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Forget Paris in the spring. Do it in the Fall this year, particularly if you are involved, interested or even vaguely curious about open source software.

That’s because in October, the second Open World Forum with the Open Source Think Tank will take place in Paris and bring together the key global players in the Free, Libre and Open Software (FLOSS) community.

Conceived as a ‘meeting point’ where industry movers-and-shakers, community leaders, politicos and CIOs could all bang their collective heads together, this year’s event will focus on FLOSS as one of the key drivers in the development of the digital industry.

Read more here:
Event: FOSS Fans to Gather at Open World Forum in Paris

The iPhone app Fring–which acts as a VoIP client for Skype and other Internet phone networks, as well as a voice and chat interface into IM networks like AIM and Yahoo–is now available for free to everyone.

Previously, it only ran on “jailbroken” iPhones, severely limiting its audience.

Fring places calls on cellular or VoIP networks.

On the iPhone, Fring can read both your IM and Skype buddy lists, as well as the contacts in your phone’s address book. And when you select a contact, you get the option of calling him or her by SIP call, Skype, or standard cellular. VoIP calls obviously don’t count against your cellular minutes, but you do need to have a Wi-Fi connection to make the calls.

The biggest challenge for Fring users is that when the app is not actively running in the foreground on your phone, it can’t notify you of incoming calls or chats or indicate your presence to buddies. Apple has yet to provide background notification capability to iPhone developers, although we keep hearing it will be in an upcoming release.

Although all iPhone communication apps remain hobbled until background processing is available, Fring does appear to be the most capable voice and text chat app there is for the device, and it’s well worth installing.

Fring is also available for several other mobile platforms.

See also: Palringo.

Here is the original post:
Fring VoIP, chat client app goes mainstream

The iPhone app Fring, which acts as a VOIP client for Skype and other internet phone networks, as well as a voice and chat interface into IM networks like AIM and Yahoo, is now available for free to everyone. Previously it only ran on Jailbroken iPhones, severely limiting its audience.

Fring lets you place calls on the cellular or VOIP networks.

On the iPhone, Fring can read both your IM and Skype buddy lists as well as the contacts in your phone’s address book, and when you select a contact, you get the option of calling him or her by SIP call, Skype, or standard cellular. VOIP calls obviously don’t count against your cellular minutes, but you do need to have a WiFi connection to make the calls.

The biggest challenge for Fring users is that it can’t notify you of incoming calls or chats, nor indicate your presence to buddies, when the app is not actively running in the foreground on your phone. Apple has yet to provide background notification capability to iPhone developers, although we keep hearing it will be in an upcoming release.

Although all iPhone communication apps remain hobbled until background processing is available, Fring does appear to be the most capable voice and text chat app there is for the device, and it’s well worth installing.

See also: Palringo.

Fring is also available for several other mobile platforms.

View post:
Fring VOIP and chat client goes mainstream

Tokoni, a community site for “sharing stories,” has formally launched after nearly a year of public beta. It has taken investment backing from eBay as well as the auction giant’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, and was founded by former eBay executive Mary Lou Song and Alex Kazim, former president of the eBay-owned Skype. Kazim serves as Tokoni’s CEO.

“We created Tokoni to fill the distinct need for an online community where individual stories of life’s experiences have a voice and are valued, and where the collective wisdom of the community is celebrated,” Kazim said in a release. “The growth of social media has enabled people to control how they create, consume, and share content and personal experiences online; however, participation in the social Web is still daunting to the mainstream. Tokoni makes sharing your own story easy.”

Indeed, as an adult-focused “community” site rather than a social network, Tokoni’s target audience is one that hasn’t caught on to the blogging and Twittering craze, and offers a more Luddite-friendly forum for conversation by encouraging the posting, reading, and discussing of personal stories and experiences. Another site with a similar slant is Gather.

With the U.S. presidential election approaching, Tokoni (which means “help” in Tongan) has partnered with WomenCount.org to provide a forum for women to discuss political issues.

eBay-backed community site Tokoni leaves beta

Ask.com is cleaning up its act a bit with the latest (the 11th, I’m told) major update of the search engine, which launches on Monday.

The biggest change is that Ask is parsing more data from various sources and displaying that in its search results. If you ask Ask a question, the algorithms will try to give you an answer in the result pages, not just a link to a relevant Web site. Ask.com president Scott Garrell confirmed that, yes indeed, this is the premise that Ask was founded on in 1996 when it was Ask Jeeves, but back then the answers were hand-crafted. Today they’re created by the engine.

The company is also mining the Web for “Q&A pairs,” and displaying answers from any site where people ask questions and others answer them. The site will also display questions related to the one the user asks, as well as the answers to their question, to help them do further research on a topic.

The service is also displaying more structured data in its results, such as TV listings and events.

Garrell claims that Ask 11 is 30 percent faster than Ask 10 as well as more accurate in its results. It’s also a bit more cleanly organized, but you’d have to put the old and new version side-by-side to see the difference.

Parsing search results instead of just displaying them in a list is, of course, not unique to this engine, but I do like the focus on displaying answers instead of just links.

See also: Search interfaces of tomorrow you can try today.

Ask new endeavors to display even more answers, instead of just links.

The new Q&A feature mines user-generated "Q&A pairs" from thousands of sites.

Excerpt from:
Ask.com, now with more answers