and Picasa to Make Way for Google Plus
It looks as though the efforts to bring together Google’s services under the “Plus” umbrella might involve rebranding two of Google’s longstanding products: Blogger and Picasa. Mashable’s Ben Parr reports that the Blogger and Picasa names – not the products – will go away, as early as the end of the month. That timing will coincide with…
Google Shutters Realtime Search, For Now
Over the weekend, the keen eyes at Search Engine Land noticed that Google’s Realtime Search had gone missing. The website returns a 404 error, the option no longer appears in the left-hand sidebar and search results for news no longer include real-time links.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the closure, but called it a temporary one. According…
The Student-Centered Netbook: Chromebook or Classmate PC?
It’s the schools that give each student an iPad tend to make headlines nowadays. No doubt, more schools are investigating tablets – Apple or otherwise – as part of their one-to-one computing initiatives, looking to replace not just desktop PCs but to replace laptops and netbooks as well. Despite the buzz about iPads, Chromebooks, and the like…
Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For?
There seem to be three forces at play when it comes to education and social media. The first is a lack of force, quite frankly – the inertia that makes many educators unwilling and uninterested in integrating the technology into their classrooms. The second is the force of fear – the pressures on the part of administrators, district officials…
Ravel Open Sources GoldenOrb, Big Data Graph Processing for Everyone
Traditional databases, even when they’re called “relational databases,” tend not handle relationships very well, and the traditional way of processing data – particularly large-scale datasets – can actually mean that some of the relationships between objects are lost or obscured.
Several years ago, Google began encountering these sorts of…
Is This The Tipping Point For E-Books & Libraries?
The American Library Association (ALA) has just released its 2011 Public Library Funding and Technology Access Survey, and among its findings, 67% of public libraries in the U.S. now offer free access to e-books for their patrons. That’s up 30% since 2007. Of course, access to e-books ranges greatly from state-to-state: 100% of Maryland and Utah…
How Consumer Technology & User-Generated Content Are Changing Ed-Tech
I’m at the ISTE 2011 conference this week, which purports to be the premier ed-tech conference in the world. I’ll be reporting on the latest-and-greatest in education technology – in new technology innovations as well as how these tools are being incorporated by teachers and students into the classroom.
The big names in the ed-tech industry…
J.K. Rowling’s Next Chapter: A Transfiguration Spell on the Publishing Industry
Author J.K. Rowling unveiled the plans behind the mysterious Pottermore website this morning, and fans that were hoping for a new installment in the beloved Harry Potter series or for a wizarding MMORG may be disappointed. But for those who’ve been waiting to read the novels on their e-readers, good news: Pottermore will involve, in part, the…
Instapaper Server, Including Data and Codebase, Seized by FBI in an Unrelated Raid
Early Tuesday morning, the FBI raided a datacenter run by the Swiss hosting company DigitalOne in what it claimed was a move to thwart “international cyber crime rings distributing scareware.” But it appears as though the Feds seized a lot more than just those “scareware” servers, as, according to Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, one of the…
Factual and SimpleGeo Team Up to Offer Developers a Better Geo-Data Toolkit
Developers working on building location-aware applications need two at least two things: a robust set of tools and quality geo-data.
A new strategic partnership announced today between two of the leading geo-data startups, Factual and SimpleGeo, will help with just that, as SimpleGeo will now be incorporating Factual’s global places data into…