The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘white’

We just came across Packrati.us, a simple bookmarking service that allows you to essentially sync your Twitter feed with your Delicious bookmarks. Once you sign up with you Twitter and Delicious accounts, Packrati will follow your Twitter feed, and whenever one of your tweets contains URLs, the site will add them to your Delicious.com bookmarks.

You can also bookmark URLs in @replies to you. In your Delicious account, the service will include any hashtags you include as tags for your bookmark and include the full text of the tweet in the bookmark comments. Here’s an example of the White House Twitter account’s tweeted URLs in Delicious, using Packrati’s tool.

Last summer, Delicious launched a deeper integration with Twitter, to allow you to also tweet your bookmarked links out. Packrati’s ability to add the URLs your Tweet out to your Delicious bookmarks is so simple, yet serves as an incredibly useful tool to store and organize the links you send out. Of course, you may not want to bookmark all of the URLs you Tweet out, so the site could make your Delicious account a bit noisy.

The U.S. needs to be more welcoming of startup founders, no matter where they were born. But the illegal immigration debate is so politically sensitive that startup founders, who create tons of jobs, get lumped in with migrant farm workers and the discussion sort of comes to a crashing halt there. Now is the time for us to rally, though, and avoid this type of situation. There is real momentum behind the Startup Visa Act, and there’s a realistic chance that, for once, our government can do something to actually help the innovation ecosystem in Silicon Valley.

On Thursday 20 or so Silicon Valley entrepreneurs will travel to Washington D.C. to talk with government officials about the Act, introduced last week by Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN), and drum up more support. Venture capitalist Dave McClure is organizing the trip.

The Startup Visa Act of 2010 would create a two year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who are able to raise a minimum of $250,000, with $100,000 coming from a qualified U.S. angel or venture investor. After two years, if the immigrant entrepreneur is able to create five or more jobs (not including their children or spouse), attract an additional $1 million in investment, or produce $1 million in revenues, he or she will become a legal resident.

What can you do to help? Tweet @2gov supporting #StartupVisa exactly at 10 AM Pacific on Wednesday March 3rd (tomorrow). Your messages will be collected and delivered during the group’s visit to the White House on Thursday. They’re hoping to get 5,000 tweets. I’m pretty sure we can do better than that.

Back in October, Yahoo revealed that Yahoo Answers sees 30 million questions and answers per month, with users contributing 2.4 questions and answers per second. Although Yahoo Answers sees a significant amount of traffic, its design and layout has been outdated. Now Yahoo is rolling out a much-need upgrade and redesign to Answers, which will be implemented over the next few days.

Navigation: The homepage’s navigation bar has four new tabs: Home, Browse Categories, My Activity, and About. Each of the tabs stays on every page you visit in Yahoo Answers. “Home” brings you to the homepage which includes a rotating Best of Answers feature, the link to the Answers Blog and more. “My activity” lets you access your Answers profile, and view your activity on the site. “About” features the Community Guidelines, answers leaderboard, Suggestion Board, and links to the Answers blog.

Browse Categories: Yahoo has redesigned the feature to browse answers by categories. On the previous version of the Answers homepage, all of the categories were displayed on the left hand column, which Yahoo says took up prime landscape on the homepage. Now, Categories is featured in a navigation tab within a hide-away menu. So you can always see the categories on any page via the drop down feature of the “Browse Categories” tab. And you can also lick on the tab j to be taken to the “All Categories” page. From this page, you can access all the questions that are open, resolved or in voting on the site.

Aesthetics: Yahoo has slightly changed the background color of the Answers page; toning down the green and replacing the white background with a light blue palate. Even the smiley icons have received a facelift. With the removal of the categories section, the homepage is a bit more cluttered and roomier. Yahoo says that the backend of the site has been fixed to eliminate a few bugs. Answer category leaderboards will now be updated on a daily basis instead of weekly.

While Yahoo Answers is still one of the leaders in the Q&A space, the site is now facing competition from startups who are innovating in the space, including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s Hunch.

Silicon Valley and the State Department are getting along quite well under the Obama Administration. Last year, a tech delegation traveled with the State Department to Iraq and Mexico City to see how technology can help aid the countries. As a result of those trips, the Iraqi government set up a YouTube channel and digitized the contents of its looted national museum, while Mexico set up an SMS hotline for reporting crimes anonymously. In January, Sec. Hillary Clinton held a dinner in Washington D.C. for tech innovators and luminaries to discuss how to harness the power of technology tools to promote diplomacy around the globe, what Secretary Clinton calls “21st Century Statecraft.”

Today, a group of leaders in the tech sector is joining the State Department on a trip to Russia to discuss how communications technologies and social media can be used to strengthen and broaden the ties between the United States and Russia. The State Department has recruited some big names to join the trip, including actor and social media lover Ashton Kutcher, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Twitter co-founder and Square founder Jack Dorsey, and Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior. We hear one of Kutcher’s responsibilities will be to Tweet about the trip. Topics which will be explored include how to foster entrepreneurship and how to use the Web to combat child trafficking and corruption, and use it to improve training, distance learning for remote populations, e-government initiatives, and cultural exchanges.

The delegation is led by Jared Cohen, a State Department policy staffer, Howard Solomon of the National Security Council and White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra. The full list of tech leaders on the trip include John Donahoe, Jack Dorsey, Padmasree Warrior, Shervin Pishevar, executive chairman and founder of Social Gaming Network; Jason Liebman, CEO and cofounder of Howcast; Esther Dyson, prolific investor and leader; Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation; and Ellis Rubinstein, president and CEO of New York Academy of Sciences.

Kutcher, along with his actress wife, Demi Moore, are the founders of the Demi and Ashton Foundation, which works on anti-trafficking issues. Kutcher also founded his own tech company, Katalyst Media, and has been active in promoting and furthering social media initiatives.

“They are taking off their commercial hat, putting on their expert hats and becoming part-time diplomats,” Cohen tells TechCrunch. “The State Department is a connector here. Statecraft is as much about building connections as doing negotiations.”

The delegation is tentatively scheduled to meet with the Russian Ministers of Communications, Health and Education; with advisors to President Medvedev; with leaders of Russian technology and telecommunications companies; with cultural and educational leaders; and with civil society organizations concerned with health, child welfare anti-trafficking, and anti-corruption efforts.

Review: Withings WiFi Scale Warner Bros. looking to reboot Superman movie franchise.

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Daily Crunch: Drive On, Sailor Edition

What we have here is a machine that automatically turns office paper into toilet paper. It’s called White Goat (seriously) and is made by a Japanese company called Oriental [JP].

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Videos: Machine turns office paper into toilet paper

There’s no doubt that President Obama’s White House has been using technology more than any other previous administration. The President has a Twitter account, is using YouTube in innovative ways and has even developed an iPhone app. The White House is releasing some impressive engagement numbers from this week’s State of the Union address.

The White House had a live stream of the speech that was embeddable on blogs or websites. Nearly 1.3 million people tuned into the WhiteHouse.gov’s live video feed of the speech, which is a ten-fold increase in traffic over the most popular live-streamed event. Unfortunately, the White House doesn’t have any concrete statistics on the number of unique streams of the speech from the new iPhone App, but says that nearly a terabyte of data was served to iPhones with the application during the event.

After the speech, over 50,000 people engaged in a live chat on Facebook. It was just the latest in our Open for Questions series where you can ask questions directly to the officials who work here at the White House. And the President will be holding a live video event next week on CitizenTube to answer questions that people submitted following this week’s address. So far, over 40,000 people have submitted 472,000 votes and 9,926 questions.

On the TV side of things, the President’s speech drew 48 million viewers. Of course, the live stream of the President’s inauguration drew a much greater audience, with 3.8 million viewers on the Ustream live feed. MSNBC reported over 18 million streams and CNN delivered over 25 million streams for the inauguration.

I’m just going to take it.

That’s right, Comcast. This is me, waving my white flag. I’m not going to complain to you any more. Why did I even try in the first place? It’s like trying to erode Mount Rainier with licks. So from here on out, I’m just going to take it. All the outages, all the fees, all 20 levels of customer service. Who was I kidding, anyway?

The White House has announced on its blog that they have released an official iPhone / iPod Touch application dubbed ‘The White House’ app (here’s the iTunes link).

The application comes packed with content, including the latest news items, videos, photos and blog posts from The White House. One feature that stands out is live video streaming, which enables iPhone and iPod Touch owners to watch the President’s public events at the White House as well as other events like key speeches and press briefings in real-time.

Next week, U.S. President Barack Obama will address the nation, and his State Of The Union speech will be broadcast live both from the White House website right here and from the iPhone application.

One thing: check the name of the app to make sure you download the official one when you search from your phone. Hint: it’s the one you don’t have to pay for.

In the coming weeks, the White House says it will also launch a mobile website at mobile.WhiteHouse.gov, which will be optimized for any internet-enabled mobile device.

Screenshots of the iPhone app:

The news this past week that Google would cease the censorship of its search results in China, and could well be forced to entirely halt operations in the country as a result, is quite simply one of the most interesting stories to come along in the tech sphere in a long time. The reality is that it’s not just a tech story; it spills into the world of international politics and beyond. And it could have wide-reaching ramifications far into the future. Did I mention there was hacking involved and potential espionage?

There are just so many angles to this story, and nearly everyone seems to have an opinion. Two of those we covered earlier in the week included Sarah’s take that Google’s actions were more about business (or a lack thereof) for the company in China. Paul, meanwhile, was quick to dampen the cheers from Silicon Valley that Google was doing the right thing, arguing they’re four years too late for this new stance to have any moral weight. Mike followed this up with a comment on the post, “The problem with un-censoring now is that it further reinforces that the decision was the wrong one from the beginning, and that they knew full well it was wrong even when they made it.” All of that rings true. But I disagree.

My position is a simple one that is twofold: it’s never too late to do the right thing. And it’s never wrong to do the right thing.

The people hooting and hollering immediately following Google’s post on the matter may have been being a bit naive about some of the causes behind this move, but that doesn’t make their immediate reaction that this is great news, any less true. Should Google have made concessions to China four years ago, veering off from their “don’t be evil” philosophy? No. But that’s easy to say when you’re not trying to run a company that grew from a project in a garage to a multi-billion dollar business with users all over the world and public shareholders looking at the bottom line.

Many accounts have Google’s initial China decision boiling down to CEO Eric Schmidt convincing co-founder Sergey Brin that it was the right thing to do for the business. Further, there was apparently talk that with a foothold in China, Google would be in a better position to change things from the outside in. That argument, along with point 8 in Google’s “Ten Things Philosophy” (The need for information crosses all borders), may have convinced him to cede points one (Focus on the user and all else will follow.), four (Democracy on the web works.), and six (You can make money without doing evil.) Without making the filtering concessions, Google simply would have never have been allowed to operate in China.

Obviously, the outside in approach to changing things didn’t work as well as Google may have hoped, but it may not have been a total disaster either. After all, while Google may not have had a strong foothold in the Chinese search market from an overall perspective, indications are that they did have a very solid hold of the better educated, young elite class in China. Those are the same users that are likely to one day be running some of the most powerful technology companies in the country. And they’re apparently not happy about the prospect of losing the ability to use Google. Are they going to overthrown the Communist government? Not likely. But they could add significant pressure in the push to open things up more.

The sad fact of the matter is that while Google may have wrongly bent to China, so too have many companies in the past. And those companies are still doing it. And many more will in the future. Google no longer is, and assuming they stick to their word, no longer will. Again, no matter the reason, and no matter the timing, that means something.

And it especially means something coming from a company as big and as powerful as Google. Rival Yahoo has already come out in support of Google’s new stance, and that’s despite their substantial ownership in the large Chinese Internet company Alibaba (which criticized Yahoo’s praise of Google). And so has no less than the White House. It’d be nice to see Microsoft come out in support as well (especially since their software is apparently to blame for the hacking), but they’re not doing that. But thanks to Google’s new stance on the matter, they’ll be criticized for it more than they would have been in the past. Google’s position may not hold the moral high ground, but it is shaking things up, and that matters more.

Also, I don’t care who you are or what your current market share is, it takes balls to walk away from China’s 1.3 billion potential customers and fast-moving economy.

With technology, and the Internet in particular, becoming more integral in all of our daily lives, this entire situation could be just a sliver of what’s to come. One blog post from one Internet company has ignited a debate that’s really one we should have never stopped having. And it’s now being played out in a type of information warfare ranging from China all the way to the White House (think it’s any coincidence that China restored text messaging service in Xinjiang today after some six months of blackouts).

Google did the right thing. And as long as they keep doing the right thing, the “why” will continue to matter less. And hopefully it will send the more important message to other companies: it’s never too late to do the right thing.

[photo: flickr/pamhule]