Monster.com Founder Starts Social Networking Site for the Dead
Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor helped you find a job, and helped ease you into middle age. Now he wants to help you build the last web page you’ll ever need. Tributes.com is scheduled for a soft launch in June. It aims to provide a central location to house online memorials for those who have passed on. It’s starting with $4.3 million in funding, with The Wall Street Journal as a lead investor. Taylor, who retired from Monster.com in 2005, says Monster was intended to take the jobs section of newspaper’s classified ads online. So online obituaries seemed like an inevitable next step.
Source: Marty Graham, Wired News, May 5, 2008
With prices of most systems ranging from $200,000 to $500,000 a room depending on the number of screens, telepresence has widely been considered a niche technology for multinational corporations. But high gas and travel prices, as well as improving video technology, are causing smaller firms to reconsider the high-end systems.
Source: Justin Scheck and Bobby White, The Wall Street Journal, May 6, 2008
Pope goes digital to better connect with youth
Pope Benedict will text message thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day in Sydney in July, hoping going digital will help him connect better with a younger audience. The Pope will text daily messages of inspiration and hope during the six-day Sydney event while digital prayer walls will be erected at event sites and the church will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook.
Source: Reuters, May 7, 2008
FBI rescinds secret order for Internet Archive records
The FBI has backed down on a secret request for information about a user of the Internet Archive digital library, thanks to a legal challenge from two prominent advocacy groups. The case, which was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the archive, dates to last year but only became public on Wednesday. That’s because the type of request involved, known as a national security letter (NSL), is accompanied by a gag order that forbids the recipient from disclosing its existence or discussing it with anyone except his attorneys, who are also gagged. As a result of a settlement, the FBI agreed to withdraw the national security letter and to lift the gag order.
Source: Anne Broache, CNET’s News Blog, May 7, 2008
Building the Zero-Emissions City
Last week, in the harsh desert climate of Abu Dhabi, construction started on a city that will house 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses but use extremely little energy, and what it does use will come from renewable sources. The initial building is a new research institute that the founders hope will be the seed for the equivalent of a Silicon Valley of the Middle East, only one centered not on information technology but on renewable energy.
Source: Kevin Bullis, Technology Review, May 8, 2008
Lie detectors to hunt out benefit cheats
A lie detector test that has slashed benefit fraud by more than £330,000 is being rolled out in the UK. The Voice Risk Analyser (VRA) system will be piloted by another 15 councils following its success in seven areas of the country. The system, developed by Capita Group and DigiLog UK, detects tell-tale stress patterns in the voice of benefit claimants over the phone and tips off officials, who decide on whether to investigate the claimant further.
Source: Nick Heath, silicon.com, May 7, 2008
Paper is passe for tech-savvy South Koreans
Young, tech-savvy South Koreans are making coupon clipping a thing of the past and turning to their mobile phones instead. Some of the fastest-growing mobile phone services in the country let retailers send discount coupons and users send gift certificates for anything from lattes to movie tickets through their handsets. The merchandise vouchers have a barcode embedded in the message. Users show the coupon on the screen and retailers scan the barcode to apply the discount.
Source: Reuters, May 9, 2008
Google to launch Friend Connect for the social Web
Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with “Friend Connect” on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of “APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.” Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.
Source: Dan Farber, CNET’s Outside the Lines Blog, May 10, 2008
Monster.com Founder Starts Social Networking Site for the Dead
Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor helped you find a job, and helped ease you into middle age. Now he wants to help you build the last web page you’ll ever need. Tributes.com is scheduled for a soft launch in June. It aims to provide a central location to [...]
