Personalized iPad magazine application Zite has confirmed that it has been acquired by CNN. The sales price is rumored to be in the $20 to $25 million range. Zite will not be branded exclusively to CNN and will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the news network.
It is an interesting play by CNN. Zite is a powerful news reading iPad app with a lot of excellent functionality. It operates almost like a "Pandora for news" that gives users serendipitous resources based on inputted interest and usage. Yet, outside of being a cool iPad app, Zite is driven by some interesting technology that could be of great use to CNN.
iTunes Match, the cloud music syncing feature that will be launched with iOS 5 this Fall, is now available to developers. Earlier reports that it would enable streaming of songs turned out to be false, but Match is a significant update to the way iTunes works nonetheless.
Beginning this Fall, users will be able to sync their iTunes-purchased music across devices automatically thanks to iCloud, a larger initiative that does the same for contacts, calendars, documents and apps. Music fans who want to take this syncing to the next level and include content they acquired beyond iTunes can pay $24.99 per year for iTunes Match. This includes independently produced music that isn't available among the iTunes Store's 18 million songs.
There's an increasing focus on bridging the gap between desktops and mobile devices. Companies like LogMeIn, VMware and plenty more besides are offering technologies to access your desktop from a mobile device. The question is, do you want to?
We talked about it internally and decided to pose the question to you. You answered, and we culled the responses from Facebook and Twitter, then pulled together your responses using Storify.
I recently received an email from the guys at MixApp. MixApp was the first collective listening web app. It was founded at the beginning of 2010 by a group of friends who wanted to build the product for themselves, like Foursquare's story. Now, they are closing shop:
"Dear all,"At long last the MixApp adventure is coming to an end. We'll discontinue the service the evening of August 27, and hope that everyone will take this coming week as an opportunity to say their good-byes."
Jason Lackey runs the @CiscoSecurity Twitter feed and managed to get an interview with @SparkyBlaze, or else someone who has access to his/her Twitter account, for his latest blog post here. Sparky used to be a member of the hacking group Anonymous, who has been responsible for break ins to a variety of sites, most recently run by the Syrian government and the BART transit agency.
Data marketplace and platform Infochimps launched a set of big new features this morning: a common geodata schema that aggregates information about places from multiple sources and offers it up in one API, an automated method of visualizing crowded geodata sets on a map called The Summarizer and a new method of allowing location data to be requested without knowing the latitude and longitude of a place.
If you look around where you find yourself in the world, physically, and are aware that there's really more to life than the naked human eye can see - the new Infochimps GeoAPI could be an important tool in shedding light on the quantifiable parts of reality previously hidden in a disconnected cloud of data.
Engineers at Twitter are busy plugging away at the microblogging service's latest outage, which appears to be preventing many users from seeing replies and mentions from others.
Twitter's support team confirmed the issue at 11:42am EST, but have not updated since, leaving many users frustrated and unsure of why they can't see replies. Among the flustered is American actress Felicia Day, whose tweet about the outage garnered a number of replies that she, ironically enough, cannot see.
In a blog post published today, Mozilla user experience designer Ian Barlow previewed the user interface their Mobile Team is in the process of building for a tablet version of Firefox.
Firefox for tablets, which does not yet have a release date, will be optimized to run on Honeycomb Android tablets. The browser will include features from the desktop version of Firefox such as tabs, themes and the Awesomebar, an adaptation of a feature launched with Firefox 3 that enables quick access to bookmarks and browsing history. Items synced from the desktop can also be accessed there.
Mobile app development framework PhoneGap announced today that it is releasing a plugin that will allow developers to easily connect their apps to Facebook. PhoneGap is bypassing the normal Facebook software developer kit and using Facebook's Javascript SDK to connect apps to the social giant.
Nitobi, which created PhoneGap, said that the normal channel for Facebook Connect that uses OAuth 2.0 created challenges for developers because it did not transfer well to mobile. Hence, PhoneGap is working around the Facebook SDK with its JavaScript framework.
This week SplashData will announce the launch of SplashID Enterprise 2.0, featuring updated Windows and Mac OS clients, new mobile apps and a Web-based application for better ID management. They have also integrated the service into Microsoft's Active Directory and now offer a free 30-day trial for unlimited users, and $5 per user per month afterwards.
They are the latest in a long line of password management tools that bridge the gap between traditional packaged software and cloud apps that are designed to be deployed across the enterprise.
Flickr will announce a new feature this morning called Geofences, forward- and backward-looking place-specific privacy settings for the location data of the geotagged photos you upload. The feature is live right now and is really well implemented - this is something that every social network ought to enable.
Geofencing is a term typically used to refer to the drawing of a line on a map where some kind of pre-determined action is triggered, it's most established in the business of transporting goods in trucks and triggering tracking actions when those trucks enter into certain geographic zones. Flickr's new privacy geofences are something everyone is likely to enjoy using though. I, for example, have already set up a geofence around my house prohibiting anyone but my approved contacts from seeing the photos I upload from home. Thanks, Flickr! Update: Turns out I got that wrong, the photos are subject to my previous privacy setting - it's just the location of my house that's now more private due to the geofence. That's cool too!
If you've ever felt underwhelmed by the Web browsing experience on the iPhone, perhaps MoboTap can help. The company just launched an iOS version of its Dolphin Browser, a third party mobile Web browser popular among Android users.
In addition to touting a very Chrome-esque tabbed browsing interface, Dolphin has re-imagined the way that sites and pages are called up and explored within a mobile browser. Its "Speed Dial" feature allows you to designate a page as a favorite, much like you can do with your phone's contacts. This is in addition to standard bookmarks, which Dolphin also has.
Facebook changed its privacy policy and sharing options last week to make it easier for users to customize how they share their information. It is a process that has been in the works for most of 201, after Facebook proposed a simpler format for its privacy policy in February. Now, Facebook is looking for comments to its changes.
The Facebook Site Governance page outlines all the major privacy changes that the site has made. It is requesting comment by this Friday, Sept. 2 at 5:00 p.m. PDT. What do you think of Facebook's new sharing options? Do you have concerns or issues that you would like to share with the company?
At this week's VMworld conference in Las Vegas, attendees are gearing up for a series of events and breakthrough announcements beginning Tuesday, some of which are expected to come directly from the mouth of VMware CEO Paul Maritz. This while the big news already hitting the floor is Citrix's move to full and free open source for its recently acquired Cloud.com infrastructure management system.
Somewhere in the middle of all this is Microsoft, which is not accustomed to playing the role of also-ran. Yesterday that company announced a revised licensing model, moving back to a per-processor scheme with unlimited virtual machine instances. It's part of the company's effort to attack VMware by going after its "V" word - de-emphasizing virtualization.
In April, social media startup Kosmix was acquired for $300 million by retailing giant Walmart. Kosmix had built a Semantic Web platform called the Social Genome, which organized social media data. The platform powered 3 products: TweetBeat, a real-time social media filter for live events; Kosmix.com, a topic-based search engine; and RightHealth, a health search portal. The URLs for TweetBeat and Kosmix now re-direct to a new site called @WalmartLabs.
The tagline of @WalmartLabs is "Social + Mobile + Retail" and it's an indicator of where Walmart wants to go with the technology it acquired. Walmart wants to tap into social data - for example from Twitter - and entice mobile phone toting customers to its stores. Walmart also wants to beef up its online operations, traditionally a laggard compared to Amazon.com.
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