Archive for January, 2008

Scribd, a self-publishing network, is a self-professed Silicon Valley startup founded in 2006 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman and Tikhon Bernstam and as the story goes, “The idea was inspired when Trip and Jared wanted to publish some of their school papers online and couldn't find an easy way to do it. They hit upon the idea of making a website designed for people to share their documents with the world… Part of the idea behind Scribd is that everyone [...]

Public schools receive funding from state, federal and local governments. Because funding depends on the whim of the public voter, it can fluctuate. While a school may receive enough funding in some years, they may fall short in other years. Catch Tomorrow has set its sights on helping remedy that situation.
Catch Tomorrow isn't the first site to offer funding for education. It is part of the Search Engine Corp network, though, which is the first search engine network [...]

Some of you may remember a Mozilla tool released last October known as Prism. This prototype-stage software, originally released only for Windows, showed Firefox users where the evolution of web apps was headed; towards site-specific browsers (SSBs).
Although a Mac version was eventually released (as well as a Linux one), Prism's cross-platform intentions don't exactly make for a native-feel when run within Mac OS X. Now, to provide a more seamless desktop experience with SSBs for Mac users, Todd Ditchendorf [...]

I know that there have been many days when I wish I was a Hollywood celebrity just so I could have my own personal assistant to run all my errands, keep track of my appointments, and fetch me coffees. When I spotted three different services and apps designed to do at least a bit of that work for me, I rejoiced, hoping that a trend is in the air this year that will bring me the ideal artificial assistant.
The first [...]

Magnify just announced that they are going to offer open source graphics development to online channel builders. Magnify is one of the most promising video curation services of Web 2.0 and their updates continue to add value to an already great innovation. This new Graphic Share Library (GSL) allows users of the Magnify.net community to create, share, and use elements from open source content submitted by other members.
Though sophisticated the sharing space is simple to use, as [...]

There are a few political social networks out there in this tech savvy election year. We've already reviewed a few of them for this series, and today we turn our sights to Essembly. Essembly began as a place for people to find like-minded people on the political spectrum, as well as a place to get political news and information from all sides of a debate.
The moment you sign up you are presented with a series of “Resolves” to vote [...]

It now looks like the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA) now has its first “project” to jump start the intentions of the newly created organization. Formed just last December, the engineering working group consists of a coalition of information and assistive technology companies (Microsoft, Adobe, HP, Novell, and GW Micro among others) with a goal of creating a set of standards to make it easier for developers to create accessible software, hardware and web products.
On Thursday, Microsoft publicly announced that its [...]

Fifth Generation Systems announced today that the have just completed a series B financing round in the amount of $5.3 million. 5G is best know for creating the social computing platform Zude , which I covered both here and on ReadWriteWeb back in September of 2007. Back then I called Zude "An end all creativity site" and the creativity continues.
Investors in this round included: Irwin Lieber and Barry Rubenstein of Wheatley Partners, Persistency Capital and [...]

In a move that will throw many online users for yet another loop, Yahoo has decided to jump on the Open ID bandwagon. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for OpenID. But this marks the third or fourth time in a year that Yahoo has merged log in credentials without taking their users' wants and needs into account. It is my opinion they are trying to become the future OpenID single source, as they have long been driving [...]