This morning, Michael Arrington, co-editor of TechCrunch.com, started his blogging day by complaining and mixing up the meaning of “interest into someone’s content” and “friendship” on a post. He claims the need to fake being someone’s friend to better use Twitter. Not to worry, this is very common in online social networking, especially with egocentric personalities.

The website talked about is the popular Twitter (www.twitter.com), which provides a way for people to express themselves about anything, as long as the message fits into 140 characters maximum. You can choose to follow anyone and monitor all of their messages.

So what Arrington complains about happens a lot in social networking sites. It’s when “following” someone or “subscribing” to someone’s list equals for a lot of people the same thing as being “friends” with this person, taking the true meaning of friendship to the bottom level. If it is not reciprocated, frustration and pressure come into place. Read the rest of this entry »

Indian company Infosys is bringing an internet-like experience to brick-and-mortar shopping. The IT and consulting firm launched ShoppingTrip 360, a“360-degree view of the shopping trip,” on July 31st.

Infosys hopes to make retail shopping as smart as internet shopping. Measuring “how” shoppers buy, as opposed to merely “what” they buy.

“ShoppingTrip360 leverages a network of wireless sensor-based applications within the store that allows people (shoppers), places (retailers) and products (CPG companies) to collaborate in real-time by creating an information ecosystem,” explains Girish A Ramachandra, head of innovations practice, retail, CPG and logistics for Infosys. Read the rest of this entry »

ClearForest Gnosis is early example of the possibilities of semantic web searches, hinting at the facility semantic web applications will allow in the future. Gnosis, a plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer (link currently unavailable), does a real-time semantic search of textual key words.

Gnosis effectively puts a powerful search engine right into the text of any web page you visit.  After processing the page, Gnosis offers a series of hyperlinks, each one operating like a sort of minisearch, highlighting people, organizations, medical conditions, companies, currency, city, country, or industry terms, for example. The thematically color-coded hyperlinks link to automatic searches on Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Linked In, Reuters News, Technorati and various financial services. Read the rest of this entry »

Several newly launched initiatives in the U.S. and other countries aim to allow governments to mine our personal data at border crossings. Legislation in the U.S. and Australia would give governments great freedom to search – and in some cases seize – our personal electronic devices.

U.S. Homeland Security can now seize laptops and other electronic devices taken across the border and hold them for an indefinite period, copying hard drives without need of warrants or probable cause. Officials are authorized to deep-scan hard drives to detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and copyright infringers. Read the rest of this entry »

NowPublic.com released Tuesday its second MostPublic index, showing the 50 most influential people in Silicon Valley/San Francisco. “The MostPublic Index is a detailed (and transparent) barometer of who’s [sic] voices are most heard in the digital landscape as new channels—Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and the like—transform how media is created and spread.”

The Vancouver-based participatory news network rated the individuals based on four measures: online visability; presence on user-generated content and social networking sites; interactivity and accessibility; and what they call The “R” factor, presence on microblogging platforms like Flickr, Twitter, and Tumblr. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent study reveals that one-fifth of U.S. TV viewers watch television online. This number represents a significant increase in the amount of online viewers since the fall of 2007.

Tuesday, Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI) released a report on “Online Viewership” affirming that 58.4 percent of online viewers are between the ages of 25-44, compared to only 19.1% of 13-24 year olds. The largest segment of online watchers is affluent, well-educated, 25-44 year old working professional Caucasian females Read the rest of this entry »

The future of cloud computing currently abounds in hypotheticals, but we’re coming closer to a concretized reality, as HP, Intel, and Yahoo, along with members of government and academia, are joining forces to create a multi-continent cloud-computing research center. The Cloud Computing Test Bed will operate six data centers on three continents.

“The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing,” says HP’s press release. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft Tuesday unveiled a prototype computer, Sphere, at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2008 in Redmond, Washington.

Sphere is composed of a large spherical screen atop an infrared projector. The projector projects images onto the screen, while at the same time allowing multi-touch manipulation of the images, so that it can be used by several users at once. Sphere uses a special algorithm to show images without distortion, as they would look on a flat screen. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Atelier.fr reported that AOL’s AIM has released a plug-in that allows users to transfer money to friends over the popular instant-messaging service, using the peer-to-peer payment service, Revolution MoneyExchange.

“Millions of people separated by time and distance increasingly rely on AIM to communicate with friends and family,” said Jason Hogg, President and CEO of Revolution Money. “We’re proud to team up with AOL to give AIM users the benefits of the MoneyExchange integrated online payment service.” Read the rest of this entry »

Launched today, www.cuil.com, the stealth search engine was co-founded in 2005 by two former Google engineers (Anna Patterson and Russel Power) and a former IBM top manager (Tom Costello). To compete with rivals Google [GOOG] or Powerset, the Menlo Park, Calif., based startup, has raised $33M in funding in the past two years.

While suffering from the launch-day blues, Cuil.com (pronounced “cool”) is impressive, a search engine that casts a wide net. Read the rest of this entry »