Feeling a bit under the weather? Soon you'll be able to cough into your mobile phone for an instant diagnosis. A research firm called STAR Analytical Servicesis working to develop software that can analyze the sound of a cough and identify it as either associated with a common cold, the flu, or something worse - like pneumonia or another serious respiratory disease. Just as doctors have been doing for years, the software will "listen" to the wetness or dryness of a cough and determine whether all you need is a lozenge or if you need to come in for a doctor's visit instead. SponsorTurn Your Head...Towards Your Mobile PhoneThe American and Australian scientists at STAR have received a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation to develop the cough-analyzing software for developing countries where access to health care is more limited than in first world nations. Despite the poor economic conditions of these under-developed countries, there are a plethora of mobile phones which are being used for everything from early warning systemsto mobile paymentsto health alerts. An mobile app that diagnoses disease would fit right in. The way the diagnostic software works is by comparing the sounds of the mobile user's cough to a database of coughs associated with all the different types of respiratory diseases. There would also be multiple coughs per disease stored in the database to take into account variations by age, gender, weight, and other factors. While to our untrained ears, many coughs sound just alike, a tuned-in doctor - or in this case, a mobile app - can listen to the entire structure of a cough from the initial intake of air to the final 100-150 milliseconds of a cough that contains the distinctive "wet" or "dry" and "productive" or "unproductive" sounds that help to classify the cough's seriousness, explains an article on Discovery News. Even the loudness of a cough is taken into account - healthy people have coughs that are 2% louder than a sick person's. At the moment, the software exists as a computer application but the scientists plan to have it re-written, when complete, as an application for mobile phones. There's no word on when the mobile application will be released, but the scientists will need to collect around 1000 cough samples before the database is ready. If they're able to then design a successful analytical tool for mobile phones, the impacts to people's health would be far-reaching - and not just in developing countries, but everywhere in the world.Discuss

  It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. With that in mind, over the coming weeks ReadWriteWeb will look back on the defining Web trends of the past 10 years. From the dot com boom, to the nuclear winter after, to the passion and enthusiasm of the pre-Web 2.0 innovations (such as RSS and podcasting), to the highs and hype of Web 2.0, tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_internet_trends_of_2000-2009_online_music.php';tweetmeme_source = 'rww';to the current era of the real-time Web, to the near future of the Internet of Things. We'll explore all of this and more.We're starting with online music. No industry, except arguably the newspaper one, has been rocked (pardon the pun) more by the Internet than the music industry. SponsorNapster & Kazaa: Online File SharingThe online music decade started with Napster, a music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning that operated betweenJune 1999 and July 2001. Napster enabled people to freely share MP3 files over the Internet; however it quickly ran into major legal trouble. Napster was the subject of lawsuits in 2000 by touchy metal band Metallica and others. It was eventually shut down by court order, after several major record labels went after the service.After Napster's demise, a P2P application called Kazaabecame the most popular service for music file sharing. But it too eventually succumbed to record industry attacks.Curiously, both Napster and Kazaa were recently reincarnated as law-abiding services. After years of re-launch attempts, Napster was acquired by Best Buy in September 2008and was born again in May 2009. Meanwhile Kazaa turned into a legit music subscription servicein July this year.iTunes / iPod: Digital Music Goes CommercialWhile Napster and Kazaa tried to skirt around the commercial imperatives of music, like paying artists, Apple took on the record industry in an entirely legal way. In January 2001, Apple launched a digital music player for music called iTunes. Then in April 2003, the iTunes Store was launched. It offered the ability to buy songs for 99 cents each, which had a major impact on the music industry. Soon after Napster's demise in 2001, Apple launched what was to become a revolutionary device in the music industry. The iPodwas launched in October 2001 and it became the most popular portable music player since the Sony Walkman in the 1980s. Fast forward to 2009 and iTunes continues to evolve. In January Apple announced that iTunes would go DRM-free. In September 2009 Apple launched version 9 of iTunes, which included a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps and 'iTunes LPs' - a feature that brings liner notes and artwork to digital albums.MySpace: Music &Social NetworkingMySpace was launched in August 2003 and soon became a popular hangout for local bands, especially indie rockers. MySpace provided a way for those bands to promote their music and reach a wide network through social networking.As ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez wrote last month, it was a virtuous circle for MySpace. The bands' presence on MySpace "began to attract a young, hip crowd of users who were interested in following pop culture, and, in particular, the up-and-coming artists they discovered while browsing through the network. Only eight months after its launch, MySpace began to experience exponential growth, as its users created profiles and friended others who would then, in turn, invite more users to join the social network. Thanks to the "network effect," MySpace soon became the place to be online. Everyonewas there."However by 2008, MySpace had ceded the social networking crown to Facebook. In 2009, MySpace is once again trying to reclaim its heritage as a music service. In October MySpace launched"Artist Dashboards" and integrated its music video vault with recent acquisition iLike.Pandora & last.fm: Online Music DiscoveryOnline music services have flourished in the 'web 2.0'era, when the ability to find new music and share it with others via the Web became increasingly sophisticated. Two services in particular stand out. One is Pandora, a free online music discovery service. Pandora was founded in 2000 and continues to grow, despite various legal issuesover the years. As ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois noted earlier this year, Pandora derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes.Last.fmis another online music discovery service. It was founded in 2002 and was sold to CBS in 2007. It continues to innovate in 2009, for example in May this year last.fm announced combo stations, allowing a user to create a station with up to three artists or tags. ConclusionThis post and series was inspired by one of my favorite blogs and podcasts, NPR's All Songs Considered. They're currently looking back at the decade in music and much of the discussionis about how the Internet helped define it. And it's true, when you think of music at the end of 2009 you think of iTunes, Pandora and last.fm - MySpace even. The record industry is still coming to terms with these and other changes.Tell us your online music memories of the past 10 years. What's been your favorite online music product or service during that time?Discuss

  Back in the day, it was assumed that heavy Internet geeks were a bunch of basement-dwelling, trenchcoat-wearing, socially maladjusted introverts.However, a new studyfrom the Pew Internet Project shows that geeks, including IM users and bloggers, are more likely to help neighbors, get out of the house, volunteer, and behave as upstanding members of their IRL communities.SponsorOne of the most interesting findings of the study completely neutralizes the stereotype of the antisocial tech geek. "Mobile phone use, internet use, frequency of use, or participating in social networking services, blogging, photo sharing, or instant messaging, was found to have no relationship with the likelihood of face-to-face contact with neighbors." That is, Internet geeks are as likely to know and speak to their neighbors as are non-geeks. Factors such as age, marital/cohabitation status, and gender have a much greater impact on local social activity, actually.And although the study found that Internet users were less likely to rely on neighbors for help, its finding also tell us that frequent or dedicated Internet users are a mighty friendly and helpful bunch when it comes to giving support to neighbors. Bloggers are almost 80 percent more likely to do small favors for their neighbors than other groups, and they're 84 percent more likely to help a neighbor care for a family member, e.g., offer babysitting help. And while Internet users, including photo-sharing folks and IM fans, are more likely across the board to help and hang out with people in their neighborhood, the study also showed that Internet users are almost 50 less likely to lend neighbors money. Insert a pun about teaching a man to phish here.Folks who use sites such as BuildingBulletinsor NeighborGoodsto connect with people who live near them are also more likely to engage with their community, especially in terms of actively discussing community issues, listening to a neighbor's problems, or helping a neighbor with chores or errands.Bloggers and mobile phone users are also 72 percent more likely to belong to a local group or organization such as a charitable organization, a youth sports league, or a religious group. For example, an average single, white person with no children has a 40 percent chance of belonging to at least one local voluntary group. However, that chance increases to 54 percent if that person users a mobile device and 72 percent if that person is also a blogger and frequent Internet user.Another fascinating set of findings completely negate the stereotypical image of Internet geeks as agoraphobic recluses. Internet and mobile users are far more likely than non-users to hit up coffee shops, parks, and restaurants in their communities. Internet users in general are around 50 percent more likely to find themselves in public places than non-users, and bloggers specifically are 60 percent more likely than non-bloggers to spend time in a public park.The study concludes, "As with other local community activities, the relationship between Internet use and participation in public and semi-public spaces is likely a combination of self-selection and an outcome of internet use... The Internet may also enable visits to public spaces through opportunities to coordinate rendezvous and search for new places to visit."Discuss

  The news from Palo Alto Networksreinforces what we should probably expect will be the norm for the foreseeable future. According to the company's Application Usage and Risk Report, social technologies and collaborative applications are moving deep into the enterprise with Twitter seeing a 250 percent increase in use since Spring of last year. In face of a report like this, it makes sense that Enterprise 2.0 technologies would be a fit for companies. Employees understand how social technologies function. Collaborative applications make sense for getting the work done.SponsorHere are some more results from the Palo Alto study:Sharepoint adoption increased 48 percent compared to last year.Google Docs showed up in 82% of the organizations, compared to 33% a year ago. Bandwidth increased 290 percent since spring of this year.Facebook increased 59 percent when measured by the frequency in which it was detected on corporate networks. Organizations saw big bumps in bandwidth consumption, increasing 294 percent to 6.3 gigabytes per organization.The study comes in the wake of a number of announcements, most notably from Cisco, which seems to have an understanding of the social network dynamics at play in the enterprise. At a press conference on Monday, John Chambers outlined a number of initiatives. Notable were his insights into how collaboration is the best way to quickly invent new products and enter new markets. He said this is especially true with younger workers entering the workforce. Young people are familiar with social networking and increasingly see it is the best way to foster collaboration.Discuss

  We've just found a new application for finding your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, and other friends from around the web on Facebook - all at once and all quite simply.This tool is called FBFriendFinder. It comes from the Dutch web dev shop Open &Sociaal, and it works like a charm by using OAuth, Facebook Connect, and contact export functions to gather enough data to organize a user's social graph. The most interesting part, however, isn't the technology but the business model. You have to read it to believe it.SponsorFirst, FBFriendFinder makes the friend-finding part of the process as user-friendly as possible, eliminating clicks and needless navigation whenever possible:FBFriendFinder has take the much maligned approach of actually requiring users to pay for the service. Users are charged around one American penny per friend found, give or take. The site integrates with PayPal, so the process is quick and painless.After we paid our fee, we were able to scroll through a slideshow of our social graph (albeit with a lot of same-name duplicate accounts) to find and add those friends to our Facebook network. This process was a tiny bit buggy and required some back-and-forth navigation (it seems our friends at The Next Web had the same problem), but overall, the experience was well worth the five bucks it took to find these friends without having to manually hunt them down ourselves or rely on Facebook suggestions.Also, we appreciate the app's acknowledgement of our "crazy lifestyle." And now, we're off to ditch these pajama pants we've been sporting since the weekend and just go bananas. It's our crazy lifestyle calling to us - the crazy lifestyle we never knew we had.A sincere congratulations to the FBFriendFinder dudefor creating a handy and monetizable application.Discuss

  In their demo video, indiceerefers to "accounting's ERP black box," a not so subtle remark about the challenges facing the average business user when trying to draw knowledge from a traditional enterprise technology such as ERP software.indicee is one of a growing number of companies that has developed methods for providing a layer of usability to existing enterprise technologies to draw intelligence. indicee uses the power of the cloud to allow the business user to do their own data mining and subsequent collaboration.SponsorIn the past few week we have written posts about companies offering services that allow for more flexibility in editing spreadsheets and collaborating to draw knowledge.These include companies such as:CubeTree, which has a feature for adding comments to a spreadsheet and other documents.DocVerse, which installs a plug-in so multiple users may make updates to a documents, add comments and sync changes that have been made while a user is offline.Socialtext, which has developed SocialCalc, a spreadsheet application that provides the ability for users to collaborate across a number of spreadsheets.The indicee approach is a bit different. It provides the ability to create mashup environments so users can make reports faster without having to cut and paste information, deal with software they do not really understand or wait in line for an expert to do the heavy lifting. It handles multiple types of data and integrates with the leading ERP applications.Here's indicee's amusing demo showing how the application works:The indicee service uses the computational power of the cloud to quickly provide the information the user needs.Ahh - this is where the true power lies with cloud computing. In this regard, indicee reminds us of how data mining is becoming far more accessible than ever before. We expect this is a trend we will see more of in the coming months as more andmore tasks get handled by business users without the need for IT to do the work.indicee charges on a per user basis. They offer a 30-day free trial. A single sharing license is $69 per month and goes up from there based on storage capacity and the number of users.Discuss

  Last month, we told youabout Google's Flu Trends' expansion to 20 countries around the world. The program monitors mentions of flu symptoms to predict - and hopefulyl help prevent - flu outbreaks.Today, Google has announced a new feature of Maps that will allow users to find flu vaccines near them. In partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the American Lung Associaltion, and Flu.gov, Google Maps is now helping users search for seasonal flu vaccination locations, H1N1 flu shots, or both together.SponsorProject managers Roni Zeiger, M.D., and Jennifer Haroon wroteon the official Google blog, "Especially given slower than expected vaccine production, we think it's important to bring together flu shot information in a coherent manner. We've been working with HHS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and state and local health agencies to gather information on flu vaccine locations across the country, particularly for the H1N1 flu vaccine (both the nasal-spray vaccine and the shot)."Now, Google has gathered information about locations of flu vaccine shots from 20 states in the U.S. Google is also collecting information from chain pharmacies and other vaccine providers in all 50 states. Currently, users can find vaccine shots available from retail chains such as Walgreen's, CVS, Kmart, and WinnDixie.The application gives vaccine location hours, when available, and even lets users know when vaccine supplies have run out at a particular location. All in all, it's a useful tool for quickly and simply finding the nearest place to get a flu shot.For more information on how Flu Trends works, check out this video from Google.org:Discuss

  Google just released a new open source programming language called Go. Go is intended to offer built-in support for concurrent processes, make the most of modern hardware and deliver a super-fast coding experience. Google says in its announcement that "Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++." Go was created by a five person team that includes UNIX co-creators Ken Thompson and Rob Pike.It's not for everyone, but we talked to a variety of developers who are looking forward to kicking the tires. Below are opinions before launch from three developers we have a lot of respect for. Two are enthusiastic and one is skeptical. SponsorRob Pike also gave an hour-long talk about Golate last month.Developer ReactionsGitHub Co-Founder Chris WanstrathI'm definitely on the lookout for C-like languages with good C integration andsolid package support (for organization). Hopefully Go provides the former with its "syscall" package (or something similar) - building on existing libraries is a huge boon to young languages, as Scala and Clojure have shown with their Java integration.Organizing big C projects is always a challenge, and borrowing packaging ideas from higher level languages like Python could really help.Can't wait to see the site and play with a few examples.Alex Iskold, founder and CEO of Adaptive BlueGo appears to be procedural language, based on C/C++ syntax, skewed heavily towards C. It has C memory manipulation model with addresses and pointers, which is complicated and not used in Java, PHP, Ruby, etc.There is nothing in this tutorial that attracts my eye, other than built-in parallel processing capability. C historically lacked threading (although current versions have it), but having it built in natively into the language is always great.I am a fan of Java and Object-Orientation, so new procedural languages sound like a thing of the past to me.If this is positioned as alternative to JavaScript, I do not see why this is necessary. Why not take JavaScript and make it better / add richer libraries like JQuery as part of the language. What Google has done with Gears for example, is built stuff using native C/C++ code and wrapped it into JavaScript calls - I think that is a better way to move forward and to make things faster.Larry Price, Computer Systems ConsultantThis is a very clean and powerful language. It's a direct descendant of C with elements of Haskell, OCaml, python and erlang visible as influences. It seems like yet another attempt to make a "better C than C", and from a first shallow glance it seems like a clear winner. Objective-C fans (mac programmers) will probably sniff that it's nothing new, and that clean message passing semantics have been available to programmers for decades, but there are some deep differences; Go is not an object oriented language although you can use it in an objected oriented manner. In many respeccts Go is not a new language, it will seem very familiar to anyone who has used C or C descended languages; and most of the advanced features that it adds to C are implemented in other languages. Go strikes a good balance between legibility, low-level functionality and high-level functional programming features. It will have a strong appeal to programmers who are interested in the type safety and concurrency friendly features of Haskell or erlang, but want to access them in a more familiar C-like syntax.It has a good chance to make type-safe concurrent programming a mainstream choice.What do you think?Discuss

  Finally, it feels like the holy grail of mobile development is at hand. This problem has persisted since Microsoft released its Palm-sized PC operating system to compete with the Palm OS a decade ago: as a mobile developer, the cost of supporting multiple mobile platforms, each with a relatively small user base and massive development learning curve, has been huge. That finally seems to be changing.Sponsor(This guest post was written by Elia Freedman.)In the BeginningWhen handheld computers went mainstream, developers had only one choice: Palm Pilot. Within five years, they had Symbian and Pocket PC (later Windows Mobile) to consider also. By 2009, there were no less than eight major operating systems for smartphones: two versions of Windows Mobile, two versions for Blackberry, iPhone, Android, Symbian, and webOS, not to mention traditional feature phones running various flavors of Java.The ImpactDevelopers were forced to make the tough choice of which operating system to develop for. Making it harder, customers were scattered and were requesting versions of a variety of platforms, with no one platform controlling the market, unlike the desktop world. Until a few months ago, they had only one choice: develop for each platform independently, picking and choosing which to support, each with huge costs and unknown payback.That, however, is changing. Developers now have three ways to develop cross-platform. And while these technologies are still in their early days, they will evolve rapidly.HTML 5 and the Mobile WebOne option is to forgo installed applications altogether and develop mobile Web applications. HTML 5, with its access to local databases, makes this possible. There are two major obstacles to this strategy right now: first, ubiquity of HTML 5-enabled browsers and, second, a willingness among customers to accept it as a standard.While the first will be solved with time and pressure from other OS platforms, the second is a bigger problem. The customer's willingness to accept Web-based applications is a psychological change that takes years to evolve. Device owners have been trained that cell phone connections are inherently unstable. In many places the connection disappears, and until that is resolved this mental adjustment cannot begin to take hold.FlashAdobe recently announcedits push into the mobile space, with Flash-enabled browsers for most platforms and a Flash-to-iPhone-app compiler for Apple's smartphones and handhelds. This would allow developers to write all of their apps in Flash and then deploy on multiple mobile browsers and the iPhone via a compiled application.This still suffers from many of the same disadvantages of HTML 5, because it requires a psychological change in customers to accept running apps in the browser. In addition, Apple's hard-nosed stance against Flash in the browser will impede this movement because it will require two completely separate creation processes.Finally, for Flash to take hold, operating system manufacturers will have to start treating Web-enabled applications the same as non-Web-enabled ones. For example, launching Web apps from the home page must become standard.JavaScript Native AppsA new class of applications has arisen. These are native applications that are compiled for a specific platform but that use Web technologies for the user interface. This has the most potential. The most prominent one currently is PhoneGap. Other solutions include Appceleratorand Rhomobile, which uses the Ruby on Rails Web development language.These technologies, all open sourced, enable developers to write back-end processes in the native code and all of the user interfaces in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This application is then compiled into a native application. It can be uploaded to app stores, distributed via downloading and installed directly to the device.The fundamental problem with mobile development isn't the back end, though. The backbone of all of these platforms is C or Java, which is generally portable if written with that intention. The problem is user interface development, which requires deep knowledge and understanding of each mobile device. Making the UI cross-platform solves the vast majority of problems associated with this kind of development. If you had to point to where the approach falls short, it wouldbe that cross-platform applications don't feel "native," a shortcoming that would be solved by good design and better CSS work!ConclusionAs the smartphone market evolves, we are unlikely to see a clear winner as we did in the PC business; and because of that, developers will be forced to write for multiple platforms. But for the first time in a decade, developers have options for multiple-device development. The cost and learning curve associated with writing native apps for every platform can finally be mitigated.While all of these technologies are early to market, the writing is clearly on the wall. After more than a decade of discussion, the combination of Flash, HTML 5 and JavaScript will make "write once, use everywhere" a reality.Guest author:Elia Freedman is the CEO of Infinity Softworks, the leading provider of software calculators, with over 15 million distributed. In its 13-year history, Infinity Softworks has developed applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows, Palm OS and Windows Mobile. Elia writes about tech, mobile and running a business on his blog, eliainsider.com.Discuss

  Microsoft just releaseda major update to Bing Maps. Bing Maps now offers draggable routes that are computed dynamically, a zoom bar, embeddable maps, smarter command parsing and a redesigned interface. The new version of Bing Maps also loads faster. Microsoft now hosts the service in 7 data centers around the world and the Bing team has brought the size of the default Bing Maps home page down from 678kb to 484kb. Just like Google Maps, Bing Maps now also understands more complex queries like "Bellevue, WA to Space Needle." SponsorDraggable RoutesDraggable routes are nothing new, of course. Google Maps has offered this feature for quite a while. Compared to Google Maps, the Microsoft implementation of this feature is slightly more difficult to use. Google Maps always displays a little button on a route that moves relative to the user's cursor. On Bing Maps, users have to be more precise when it comes to grabbing a point on their route where they want to deviate from the computed route. Still, this is a welcome addition to Bing Maps.EmbedsEmbedding Bing Maps is now as easy as clicking one button and copying and pasting the embed code. The best feature here is the ability to customize these embeds. Users can select different sizes, whether to display a static or draggable map, as well as different map styles (road map vs. satellite imagery). Bing Maps also generates a link to the map that can be shared by email.View Larger MapDriving DirectionsView Bird's Eye As Google continues to enhance its mapping products and now even producesits own map data in the US, Bing Maps and others will have to stay on their toes. This update to Bing Maps mostly brings Microsoft back on par with Google with regards to features. Bing always offered a number of features that Google didn't offer, including high-resolution aerial photos, and a Google Earth-like 3D view with 3D models in the browser. Currently, however, Google is adding more features (like traffic for more roads) and improving its maps at a faster rate than anybody else and it will be interesting to see if Microsoft will be able to keep up with this pace.Discuss

  Blogging and stuff sharing service Posterous.comnow publishes real-time PubSubHubbbubfeeds for every site in its domain, the company announced yesterday in a blog postabout a number of major revisions to the site. That means that real-time savvy content aggregators will receive Posterous content almost instantly after its published, instead of waiting as much as half an hour to poll the site for updates.The company is using the service Superfeedrto outsource its Hub management. Posterous joins WordPress, Blogger and TypePad among the popular publishing platforms to offer real-time feeds.SponsorPosterous combines very easy publishing of original and curated content with an in-network subscription reader. If you're familiar with Tumblr, this is similar. Posterous is much smaller than Tumblr but this Fall introduced a feature to import Tumblr blogsinto its own platform.Superfeedr is a service that consumes content from publishing platforms in a wide variety of ways, including polling if needed, and then offers a republished feed in real-time formats including PubSubHubbub or XMPP. Other services using Superfeedr include Six Apart, Adobe, Twitterfeed, StatusNet and SmackSale.In the Posterous announcement the company tried to explain the value of going real time like this: "this will mean your posts will appear in Google Reader much faster, as they're gradually rolling out PubSubHubbub support." Unfortunately, Google Reader does not yet consume real-time feeds. Aggregators that do to date include Dave Winer's River2, discovery engine LazyFeedand the forthcoming next version of Netvibes.It's probably just a matter of time until Google Reader implements real-time feed consumption, but in the mean-time real-time blog feeds are quickly becoming a substantial portion of the real-time ecosystem. That ecosystem is best known for its high profile constituents Twitter and Facebook but now already includes far more than just those sources. These are very early days in the real-time web but the pace with which publishing platforms have adopted the paradigm demonstrates how easy it is.Publishers making the move to real-time feeds not only offer their users a chance to appear first in front of readers, they also substantially reduce technical infrastructure requirements for publishers burdened by the need to poll periodically to check for updated content.You can find my new curated blog on Posterous here.Discuss

  Amazon just releaseda free e-book readerapplication for Windows PCs. The Kindle for PC application allows Amazon customers to read Kindle books on their Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines. A Mac version will follow soon. The application was clearly designed to work on a wide variety of computers and works especially well on netbooks and touchscreen devices. Besides being capable of working with Amazon's proprietary e-book format, the app can also display e-books in the .mobifile format.SponsorFeatures The application itself is pretty sparse, with just a few buttons for sorting books and switching between downloaded and archived books. Amazon did not integrate the Kindle store into the application, though a prominent link in the app opens up the Kindle store in the browser. This comes as a surprise, given how easy it would be to integrate the store. While reading books, users can adjust the size of the font and bookmark a page. The app can display notes and highlights that were created on a Kindle or in the Kindle for iPhone app. In designing the app, Amazon clearly had touchscreen and netbook users in mind. All the buttons in the app are large and the left and right edges of the application can be clicked - or tapped - to move between pages. To advance a page, users can also use their cursor keys or mouse wheel. Users of the Windows application can not add notes or highlights to a book right now, though the company plansto add the ability to create notes and highlights in the application in the future. Amazon is also considering to add a search feature, as well as the ability zoom and rotate images. Another feature that is currently missing but that netbook users would likely appreciate is a full-screen mode. Kindle EverywhereOverall, the app is easy to use and works as advertised. The lack of a built-in store and the ability to add notes and highlights is a slight disappointment, though. Sony, Barnes & Nobleand othersoffer desktop e-readers for OSX and Windows with more features. Amazon decided to keep the application as simple as possible. For Amazon, this is an important move, as it gives the company access to a wider market. While Amazon has sold millions of Kindles, the PC market is still far bigger and the popularity of netbooks could also give the app a boost. Reading a book on a PC or laptop is not as comfortable as on a hardware e-reader with an e-ink display, but the free desktop application will allow users to sample e-books and get accustomed to the process before buying an e-reader. The desktop application will also give Amazon a presence on all the big platforms - so while other devices may be more open than the Kindle, this argument against the Kindle becomes less potent as Kindle users can now read their books virtually everywhere anyway.Discuss

  A growing debate in Enterprise 2.0 circles focuses on what value new technologies have for people who do back office functions. Questions persist about how Enterprise 2.0 technologies are built into the processes of every day work and what upside they really have.In that regard, it's interesting to note the partnership announced today betweenNetSuiteand InsideViewto bring in real-time information from across the social Web into such departments as accounts payable and human resources. The partnership will bring InsideView's insights from across social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Blog Search into NetSuite's CRM and ERP offerings which will help to create what it calls a'Social ERP' system. SponsorNetSuite is a Software-as-a-Service provider that provides a cloud computing platform to help manage software suites. Its customers are mid-sized companies and divisions of large enterprises. Inside View coins itself as a Sales 2.0 leader, "bringing intelligence gained from social media and traditional editorial sources to the enterprise to increase sales productivity and velocity."NetSuite users will have access to information from a wide variety of traditional information sources and real-time social networks. The structured and unstructured information is aggregated and filtered by InsideView. It flows directly into the application and is filtered for the particular office function such as accounts payable. NetSuite says this is the first time a social component has been built natively into its application.Some of the benefits the two companies see with the integration:Better understanding of customers and partners to assess payment risk and improve collection processesThe ability to better use the buzz about suppliers and brand reputation and level of customer satisfactionIntegrate social profile information to engage job candidates across multiple channels, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter;InsideView for NetSuite was built using NetSuite's SuiteClouddevelopment platform. Additonal NetSuite partners are planning to build their own integrations, which the company says may mean more social components into the NetSuite environment.Currently, NetSuite users may see information that others are collecting by subscribing via an RSS feed. Further integration could be the potential addition of activity streams for sharing intelligence.This is an unfolding trend which we believe will create a more measured look at how Enterprise 2.0 applications fit with back office functions. It also represents another example of how business intelligence applications from companies like IBM will begin to compete in this realm as more efforts continue to meld structured and unstructured information.Discuss

  At yesterday's Blackberry Developer Conference, several companies announced major updates to their applications and services designed for Blackberry smartphones. From Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM) came new geolocation, advertising and push services in addition to other developer tools. Meanwhile, companies like Loopt, eBay, Xobni, and others took the opportunity to show off their latest Blackberry applications as well. SponsorRIM Woos DevelopersWith all the news from the event, one thing was clear: RIM desperately wants developers to build for Blackberry and is now actively enticing them with a slew of new offerings designed to win them over. One of the biggest announcements made yesterday involved the launch of new APIs(application programming interfaces) for third-party developers. The APIs offered include a new advertising service, a payments service, location services, and the general availability of Blackberry's own Push service, which had never before been made available to outside developers. What this means is that developers now have the tools to build applications that rival those already available on many other smartphones today, most notably, the iPhone. In some cases, the Blackberry APIs even offer something the iPhone doesn't such as is the case with the payments service which allows you to pay for apps on your next mobile phone bill. The location services include a geo-location API that will use cell tower triangulation as a backup for when GPS fails, making location-based applications more reliable. There are also services for determining your phone's location on a map and another that helps estimate travel time for driving directions. It's obvious to see how these types of services could help build new and useful mobile applications for the Blackberry. Also revealed was the new Blackberry Advertising Service, an offering designed to help developers generate revenue from their mobile applications. Through partnerships with ad networks, developers can easily integrate mobile advertising within their apps and track the ad's effectiveness with an included analytics package. It's even possible for these ads to access the phone's core features. For example, you'll be able to initiate a phone call from an ad or add a calendar entry from an ad. That's an innovation that many other mobile handhelds are not yet offering. These types of interactions should have a clear appeal to the many business-minded corporate Blackberry users who are often more interested in getting things done than they are with playing mindless games.That being said, the game-playing crowd isn't being ignored either. Also announced was support for OpenGL ES, a graphics API for 3D games. While this doesn't quite put the Blackberry on par with what's available for iPhone, it's a move that's designed to keep Blackberry at least somewhat competitive in the field of mobile gaming. Other announcements included new support for mobile developers looking to build applications with the languages and tools they already know and use. Java developers will get a new GUI builderthat lets them create mobile interfaces using a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor with drag-and-drop capabilities. Adobe developers will be able to usethe company's Flash Platform technology and Adobe Creative Suite tools to build rich, mobile apps as well. This is another area where Apple falls short - Flash still doesn't work on the iPhone. Instead Flash developers have to use special Adobe software to convert appswritten in Flash to a format that's iPhone-compatible. Also, designers can now use Adobe Photoshopand Dreamweaverto build both themes and widgets using the new Blackberry Theme Studio 5.0. Apps, Apps, Apps!In addition to the RIM-specific announcements, a number of companies also used the Developer Conference as the launching pad for new Blackberry applications and related announcements. Ebay, for example, unveiled a brand-new mobile app that lets you search for items, view descriptions and photos, bid, watch items, and more. It will also tap into Blackberry's now open Push services API to deliver real-time alerts as to when you're outbid on an auction. Considering that the company has already generated $400 million this yearusing eBay's iPhone application, this new Blackberry app should be a big hit among mobile users when it launches next month. The popular location-based social networking service called Loopt also revealed a major update for Blackberrywhich includes something the iPhone can't offer due to the nature of the device: it runs in the background to continually update your location in real-time. This is one of the iPhone's biggest flaws according to critics, since so many mobile applications take advantage of always-on connectivity to track your location for the benefit of specific mobile apps. In Loopt's case, the app knows where you are in order to show you nearby friends and local businesses which you can rate. It even offers mobile coupons for the retailers and restaurants in your vicinity. Finally, Xobni, the Outlook email search plugin that discovers social connections in your inbox, revealed their new Blackberry application, too. As with the desktop software, Xobni for Blackberry will let you find contacts in your address book quickly using Xobni Rank technology which returns results ranked based on frequency and freshness of your communication. The application will be made available sometime early next year. The Blackberry Developer Conferencecontinues until Thursday, so stay tuned for even more news over the coming days. Discuss