Amazon appears to have realized that e-book readers are going to take over traditional paper books and for that it’s speeding up the development of Kindle. In less than a year, it has released two versions of the device, Kindle and Kindle 2 and reports state that the third one is set to come out much sooner than anyone would have anticipated. The latest version might come our as early as this week or maybe a bit less. Whenever it’s coming, the new Kindle will have a bigger screen, the idea behind is to optimize the device for newspapers and magazines, which are a bit difficult to read in the current size. Well let’s just wait and see if all the rush proves fruitful for Amazon, perhaps it feels the pinch to stay ahead of any possible competition.
Startup incubator, TheFunded has initiated a new program called The Founder Institute to help startups. The institute is open for registration of startups, which closes on 10 May, 2009. The idea is to bring both founders and mentors together and establish a long term relationship. The institute has recruited CEOs of 25 startups to help founders and provide tips on how to build an effective startup. The working is also different from the rest of the incubators given that it is founder centric with a clear objective of sharing the upside from al participating founders and mentors. Such initiatives do help make things better and not to forget that a good startup has the potential to have a very positive impact on the economy, opening new horizons and providing more opportunities in the Web sphere. You can apply here if you are a CEO of a startup and interested in being a Mentor.
I am not sure if this issue is being faced by many other Plurkers or just myself, but I have been facing a few problems with Plurk for quite some hours now. First it failed to load, then there were issues associated to not showing the signup screen and now it says the my account is not found. Surprisingly enough I am signed in with the same but the timeline just doesn’t show up. Plurk fell prey to China as the micromessaging site was banned in the country. I hope this issue is only temporary and is resolved soon.
While you can always find any song at YouTube with a video, there is always a requirement to have a YouTube for audios. Well Mixcloud is doing exactly that by providing content creators with platform to promote everything audio, from radio shows to podcasts. This would let creators have access to the countless eager ears of music lovers, giving them a chance to discover the freshest beats. It wont be wrong to call it a social media for music as members can browse through the site for music, follow the creative creators and comment on tracks they listen to. The site is still in private and one will have to wait until it moves over to the public. Sounds great, something that music lovers would like to test.
Owen Thomas, the man who had been running Valleywag for quite some time has left the job. He will be joining NBC as managing editor of its Bay Area site, which is still in beta and will focus on the Bay Area alone. He will be replaced by Ryan Tate, who had earlier been working as Gawker’s night editor. Gawker has been seeing a few changes lately, when it earlier laid off around nineteen employees and shutdown half dozen of its sites.
As Twitter continues to become popular beyond imagination, people are trying to capitalize on almost everything associated to it. The current target is set at capitalizing Twitter usernames and out comes Tweexchange, a startup that lets you buy, exchange and find usernames from its existing members. This lets you know which usernames have been taken or recommends alternate ones. Incase you are interested in a name that is on sale, you can tweet/email its owner and negotiate over the price. It’s pretty useful given that many users would pay a price to have their desired username, incase it’s already been taken. While all this sounds pretty nice, there is always a chance that a few might take this as an opportunity to bag as many names as they can (those that have better chances to fetch a price), though the chances are pretty slim, I bet this is bound to happen.
When it comes to going Green, Google has got its own bit of things to try. To clear the fields of weeds at their Mountain View headquarters, the world’s top brand is showing its concern at reducing carbon levels, noise pollution by not using lawn mowers to mow the fields. It has instead decided to have the goats do the job for them. The goats spend a week eating grass and at the same time fertilizing the fields for them. Clever and very environment friendly.
While online gambling might have had many throwing away their money, the State of Minnesota has now asked all ISPs to block access to all gambling sites. While this might be a great news for those who are against gambling in any form, the law can have its own drastic effects. The reason being, if ISP were to block a single IP, the block might also affect several other sites which may not bee associated to gambling in any way. I am pretty much against gambling myself, but I don’t see how this is going to help on a wider scale, primarily because implementation of any such law contradicts with everything that has to do with freedom of expression and limiting connectivity on the web. I would be keen to know how fruitful this decision is going to be overall, including that on gambling/gamblers.
Autimattic, the company behind WordPress has released BuddyPress, a platform that enables users to create social networks around their sites. The social networks created this way would provide users to have customized features, which include private messages, profiles and activity streams. While there are other ways that users can create social networks (Ning for example), BuddyPress lets you do so specifically around your own sites/blogs, ridding you of the need to look elsewhere for doing the same. Automattic had earlier acquired Blo.gs from Yahoo and Ii bet this new release is going to prove fairly popular with the masses.
