Archive for May, 2007

Worried that your memory, attention, and processing speed are slowing down with age? To keep your brain fit, check out Lumosity. It?s a fun way to keep your brain functioning the way you want it to by playing different games that help to train your cognitive abilities of memory, attention, processing speed, and cognitive control.
It?s been scientifically tested and has had incredibly positive results. With each game you play you get helpful hints about improving your brain function and which [...]

When I first heard rumblings about a new Web 2.0 way of tracking finances, I was really interested. I'm notoriously unorganized when it comes to banking, and find programs like Quicken to be kludgy and tedious. I've given Wesabe a try, and while it's certainly more fun than Quicken, it's got a long way to go to be really useful.
Like most 2.0 apps, Wesabe has all the usual suspects: ease of set-up, pretty interface, and tagging. The tagging comes [...]

Earlier this month, we brought you word that eBay was showing a significant amount of interesting in one of the more unique search engines on the Web, StumbleUpon. Today, we bring you news that eBay has officially acquired the recommendation site.
For the same amount the rumor mill was throwing about, too.
Yes, StumbleUpon sold its soul over to the auction-house-in-so-many-areas-of-the-tech-industry-that-it-doesn’t-know-what-to-do-with-itself for a sizable $75 million in cash. We’re still curious to learn exactly why eBay has taken a now-public $75m [...]

Google's made many headlines lately, but today one particular announcement by the company shadowing almost all others. We say almost, because the biggest elephant in the room remains the Google-DoubleClick deal. $3.1bn is one card that’s really very difficult to trump.
On to the latest news. It turns out Google’s been hard at work trying to construct a bridge between online and offline use of applications that as of now can only be accessed with Internet connections, and come out from [...]

Google has announced that it is going to buy Panoramio for an undisclosed amount to add it to its Google Geo product mix (Google Earth and Google Maps). For those of you who don't know yet, Panoramio is a photo hosting website that in addition to offering you free 2 Gb for photos storage allows you to organize and locate photos by linking them to the places where they were taken. This service also enables you to explore the world [...]

Mahalo is a human-powered search engine. Currently they have over 4,000 of the top English search phrases mapped with their own pages, and by the end of the year they hope to have 10,000. It’s a five year project, and this is only their fifth month. With Mahalo you are guaranteed to never run into any spam and to only get quality results, since each page is written by actual people and not algorithms.
The Guides, or page writers, also help [...]

Last.fm, the self-described “social music revolution,” has been acquired by “US media giant CBS Corporation for $280m, the largest-ever…Web 2.0 acquisition” in the UK.
The service, built to provide music fans worldwide with a base of fellow audiophiles with which to share favorite tunes and discover new ones easily, has in five years amassed a usership of “more than 15 million” people, making it a clearly desirable property – in this instance desirable for a business that has only recently (publicly) [...]

Apple today launched a subset of iTunes, dubbed iTunes Plus, established to market DRM-free, 256kbps-quality audio tracks to consumers interesting in obtaining unrestricted files for playback and to transfer any which way they so wish – as long as the application and/or device they prefer using recognizes the AAC file format. All iTunes Plus tracks cost $1.29, though full albums will run iTunes Store customers the same amount as those with digital rights management software attached.
As AppleInsider has reported, the [...]

When Google acquired YouTube we all predicted that Google would have lots of copyright problems with owners of content uploaded to the video sharing website illegally. But it has proven that recently YouTube is frequently mentioned in relation to various countries blocking access to YouTube for their citizens due to their dissatisfaction with YouTube's content. We have already reported on Turkey and Thailand blocking YouTube. In both situations it was a government's decision that was officially declared and was soon [...]