Posts tagged Some
Brother Can You Spare Some Code?
Mar 19th
To paraphrase President Kennedy: Ask not what your country can code for you — ask what you can code to help your country. If you’re a developer, consider empowering your fellow citizens help the homeless veterans in your community. The Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, and the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation have collaborated to back a new challenge to developers to create a better way to help the homeless veterans using the Internet and mobile devices.
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“Last year’s 12 percent drop in Veterans homelessness shows the results of President Obama’s and the whole administration’s commitment to ending Veterans homelessness,” said Secretary of House and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, in a prepared statement. “I want to thank Jon Bon Jovi for being a part of that effort and for using competition and innovation to advance the cause of ending homelessness.”
He’s right. Here’s your jarring statistic of the day: One out of every six men and women in the United States’ homeless shelters are veterans. Veterans are 50 percent, according to the VA, are more likely to fall into homelessness compared to other Americans.
The idea here is relatively straightforward: use the open innovation approach that the White House has successfully applied elsewhere federal government to tap into the distributed creativity of the technology community all over the country.
“This contest taps the talent and deep compassion of the Nation’s developer community,” said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki, in a prepared statement. “We are asking them to make a free, easy-to-use Web and smartphone app that provides current information about housing, health clinics and food banks.”
While “Project REACH” stands for “Real-time Electronic Access for Caregivers and the Homeless (REACH),” it actually aspires to do something more meaningful: give mobile citizens and caregivers the information they need to help a homeless veteran where and when it’s needed.
This app “will better connect our nation’s homeless to resources that are already available to them in a manner that reaches them where they are,” said Aneesh Chopra, the first US chief technology officer, in a conference call today with reporters. Chopra, who left the administration earlier this year, later clarified that he was serving as a volunteer and judge for the challenge.
To say that improving the current state of affairs with homeless veterans is needed would be a gross understatement. “Homelessness for anyone is a national tragedy,” said Sean Donovan, secretary of HUD, in today’s call. “It’s never worse than for our nation’s veterans.”
The “Obama administation believes that no one who has fought for our country should ever be invisible to the American people,” said Donovan, who noted that while HUD has housed 28,000 veterans and has gotten nearly “nearly 1 in 5 homeless veterans off our nation’s streets,” more effort is needed.
He’s right. Here’s your jarring statistic of the day: One out of every six men and women in the United States’ homeless shelters are veterans. Veterans are 50 percent, according to the VA, are more likely to fall into homelessness compared to other Americans.
The Project REACH challenge asks developers to create a mobile or Web application that will connect service providers to real-time information about resources for the homeless and others in need. “What if we had the ability, in real-time, drawing on local data, to help the homeless vet?” asked Donovan today. He wants to see information that can help them find a place to sleep, find services or work put in the palms of the hands of anyone, giving ordinary citizens the ability to help homeless veterans.
Instead of offering spare change, in other words, a citizen could try to help connect a homeless veteran with services and providers.
The first five entries to meet the requirements will receive a $10,000 cash prize and the opportunity to test their app at the JBJ Soul Kitchen. The winner will receive a $25,000 prize.
“At the Soul Kitchen we’ve seen the need for a simple, user-friendly, comprehensive application that connects those in need to resources in their community,” said Jon Bon Jovi, legendary rock musician, chairman of the JBJ Soul Foundation and White House Council Member, in a prepared statement. “As we sought out a solution to resolve the disconnect, we found the VA, HUD and HHS to be of like mind. Together we can provide the information about existing services – now we need the bright minds in the developer community to create a platform to tie it all together.”
“High Tech, High Compassion”
Empowering people to help one another through mobile technology when they want to do so is more about the right-time Web than real-time. And yes, that should sound familiar.
Community groups and service providers sometime lack the right tools, too, explained W. Scott Gould, deputy secretary of veterans affairs, on the call today. The contest launched today will use Internet and smartphones to help them. The app should use tech to show which community provider has a bed or find an employer with openings, he said.
“It’s a high tech, high compassion, low cost solution,” said Gould, that “puts the power in the hands of anyone” to use data to help veterans get the help that they need. He wrote more about using technology to help homeless veterans at the White House blog:
Project REACH (Real-Time Electronic Access for Caregivers and the Homeless) challenges applicants to make a free, easy-to-use, and broadly accessible web- and Smartphone app to provide current and up-to-date information about housing and shelter, health clinics, food banks, and other services available to the homeless. It is designed to tap the enormous talent and deep compassion of the nation’s developer community to help us deliver vital information to the people who care for the homeless.
People caring for homeless veterans will be able to use this app to look up the location and availability of shelters, free clinics, and other social services – and instantaneously be able to share this critical information with those in need.
Bon Jovi, when asked about whether homeless veterans have smartphones on today’s call, told a story about a man at the Soul Kitchen who stayed late into the evening. The staff realized that he didn’t have a place to go and turned to the Internet to try to find a place for him. Although they found that it was easy to find local shelters, said Bon Joivthe websites didn’t inform them of hours and bed availability.
“People like me, who want to help, sometimes just don’t know, real-time, if there are beds available,” he said. “Think about the guys like me that have a computer, in the Soul Kitchen, that want to help.”
As healthcare blogger Brian Ahier noted this afternoon in sharing his post on Project REACH, this is the sort of opportunity that developers who want to make a major contribution to their communities can be proud to work upon.
New developer challenge: Project REACH to help homeless veteran’s bit.ly/zyCyoW Work on stuff that matters! #Gov20
— Brian Ahier (@ahier) March 19, 2012
Improving the ability of citizens to help homeless veterans is a canonical example of working on stuff that matters.
“We will, through our broad and deep network at HUD, make sure that whoever wins this competition, will make sure that app and tech is available to more than 8,000 providers,” said Donovan.
If that network Bon Jovi’s star power can help draw more attention to the challenge and any eventual services, more of the nation’s civic surplus just might get tapped, as more coders find that’s there’s a new form of public service available to them in the 21st century.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Weekly Wrap-up: Why Some Bosses are Asking for Your Facebook Password and More Top Stories
Mar 16th
With unemployment hovering at 8.3%, some employers feel they can ask for the unreasonable. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.
After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.
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What Should You Do If Your Employer Asks For Your Facebook Password? HOT TOPIC
Sure, you sacrifice some of your rights to privacy when you enter the workforce, but asking for social passwords seems to be an extreme request. Employees are advised to be proactive and ask about social media policies and, of course, assert their rights to privacy in non-work activities.
What would you say if your boss asked for your Facebook password?
From our readers:
Christiaan Conover — An employer asking for your Facebook credentials is tantamount to asking for permission to read your personal (delivered to your house) mail, read your personal email or listen to your personal voicemail messages. They have no business gaining access to something that has no connection to the employer and violates another company’s terms in the process.
More Top Posts:
New York City Subpoenas Twitter For Occupy Wall Street Protester Data
U.S. activists who thought Twitter was a secure way to communicate during demonstrations may have another thing coming. The New York District Attorney’s Office has begun sending subpoenas to Twitter seeking data on protesters arrested during the Occupy Wall Street protests last year. More
Best Wiki Ever? Hackpad Just Might Be
After catching a note about the wiki for SXSW being edited with Hackpad, I thought it might be worth a look. Then I caught the tagline, “best wiki ever.” Well, that’s a bold statement. Then I noticed that Tomboy creator Alex Graveley was part of the team behind it and thought maybe it really is. After a short test drive, I’m even more impressed. Hackpad combines the simplicity of Tomboy with real-time collaboration features that make it a great lightweight tool for teams. More
Google Semantic Search: Bad for SEO, Good for You
The Wall Street Journal reported today on some changes coming to Google search, but the article seems a bit confused about what they are. The lead item is that “[o]ver the next few months,” Google “will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links,” providing direct answers to questions instead. That’s not new at all. More
How Windows 8 Succeeds From Here: A Prognosis
We live in a post-something era. This much, Microsoft is willing to concede; the iPad’s thundering success changed the landscape. It has shown that the buyer is willing to imagine a different form factor than the PC commanding her principal information delivery platform. Apple has yet to conquer that platform, but it has fired its third round of volleys and the castle walls have been breached. More
![[Poll] What Company Provides the Best HTML5 Framework and Toolset?](http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/mobile/html5_150x150.jpg)
[Poll] What Company Provides the Best HTML5 Framework and Toolset?
HTML5 and the mobile Web is starting to catch up with native apps, at least in terms of developer attention. Many developers are rushing to create HTML5-ready mobile websites or hybrid apps and need the proper tools to create dynamic apps that will function across platforms. As such, there is an arms race in the HTML5 ecosystem to create tools that developers will need to produce quality apps and content for the mobile Web, Android and iOS. More
Death By Wikipedia: Encyclopedia Britannica Stops Printing
So many things about printed encyclopedias seem insane now. The space that dozens of volumes takes up. How much an entire set weighs (well over 100 pounds). The fact that many middle class families used to have to pay for them in regular installments. How slowly they are updated with new information.
Today, we have a reservoir of infinite knowledge, most of which is virtually free to access. It takes up no more physical space than the tiny devices we use to view it. More
Stephen Wolfram Thinks Instagram is “Completely Nuts” For Writing Its Own Photo Filters
The easy news at South by Southwest yesterday was that Instagram has reached 27 million users and has indeed built the expected Android version. The hard news is that it may have wasted lots of time and effort along the way.
In a talk today entitled “Computation and Its Impact on the Future”, Stephen Wolfram took a rapt audience on a tour of Wolfram Alpha and the Mathematica kernel that underlies it. To demonstrate Mathematica’s capabilities, he wrote some software right in front of us to upload and filter photos. It took 10 seconds and two lines of code. More
5 Things I Learned About the Future from Stephen Wolfram
Lots of the knowledge dropped at South By Southwest Interactive is vertical. In the sense that tech people use that word, “vertical” means focused on a particular market or problem and all its implications from top to bottom. Talks tend to be about the business of this or that, or the makers of one app will talk about how they did it. More
![[STUDY] Why Do People Use Instagram?](http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/Jared-Instagram-150.jpg)
[STUDY] Why Do People Use Instagram?
Instagram is the iPhone photographer’s app of choice, and it’s not just because of those slice and dice filters. Are Instagram users hasty and lazy, or do they actually take time to craft the photos before uploading them? A study done back when Instagram was fairly new suggests that the hardcore users of the Instagram app are anything but lazy. In fact, they might be using this tiny app to create art and build beautiful new communites. Before Zachary McCune joined @piictu as a community manager, he found himself in the UK on a fellowship studying the software users of Instagram. More
ReadWriteWeb Channels
- If Windows 7 “Simplifies” the PC, What Does Windows 8 Do to It?
- Two Years with the iPad: Was It Worth It?
- How Windows 8 Succeeds From Here: A Prognosis
- Your iPad 2 is About to Have an Accident
- [Poll] What Company Provides the Best HTML5 Framework and Toolset?
- AppMobi Releases First Public Version of jqMobi HTML5 Framework
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- Next, Salesforce Aims to Obsolete the CMS with Site.com Launch
- Four (Competing) Approaches to Security in the Mobile + Cloud Era
- Hadoop Users Could Get Their First Taste of Real Encryption
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Give Google Some Credit
Feb 17th
Google’s having a down moment in the press. It can’t catch a break. Every public, top-level decision it’s made recently is either the end of “Don’t Be Evil” or impossibly optimistic. After all, “Giant Company Falls From Grace” is the kind of headline industry reporters dream of writing, so we pounce on any scrap of evidence.
But lord knows tech news is an echo chamber. A successful meme like “Google sucks” tends to amplify. It’s easy to laugh at blustery executive statements and paint a whole picture of Google’s decline. But, surprise surprise, things are more complicated than what you read on the blogs.
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It’s Complicated
Yes, unambiguous failures of Google products have come to light recently. There’s no excuse for Google’s mobile payments to be insecure. Score one against Google. It has also come to light in the last day or so that Google does sneaky things with Apple’s mobile Safari browser to track users’ browsing habits. Does that mean Google is evil, period? Or is there perhaps more to the story? What about every other technology company involved here?
Online privacy is a generally sad state of affairs. Is Google all-the-way evil for exploiting mobile Safari like this, even though its users can delete their browsing histories? Can Facebook users delete their tracking history, which Bing uses for social search? (No.)
Search, plus Your World
Other Google products have changed recently, and our reactions are matters of opinion. I’m just glad I vented my Google+ spleen when its integration into the rest of Google was still mostly hypothetical, because what eventually shipped was not that bad. You might even like it if you try it for a few months before you blog about it.
Google iterates constantly in response to huge, statistically significant amounts of data from its millions of users. That’s why, for example, it hasn’t settled on a top nav bar yet. It might be temporarily annoying to users and provide temporary blog fodder, but Google’s public beta testing gives it statistical confidence about its product decisions. The opinions of bloggers aside, the behavior of millions of users doesn’t lie.
Search, plus Your World is no different. It may be propelled by business imperatives, but as Google Search lead designer Jon Wiley told me yesterday, the design team’s motto is “don’t break search.” If SPYW breaks search for its users, Google will change it. I don’t much like it myself yet, so I just turn it off. “We’re at the very beginning,” Wiley told me, “and how that experience is going to grow and change is kind of an unknown, because it really is dependent upon how people use it.”
As I said on Twitter at the time:
When a large-scale Web service puts an opt-out switch on a new feature, it’s because they know users will like the feature.
— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 10, 2012
When I talked to Wiley yesterday (more from him later today), I asked him if “people have chilled out” about Search, plus Your World since it launched. But even as I asked it, I realized the question was smeared with blog-juice. “That implies that they were not chill to begin with,” Wiley pointed out, and that’s true. I was biased by the blogosphere into thinking that people hate this thing.
If the numbers didn’t support it, even if Wiley hadn’t been straight with me about it, I would have heard it in his voice. But “Search, plus Your World is working as intended,” he said. That sounds opaque. But Google’s intention is to enable hundreds of millions of users to find what they’re looking for. If that wasn’t working as intended, this product would change.
Google Is People, Not Just Data
But more can be said for Google products right now than that the data support the decisions. Some of Google’s current projects are completely irrational, and yet they’re wonderful. Have you tried a Google+ Hangout? You should. Lots of Web products in 2011 liked to call themselves “social.” How many of them really were? Lots of people in 2011 liked to say that Google doesn’t “get” social. Is that true?
No, Google+ will not replace Facebook. Is Facebook your standard for what “social” means now? “Like” buttons and virtual farms? Google+ has those, too, and that’s a bummer. But Google+ also lets you hang out, face to face, with anyone with a computer or smartphone. Even people with dumbphones can join in by voice. Which is more social: being the Foursquare mayor of your neighborhood Starbucks or talking to people?
Yep. It’s ironic that I’m praising hangouts. I’ve had three straight hangouts go horribly wrong due to technical glitches. The conversations themselves were fantastic, but Google lost them afterwards. Google+ has given +ReadWriteWeb Hangouts On Air capability, and no, it hasn’t worked very well so far.
You know what else Google has given me, just another of its users, other than the ability to broadcast high-quality, 10-way video conversations to everyone in the world for free? Tech support for Hangouts On Air in the middle of the night. In-person training on how to use it. Why the hell are they doing this? Isn’t this ridiculously expensive in both human and machine terms? What does Google get out of making a product like this?
You know, other than a hangout with the President of the United States?
That’s a pretty good question. Maybe Googlers just think it’s amazing.
Just So We’re Clear
You might notice I haven’t mentioned Android. It is my opinion that that product isn’t serving its users well, which is why I am not one of them. But I haven’t mentioned Chrome either, and I think that’s the best browser in the world. The point is, Google is a big company. It’s working on lots of things.
Some are bad. Some are dumb. Some are wrong. Some are the best tools on the entire Web. Some are insane, totally irrational, like free face-to-face hangouts for everyone. We should never fail to hold Google accountable, but don’t fault it for trying, either.
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Google Showing Fewer Than 10 Results For Some Searches?
Feb 16th
It appears Google is testing showing fewer than the typical 10 web search results, in what might either be a test or possibly a bug. I spotted complaints in a WebmasterWorld thread where searchers were asking why is Google limiting the results for a search query on Google UK for bbc football, such…
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Is Twitter Ready For Some Football?
Feb 3rd
Sunday’s Super Bowl is full of betting possibilities, but one line we couldn’t find in Vegas is whether or not Twitter will crash because of heavy traffic during the game.
This year’s NFL playoffs have already set one record for the most tweeted sports moment in history, when a Tim Tebow pass stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers on the first play of overtime against the Denver Broncos. The 9,420 tweets per second were not enough to cripple Twitter, but on New Year’s Eve in Japan 16,197 per second brought the service down. There is speculation that this year’s Super Bowl will set new records for both Facebook and Twitter.
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We’ve asked Twitter if they’ve made an contingencies for Sunday’s game and will update as soon as we hear back from them. Such an incident doesn’t just affect users, but also loads of sports apps that let users track chatter about the game using Twitter’s API.
Most recent Twitter crashes have occurred as a result of a clearly-defined moment: midnight on New Year’s in a part of the world where Twitter is more popular than Facebook was a good candidate. For Twitter to crash on Sunday, we suspect there would have to be a key, game-shattering play like the Tebow pass. With even more people tuning into the game it would most certainly shatter that record, although it’s unclear whether it would be enough to bring the site down.
Super Bowl commercials aren’t likely to produce a Twitter-crashing moment, either, as most of the commercials have already been leaked online. So many surprises have already been given away already that today marked the first time since 1988 that USA Today did not publish a list of Super Bowl advertisers on the Friday before the game.
Predictions
- A close game will produce a moment that makes it into the Top 10 list of most tweeted events: most likely it’s a game-ending play or a referee’s announcement after video review of a disputed call.
- That moment makes the Top 10 but does not cause Twitter to crash.
- That moment doesn’t come close to breaking the all-time tweets-per-second record of 25,088 set in December when a popular anime film was shown on Japanese television.
- And not that it has anything to do with tech or Twitter, or anything other than geographic bias, but the Patriots win a fourth Super Bowl with a 31-21 win.
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Hate the Facebook News Ticker? Some Can Now Hide It
Jan 31st
Users made a big stink about the Facebook news ticker, that annoying, constantly updating feed in the upper right-hand corner of the homepage. Facebook responded. Now some users have the option to hide the ticker. This is good news for people who prefer to use the news feed and would like to avoid noisier information about which links their friends “like,” what friends are listening to on Spotify and who is now friends with whom. Teenagers spoke up about the news ticker, calling it the “stalker feed” and insisting that it provided too much information.
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The news ticker debuted before Facebook launched Timeline. Perhaps that was part of the user pushback on it – and because many of the same stories appeared in both the news feed and the news ticker.
Seeing interesting music selections from friends pop up on the news tick make it easier to discover new music. That is a very different experience than seeing annoying updates about which links friends have “liked” or commented on. Publishing activity from open graph apps – such as “watch,” “run,” shop,” “cook” – to the news ticker makes a lot more sense than seeing the mundane moves of your friends. In the meantime, if you’re one of the lucky users, you can now hide your ticker.
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Matt Cutts Convinces Some South Korean Govt. Websites To Stop Blocking Googlebot
Jan 31st
Matt Cutts, international diplomat? That might be the more appropriate title for Google’s chief spam cop. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cutts is in South Korea this week and, in a presentation Monday night for about 80 government officials, webmasters, lawyers and journalists, managed…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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[Infographic] Google Apps Has Some Big Paying Clients
Jan 31st
SaaS backup provider Backupify has recently examined its own customer sample to do some demographic profiling of Google Apps users. The results are somewhat intriguing, as you can see in the infographic below. If you remove .edu domains, Google Apps still has nearly 40% of all of its seats used by businesses with more than 10,000 employees. The company surveyed their customers who have at least 30 users.
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How did Backupify obtain this information on the size of each domain that is part of the Google Docs ecosystem? “When someone signs up for a trial, one of the pieces of information Google sends us over [in] the API is the total number of seats on the domain.” This makes for some fascinating information:
Backupify recommends that “Whether you sell a per-domain product in the Google Apps marketplace, or a per-seat product, you should customize that product for both: Very few solutions work for mom-and-pop businesses and also work for large universities and software consultancies. However, Google Apps is relatively young and Google has increased staffing in their partnership department this past year, signaling that they take their partners seriously and want to build a strong ecosystem that includes add-on developers.”
More information and their original blog post on this analysis can be found here.
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Netflix Gains Most Of Its Subscribers Back, Still Hurting In Some Areas – ReelSEO Online Video News
Jan 26th
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Netflix Gains Most Of Its Subscribers Back, Still Hurting In Some Areas
ReelSEO Online Video News This week's look at the Reel Web covers tips for YouTube SEO and several news stories from the… We've seen a lot of research pointing to how effectively video helps increase conversion, sales and… One of the top viewed pages on ReelSEO is that of a … |
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Some In China Get Around Government’s Twitter Censorship
Jan 24th
Social media use grew 300% in China last year and more than half of the country’s 500 million users are on a social network, according to a government report released last week.
And that’s why Chinese New Year became the most micro-blogged event in history, with 481,207 messages posted in the first minute of the year on a Chinese, Twitter-like service, as well as 32,312 messages posted in a single second: well above Twitter’s record of 25,088 tweets in a second. Still, many Chinese — both in China and abroad — are finding ways to use Twitter to talk free of government censorship.
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Because of government blocks on U.S.-based social networks like Twitter and Facebook, most of the messages are posted on Twitter-like copycats known as weibos. But an increasing number of Chinese dissidents are turning to Twitter, where they can discuss their homeland free of government censorship and without having to register their social media accounts under their real names, as now required under Chinese law.
While English-language users may lament the 140-character limit Twitter places on messages, users who tweet in character-based languages like Chinese are capable of recording whole paragraphs, according to Yaxue Cao, a writer who has been blogging about her experience on Twitter.
As reported by the New York Times, mainland Chinese users need to have enough technical know-how to circumvent the Great Firewall of China to use Twitter. That means conversations are more intimate — while also being more frank — than those on the government-monitored weibos. On Twitter, mainland Chinese Twitter users can interact with dissidents, including former student organizers who were exiled following the 1989 Tienanmen Square uprising.
“When one of them (@wurenhua) tweeted about his recent conversation with his 80-year-old mother over the phone and why the mother and son had avoided video chatting (so that they can hide sadness from each other), you get a glimpse of what this exile entails,” Yaxue write on her blog.
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