Source: Nvidia Wins $20M In DARPA Money To Work On Hyper-Efficient Chips
Source: Cisco Pricing Undercut By $100M In Big Cal State University Network Project
Source: With $8.6M In Kickstarter Funds, Ouya Opens Console Pre-Orders
Source: IRS Employee Stole Data To Forge $8M In Fraudulent Returns
Richard MacManus shares his favorite web products of 2011. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.
Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.
Wondering which web tools are worth a second look? Take a look at some of the favorite web products of ReadWriteWeb founder, Richard MacManus. This year’s list includes productivity tool Evernote, cloud-based file-sharing favorite, Dropbox, and social phenom Facebook.
@michaelwroberts agreed:
The Kindle Fire has been released to great fanfare, mixed reviews and millions of devices sold. The device’s growth trajectory has already outpaced that of any other tablet introduced to the market. Secondary statistics show that the growth of the Kindle Fire rivals even that of the original iPad when it was unleashed on the world in the beginning of 2010. (more)
This year wasn’t the first time any of us heard about the impact of social media on television. People have talked about TV shows on Facebook and Twitter for about as long as those social networks have existed, and the trend has only accelerated as social media usage in general has exploded. (more)
Yesterday TrackVia released some surprising survey results here about how frustrated customers are with their computer experience. What is surprising is how low the numbers were. (more)
Ending a month of speculation, Google has renewed its search exclusivity deal with Mozilla, who has long featured Google as the default browser on its Firefox Web browser. (more)
With little fanfare, GitHub has released Janky under the MIT license. Janky is a continuous integration (CI) server that runs on top of Jenkins and Hubot, designed to work with projects hosted on GitHub. (more)
The technology industry loves to come up with pet names and terms for trends. To name a few that have come out in the last year or so: gamification, social dynamics, check-in, onboard, pivot, open graphs, closed graphs, social graphs. Lots of graphs. Most of these words and terms are fine, if overused, additions to lexicon and fit well within the nerd nomenclature. Yet, there is one that should be banished before it has a chance to spread its wings. (more)
YouTube reflected on its banner year today, announcing that it served over 1 trillion playbacks in 2011. “That’s about 140 views for every person on the earth,” YouTube’s Rewind blog post says. YouTube saw record traffic and mobile growth this year. It gets 3 billion views per day, and video uploads have doubled since last year. (more)
WordPress has released version 2.0 of its Android app for mobile blogging, and as a WordPress for iOS user, I am jealous. The new app launches with a screen that covers just about every first action a mobile blogger needs. It’s arranged in correct order of priority, and it uses a big, easily tappable grid of buttons with an “action bar” over the top to handle the rest. (more)
Google.com is still one of the cleanest, calmest sites on the Web. At least, it is before you start typing. At this point, you don’t even have to hit enter before the page starts filling up with noise. Google has been hard at work on its core product this year. The changes have affected search quality in uneven ways. (more)
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Source: Daily Wrap: Richard’s Favorite Companies of 2011 and More
David Strom reviews the biography of Hedy Lamarr, The First Geek Movie Star. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.
Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.
Hedy Lamarr, probably more famous for her contributions to Hollywood than to the technology world, is the object of a biography by Richard Rhodes. Apparently while researching a possible breast augmentation with her neighbor, a composer, the two patented a technique for frequency-hopping radio communications that is the basis for spread-spectrum radio communications still in use today.
In response, @KTischhy said:
Twitter is far and away my favorite social network, but it does have its downsides. The 140 character limit? Nope, I actually enjoy the challenge of crafting meaningful messages in limited space. The problems come in when you have users who don’t quite understand the way Twitter is supposed to work, or when people or companies abuse the service. (more)
In what sounds like its last announcement before the holidays, Google+ has shipped one of its best updates yet. It addresses the noisy the stream with a slider at the top of every circle, allowing users to adjust the volume of that circle within their overall stream. It also adds more information to the notifications menu and makes new events easier to understand. (more)
New research from Nielsen’s NM Incite reveals that knowing someone in real-life is the number one reason people friend them on Facebook. Of the 1,865 adult social media users surveyed, 82% reported that they friend people they know in real life and 41% cite “don’t know well” as the top reason for Facebook unfriending people. How does this data size up against Facebook’s purported purpose of “helping build closer ties among friends”? (more)
Tablet maker Fusion Garage is on the ropes. One of the first companies to try and make tablet computing commercially viable, has been embroiled in a legal battle with its partners and this weekend lost its legal council after it failed to pay him. The JooJoo, once called the CrunchPad, could have been exciting. Now, it is likely to go down as an unremarkable footnote in history. (more)
Smart devices have fundamentally changed how people interact with the world. Users now have information on tap, everywhere at any time. That has correlated into a shift in how consumers react with brands online, in retail stores, what products to buy and when to buy them. When consumers’ brand interaction change, it is a sign that advertising is going to change as well. According to Google, that shift has started to take place. (more)
For a service that only exists on one platform, Instagram has been wildly successfully. The photo-sharing app for iOS is now on track to hit 15 million users, which as a post SocialFresh points out, is how many people are using Foursquare today. (more)
A series of three independent studies on mobility management and security from Cisco, Mimecast and Good Technology show that managing all this data moving around on laptops and smartphones is going to be a challenge. But you knew that already. But what is clear is that the rate of adoption varies widely, depending on who is doing the measuring. (more)
PhoneGap is turning 1.3 today. There are a plethora of new features, tools and controls across five platforms in the new PhoneGap release. Biggest among these is Windows Phone’s support of all PhoneGap features, a first for any mobile platform that is not iOS or Android. (more)
The $300 million secondary investment Twitter confirmed Monday morning comes from a key figure in a region where Twitter is experiencing some of its fastest growth.
Never mind that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi investor whose Kingdom Holding investment firm has stakes in Apple, Citigroup, and now, 3% ownership of Twitter, isn’t a big user of the service himself (Prince Alwaleed follows just 25 users with his account – including Fox News and Barack Obama – and he hasn’t tweeted since Oct. 6 when he sent out RIP condolences to Steve Jobs). (more)
Keep up with ReadWriteWeb by subscribing to our RSS feed or email newsletter. You can also follow ReadWriteWeb across the web on Google+, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
Source: SpyEye Botnet Nets Fraudster $3.2M In Six Months
Source: $5M In Torrented Files Presented As Art
The latest stable version of WordPress, 3.1, was first released on 23 February 2011.
Now, less than 5 months later, the blogging software has been downloaded over 15 million times according to a tweet posted mere minutes ago (and the download counter).
Joomla just recently announced that its software has been downloaded 23 million times (note that this is the total number, not for any specific versions of the software solution).
For your information: WordPress 3.1 is what TechCrunch uses to power most of its sites. The latest version of the popular blogging software product is actually WordPress 3.1.4, which is a maintenance and security update for all previous versions.
Just yesterday, WordPress parent company Automattic published a blog post, announcing that the next version, WordPress 3.2, will be released ‘very soon’ (release candidate here).
With WordPress 3.2, Automattic will finally be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6.
Related: Automattic Hits 300 Million Unique Visitors, Roughly $10M In Revenue
Source: WordPress 3.1 Downloaded 15 Million Times In Under 5 Months
