Mountain View-based startup Appcelerator has raised $4.1 million in a Series A round led by Storm Ventures. The money will go primarily towards the development of an open source competitor to Adobe AIR, which enables web developers to create applications that look and function more like desktop programs. The first version of Appcelerator’s RIA platform, dubbed Titanium, is being released today for developers on Windows and Mac OS. Appcelerator is also releasing a few demo applications, such as a Twitter client named Tweetanium and a YouTube media player called Playtanium (both shown in the video below). I’ve tested the...
The line between Web and desktop apps is getting fuzzier Tuesday, with the preview release of Appcelerator Titanium, platform designed to turn Web app developers into desktop and mobile phone developers. Appcelerator, which makes an open source Web app framework, is targeting Titanium at Web developers who want to bite off a chunk of the desktop market while still using their HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills. Titanium will be going head-to-head against Adobe AIR, letting developers using Appcelerator's SDK compile installable versions of their apps for PCs and Macs (a Linux version is coming later). Titanium apps are more...
We have ran across other sites that do as Twilert does, scan tweets for keywords and send you email summary updates. You must resigter to use the service and it was founded (according to the about) in 2008 from the UK. What’s the point of Twilert? Although Twilert can track any keyword, it is particularly useful for anyone who wants to keep track of discussions and comments made about a brand, company, product or service. Constantly monitoring Twitter for a specific keyword is time consuming (well nigh-on impossible now) so Twilert provides a service that makes it easy and...
This week we were happy to announce that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported the Apple’s iPhone. So far the development team has managed to get a serial driver, frame buffer driver, serial over USB driver and Interrupts and MMU Clock. Eventually we will be seeing support for sound, accelerometer, baseband support, touchscreen, write support for the NAND and wireless networking. It looks like Taiwan will be the next to get the iPhone 3G. The release date over there is set for December 13th. Chunghwa Telecom is the lucky provider to get the very popular handset and plans to...
Google Desktop's integration with Gmail has always been slow and unreliable: Google Desktop could fetch and index the messages from a Gmail account, but this could take days. The new Gmail gadget for Google Desktop doesn't add your messages to the index, but it's a small version of Gmail's interface that sits in the sidebar. You can read your mail, send replies, star messages, perform searches directly from the gadget.Here are some potential uses for the gadget:* check your inbox from a fast-loading simplified interface* find the email address of a contact: compose a message and use Gmail's auto-complete feature...
As some of you know, last year I worked on the platform behind the What's New page on Windows Live Spaces which provides the similar functionality to the News Feed on Facebook. That was just our first run at the feature and almost immediately after our release there was some great feedback from various corners. The most complete feedback I found online came from Jamie Thomson who wrote about the Spaces home page and gave the following suggestions There's a lot of potential for this activity list given that it could capture any activity people commit using their Live...
RussianiPhone.ru is currently claiming that they have managed to get their mitts on a pre-release of the upcoming iPhone firmware 2.2.1 beta. This update is rumored to hold the long awaited push notification service and synchronization for your notes. There is no real indication as to if this is even real or not. Creating a false picture of the iPhone interface to generate hype and traffic is extremely easy to do these days. It seems a bit early for such a firmware version to leak but who knows. Hopefully the update contains these push notifications as well as a fix...
Although Google already enjoys a lead in search on mobile devices comparable to its dominance on the Web, the unique characteristics of mobile – small screens/keyboards, GPS, and cameras, just to name a few – leave open an opportunity for startups to come to the space with new ideas. One such company is Proximic, who is launching an iPhone app today that is just a sampling of some of the interesting things they have in-store for mobile search. The company utilizes a technology it calls “Pattern Proxmity,” which lets users highlight whole paragraphs of text to perform a search for...
Last night's release of the Google Desktop Gmail Gadget added yet another way for users of the big G's email service to be pinged about their new inbox messages. While constant email awareness isn't necessarily a great thing, as alumnus Keith, author Tim Ferriss, and our site editor have noted, Gmail seems fairly open to third-party apps and clever hacks that can keep you aware of your inbox without annoying sounds or in-your-face pop-ups. We're wondering which tools our readers are actually using, if any, to stay on top of their inboxes in an ambient kind of way. Read on...
If you’re addicted to Facebook, as millions upon millions of people are these days, the odds are pretty good that you don’t want to be detached from your precious Facebook messages each time you step away from your computer. Smartphone users can enjoy a mobile app on several different platforms such as BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile, but what about the rest of the masses? Sure there’s a semi-usable mobile site but it won’t provide you with any type of notifications when it’s not open in your browser… What’s an addict to do? Emoze announced earlier this year that...
As Facebook steps up the press around Facebook Connect this week, much of the discussion in the media trades around the business model for Facebook Connect is focusing on its potential to enhance contextual advertising on Connect-enabled websites. But while supplemental demographic data and social endorsements will inevitably improve website ad performance in the long run, the real business behind Facebook Connect lies in its potential to make Facebook a communication platform for the whole web. If successful, Facebook Connect could increase webmasters’ reliance on Facebook to distribute and deliver messages between their own website users - and their...
A developer posted on a Russian iPhone forum yesterday that upon receiving the latest beta iPhone software, version 2.2.1, he discovered the much-awaited presence of push notification support. Woo hoo! He describes OTA syncing of Apple’s notes and calendar apps and the presence of push notifications to indicate that new notes are available. While you may have read this news around the net this morning and gotten pretty excited, anticipating a day when software such as Instant Messengers and social networking apps might actually be useful on the iPhone, we thought it was important to let you know that...
Image via Wikipedia I can’t stand Facebook. It’s not really anything they did. It’s nothing personal. I just don’t really like going there. It wasn’t as bad before the site redesign, but they managed to do exactly what was necessary to make the interface more annoying and confusing. The redesign does have some redeeming qualities, but mostly it makes my head hurt. My friends over on FriendFeed actually got me interested in using Facebook again. Not that they all love it or anything, but some of them do use it. After adding them as friends, I found I was...
In case you’ve noticed more notifications from Facebook in the past 24 hours, it’s probably not because you’ve suddenly become more popular. It looks like Facebook’s email notification problem is getting worse. Facebook lets members turn email notifications on or off for more than 30 different actions on the site. These include anything from when someone sends you a message inside Facebook, invites you to an event, or adds you as friend to when someone tags you in a photo or sends you a poke. Facebook sent out the email below to anyone who is affected: Unfortunately, the settings...
Most believe that by continuously linking in, you'll decrease bounce rates, increase the average amount of time a visitor spends on your site, and increase traffic. While at the surface this may be true, I believe that linking out is twice as good as linking in and here are my 9 reasons why. Expanding Knowledge - Linking out provides a means for your audience to expand their wealth of knowledge by picking up websites they may not have known about before. This aids in reading content from multiple perspectives. Also, providing links related to whatever niche you are writing about...
