designShrine

Not only is IKEA infiltrating ICFF , now the furnishings giant will officially launch a collection of furniture for your Sims. When we dabbled in Sims2, our favorite part of the game was designing and furnishing homes for a digital family. The IKEA Home Stuff pack would have been a welcome addition to the available [...]

Amazon Amazon (NASD:AMZN) has sued New York State claiming that a newly passed law governing sales tax for affiliate programs is unconstitutional and that it unfairly singles out a single company (Amazon).
The law was originally proposed by former Governor Eliot Spitzer before he was otherwise distracted. It was signed into law last week by new [...]

Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 [...]

For something so focused on navigation and geography, it’s a bit ironic that location-based social networks have to work their way through such a jungle: carrier partnerships, handset compatibility, creepy privacy concerns, and what-have-you. But one small New York start-up, Socialight, says it’s found a route: developers, developers, developers.

Socialight, which focuses on user-created city maps [...]

Update: Adobe has informed us that while the new Flickr connection isn’t live yet, it will be very soon. We will provide another update when we have confirmed that it is live.
When Adobe launched Photoshop Express at the end of March, it indicated that Flickr support would be next on the agenda, and today the [...]

All gold rushes must come to an end, and according to one new report, Facebook’s developer platform is no exception.

Facebook developer Jesse Farmer, creator of developer analytics service Adonomics, did an extensive amount of number-crunching after coming to an odd observation earlier this year: “Something is wrong in the Facebook developer community,” Farmer wrote in [...]

There was a strange moment this afternoon at the Snap Summit 2.0 in San Francisco. Dave Morin, Facebook’s Senior Platform Manager was fielding some audience questions after spending the better part of an hour giving a very broad overview of Facebook’s development efforts to a room full of mostly developers. For many, the event was [...]

Talk about hot foundation-on-foundation action.

On Tuesday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced it was giving the Wikimedia Foundation–which runs Wikipedia–$3 million.

The money will go toward supporting “Wikimedia’s organizational development and help to increase the quality of its content and the reach of its services.”

Among other things, the announcement said the money would go specifically to [...]

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–MySpace might have gotten a stigma for its advertising and user spam, but the company is hoping to get a fresh start with its developer platform.

Jim Benedetto, vice president of technology for MySpace, discussed the company’s current developer strategy with a group of 250 social application developers, entrepreneurs, and members of the press [...]

The book’s opening line is: “Helen has just registered on Facebook.”

Sentence two, if it gets enough votes by Facebook users, would be: “Friends have been telling her for a long time to do this, but for some reason she had continually postponed this moment. Why? She could not answer this question exactly.”

The rest is [...]

This post was expanded at 10:49 a.m. PDT to add comment from the OpenSocial Foundation conference call.

It’s like the Justice League of social media: Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.’s MySpace.com announced on Tuesday that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year to promote [...]

AdSense revenues can ignite spikes of exhilarating joy as well as phenomenal dips of depression, depending on whether AdSense-based revenues are moving rapidly up or have suddenly dropped without any apparent logic to it.
The reasons for such advertising revenue fluctuations can vary a great deal, and learning which variables and factors can affect them [...]

Robert Scoble couldn’t do it, but Windows Live can.
Microsoft’s Web-app division announced Tuesday that it has partnered with five social networks–LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo, and yes, Facebook–on a new project to facilitate address book portability. The partner social networks have agreed to use the Windows Live Contacts API so that members can import Windows Live [...]

Yahoo has announced this morning that they have joined the OpenSocial Movement, created and run by Google. I don’t get it - Yahoo was just starting to appear to have some legs as they are fighting the Microsoft takeover and yet they throw in the cards and join Google? Here is our simple OpenSocial overview.

The [...]

Mobile social communications provider Jangl is announcing a new distribution relationship with PerfSpot today. Nielsen Online recently ranked PerfSpot as the U.K.’s fastest-growing social media site, with PerfSpot witnessing over 700 percent growth in the last nine months of 2008. The company self-reports over 50,000 new members signing up daily.

Jangl already has applications inside of [...]

Below are five of the newest startups according to Killer Startups for the period ending March 25, 2008. Check out previous Killer Startups posts.

GoodInvitation - Create Funny Online Invitations

GoodInvitation is aimed at allowing you to create funny online invitations for free. When you log on to the site you are presented with the option to [...]

Welcome to 2008, the year of the friend. This year it’s not about what you like or are interested in, it’s what you will show interest in because your friends thought you should. Toluu has launched to help us with this task. It’s simple to use: pop in your feed list (also known as OPML), [...]

Alright so this one is a bit complicated but let’s give it a try. KIT Capital, which has invested in former NY-based ROO Group, has provided an unspecified strategic investment in NY-based Viewdle. Viewdle has created a video search engine based on their proprietary facial recognition software. Side note, why aren’t they indexing photos in addition [...]

TheLadders, the site that allows you to pay to view job listings for those seeking employment over $100k/yr, has announced office expansion plans in NYC today. The new location featuring 20,000 square feet at 205 Hudson Street joins TheLadders.com’s current 25,000-square-foot headquarters at 137 Varick Street.

Occupancy will be immediate and the new office will house the [...]

It’s not the latest breaking news but I’m just getting to the MacBook Air since I spent some quality time with it today. I’m a Mac lover so keep that in mind. I found the MacBook air to be fabulous. Thin, and yes, light. A true travelers laptop. It has a full size keyboard with [...]

The most popular video API is about to become more popular. As just announced by Googe’s Jim Patterson on the YouTube blog, YouTube Everywhere, the YouTube API has just been upgraded with some very powerful new features. So much so that, as Jim describes, “It has become an open, general purpose, video services platform, available [...]

Online photo sites have steadily grown in popularity. Millions of people use Flickr, Smugmug, Picasa, AOL Pictures, and other sites to post and share all kinds of pictures. What many people don’t know is just how many of these sites offer APIs that can be used to build mashups, photo tools, and other applications.
There are [...]

Michael McDonald of WebProNews conducted a video interview with Matt Cutts of Google and Vanessa Fox, our Features Editor.

Looks like Facebook does not like people making money off their own profiles.
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Earlier this week Google released the fastest rising search terms in the US. I have received the fastest rising search terms Globally from Google and there are some interesting conclusions to point out.
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 2, 2007
It was 60 degrees on Thursday in Washington, well above normal, and as I slipped away for some pre-Christmas golf, I found myself thinking about a wickedly funny story that The Onion, the satirical newspaper, ran the other day: “Fall Canceled after 3 [...]

Reading your genomic profile
—learning your predispositions for various diseases, odd traits, and a talent or two—is something like going to a phantasmagorical family reunion. First you’re introduced to the grandfather who died 23 years before you were born, then you move along for a chat with your parents, who are uncharacteristically willing to…
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Yahoo launched beta test of Ads for Adobe PDF - opened for publishers, offering placement and tracking of contextual ads alongside Portable Document Format content.
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You’ve got a household full of PC’s and you’ve stopped yourself from getting a Mac because you don’t want to deal with incompatibility headaches. Eight years ago that would’ve been understandable, but today Mac OS and Windows can work together in harmony on the same home network, sharing files and printers, mounting [...]

October 18, 2007 2:23 PM PDT
Posted by Elinor Mills [...]

Microsoft’s much-touted and much-anticipated RIA (rich Internet application) entry, Silverlight, lets Web developers and designers create “rich, engaging user experiences with 2-D graphics, animation, images, media, and video,” to use Microsoft’s own description. Silverlight competes in this arena with Adobe Flash and Flex, with OpenLaszlo and Curl, and with a variety of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript [...]

By Evan Schuman
E-commerce spending in the United States for this year’s second quarter jumped 19 percent, to $47.5 billion, compared with last year’s identical quarter, according to a statement released this week from ComScore.If you take travel out of that equation—in what ComScore considers the pure e-tail segment—the quarterly figure grew [...]

“Will It Blend” Videos Boost Sales 5x
September 27, 2007 — 09:46 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — Share This — 11 Comments

Here’s another success story for viral video marketing online. The Blendtec guys have increased their sales five times over thanks to a little segment called “Will it Blend?”
The most [...]

Why Creative Commons licenses and the GPL are incompatible, and how that makes life difficult for artists like icon and wallpaper designers who love free software.
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This is a follow-up to read/write’s “10 Future Web Trends” article - and these picks are much more futuristic than the last lot!
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