Recently I was the keynote speaker at the Unlimited Potential W2W (Wellington to the World) event in Wellington, New Zealand. The topic of my presentation was running a virtual company . In the presentation, written by our Marketing Manager Elyssa Pallai , I spoke about the unique nature of ReadWriteWeb’s virtual business model and culture. Watch the video of my entire presentation below, for details of how our company is run and the Internet tools we use. Sponsor As I explain in the video, ReadWriteWeb is a totally virtual organization. We have no head office, or any office for that matter. Our team work from home or on the road, around the globe, in multiple time-zones, 24/7. Being totally virtual is about a cultural change – a mind shift. Presentation, video-taped by Spring TV and available on Viddler : Slides, via Slideshare : Discuss

Read more from the original source:
Totally Virtual: How ReadWriteWeb Operates

It’s official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win. Now that the Chrome browser is becoming available for Mac, and the Snow Leopard OS doesn’t play nicely with Gears, Google has decided to trash the whole works and wait for HTML5, even though the spec isn’t yet ready and isn’t supported by commercially available browsers. Oh, the humanity… or rather, the machinery. Sponsor In the mists of time, back when Gears first launched , we wrote, “We’ve written many times before about the need for offline web app access… And guess who is most at risk with this announcement? Yes, Microsoft. Google after all has many of the top ‘best of breed’ web apps now.” This was before Google’s Chrome browser had hit the scene, and the Gears project was a collaborative effort between Goog, Opera, and Mozilla. But in our coverage of last year’s Google I/O conference, we wrote of Gears, “We question whether offline access is even necessary. After all… in today’s world, you’re never too far from an internet connection. We concluded that offline access is important now, but less important with each passing day.” Not only could Gears be used to take online data offline; Google had more in store for Gears users. A few short months later, Google announced a geolocation API for mobile devices running Gears. We wrote, “We think that location-aware software is going to be one of the most interesting markets to watch in the near future and as as location-aware devices become more ubiquitous, we will hopefully see a lot of new and innovative services make use of them.” But the party ended with Snow Leopard’s release. A change in the newest Mac OS prevents Gears from running on newer Mac computers. Whether or not the relationship is one of causation or mere correlation, Google is now abandoning Gears. As one Google rep told the L.A. Times , “We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites.” Believe us Google, no one is looking forward to the cross-browser, cross-OS implementation of HTML5 as much as we are. Discuss

View post:
Google Dumps Gears for HTML5

Twitter’s default URL shortening service Bit.ly announced steps today to stop phishing and malware attacks from being passed around online through its service. If effective, the effort should help a whole lot of people save face and prevent those moments of panic when you’re afraid you may have lost access to your Twitter account forever. Really, though, people who take tech seriously don’t fall for those kinds of things, right? Wrong! Below we offer the job titles of some of the most surprising people we’ve received phishing direct messages from over the last several months. It’s a pretty surprising list. Sponsor May this serve as a memorial and a reminder that when new communication media emerge – even the most savvy people can get on board and fall for the oldest tricks in the book. Remember also, this could happen to any of us (apparently, perhaps) and thus the old saying “there, but for the grace of the Fail Whale, go I.” “I made $300 today with http://ifortune4u.com” – and assorted variations… Bio: Market analyst following datacenters, energy efficiency, and blade servers. That’s complicated stuff but probably pretty mechanical. No wonder a little human-engineering was able to overcome this person’s defenses. Bio: Enterprise Comms Analyst That’s Comms as in communications? Bio: Industry analyst: enterprise communications [Different person, same analyst firm as the above] Oops. Why are these analysts, some of whom charge up to $1000 per hour for their work, falling for a scam that promises relatively small sums of money? Bio: Consultant in large scale data warehousing. Looks like just a little bit of your data just got warehoused! Bio: Strategy planning at [Giant European Firm] Enterprise Communications How’s this for an enterprise strategy? Know a phishing scam when you see one. Bio: Customer Interaction Analyst at [Giant Marketing Research and Analyst Firm] / Speech Reco and UI Geek / Trendspotter Oh my… Bio: an investor and co-founder of [common web 2.0 term].com; a founding partner and Vice-President in [big Web 1.0 company]…8 million page-views and 1 million unique visitors per month…with zero marketing budget. Surely there were people pulling scams like this back when you were…building a website with 8m monthly pageviews…with zero marketing budget… Want to brush up on your social networking skills, so you can stay off of lists like this? Check out Sarah Perez’s post from October How to Avoid Malware on Facebook and Twitter: 8 Best Practicies . You can find the whole ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter here . You can follow us with the knowledge that we aren’t going to spam you with scammy Direct Messages – or at least if we do you can write a blog post teasing us about it. Discuss

Read the original here:
7 High-Tech Twitter Users Who Fell For Phishing Scams

Wrapping up a six month-long challenge to mobile developers, Google has announced a string of winners of their second Android Developers Challenge (ADC). From games and social networking apps to productivity and privacy tools, the cream of the ADC 2 crop includes an app for just about every kind of mobile user – and just in time, as the Droid has recently become ” the fastest-selling Android phone to date .” Take a peek at the innovative apps waiting in the wings for the lucky owners of Android-powered devices. Sponsor As Android adoption swells and trends suggest the OS might be the second most widely used mobile OS by 2010 , it’s important that the app universe keeps pace with users. Google announced this challenge in May at their Google I/O developer conference and offered well over $1.5 million in cash prizes to the winning developers in 10 categories. The applications – some of which might remind you of already popular iPhone apps – should be available shortly to Android users. The overall ADC 2 winners are: SweetDreams , a revolutionary tool that will finally allow you to go to sleep without worrying about changing your phone settings in order to avoid unwelcome late night calls. You can even use those inactivity periods to save battery power as well. What the Doodle!? , a real-time online multiplayer game where one player tries to draw out a given phrase and others try to guess it. Features FFA and Team games, Global Highscores, Personal Face Doodles, integrated Voice Recognition and more. WaveSecure , a complete mobile security solution that protects your device, data and privacy. Track your phone’s location and who is using it , lock down your phone remotely, back up all your data, wipe out your data remotely, and finally, restore your data. Winners in the education and reference category are: Plink Art , an app for identifying, discovering and sharing art. The Word Puzzle , a fun way to learn basic English words for preschool children. Celeste , an educational augmented reality app that displays the Sun, Moon, planets and their paths through the sky onto your camera view. The entertainment category winners are: A World of Photo ,a casual, globally multiplayer game inspired by Spin the Bottle. SongDNA , a widget that allows you to quickly look up detailed information about a song. Solo , an easy-to-play and feature-rich pocket guitar for your phone. Winners for the arcade/action game subcategory include: Speed Forge , in which heavy duty hover vehicles normally used for mining are now seen in illegal races organized in abondoned factories and dark Marsian alleys. Graviturn , a game that makes you tilt your phone to move the red circles out of the screen while keeping the green circles. Moto X Mayhem , an app that includes seven levels of motorbike action in a side scrolling bike game. Winners for the casual gaming category are: What the Doodle!? Totemo , a unique puzzle game with over 60 mind-soothing logic tasks. Mazeness , a rather simple game involving moving balls to their goals with help of barriers, teleports and holders. These are Google’s lifestyle category winners: SweetDreams SpecTrek, an augmented reality ghost hunting game that doubles as a fitness app. FoxyRing , an app that analyzes the ambient noise and adjusts the ringer volume on your phone. Media category winners are: Buzz Deck , an app that gets all the web content you care about most, along with Twitter & Facebook updates. SPB TV , a highly usable IP-TV application optimized to run on mobile devices. FxCamera , which lets you take pictures with various effects. Here are the winning productivity tools: WaveSecure Hoccer , an application for gesture-based ad-hoc data exchange. Tasker , an app that lets users link any Task (action set) to the Contexts (application, time, day, location, event, widget press) where it should run. In social networking, the winners are: Ce:real , an app that displays geographically based, real-world trends, including photo stories paired with Twitter keywords. SocialMuse , which lets users find people with similar musical taste or just explore the world through music. SpotMessage , a communication tool using GPS. Send a message designating a spot with Google Maps then the message will be notified when the recipient arrives at the spot. For the travel category, Google name these top apps: Trip Journal , a trip tracking and sharing solution sending real-time updates from the places you are visiting. iNap: Arrival Alert , an application that allows traveling users to sleep (or work, or just zone out) then relies on GPS to alert them with an alarm when the destination is nearby. Car Locator , which navigates you back to your car should you ever have trouble finding it. Finally, here are three miscellaneous winners: Rhythm Guitar , which plays like a real 6-string, 5-fret guitar. Andrometer , and app that measures the approximate distance from you to an object that you can see using GPS, accelerometer and geomagnetic sensors. Calton Hill GPSCaddy , an app that allows golfers to quickly and easily map any golf course either out on the course using GPS or in the comfort of home using satellite imagery. Bonus Round: See our picks from last year’s ADC !) Let us know in the comments what you think of this year’s winners (too many iPhone app clones? too little augmented reality?) in the comments – and definitely tell us what you’d like to see Android developers tackle next! Discuss

Follow this link:
Google Names 30 Best Mobile Apps for Android

The do-it-yourself website space is so crowded right now that it’s amazing to see anyone launch a product and cut through the noise. Still, we were captivated by the simplicity and design of Flavors.me . Similar to Card.ly , instead of forcing you to use Facebook, LinkedIn or your neglected blog to represent you, Flavors lets you to build a basic vanity site in less than 10 minutes. As of this evening non-designers will have a chance to revel in their newly found web sex appeal. Sponsor Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo . ReadWriteWeb spoke to co-founder Jonathan Marcus to get an early look at the service. The basic premise is that Flavors lets you produce a well-designed springboard to portfolio pieces, current work and profiles. Users add links, edit fonts and colors, and upload a background photo. Rather than fiddling with cascading style sheets or modifying blog templates, this service offers a fast and easy way to create an elegant web presence. Under the banner of Hii Def Inc. internet incubator, brothers Jonathan and David Marcus and former Vimeo design lead Jack Zerby created Flavors as just one of three companies to launch in 2009. Prior to Flavors.me, the group produced online sneaker shop Superkix . As a hybrid of both Flavors and Superkix, the team will soon release an online storefront tool by the name of Goodsie . Says Jonathan Marcus, ” We wanted to sell Superkix t-shirts online but weren’t satisfied with Yahoo Stores, Shopify or BigCartel and realized there were enough re-usable elements from Flavors to make it feasible to build in parallel.” While Superkix is an obvious revenue generator as a retail storefront, the group plans on offering a domain redirect feature to Flavors in mid-December as well as a yearly subscription fee after a 30-day trial. Upon launch, Goodsie will be available with a monthly subscription. Says Marcus, “Both [services] will dramatically reduce the cost and complexity associated with maintaining a web presence. Any other monetization model such as advertising would introduce competing and distracting interests.” Users can test Flavors later this evening at flavors.me . In the meantime, you may want to check out the company’s design gallery here . For those interested in a fuller feature set check out ReadWriteWeb’s Tools for Codeless Website Creation . Discuss

Excerpt from:
Flavors: 10 Code-Free Minutes to a Sexier Web Presence

Last week we surveyed you , the ReadWriteWeb community, about your favorite mobile applications. We asked for your top 5 mobile apps and ended up with nearly 200 different mobile apps in the post and comments! Today we reveal the full results, including the most popular mobile apps of our tech savvy readers. Earlier today our resident Mobile Web expert Sarah Perez listed ReadWriteWeb’s top 10 Mobile Web products of 2009 . As for your choices, we discovered that you like social networking on the go (Facebook, Foursquare), Twitter clients (Tweetie, Twitterrific), Google (Google Maps, Google Mobile), and innovative mobile-focused apps (Evernote, Shazam). The top 16 is listed below, with commentary. Also at the bottom of the post you’ll find a spreadsheet of the entire list. Sponsor Top Mobile Apps of RWW Readers Facebook 32 Tweetie 24 Google Maps 14 Foursquare 10 Evernote 8 Shazam 8 Google Mobile 7 Echofon (Twitter client for Mac) 6 Gmail Mobile 6 Pandora 6 TweetDeck 6 Twitterrific 6 Dropbox (to sync files) 5 Kindle 5 Spotify 5 Yelp 5 Many of our readers use iPhones, so the above list features more iPhone apps than apps from Android, Blackberry, Nokia, or other phones. Facebook was the most popular mobile app listed by you all. Facebook has been improving their iPhone app all year and this survey shows that our readers are liking those iterations. As Sarah Perez noted earlier today , “if any application deserves an “app of the year” award, it’s Facebook 3.0 for iPhone.” Not far behind Facebook was Tweetie, a popular mobile Twitter client which released a major new version of their app in September. Tweetie 2 introduced features like video tweets, offline mode, geolocation, and more. Other mobile Twitter apps to be mentioned multiple times include Echofon, TweetDeck and Twitterific. Google has always been popular in our Mobile apps surveys, since we began doing them in 2007 . They’re listed 3 times in the above list, including at number 3 with Google Maps. Several mobile-centric apps (i.e. apps developed specifically for mobile, rather than the desktop computer) made our top 16 list. Foursquare is a trendy new mobile social network, Evernote is a great note-taking tool, Shazam is a head-scratchingly good app for identifying songs – to name just a few. Click here to see a Google spreadsheet featuring the entire list of nearly 200 mobile apps listed by our readers. SEE ALSO: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 Discuss

More:
Your Favorite Mobile Apps: Facebook, Tweetie, Google Maps, Foursquare, and More

IBM has acquired Guardium , a real-time provider of enterprise monitoring technology to secure and provide better business intelligence across the hundreds of databases that often exist in larger enterprises. Guardium has established itself as one of the premiere data security companies. Its clients are a who’s who of the Global 100. Its technology is designed to protect from internal and external threats to the enterprise. It is known for its ability to provide data integrity for better governance and compliance. Sponsor As one of its executives said in an interview, Guardium provides a last line of defense against attacks, kind of like the “goal keepers of the data.” Details of the acquisition were not disclosed but an Israeli newspaper said the deal is valued at $225 million. IBM is banking on business analytics for future growth. As we report here often, the amount of information flowing into the enterprise is unprecedented but there are few companies that have the ability to quickly analyze this fragmented information and use it to make intelligent business decisions. For most, decisions are being made based upon incomplete information or data that has been corrupted in some manner. IBM see Guardium as a way for it to provide a transparent view into the enterprise by providing a real-time watch on information. By protecting the information, Guardium gives companies the ability to access data that has not been tainted. Guardium will become part of the IBM Information Management Software group, which has been on a bit of an acquisition binge in the past year. Earlier this year, IBM acquired SPSS , a statistics software company. Discuss

Continued here:
IBM Acquires Guardium – The Last Line of Defense