The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘country’

Every year, we come across dozens of new applications looking to capitalize on March Madness, when millions of basketball fans across the country try to predict the outcome of the heated 65-team NCAA tournament. One new app that’s launching today is called tweetBracket, which gives users an extremely easy way to share their picks with their Twitter followers. The application, while basic, is notable because it’s a preview of the technology being built by a Y Combinator startup called 140bets.

Using tweetBracket is simple. You sign in to Twitter using oAuth, and are presented with a random matchup from today’s games. Click the team you think will win, optionally tweet your choice to your followers, and repeat. The game keeps track of your picks throughout the tournament, and prizes are being awarded to the people with the most correct predictions for each round.

tweetBracket is built off of the platform that 140bets is currently developing, which makes it easy to build apps around a binary interface (the company has also put together a similar app for American Idol fans called Tweet Idol). CEO Jason Wilk says that the platform is still early in development, but that eventually it will be used for more real-time interaction (for example, you might keep it open as you watch a game and predict whether or not a player is going to make the free throw he’s about to take).

Not an easy thing to conceptualize indeed, but according to eMarketer there will be more mobile Internet users in China than the entire population of the US by the end of this year.

For your reference, the 2010 estimate of the size of the United States population stands at roughly 310 million people according to Wikipedia, so that’s a shitload of people browsing the Web from their phones right there.

The report, which you can purchase here, also says the number of mobile Internet users in China will grow fast to reach a staggering 957 million, and that the country will count approximately 1.3 billion mobile subscribers by 2014.

eMarketer points out that those mobile Internet users do not currently monetize as well as smaller mobile audiences in, say, the States, which means that mobile advertising spending levels in China are still low relative to the size of the mobile Web user base. Also, the company highlights another key trend in China, which is that mobile subscriber growth is actually slowing while mobile Internet user growth is accelerating.

More in this blog post (via Twitter).

(Photo credit: Flickr / lime*monkey / CC BY 2.0)

An outstanding e-mail showed up in my inbox a few moments ago promoting the release of Donkey Kong Country 2: Serious Monkey Business . It’s a remix album from OC ReMix, the people who are famous for, you know, remixing video game soundtracks.

The rest is here: 
You probably ought to download Donkey Kong Conutry 2: Serious Monkey Business

Augmented Reality is a pretty hot topic currently, but it seems to me that the Japanese in particular have really embraced the concept of mixing the real world with computer-generated imagery and data. One case in point is the Crimsonfox project [JP], an “Alternative Reality” scavenger hunt game event that took place over the weekend in Tokyo, Japan

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Crimsonfox: Augmented reality-powered scavenger hunt in Tokyo (video)

Look at that pic. Take a real good look

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You’ll never ID this photo (unless you read Reddit)

Last week it was Sony, and today it was Hitachi announcing [JP] a flood of new flat-screen TVs for the Japanese market.

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Hitachi Japan rolls out 11 new plasma and LCD TVs

Up until a moment ago, this was going to be a standard “newsy” post: the FCC will announce its National Broadband Plan on Tuesday, here’s what it’s all about. Then I read the comments of a PC World article discussing that very same plan—many people are outraged that the government would muscle its way into the free market! If Americans wanted fast broadband then the market would provide it on its own terms. That, of course, is complete nonsense: plenty of Americans live in one-ISP towns, and if said ISP provides terrible service, well, though cookies, chico

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Why are people against the FCC’s National Broadband Plan?

A couple weeks ago, we noted the city of Topeka, Kansas’ humorous attempt to get Google’s attention: by rebranding their city “Google, Kansas.” Why would they do such a thing? Because they want in on Google’s fiber action — the search giant’s proposed plan to sell 1 gigabit-per-second broadband to consumers. Now Baltimore, Maryland is getting in on the fun as well.

The city has appointed a “Google Czar” — yes, that’s the actual title — to lobby the company to put Baltimore on the list of cities in the initial trial. Tom Loveland, CEO of a local tech company, Mind Over Machines, has been appointed by Baltimore’s mayor to take this exalted, but volunteer position.

The Baltimore movement has also launched a website, BmoreFiber, which states in huge, bold letters, “Ask Google to Invest Billions in Baltimore’s Future.“

These attempts by cities to catch Google’s attention, while humorous, show a massive desire for better broadband in this country. It’s kind of sad that it takes an outsider, Google, to spur faster broadband development. Meanwhile, companies that offer broadband as a core business, like Comcast, drag their feet with service that is an order of magnitude slower at huge prices.

This is the lede, verbatim, from a story that appeared in The Hill yesterday : “The Internet allowed extremists to contact, recruit, train and equip the suspect responsible for the attempted Flight 253 bombing on Christmas Day ‘within weeks,’ a top Pentagon official told lawmakers Wednesday.” What’s the implication, that because someone used the Internet to plan something, something bad , we should get rid of it? Fine by me, believe me.

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Pentagon partially blames the Internet for that Christmas underpants bomber

While California and New York tend to get the most attention as technology hubs, other states are quietly hosting their own vibrant communities around technology and innovation. Utah is one of these states. Utah is home to tech giants Omniture (which was acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion), Novell, Symantec. And today, Utah is getting its very own startup incubator, BoomStartup, which is a seed capital and mentor-focused investment program for web and software start-ups based in Utah.

Based in Orem, Utah at the Canyon Park Technology Center (the original site of WordPerfect Corporation), BoomStartup is a full-time program that will run from May to August and provides each selected company with seed capital (up to $15,000), mentoring from entrepreneurs and technologists, free office space and resources, and education that takes them through the various steps of getting a tech startup off the ground. For its first rounds, the organization will choose eight startups to participate in the program. Applicants for BoomStartup must have a founding team (two or more individuals) and an idea with a focus on web, mobile, software, and non‐hardware tech. Startups can apply here.

BoomStartup was founded by Utah angel investor John Richards who invested in Omniture. BoomStartup is made up of seven other mentors and investors in the fund. Each investor-mentor has contributed $15,000 in the fund. Investors include Omniture co-founders Josh James and John Pestana, Ralph Yarro, Nobu Mutaguchi, Martin Frey, and Rod Watson.

It’s always great to see investors and former tech executives investing time (and money) in promising startups and ideas. And we are seeing a plethora of innovative startups emerging from a variety of incubators around the country and world, including Y Combinator, TechStars, The Founder Institute, Launchbox Digital and more.

Continued Richards: “This group of investor-mentors has a track record of growing successful businesses and creating innovative technologies. Their expertise and vision will be invaluable to the selected companies, and give them the know how to overcome the obstacles they might confront, whether that be on the business or technological side.”

BoomStartup will host a series of “Meet the Investor-Mentor Days” through the April 12, 2010 deadline; the first will be held Friday, March 12, 2010 at 4 p.m. at the Canyon Park Technology Center, Building J (1401 N. Research Way, Orem, Utah). Investors-Mentors will be on hand to talk with prospective applicants about business, technology and discuss strategies for their businesses.