Joshua Schachter and his team of star developers at TastyLabs have begun work on a second project, an endorsement and people search engine called Skills.to. The site lets you endorse people for their skills in various fields, see what the people you know have been endorsed for and search for people with particular skills.
The site is just…
How do machines understand what place you’re talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood? With geocoding technology, that’s how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn’t a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder…
“You can’t judge if someone is one of the best programmers in the country in 1 minute, but it turns out you can in 5 minutes.”
Good software developers are hard to find. Startups are all about finding creative solutions to common problems – so why not this one too?
Two startups that have found creative and interesting ways to solve their…
There may or may not be robots that are truly “good” someday, but there will probably be bad robots, if there aren’t already. If not bad robots, then bad robot situations. You can catch a taste of the feeling of what might go wrong in the robot pricing wars that elevate the cost of certain used books on Amazon into millions of dollars.
For…
Amazon just announced the availability of a new service called Simple Workflow Service (SWF), which allows developers to define a series of complex steps in carrying out a business process, then implements and monitors those steps all together, as a service. “This new service gives you the ability to build and run distributed, fault-tolerant…
Teddy Ruxpin, meet Siri. Imagine a children’s toy designed by the people behind the Toy Story and Finding Nemo movies […]
Skill building, tracking and optimization, knowledge retention and measurement of workplace effectiveness – those are the aims of some of the software industry’s hottest companies. SuccessFactors got bought last year for $3.4 billion by SAP. Taleo got bought by Oracle for $1.9 billion last week. Salesforce bought Rypple and Workday is one of…
“Big Data” is a hot topic these days, but there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about the specifics of what will most likely be one of the biggest sources of data: newly web-connected devices in the home and workplace.
I spoke this week with Bill Zujewski, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy & Marketing at M2M (machine to machine…
Late last night Jane McGonigal, the most respected authority in the world of gamification, Tweeted that she’d pitched in to […]
Late last night Jane McGonigal, the most respected authority in the world of gamification, Tweeted that she’d pitched in to support the creation of a new point and click adventure game from respected game development shop Double Fine. That was the first trickle I saw of what quickly became a flood of support for the Double Fine Adventure…
Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the panel was what technology we were most excited about at the time. I said I was most excited by…
Facebook has announced what will likely be the tech industry’s biggest Initial Public Offering of stock ever. What do practitioners of feminism, a philosophy centered in the experiences of women, have to say about the political economy of the world’s biggest social technology company? They’ve raised a number of interesting questions so far.
It…
The Internet may have grown up first in the United States, but it’s a global phenomenon now. The same can be said for the fast-growing body of educational content on the web. YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education Channel today and noted that nearly 80% of the viewership of educational content on the site…
Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.
“As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times,” AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company’s blog tonight. The…
In June of 2009, leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, the Chinese government blocked access […]
Today is International Data Privacy Day, an event backed by companies like Intel, Ebay, Facebook and Microsoft, and dedicated to educating data owners about best practices in protecting the privacy of consumer data.
The need to keep people from being exploited on account of violations of their privacy is clear, well-known, intuitive and amply…
iTunes U has been around for a long time, but its expansion last week onto iPhones and iPads, as well as into new content like K-12 curriculum, has truly made this a 2.0 release. And it’s very, very good.
The iTunes U website carries the bold title “Learn anything, anywhere, anytime.” That’s an overstatement for sure, with 500,000 assets it’s…
Google announced today that it is closing a number of services that it wasn’t able to attract millions of users […]
Google announced today that it is closing a number of services that it wasn’t able to attract millions of users to without making any effort. The worst of the lot to lose are two: the Social Graph API and DIY data extraction service Needlebase. Following on the heels of the kitten-stomping-bad sunsetting of Postrank, these latest closures are…
It’s hard to wrap my brain around the cold cynicism of Apple’s releasing a new tool to democratize the publishing of eBooks today, only to include in the tool’s terms and conditions a prohibition against selling those books anywhere but through Apple’s own bookstore. There’s just something so achingly awful about it.
Portland, Oregon iOS…