Posts tagged soon
Google+ Check-in Offers Coming Soon
Dec 14th
Google is integrating additional mobile and Offers features with the Google+ social network. Upcoming features will allow check-in based offers, incentivizing Plus shout-outs for local businesses – but stepping on the toes of other Google se…
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SMX West Super Early Bird Rates Expire Soon – Register Now, Save $400
Dec 6th
February 28 – March 1 in San Jose, CA Attend SMX West and get expert insights and real-world-proven tactics that yield results instantly. Programmed by the editorial team of Search Engine Land, the multi-track agenda will feature 60+ tactic-packed sessions on SEO, paid search, social media…
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Coming Soon to a Coffee Shop Near You: NFC-Powered Foursquare Check-ins
Nov 28th
If you think whipping out your phone, searching for a venue and then tapping the “Check In” button on Foursquare is a tiresome waste of several seconds, you’re in luck. Like so many other things in life, the Foursquare check-in promises to be simplified by NFC technology, allowing us to simply wave our phones to automatically check into a venue.
Of course, mainstream adoption of NFC is at least a few years away, but owners of Symbian-powered phones can get started thanks to a new update to the Foursquare app for the platform.
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To enable NFC-powered check-ins, establishments need to display a sign or poster containing an NFC tag that points to their venue’s Foursquare listing URL. Nokia’s developer blog has some resources on getting started with NFC tags.
Signs like this not only enable people to check-in with less effort, but can also provide a visual, real-world call to action. For non-power users of location services like Foursquare, it can be pretty easy to simply forget to check in to a restaurant or other local business. Having that sign hanging there can provide a mental trigger. Business owners can also use the opportunity to push promotions and deals, offering discounts or free products to the mayor or anybody else that checks in.
Admittedly, the average person has no idea what NFC is right now. But it’s almost universally predicted to reach mainstream adoption within a few years, quite possibly replacing our wallets and keys at some point in the future. NFC is already included on a number of Android-powered handsets and is rumored to be coming to the iPhone 5 next year.
Are you excited about the prospect of checking in by waving your phone, or do you think this propels laziness to new and unprecedented heights? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Education-Specific HTML to Be Submitted to Search Engines Soon
Nov 21st
Students, educators and others interested in finding the best published content, events and experts for learning new things will be heartened to learn that a new metadata markup standard is in the works to make discovery of learning materials easier than ever. Perhaps more importantly, it will make those materials easier for machines to find. Once finding the right content is a solved problem, many new things could become possible.
The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), a project co-led by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, today took the next step towards submitting its specification to Schema.org, the collaboration between Google, Yahoo and Bing that maps out 100 different types of content online in a standardized format.
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The LRMI 0.5 spec lets publishers communicate in a page’s HTML things like the competencies taught, the competencies required, the type of educational materials and the typical age range of intended users for anything educational published online. Time required for completion, degree of interactivity and a small number of other ways of describing educational content are included in the spec.
Active participants working to figure out how to construct LRMI and how to integrate it into Schema.org include people from small non-profits like open curriculum community Curriki, corporate education technology giant Pearson, international information standards group Dublin Core and intellectual property law group Creative Commons, among others.
Participants debate on the official mailing list over new terminology, balancing concerns like coherence with Schema.org, ease of input by people who will enter metadata to go with resources being published online and specificity gained or lost by the way that metadata fields are named and framed.
While some semantic technologies are able to assert categorization from the top down, whether content publishers participate or not, it seems likely that the kind of data that will be communicated in LRMI will require informed participation by the producers of the content themselves. Requiring participation in categorization could pose a challenge to hopes the spec will gain meaningful adoption.
The LRMI effort doesn’t seem well-known yet outside its own ranks, either; the official website has almost no inbound links indexed by Google yet and none of the education technology blogs we track here at ReadWriteWeb have mentioned LRMI yet. The project was just announced last month though and in the education market, a month isn’t a very long time.
LRMI isn’t alone though, either. Nathan Angell, a Board Director at the collaborative open education software community Sakai Foundation and a Product Manager at rSmart, calls LRMI “another welcome intervention in growing list of data specifications for education.”
“These days we have access to an unbelievable number of learning resources–both open and proprietary–but it’s still hard to find the right ones, quality resources, suited to your needs, when you need them.
“For example, in the Sakai community, we have built a new platform–the Open Academic Environment–that helps people create and tag learning materials, and most importantly, share them openly by default.
“With the LRMI specification, we can help people tag their materials with exactly the right information that will make them easy for others to find and use…and even better, we can augment the suggested content widgets we already have in place to discover resources in the moment that match the very specific needs of a particular educator or student.”
Angell, who isn’t associated with LRMI in particular, sees data specifications like this as potential game changers. Those suggested content widgets are really shorthand for computation that can begin at a higher level of abstraction if the hard work of content categorization and description has already been done in a standardized way. That means education technology providers, search engines and others don’t have to invest time and energy into understanding educational resources online – they can begin with a pre-existing understanding of that content and then offer higher-level features and services on top of already-organized information.
“LRMI helps set the stage for the hive mind that will help our children’s children learn faster and better than we ever thought possible,” Angel says. “In comparison, school today will look like drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick.”
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Coming Soon to a Bank Near You: Cloud Computing
Nov 3rd
The financial services industry is warming up to the idea of using the cloud for some of its critical computing needs. More than half of bank transactions will be supported by cloud-based infrastructure and software by 2015, according to a recent report from Gartner.
That is the expectation of about 39% of financial services CIOs worldwide, according to the survey. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 44% of CIOs for banking firms expect that more than half of their institutions’ transactions will take place via infrastructure that lives in the cloud, and 33% expect most of them will be processed using some type of SaaS application.
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For banks, the cloud can offer far greater computing power and scalability. Migrating critical operations there won’t be without its risks, however. Security and stability are always a concern when moving to the cloud, and that’s especially true when highly sensitive data like financial transactions are involved. It simply requires that systems are architected in a secure and fail-proof way.
Let the Machines Do What They Do Best, So People Can Focus Elsewhere
Another key value the cloud offers to financial firms is increased efficiency. As Gartner points out, banks are increasingly going to be replacing people with machines to perform certain tasks, leaving humans to do things the human mind is good at.
“As banks progressively replace people in the value chain with algorithmic operations (AOs) to run processes and make decisions, their intellectual property increasingly resides in these algorithms,” reads a post on Gartner’s blog. “The value of people is not in running operations but in improving the AOs.”
It’s this type of efficiency and operational enhancement that can drive what Gartner calls “creative destruction” within the banking industry.
As Gartner Managing Vice President Peter Redshaw summed it up, “Successful new cloud services can displace the existing and dominant process for design, distribution or transacting in a disruptive way, rather than just incrementally improving them.”
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Flipboard’s Biggest Competition is Coming Soon From Google and Yahoo
Oct 28th
If Flipboard thought it had enough competition in the social news-reading tablet app space, it’s got a thing or two coming. Well, one from Google and one from Yahoo, reportedly. The two Web giants are working on their own such applications, the first of which may drop next week.
Livestand is Yahoo’s take on the personalized reading app for tablets, which ousted CEO Carol Bartz announced earlier this year. Sources tell AllThingsD that the app is expected to be released next week. It was originally slated to be launched on iOS and Android during the first half of 2011.
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More than it resembles the likes of Flipboard and Zite, Livestand looks and feels like AOL’s Editions app for iPad. It functions as a personalized, magazine-like publication with dynamic content and sleek, often video-based advertisements. It’s a natural extension of Yahoo’s efforts to become a company that specializes, among many other things, in digital content. But can Livestand stack up?
Also in the pipeline is a project from Google code-named Propeller. Less is known about how that app will look and function, but it’s generally understood to be the search giant’s answer to Flipboard, which Google unsuccessfully tried to acquire. The app that Google launches instead is expected to include several media partners and integration with Google Plus, something Flipboard doesn’t have yet.
The Cross-Platform Advantage and Flipboard’s Weakness
Another big advantage that Google, and presumably Yahoo, will have over Flipboard in particular is cross-platform support. As wildly successful and popular as its been on the iPad, the startup has been slow to launch a version for iPhone, let alone Android. For the time being, the iPad remains dominant in the tablet space, so players like Flipboard probably feel safe focusing there for now. But if the smartphone space is any indication, Android is capable of catching up to iOS.
It remains to be seen whether Amazon will succeeding to light another competitive fire in this space when the Kindle Fire ships in a few weeks.
Google’s application is described by AllThingsD as “an HTML5 reader for the Apple iPad and Android.” Knowing Google, Propeller may well manifest itself as a browser-based Web app (perhaps alongside native apps), which would practically guarantee that it’s available on any modern tablet with a Web browser capable of rendering HTML5.
Too Late to the Game?
Even with the cross-platform advantage and enormous development resources behind it, products of this nature from Google and Yahoo could simply fail to catch on. The iPad has been in existence for nearly two years and applications like Flipboard, Zite and Pulse have proven very popular among consumers. To compete, the big players will need to offer something truly unique to readers, publishers and advertisers alike.
Tablets may or may not be the savior that many traditional publishers had hoped for, but early surveys indicate that people who own an iPad or another tablet device are deeply engaged and read more news content than they ever did on desktops. As this space heats up and continues to evolve, it’s no surprise to see new contenders jumping into the ring. If nothing else, the eagerness of established tech giants to join in the fun is a sign of just how significant the trend is.
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Facebook Timeline Profiles May Arrive Soon; But You Could Just Get it Now
Oct 15th
Facebook’s Timeline Profile design has still yet to be officially released to the public due to privacy concerns and a trademark dispute, but the latest rumors are that they will be made public on the 19th of October, according to The Next Web.
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Android Patent Wars Continue, Ice Cream Sandwich Coming Soon
Sep 9th
HTC is suing Apple with patents transferred from Google as a defense against Apple’s lawsuit. Meanwhile, Acer and Viewsonic have signed patent licensing agreements with Microsoft.
HTC Counters Apple with Google Patents
Google transferred nine …
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Coming Soon to Engine Yard: MongoDB, PostgreSQL 9
Sep 5th
Engine Yard is moving well beyond its roots. On August 23rd, the company signed an agreement to acquire Orchestra to add PHP to its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. Now it’s announcing plans to add to its database stack.
In a post last week, Engine Yard’s Ines Sombra outlined plans to upgrade the MySQL implementation, and expand the database stack to PostgreSQL 9 and MongoDB.
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According to Sombra, Engine Yard is going to be upgrading MySQL to 5.1 and 5.5. (You can find the current supported stack on the Engine Yard site.) PostgreSQL 9 is in a limited alpha preview for Engine Yard customers, with plans for a public beta shortly. MongoDB is not yet in alpha, but Sombra writes that Engine Yard has partnered with MongoHQ and MongoLab.
Engine Yard has its work cut out for it keeping up with Heroku, which was acquired by Salesforce.com in December 2010. Heroku has been busy as well, adding Node.js last year and Clojure recently. (Heroku also supports Ruby, of course, and Java.) For datastores, Heroku supports a wide variety – MySQL, MongoDB, CouchDB, Memcache, and PostgreSQL.
After picking up PHP, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, where do you think Engine Yard should go next?
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