walled garden
Google Pushes Play Front And Center: Is Selling Content Now King?
techcrunch.com
Google is marching steadily towards Larry Page’s reported goal of a “single, unified, ‘beautiful’ product, across everything.” It started last year, as redesigns came to all of Google’s big products, Search, Maps, Translate, Reader, Gmail, YouTube, etc, etc. A black navbar appeared, which Google later announced it was removing, only...
Is Facebook 2012 The Same As AOL 2001?
www.readwriteweb.com
News that the use of Facebook’s reader apps was in a steady freefall got me thinking about AOL. Or, more specifically, America Online, as the company was known back in the dot-com bubble, before it took on the AOL moniker as part of one of many image overhauls. There was a time when...
Do users really care whether the web is open or not?
gigaom.com
As Facebook draws close to the billion-user mark and a $100-billion market valuation, the giant social network’s dominance has reignited old fears about the decline and fall of the open web. John Battelle argues that we need a manifesto for the truly open internet in order to rally the...
Spotify’s new Play button brings millions of tracks beyond Facebook to the open web
venturebeat.com
Spotify continues to push the boundaries of streaming music. This morning it released the “Play” button, a widget that lets people embed songs from Spotify on any website. You need at least a free Spotify account to listen, which will no doubt help to grow the company’s user base. For...
The Ground Beneath Apple’s Walled Garden
techcrunch.com
Apple’s blanket rejection of apps accessing UDIDs is just the latest in a long line of erratic behavior on Apple’s part of enforcing the rules of the iOS App Store. Sure, Apple warned developers that they were deprecating UDID, but like many of Apple’s Solomonic pronouncements about the iOS App...
Apple Invites Kaspersky Lab to Consult on OS X Security Issues
www.macrumors.com
Computing.co.uk reports on comments from the Chief Technology Officer of Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab, who claims that his firm has been invited by Apple to probe security issues on OS X and to assess the platform's vulnerabilities.Speaking exclusively to Computing, Kaspersky CTO Nikolai Grebennikov said his firm had recently...
Instagram opens up its walled garden, allows photo sharing from rival HIpstamatic
venturebeat.com
With all eyes on Instagram’s long-awaited Android app, the hot photo sharing app today announced a surprising partnership with rival Hipstamatic, opening up photo sharing in Instagram from Hipstamatic’s 4 million users. “When we launched, it was all about Facebook and Flickr and Twitter, and now we’re seeing a...
HackStore is like Cydia for Mac OS X, replaces walled garden with open dacha
www.engadget.com
Despite its loud anti-piracy notice, Andrey Fedotov's HackStore sees no issue in ripping off the official App Store's interface. Nevertheless, its aim is to gather up legit and readily available apps that didn't make it past Apple's trellis for whatever reason, and hopefully with Fedotov keeping an eye out...
An Answer To Apple: Inkling Creates First Industrial Publishing Platform For Interactive eBooks
techcrunch.com
About a month ago, Apple held an education-focused event in which it announced the launch of iBooks 2, a move the company said it was making in an effort to “reinvent the textbook” by allowing users to purchase and download textbooks to their iPads. The new app enables the transformation...
Sergey Brin: Facebook And Apple Pose Serious Threats To Internet Freedom (GOOG, FB, AAPL)
www.businessinsider.com
Google cofounder Sergey Brin is concerned about the future of the Web, reports The Guardian. "I am more worried than I have been in the past ... it's scary," he said. Brin called out "walled-garden" restrictions, such as those implemented by Facebook and Apple, as serious threats to Internet freedom....
Sparrow mail app for iOS hits version 1.1, Push support to follow 'with or without Apple'
www.engadget.com
Good news today for Sparrow iOS users. As expected, the company has updated its splendid lil' email app to version 1.1 and loaded it with a few hotly anticipated features. Among some bug fixes, you can now make use of a built-in browser, "Send and Archive" messages, filter specific...
Twitter follows Facebook down the walled garden path
www.theverge.com
Twitter set off alarm bells across the web in recent weeks when it ended its partnership with LinkedIn and reiterated its warning that it would be cracking down on the terms of its API. The company didn't offer any explanation for why it removed tweets from LinkedIn, but speaking...
Scoop: Microsoft bets on WebRTC for Skype’s browser future
gigaom.com
Skype is taking first steps towards a browser-based future, and it is doing so by embracing a key technology open sourced by Google last year: New job postings on Microsoft’s website suggest that WebRTC will be at the core of Skype’s next generation messaging architecture. This is a big step...
DragonPlay secures $14 million to expand mobile gaming portfolio
thenextweb.com
DragonPlay has locked in a massive $14 million series A funding round from Accel Partners, a venture firm that was a very early investor in Facebook. Born in 2010, DragonPlay is a young company, but one that has made its mark on the mobile gaming space. It’s very popular Live Holdem Poker...
Facebook app store launches
www.guardian.co.uk
Social network offers its millions of users a range of games and programs that can be used on web and mobileFacebook has launched an app store, similar to that for the Apple iPhone, in a bid to turn the social network into a key entertainment platform online.The network announced its...
iKamasutra: A Tale Of Sex, Love, And Apple App Store Rejection
techcrunch.com
I’ve seen plenty of apps get yanked from Apple’s App Store in my day, but the news of an app called iKamasutra getting that same treatment really has me scratching my head. I won’t rehash the entire story, but here’s the gist of what happened: Apple pulled the iKamasutra from...
Sergey Brin says secondary reporting 'distorted' internet threat comments
www.theverge.com
Sergey Brin has taken to Google+ today to distance himself from reports earlier this week that he believes internet walled gardens are on a par with governmental censorship. Brin explains that his words have been misconstrued by secondary reporting, and that in an interview with British newspaper The Guardian...
Twitter just threw a lifeline to the content industry
gigaom.com
Twitter just achieved a holy trinity of snackable multimedia: you could already view Instagram pictures and YouTube videos within tweets, but now you can also listen to SoundCloud sounds without ever leaving Twitter.com. If it sounds a little Facebook-ey, it should — this, along with the other parts of the...
How the e-book landscape is becoming a walled garden
gigaom.com
Just as a few massive chain stores eventually came to dominate the traditional printed book market in North America, the e-book marketplace is a kind of oligopoly involving a few major players — primarily Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble. And while bookstore owners of all kinds are free...
Is Fragmentation Making Android Devs Jump Ship?
gizmodo.com
Android proponents frequently argue that the open-source ecosystem with tons of devices has far more potential than Apple's two device walled-garden. Think of the possibilities! Well, a new study indicates that all that potential is scaring many would-be developers away because they don't know which version of Android to...
Instagram will let users import Hipstamatic photos in new partnership
www.theverge.com
Popular photo-sharing platform Instagram already allows users to export its photos to other networks, but inside the app has mostly been a walled garden — until now. Today, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick told Fast Company that the two companies would be announcing a partnership,...
Nintendo granted patent for emulating handheld consoles and software
www.engadget.com
Any geek worth his / her salt knows that techdom's territory-spanning intellectual property spats are far from over, so we don't begrudge heavyweights like Nintendo for endeavoring to bulk up their litigious arsenal. Filed back in October of 2003 and just recently granted by the USPTO, is patent number...
Marco Arment talks about finally bringing Instapaper to Android
www.theverge.com
Marco Arment has long been typecast as a one of the most ardent Apple fanboys, someone quick to point out every flaw in the Android operating system, while keeping his beloved Instapaper app safe and sound inside the iPhone's walled garden. With the release of Instapaper for Android today,...
Can Facebook Really Bring About A More Peer-to-Peer, Bottom-Up World?
www.techdirt.com
Mark Zuckerberg's letter to shareholders included in Facebook's IPO filing contains a pretty bold vision for Facebook to not just connect people and enable them to share, but to fundamentally restructure the way that the world works: By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people...
Microsoft commits to WebRTC - just not Google's version
gigaom.com
Microsoft officially announced its own proposal for plugin-free real-time communication Monday. “Customizable, Ubiquitous Real Time Communication over the Web,” or short CU-RTC-Web, is Microsoft’s contribution to the W3C WebRTC working group, which is working on a common API for voice and video chat between browsers. Microsoft’s commitment to this kind...
Apple’s New Fraud Problem: Cracked Walls and Broken Promises
www.wired.com
Apple’s announcement of a dividend and stock buyback was a welcomed boon to already well rewarded shareholders. Yet to be addressed, however, is a critical issue that affects even more vital stakeholders — its customers and developers. The rising chorus of complaints about fraud perpetrated through the App Store...
Two Big Reasons Why Instagram+Hipstamatic=Match Made In Heaven
techcrunch.com
Today Fast Company has a story on how two of the hottest photo apps for iOS, Hipstamatic and Instagram, are going to announce a partnership that will see Hipstamatic become the first third party to port photos to Instagram’s own photo-sharing social network. The deal, exclusive for now, represents a...
Apple's Next Privacy Scandal: Apps That Steal Your Photos
www.readwriteweb.com
It's only been a few weeks since the last major iOS privacy scandal. In case you were getting bored, a new, somewhat related controversy just started brewing thanks to reporting by Nick Bilton at The New York Times. This one comes three weeks after Path apologized for a privacy loophole...
The Free Universal Construction Kit uses 3D printing to break out of Lego's walled garden
www.theverge.com
Toy construction sets like Legos and Krinkles can provide an incredible creative outlet for individuals of all ages, but with their own connector types and configurations, most of the systems are designed to work best within their own ecosystems. Coming to the rescue is the Free Universal Construction Kit,...
Dell tests open-source laptop for developers
gigaom.com
Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth What is it that web developers want? That’s what Dell is trying to find out with its just-launched Project Sputnik, an “experimental” laptop bundled with Ubuntu Linux plus utilities, and with an easy on-ramp to github repositories coming soon. Sputnik looks like Dell’s attempt to wrest...
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