Blogging

It’s time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. This week Nokia launched an iPhone competitor called the Tube, Netflix released an API, Google Blog Search re-designed, and we ran a poll about Flash coming to iPhone. On the trends side, we investigated the lack of commercial RDF apps in the Semantic Web, reviewed 5 insightful science books, launched our ‘Gritty Entrepreneurs’ series, and interviewed a co-founder of last.fm. We also brought you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.

Web Products

Nokia Reveals iPhone Competitor And Goes to Battle With iTunes

At an analyst and media event in London this week, Nokia unveiled their company’s first touch-screen phone, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, otherwise known as the Nokia “Tube,” a device designed to compete directly with Apple’s iPhone. Along with the phone, Nokia also detailed plans for their new “Comes With Music” service, a 12-month subscription service which offers unlimited downloads. There’s no charge to download the individual tracks because the cost for the music is bundled into the cost of the phone.

Netflix API Launches - Here’s What it Will and Won’t Include

The much-awaited Application Programming Interface (API) for movie site Netflix launched this week. It looks pretty good, but there are some major limitations, too. Millions of people love movies via Netflix, making this API an opportunity for all kinds of developers to add well-known value to any other application.

See also: Evernote Hits a Homerun With API, Data Portability

Google Blogsearch Relaunches as Techmeme Killer, Across 11 Categories

In its first major upgrade ever, Google Blogsearch relaunched and looks radically different. Instead of the blank page look of Google.com, Blogsearch now looks like Google News (but uglier) - with the hottest topics from the blogosphere aggregated on the front page. Readers can drill down in 11 different categories, from technology, business, sports and entertainment. Google says you can use Blogsearch to see what the world is talking about.

RWW Predictions: Will eBay Sell StumbleUpon?

Last week rumors were swirling that eBay was looking to sell StumbleUpon. eBay purchased StumbleUpon in early 2007 for a bargain price of $75 million. We’ve still yet to have these rumors confirmed, but what if eBay were to actually sell StumbleUpon? We ran a prediction challenge this week asking whether eBay will sell the service by the end of this year and if so, the price tag that it might fetch. Here are the results:

PD_WIDGET.keyword=”auctionid:6065″;PD_WIDGET.height=”250″;PD_WIDGET.width=”300″;PD_WIDGET.color1=”0xFFFFFF”;PD_WIDGET.color2=”0xB80103″;PD_WIDGET.color3=”0xB80103″;PD_WIDGET.create();

Poll: Adobe Confirms Flash For iPhone - Do You Care?

At the Flash on the Beach 08 conference being held in Brighton, England, Adobe’s Senior Director of Engineering, Paul Betlem, confirmed that a Flash Player is in development for the iPhone. The information was provided in answer to a direct question from an audience member during the Town Hall meeting sessions held during the conference. Also check out our poll on the topic:

Does iPhone’s Lack of Flash Bother You?

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!

• FreshBooks offers professional online invoicing.
• SocialText provides an enterprise wiki platform.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• E.Factor is an online community for entrepreneurs.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Calais brings semantic functionality into your site.
• The Web 3.0 Conference is on October 16 - 17 in Santa Clara.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• The Defrag conference is on November 3-4 in Denver.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Web Trends

Where Are All The RDF-based Semantic Web Apps?

RDF is the cornerstone of The Semantic Web, yet there still very few commercial RDF apps.

In the latest issue of Nodalities, a magazine about the Semantic Web by UK company Talis, there is an article by Talis CTO Ian Davis about the state of Semantic Web applications. Davis says that we’re still in “Generation Zero” of the Semantic Web, because there are relatively few compelling apps. Specifically he notes that “there are still only a handful of applications that incorporate RDF at their heart and none of these are using the full potential of the Semantic Web.” RDF is the Semantic Web’s equivalent of the Web’s HTML - its chief characteristic is the ability to ascribe meaning to data. We investigate…

See also: Swirrl: Newly Launched Semantic Web Wiki

Web 2.0 Gritty Entrepreneurs

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Times are now tougher. Which makes most people head home. The half-hearted entrepreneurs, the wannabes who thought it was going to be easy, the folks with connections to VCs who could get a $5m Series A for a copycat app. Who will be left? The gritty entrepreneur of the old school who knows that it is really, really tough to build a great company. At ReadWriteWeb we celebrate these gritty entrepreneurs and in a series that kicked off this week we will be writing about them - and for them.

See also: Gritty Entrepreneurs: Jigsaw, a Profitable Web 2.0 Venture

Interview With Last.fm Founder Richard Jones

This week we interviewed one of the founders of online music service last.fm, Richard “Mr Scrobble” Jones. We wanted to find out last.fm’s reaction to the launch of MySpace Music and the rise of Imeem, discuss business models in online music, and find out what’s new at last.fm. We ran the interview in 3 parts, over 3 days. Part 1 discusses the increasing competition in online music this year. See also Part 2, on business models and Part 3, on design and features.

5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind

From the dynamics of social networks to market bubbles, science has a lot to say about
the world of technology.

One of the great discoveries of modern science was the realization of
how interconnected the world is. The deterministic, Newtonian view of
a clockwork Universe was replaced by the much more dynamic, uncertain and entangled
world of Quantum Mechanics. The new world is the one where Godel forever cut hopes for
completeness in mathematics and Turing showed that computation, like the future, is
fundamentally unpredictable. Despite these unexpected setbacks, modern science
is wonderful, powerful and thought provoking - and relevant to technologists.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Mumboe Uses Semantics To Pull Key Data From Contracts

Mumboe isn’t just another enterprise collaboration suite. Instead, they focus on doing one thing and doing it well: making business agreements searchable. That’s a very unique need they fill, which is why is why they already have 3000 customers using their free Express solution after only having launched earlier this spring.

To compete with the handful of other vendors in this narrow space, Mumboe has now added a new feature called On-Demand Contract Intelligence, which takes advantage of the service’s semantic processing engine to deliver something the others don’t: automatic extraction of data.

Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Original post:
Weekly Wrapup: Nokia’s iPhone Competitor, Netflix API, RDF Apps, and More

Our friend Jens Chr Brynildsen, a Flash expert who maintains a number of resources for the standard including Flash Magazine, has reportedly confirmed with Adobe Systems’ senior director of engineering, Paul Betlem, that Flash is coming to the iPhone. However, Betlem says that “Apple calls the shots as to when it’ll be available.”

Brynildsen got the confirmation at an Adobe Town Hall meeting session. He reports:

“Upon a direct question from the audience, Paul Betlem for the first time publicly confirmed that Adobe is actively developing a Flash Player for Apple’s popular phone. He said (not direct quote) ‘My team is working on Flash on the iPhone, but it’s a closed platform.’ He noted that Apple makes all the decisions, so in other words, the ball is in Apple’s yard at this time. If Apple says yes, Adobe will have the player available in a very short time.”

In mid-June, Adobe’s CEO said that company already has Flash running on an iPhone emulator (presumably the same emulator included with Apple’s iPhone SDK).

As we’ve pointed out several times, Flash performance and usage is abysmal on current mobile devices that support playback. Mobile device processors–including the iPhone’s–simply aren’t fast enough to handle most Flash-laden sites. Flash Lite, the scaled-down standard designed specifically for mobile devices, is even too much for most devices, and isn’t widely used.

Note: This post originally appeared on iPhone Atlas

Originally posted here:
Adobe exec confirms Flash for iPhone, says Apple will decide when

New York based Neighborhoodies has a cool new tool for people who are all about customization called the “hoodie-o-matic.” Like services that let you custom design clothing to sell to others, you can create an entire garment in your browser and see the results in real time as you toggle various options.

The results aren’t actually a new service offering. In fact, the previous system would let you do the same thing, although it was a series of drop-down menus, the result of which you’d only see once you received the garment. The new system takes away that element of surprise, and also cuts down on some of the manpower needed to transfer over those design orders for printing.

I had great fun creating the one pictured below, although as you can see from the price tag these designs don’t come cheap. Each additional design element costs a little extra on top of the base price, although you can stack on as many as you want.

For now the tool only works with hooded sweatshirts (hence the name), but considering the large volume of t-shirts the company sells, there could be a version for t-shirts or another articles later on down the line.

The Hoodie-o-matic lets you design hoodies with all sorts of custom touches. They don't come cheap though.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

View post:
Design new clothes in Flash with the hoodie-o-matic

If you’ve been on the fence about ditching Outlook for Google Apps you might want to give Google’s efforts another look. In a blog post this morning the company outlined some of the ways Google Calendar has improved over the past month with a handful of small, but important features. Many of them are aimed squarely at business users.

One of the new improvements, flexible reminders, seems like the most minor–but it’s not. Setting up reminders in the previous system had presets on when you’d be able to get the message. The new system is far more customizable and lets you drop in whatever time you want, complete with an option for days, which means you could set a reminder years in advance. You can still set whether you want it as a pop-up, e-mail or SMS message, the last of which I find to be the most useful if your mobile phone doesn’t sync up with Google Calendar.

The other major improvement, which is more business-centric is the option to selectively e-mail meeting attendees. Like Outlook you can now get a separate list of people who have replied yes, no, or maybe and e-mail specific groups without perturbing the others. In both the business and social world, this is a great way to send notices and reminders without spamming the in-boxes of people who have already responded.

Alongside these two features is a slight upgrade to the event creation tool which now allows for overlapping events, as well as a new two-click calendar subscription shortcut that lets you subscribe to someone else’s calendar without having to deal with special invites or permissions.

One of the updated features is the option to create new draggable calendar events over other ones. Previously you'd have to create it elsewhere then drag it over–making it a two-step process.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

Read the original here:
Google Calendar gets more business savvy

In a move to make videos easier to understand without volume or for the hard of hearing, YouTube has given users the option of embedding closed captions that show up as semi-transparent overlays. Caption files that have text dialogue synced up to the proper timestamps can be uploaded during the time of upload or afterwards, and YouTube has provided multiple language support to let viewers swap between different languages of a single video without having to leave playback.

Videos with closed captioning have it as an option in the lower right hand corner menu; a part of the UI that also houses the toggle to turn video annotations on and off. Even with the inclusion of closed captions you can continue to keep annotations enabled, although the two may overlap if annotations have been ledged on the bottom of the screen.

Videos with closed captions appear as on-screen overlays. You can also swap between multiple languages if the video author has provided that as part of the file.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

For now closed captions can only be seen on YouTube. Embeds do not yet have the option to have them toggled on, just like annotations are not yet available.

Also, no news yet on if this feature will be making its way to mobile versions of the site, particularly the iPhone application which does not yet have support for YouTube’s warp or on-screen annotation features. Considering the iPod touch does not have an external speaker built-in, having closed captions on the go could make for a much richer mobile experience.

There’s already a small handful of content providers including closed captioning in their videos, including CNET, MIT, and the BBC. Of the bunch I think the most useful is for video lectures, although for non-native language speakers, seeing a video in your own language (if available) is pretty darn useful. If you want to see it in action go check out this episode of Blassreiter which is entirely in Japanese–and awesome.

See the original post:
Youtube gets closed captioning support