This past week the new mashups added to our mashup directory used 25 different APIs. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include BlankSlate , Google Gears , Meetup and TokBox . The most often used APIs this week are Google Maps , Twitter and YouTube . And the most commonly used types of APIs were Shopping (3 APIs, 4 mashups), Social (3 APIs, 6 mashups) and Internet (3 APIs, 3 mashups)
Web technology has revolutionized finance by making it easier than ever to monitor cash flow and track trends in your spending. Mint.com has been a leader in this realm for personal finance: its technology helps you track multiple accounts, analyze spending trends, and manage financial goals. There isn’t a clear counterpart to Mint for businesses, though. That’s where inDinero , a Y-Combinator-funded startup, comes in.
Let’s talk, it’s Tell Us Dammit. Tell. Us.
Here’s the latest action: Apple TV due for an upgrade — Rumor has it that the humdrum Apple TV service launched four years ago will get a fresh upgrade, including a transition to the iOS operating system that powers the iPad and iPhone. Wired has more . New funding for broadband — President Barack Obama announced today that the federal government will funnel money into 66 projects intended to extend broadband into remote and impoverished regions of the U.S. Schmidt addresses Google threats — Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the Activate summit today, where he took a holistic look at all of the threats confronting the search engine and emphasized the importance of mobile over internet strategy
Facebook Rules – Hitwise reported this week that Facebook accounted for 75.73% of all social networking visits in the U.S. in May. 16B Minutes on Facebook a Day – Data Center Knowledge reported information gathered from Facebook employees Tom Cook and Jonathan Heiliger. Some of the information reported included a guesstimate that Facebook now has about 60,000 servers, as well as the fact that users spent about 16 billion minutes on Facebook daily, that more than 3 billion photos are uploaded each month, that 6 billion pieces of content are shared weekly, 1 million photos viewed every second and the company’s servers perform upwards of 50 million operations a second
It takes longer to read books on a Kindle 2 or an iPad versus a printed book, Jakob Nielsen of product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group discovered in a recent usability survey. The study found that reading speeds declined by 6.2% on the iPad and 10.7% on the Kindle compared to print. However, Nielsen conceded that the differences in reading speed between the two devices were not “statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability” — in other words, the study did not prove that the iPad allowed for faster reading than the Kindle. A total of 24 participants (10 is about average for a usability survey) were given short stories by Ernest Hemingway to read in print and on iPads, Kindles and desktop PCs.
Anna Chapman, the Russian woman accused by the FBI of being part of a spy ring , had her own startup that was creating a web site aimed at helping people find apartments. Techcrunch reported today that the 28-year-old Chapman had created the company PropertyFinder and was in the midst of creating the rental web site NYCrentals.com. It has both a copy of Chapman’s business plan and a video in which Chapman describes the internet business.
Twitter has rolled out several different advertising systems in recent weeks and we’re hearing that the next one will take a page from the Dell Computers playbook. In December, Dell famously reported $6.5 million in sales through links published over two years on Twitter. Imagine how much more Twitter might be able to pull in with a bigger audience, more diverse products and promotions and big brand partners. We believe that’s what Twitter will soon announce is the plan for the two-week old account @earlybird , which just opened up to accepting followers today
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, may think email’s dying , but until it’s dead it’s still the incumbent monarch of enterprise communication. Tools that don’t fit seamlessly into existing processes and workflows will hinder the adoption of next-generation enterprise collaboration solutions. eTouch ’s enterprise-grade wiki SamePage attempts to solve this problem by allowing users to create wiki pages via email, and several other features to ease adoption. Sponsor The new version of SamePage, 4.3, adds an “Explorer View,” similar to Windows explorer, and WebDAV support for editing attachments online without saving them to the desktop
In another groundbreaking move, The Guardian newspaper in Britain has launched a plugin for the popular blog-publishing tool WordPress (see disclosure below) that allows web sites to embed the full text of Guardian news stories and other content for free. The plugin comes with a catch though: Sites also have to embed the newspaper’s advertising. The new tool is part of an ambitious program of opening the paper up to the web — a move that got its start in May of this year when The Guardian launched its “open platform,” which allows developers to use the publisher’s open API to create apps and services that include the newspaper’s content. Matt McAlister, lead developer at The Guardian and the architect of both the open platform project and the open API, says the rationale behind both the open platform and the WordPress plugin is the same: to allow other sites and services to make use of the newspaper’s content, and at the same time to enlist them as partners in monetizing that content by carrying advertising (The Guardian also has platform partners who share the revenue from their services with the newspaper).
Review of Poynt for BlackBerry Smartphones [ youtube video link for mobile viewing ] Poynt is definitely an essential when it comes to your BlackBerry. This app truly connects you to the world around you. You can use Poynt to find movies, restaurants, people, businesses and gas prices.
Smartphone owners love free apps, but none as much as those toting Android phones, according to new data from Distimo . Approximately 25 percent of apps downloaded across all smartphone platforms were free apps with the exception of Android, where a whopping 57 percent of the apps grabbed were free. The Dutch analytics company finds that games are the most popular apps across all platforms — 90 percent of the most popular free apps and 80 percent of the most popular paid apps. Twitter is still a popular social network for the Apple and Android crowds according to the new numbers
You may remember the Arc Mouse, an attractive and portable little thing (marred in my opinion by the sensor placement) I reviewed back in ‘08. It’s a nice design, perhaps one of Microsoft Hardware’s best, and now there are signs pointing to a touch-based update — perhaps using one of the technologies I saw on my visit to Microsoft Labs . The FTIR mouse or Cap mouse would be the likeliest candidates for a transplant, the others requiring a much more significant change in form factor.
Just a friendly PSA: after facing a tidal wave of customer complaints and bad PR, Apple has opted to waive the 10% restocking fee incurred on customers returning their iPhone 4s. I doubt this is any sort of admission of faultiness from Apple — they’re addressing the reception problem partially by making the bars bigger — it seems more like a tactful placation of their angriest customers. The restocking fee also figured in one of the lawsuits Apple is facing, so there’s that as well. Sure, $20 or $30 isn’t that much money, but when all signs seem to point to your having returned a faulty product, and you still have to give them money, it can sting a bit.
Just a friendly PSA: after facing a tidal wave of customer complaints and bad PR, Apple has opted to waive the 10% restocking fee incurred on customers returning their iPhone 4s. I doubt this is any sort of admission of faultiness from Apple — they’re addressing the reception problem partially by making the bars bigger — it seems more like a tactful placation of their angriest customers. The restocking fee also figured in one of the lawsuits Apple is facing, so there’s that as well. Sure, $20 or $30 isn’t that much money, but when all signs seem to point to your having returned a faulty product, and you still have to give them money, it can sting a bit
