Get news, photos, music, videos, and chat about your favorite artists directly on your desktop by downloading Fanbase powered by Adobe AIR. This application is completely free and features a streaming audio player, chat room and a continuous feed of all the official and unofficial news from your favorite artists. The AIR App was created by Atlantic Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Cuil, the latest search engine to hit the market, is made up of former Google employees and it supposedly is the largest search engine with an index of 120 billion web pages. 120 billion web pages would arguably make them the most comprehensive search engine on the planet. Google hasn’t disclosed the size of their index, but they claim to index about 1 trillion web pages. However, Cuil claims that they index three times as many web pages as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
Cuil’s corporate philosophy is that the Internet has grown exponentially in the last 15 years and that search needs to grow exponentially as well to keep pace. Rather than rely on superficial web metrics, Cuil will search for and rank pages based on their content and relevance. While on a search results page, Cuil allows users to stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency. Cuil will also offer users helpful choices and suggestions until they find the page they want.
I just signed up for the Socialmedian Beta launch and my fingers are crossed that it helps counter the deluge of information overwhelming me on a daily basis. The foundation of Socialmedian is its user created ‘news networks.’ The service currently boasts over 1000 different networks and the user communities can continue to add links into these networks. Socialmedian will also automatically suggest stories based on user-generated keywords. Between the user communities continuously adding content into the networks and Socialmedian suggesting stories, even the smallest networks can have a constant stream of updated news.
For Esquire’s 75th anniversary, the magazine’s October issue will feature an electronic ink display cover powered by a special battery said to last for approximately 90 days. By incorporating Amazon Kindle’s e-paper technology, the cover will flash the words “The 21st Century Begins Now”. The special 75th year issue will focus on issues, people, and ideas leading the way into the future. Only 100K copies will be available for purchase given the high production costs.
Developed by Sense Networks, Citysense is an innovative mobile application for local nightlife discovery and social navigation, answering the question, “Where is everybody?” Citysense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations. Citysense is a free demonstration of the Macrosense platform.
Currently, local discovery depends on proactive searching for relevant locations. Users are challenged to input specific location data into mobile interfaces with small screens. Citysense eliminates the need to search. Instead, it evolves searching to sensing. Citysense passively “senses” the most popular places based on actual real-time activity and displays a live heat map. The application intelligently leverages the inherent wisdom of crowds without any change in existing user behavior, in order to navigate people to the hottest spots in a city. And it’s not dependent on having a critical mass of users on the system. Citysense is an application that learns. The application learns about where each user likes to spend time – and it processes the movements of other users with similar patterns. In its next release, Citysense will not only answer “where is everyone right now” but “where is everyone like me right now.” Four friends at dinner discussing where to go next will see four different live maps of hotspots and unexpected activity. Even if they’re having dinner in a city they’ve never visited before.
Sense Networks has built a unique back-end infrastructure that processes years of data encompassing billions of points of positioning data. Created on the Macrosense platform, Citysense leverages this historical data analysis to normalize live location data originating from tens of thousands of devices and users moving throughout a given city.
An organic sculptural landmark that responds to human interaction and expresses context awareness using hundreds of sensors and over 15,000 individually addressable optical fibers. Constructed of carbon glass, rising over four meters high, and containing more than 65 kilometers of fiber optics, the Cloud encourages visitors to touch and interact with information in new ways, manifesting emotions and behavior through sound and a dichotomy of luminescence and darkness. Located in downtown Florence outside the Fortezza da Basso. the Cloud is part of the “Redesigning Fashion Trade Shows” project that Pitti Immagine launched with MIT Mobile Experience Lab in January 2007. It is a long-term project to creatively re-think the trade show concept and propose innovative technologies, perspectives and sensory experiences for fashion trade shows. In June of 2008, the Fiber Cloud will officially debut at the 74th Pitti Uomo Trade Show.
[via TrendCentral]
TidalTV is the latest entry to the online TV category, TidalTV offers desk jockeys and couch potatoes alike quality on-demand programming in a user-friendly viewing experience that accurately mimics real television. The antidote to viral video overload, TidalTV offers both branded entertainment and news from the likes of Vogue, Ford Models, Dow Jones and Sports Illustrated and regular TV shows from channels such as CBS, National Geographic, NBC News, and Food Network. Next time you forget to DVR Swingtown, know you can always find it here.
[as reported from the Silicon Alley Insider]
One of Apple’s favorite apps for its upcoming iPhone apps platform: Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL Radio app, which lets iPhone owners listen to some 200 stations, including CBS radio and 25 other genres, for free. Stations will stream over the iPhone’s mobile Internet connection, and will be supported by in-stream audio ads, and potentially graphic ads, Bits’ Saul Hansell reports.
We haven’t had a chance to play with this software yet, but we’re excited about it. The music business should be, too: For years, both labels like Warner Music Group (WMG) and services like Napster (NAPS) have been hoping for a practical way to get consumers to experience music delivered over the air, directly to their phones. With the exception of novelty ringtones, it hasn’t happened (at least not in the U.S.). A working radio app — one that works pretty consistently, doesn’t chew up your battery life, etc — on a phone that’s about to become mainstream would be a huge first step.
On the flip side, it’s more bad news for Sirius (SIRI) and XM (XMSR), which are steadily losing relevance while the FCC sits on their merger deal. If we’re going to listen to music we’re not programming ourselves, it might as well be free and on a gadget we already own. Expect satellite radio growth to continue to slow as more services like this come out.
Going Fast on the Mobile Web, is a deck on Slideshare by Jason Grigsby, and has the rough structure of: (1) mobile is huge, (2) iPhone is worth developing for, (3) here’s why other platforms’ mobile experience sucks, and (4) what you can do to fix it. The two slides that really stood out were on points 1 and 2.
The size of mobile (3.3B handsets, one for every two people on the planet) is staggering, and well known (see Communities Dominate Blogs for description of other media’s relative penetration). What made Grigsby’s slide so good was the graph he used to illustrate it.
The Roku Netflix Player makes it easy to instantly watch movies and TV episodes over the Internet on your living room TV, or anywhere you have a TV and an Internet connection. Movies and TV episodes in your Netflix Instant Queue appear right on your TV screen. Also, it doesn’t matter what kind of TV you have, the Netflix Player is guaranteed to work with it. Connect to the latest HDTV or one that you’ve had for years. With standard RCA jacks, S-video, component video, HDMI, and optical audio, the Player will work with virtually any TV, AV receiver, or home theater system. Lastly, the Netflix Player lets you access the world’s largest online movie rental service with over 10,000 instant movies and TV episodes available. Watch as many as you like, as often as you want—with no additional fees.
Coming off of some major industry show buzz for their involvement in the Halo 3 campaign, the folks at T.A.G. bring the naughty party antics online for N.E.R.D with the help of Last Night’s Party. The site showcases a number of racy scenes from a live performance at a club. Visitors to the site have to browse the site quickly since the racy clips quickly disappear and visitors have to refresh their browser to get them back.
The first phase of Android Developer Challenge I is now complete. 50 teams of developers each received a $25,000 award and the opportunity to compete in the second and final round of ADC I, for ten $275,000 prizes and ten $100,000 prizes. Over the next several months, the developer teams can take the opportunity to further refine their applications in preparation for the final judging.
Shown above is CallACab developed by Konrad Huebner and Henning Boeger. CallACab helps you call a cab in a foreign country when you don’t have the local cab number. The application is location-aware, so there is no need to know where you are and you never get a busy signal.
[via Social Worx]
Loic Le Meur has a great interview posted with the GM of Nike+, Michael Tchao. Nike continues to set the bar with their use of branded utilities and social media to support their customers. And with their latest launch of Nike Soccer, which focuses on delivering a ‘bootcamp’ training program for soccer players, they are providing another strong tool for facilitating community around the brand.
Parallel Kingdom is one of the first Mobile Multiplayer Trans-Reality Game (MMTRG) for the cell phone. Parallel Kingdom brings new meaning to role playing games by using GPS to place the virtual world on top of the real world. By using any iPhone or Android based device, users can attack, dance, hug or team up with anyone around them. Set up trade routes, craft items or even create their own kingdom.
Nexus creates a graph of your social network and finds commonalities between your Facebook friends. However, it’s more than just a flashy data visualization tool, in addition to viewing how your friends are connected, Nexus can help you discover what interests your friends share and which of your friends are the most similar to you.
TwitterLocal lets you generate an RSS or XML Feed to filter out Tweets around a certain area. Just enter a city, state, postal code, choose the range of miles you want to include, and hit the button. You’ll instantly get URLs to add to your RSS reader.
As recently reported on IntoMobile.com, Orb, the application/service that allows you to stream content from your PC to other devices, just announced support for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. However, only jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch devices can utilize this new feature. The assumption is that this new feature is only a temporary solution until the new firmware with third-party application support becomes available later this summer.
I scraped this video from CrackBerry.com which has an in-depth look at the BlackBerry 9000’s new user interface. The BlackBerry 9000 rocks the BlackBerry OS 4.6 and sports a new slick user interface. As you’ll notice in the video, the menu icons light up as you scroll over them, while the screen dimension is a hearty 480×320 resolution. An amped up processor in the 9000 model gives this latest BlackBerry a leg up in the speed department versus previous BlackBerry handsets.
ShifD is a mobile application that provides users the capability to seamlessly shift content back and forth between their desktop computers and mobile devices. It was created by Michael Young and Nick Bilton, two members of The New York Times Company’s Research and Development Lab.
[from RWW]
Up-and-coming mobile social network Brightkite faces some serious competition from a myriad of mobile social networks, all of whom are fighting to win the emerging mobile market. However, Brightkite has a few tricks up their sleeve that they hope will make them stand out from the rest, the most important of which is their ability to create a social network that merges with your real life.
A couple of weeks ago, Brightkite launched into their private beta, inviting 100 people to join their network. As those users invited others with the five included invites, the network began to grow. Recent conferences like the Web 2.0 Expo and ROFLCon spread the word even more.
The service, a device agnostic, SMS-based application, lets you “check in” at various locations out in the real world and then see who else is there, has been there, and who is nearby. You can check in via text or via the web, but text is easiest if you’re mobile.
After checking in, you can post updates in a Twitter-like fashion and upload photos to your Brightkite-enabled stream, available at a URL in the format of brightkite.com/people/username.
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