Yesterday, I was with my wife in the L'Occitane store. The shelves were filled with fragrances, soaps, lotions: all sorts of handcrafted beauty products. It occured to me while looking at the labels that I have no idea how these products were made. I am reasonably versed in chemistry, but the process of manufacturing perfume is not something I know anything about.
In general, I am just not good with physical things, because I am a software person. I've always been fascinated by people who can easily make sense of physical objects, because for me it takes a lot of effort even to put together children's toys. My brain is wired differently, to see patterns in software, not in hardware. But most people are the other way around.
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We are still hoping to see a full office suite on the iPhone, but while there are already some apps that allow you to edit documents on the phone, the device's size currently makes it more useful for reading documents than actually creating them. Today, Soonr launched an application in the App Store (iTunes link) that allows you to sync files from your desktop to Soonr's online storage and then view them on your iPhone. Soonr can handle over 40 different file types and provides you with 500 megabytes of free online storage.
In the first RWW Live of 2009, we tackle an issue that is of vital importance to all startups right now - how to navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. Join the ReadWriteWeb authors and special guests on our live podcast show. Our guests are entrepreneurs from BrightKite and Zoho, two startups that were recognized by ReadWriteWeb in our annual end of the year awards: Zoho won 'Best Little Co' and BrightKite won 'Most Promising Little Co'.
Music mashup site shows how User Experience is done.
MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine launched a new microsite today called the Music Blog Zeitgeist. There you can listen, for free, to entire albums from the most blogged-about musicians of 2008. Bringing together a whole host of different technologies to create one experience, the site is beautiful and a lot of fun to navigate.
Every year old-school web design guru Jakob Nielsen releases a survey of the world's top Intranets. This year's report has some interesting comments on the use of 'web 2.0' techniques in company intranets. However Nielsen continues to take petty shots at the latest social web technologies. We were critical of this last year, but frankly it's just tiresome now. Thankfully his report has some very useful information for enterprises especially, so let's check that out.
Ever since Apple finally lifted the NDA covering the iPhone SDK, a small number of developers have started to open source their native iPhone apps. Today, Freshbooks, a popular online time-tracking and invoicing service, joined this group by open sourcing its native iPhone application. Other open source iPhone apps include Wordpress, the applications from Apps Amuck's 31 Days of iPhone Apps, and a collection of source code for handling the iPhone's touch controls.
In March 2008, Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails released the first part of Ghosts I-IV via BitTorrent, and released all four albums under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Even though fans could easily get free versions of the album, Ghosts actually went on to become the best-selling album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.
Days after a wave of phishing attacks fooled thousands of Twitter users, it appears that another security hole has been found by...someone. Obama's account, unused since election day, sent out an affiliate link to a survey with a gas card prize, Fox News said that "Bill O'Reily is gay" (not that there's anything wrong with that) and Britney Spears' made a lewd post about her anatomy. Rick Sanchez, the Twitter loving CNN anchor, says he's "high on crack and might not be coming into work today."
The Fox tweet was deleted an hour after it was posted, so the password may not have been changed. The Facebook account on Twitter just posted a link to porn, so it appears that the situation remains unresolved. Update: Twitter says it's been resolved but that users should change their passwords! The Twitter blog has just posted an explanation of the breach. Screen shots of the hacked accounts below below.
Have you ever wondered what iPhone apps are hot in Japan? If you're attending this year's MacWorld conference in San Francisco, you'll have a chance to find out. There, Nobuyuki Hayashi, a Japanese Mac and iPhone tech journalist and blogger, is hosting an event called "Japan iPhone Apps: State of the Market," which will be held on Wednesday, Jan 7th. If you can't make the event, here's a sneak preview of the apps being featured.
What do you get when you combine blogging and lifestreaming? You get Kakuteru, a semantic blogging mashup with funny name. The service imports your activity streams from FriendFeed and combines them with longer articles you write yourself. After you set up your Kakuteru site, its URL can then be hidden behind a domain name of your choosing so it appears as if it's your own blog.
Years from now, our grandchildren will gather at our knees saying: "Tell us again about those wild days of Podango! And Pownce! And I Want Sandy!" Misty-eyed, we'll tell them about a glorious time when any youngster with a VPS, a sans-serif wordmark and a glint in her eye could stake her claim to social media millions...
Hype Machine Zeitgeist: 50 Most Blogged Albums of 2008
2009 Web Predictions
Top 100 Products of 2008