Author: Frederic Lardinois

Sony just announced that it is expanding its selection of newspapers and magazines in its e-book store. Starting today, users of Sony’s e-readers will be able to subscribe to 20 new newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, PC Magazine and Foreign Affairs. With the newspaper business in turmoil, it only makes sense for these papers to try to get a better foothold on more devices.

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eInk vs. LCDs

For users who don’t own an e-reader yet but are looking into getting one, the question right now is to either wait for the iPad and go with a regular LCD screen for reading books, or to choose a more traditional (and cheaper) e-reader like the Kindle or Sony Reader that feature electronic ink. While some users don’t mind the blacklit LCD screens of their phones to read, others can’t fathom reading any long-form content on these screens.

Fighting Off the iPad

For Sony, Amazon, B&N and others who are currently betting on electronic ink for their devices, one of the best ways to distinguish themselves from Apple is to offer more content over their free wireless connections and to play up the advantages of eInk. In this context, adding a newspaper like the New York Times (which is also a favorite of Steve Jobs and features heavily in Apple’s iPad ads and other promotional material) makes a lot of sense. For the newspapers, getting on more devices and selling more subscriptions is simply good business. Sony charges up to $14.99 per month for these subscriptions.

Given that all of these papers could sell their own apps and subscriptions on the iPad as well – and that some of them will be available for free – the availability of newspapers may not be a deciding factor for a lot of potential iPad and e-reader buyers. Hopefully, however, we will also see a lot of innovative newspaper and magazine apps on the iPad. Chances are that these new apps will make today’s traditional e-readers seem rather quaint in comparison. The availability of these apps could easily sway a lot of potential e-reader buyers to get an iPad instead.

What is your experience? Do you think e-books and newspapers just look better on eInk? Or are you waiting for the innovative newspaper apps on the iPad that will include video and other interactive content?

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Get Satisfaction, the popular online customer service company, just announced that it is bringing its service to Facebook fan pages. This new service, the Facebook Social Engagement Hub, will allow companies that have a presence on Facebook to easily answer questions from their customers on Facebook. The Social Engagement Hub recreates the Get Satisfaction experience on Facebook and allows users to ask questions about products or make suggestion for new features. One key feature here is that the discussion on Facebook and the Get Satisfaction topic pages are synchronized, so that questions that get answered on a company’s topic page on Get Satisfaction also appear on Facebook and vice versa.

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Liberating Content from Facebook

The new Social Engagement Hub on Facebook will cost Get Satisfaction customers an additional $99 per month. As Get Satisfaction’s co-founder Lane Becker told us yesterday, however, this expense could easily be worth it for these companies, as users on Facebook tend to be very active on these fan pages and really want to interact with these companies and brands on the social networking service.

As Lane also noted, conversations that happen around a brand in Facebook tend to be trapped in this silo. Thanks to the synchronization between the two platforms, however, brands can now take this content and make it useful outside of Facebook as well. Another problem for brands that Get Satisfaction is trying to solve here is the simple fact that conversations on Facebook only have a very short lifespan. Get Satsifaction now allows companies to capture these conversations.

Overall, this looks like a very smart way for brands to interact with their customers on Facebook and to streamline their social media customer service efforts.

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Phonebooth.com, a VOIP service for individuals and small businesses, just launched a free version of its service. Phonebooth, just like Google Voice and Ribbit Mobile, provides its users with a free local phone number that can be forwarded to any cell phone and landline. Phonebooth also offers voicemail transcriptions. What makes it stand out from it competitors, however, is that it offers an auto attendant feature that allows you to route callers to different employees.

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It’s worth noting that Bandwidth.com, the company behind Phonebooth, has been providing infrastructure services to other VOIP services, including Voxeo and Yext, for more than three years. The company’s VOIP network delivered almost 4 billion minutes in 2009. Bandwidth began a beta test of the paid version of Phonebooth.com last year and now has over 1,000 customers.

A Free VOIP Service that Will Grow With You

Starting today, Phonebooth will offer a free service geared towards individuals. The company also announced the general availability of its $20/month/user option, which offers a fully featured phone system in the cloud. One of the advantages of using Phonebooth over similar services like Google Voice or Grasshopper is that the company allows users to upgrade their phone system over time. Once your company outgrows Phonebooth’s basic plan, you can easily switch to a higher-end phone system (Phonebooth on Demand) with hardware IP-based phones.

Phonebooth’s users will be able to choose local numbers from virtually everywhere in the U.S. (the service us U.S.). Sadly, though, there is no way to make your Phonebooth number appear on the caller ID for outgoing calls from your landline or cell phone. Phonebooth doesn’t currently offer any mobile apps, though the company told us earlier today that mobile apps are definitely on Phonebooth’s roadmap.

Contact Plus Widget

In addition to the free VOIP service, Phonebooth is also launching a new widget for small businesses – Contact Us Plus – that allows potential customers to use Phonebooth’s VOIP service to initiate a call right from the website. In addition to initiating phone calls, the Phonebooth widget can also feature additional contact info (Twitter account, email etc.), as well as your address and a map. Phonebooth’s users can also opt to show phone numbers for different departments in their company in the widget.

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Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API.

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How Will Facebook’s Users React?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users – who are famously averse to change – will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook “has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.”

When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service’s users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it.

Will Facebook’s Users Care?

It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn’t seen a very strong response from users and developers so far.

Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.?

According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn’t trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook’s users.

It’s also important to note that Facebook’s API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however.

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StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, just announced the launch of the public beta of its StatusNet Cloud Service. Thanks to this, you can now easily host your own Twitter-like community for your blog, club or company.

The StatusNet Cloud Service also supports OStatus, a new standard that allows users on different social networks to follow each other. StatusNet accounts are currently available for free. The company will begin to offer additional paid services in April.

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Getting Started

To get started, just head over to status.net, sign up for a free account. You can choose between a single user account (good for bloggers and brands), a private network for your company or a public community site. After that, you can customize your site with your own logo and colors. You can also set the character limit for status updates from your users.

Connect to Twitter

Just running your own microblogging network isn’t too exciting unless you are running an internal site for your business, but you can easily connect your Twitter account to your StatusNet site, so that every update from your personal site gets syndicated to your Twitter stream as well. Sending local StatusNet @replies to Twitter is optional.

StatusNet in the Enterprise

StatusNet also offers paid enterprise solutions, with costs ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 per year depending on the features and level of service the customer expects. Our Own Alex Williams just took a closer look at the service’s future in the enterprise last week and argued that it “has the features that the enterprise customer wants and it has a strong developer community.”

As of now, StatusNet’s free offering can’t quite replace Yammer or similar products in a business setting, but if you always wanted to set up your own Twitter-like environment, StatusNet now makes it as easy as choosing a URL.

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Sooner or later, every popular web service with an API spawns a Google Maps mashup. FourWhere, which launches today, combines data from the increasingly popular location-based social network Foursquare with a Google Maps-based interface. Thanks to this, you can now easily find Foursquare venues around your current location or a location you plan to visit. The site was developed by social media analytics service Sysomos.

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The FourWhere service itself is pretty basic. You simply browse the Google Maps interface and a right-click anywhere on the map will bring up a menu that allows you to either see nearby venues on the map or user comments about these nearby venues. In the future, Sysomos also plans to add additional services based on the company’s extensive database of social media sources.

First Step Towards Integrating LBS Analytics Into Sysomos’ Main Services

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us, the company plans to bring location-based sources – including Foursquare – to Heartbeat and MAP, Sysomos’ professional social media and analytics and media monitoring applications. For Sysomos, launching a free service is just a first stop towards learning more about this space.

As services like Foursquare, Gowalla and others continue to gain momentum and slowly inch towards the mainstream, social media monitoring services like Sysomos or Radian6 need to give their customers to monitor these communities. If these services go mainstream, a bad comment on Foursquare about a restaurant could easily have the same effect as a negative Twitter message or Yelp review.

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Twitter launched lists in October 2009 and this feature has quickly become an essential part of the Twitter ecosystem. The power of lists isn’t just in their ability to organize your followers, they also provide an an insight into how other users use Twitter. The number of followers an account has might show its popularity, but the number of lists called, for instance, “most influential” or “essential”, that it appears on reveals just how important that account is.

Today, we’re using lists to unscientifically analyze what we think are some of the some of the most influential Twitter accounts. We used a variety of lists to identify 485 accounts and then ran those names through Tableau’s data visualization tools.

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Editors Note: This post is the second of a four-part content series ReadWriteWeb is producing in partnership with Tableau Software, where we examine interesting data sets relevant to technology trends today. You can use Tableau Public to create interactive visualizations like this and publish them to your own blog, Web sites, or anywhere online. You also can embed this (or any other Tableau Public) visualization on your own site.

Our List

We generated our list of Twitter influencers based on the lists that the RWW team follows and lists that some of the most influential people on those lists have created. We only used lists that were aggregating accounts that the list creator had called, for instance, “most important”, or “most influential”. After removing duplicates, we ended up 485 Twitter accounts. This list includes people, companies and breaking news feeds. By using lists instead of just follower counts we added an important filter, as many of these lists were created by Twitter users outside of the RWW team.

The Data

What it Means

Many of the conclusions are unsurprising: Influential accounts have between 100 to more than 1 million followers. While there are some relatively new accounts in our list, the vast majority has been on Twitter for over a year. When it comes to influence on Twitter, being an early adopter clearly has some advantages.

Most of the users who appear on a lot of lists and have a lot of followers also tweet a lot. Given that some of these accounts are from news organizations, this number makes sense, but there is also a group of users like Anil Dash, the Gates Foundation and Outside.in’s Steven Johnson who don’t tweet a lot, but still have a large number of followers based on their reputation.

It is interesting to note is that there seems to be a group of users that has a very large number of followers, but doesn’t appear on an extraordinary large number of lists. This group includes a surprisingly large number of Twitter employees, including Cheryl Palarca (Twitter HR), Alex McCauley (Twitter business operations) and Kevin Thau (mobile products and partnerships at Twitter).

Lastly, it’s obvious that a large number of power users – those with a high number of followers and who appear on a large number of lists – were early adopters; SXSW 2007 and the months leading up to it is when a significant number of influencers signed up. However, while the sign-up rate of those influencers has significantly dropped over time, new influencers continued to appear right through the end of 2009. Twitter early adopters may have moved on the next big thing, but users with prestige haven’t stopped signing up.

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Making breakfast, lunch or dinner plans for any group that involves more than two people can quickly become a chore. Lunchwalla, which launched earlier today, wants to make this task a bit easier by providing you with a web service that allows you to avoid long email chains and back-and-forth phone calls. You simply pick a time, choose a few restaurant options and a list of friends you want to invite. Lunchwalla will email your contacts and they can then RSVP and vote for the restaurant they prefer.

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What makes Lunchwalla unique is that it brings together Yelp reviews, OpenTable reservations, menus and local coupons. This makes it different from similar scheduling services like Evite, Tungle.me, Presdo or Doodle.

Not Just for Lunch

While the name implies that Lunchwalla is only focused on getting people together for lunch, the site won’t stop you from organizing breakfast, brunch, dinner or happy hour get-togethers.

After you have sent out your invitations, you contacts can vote for different restaurants right in their email clients. Once everybody has voted (or decided not to attend), you can make the final decision and your contacts will get one more email with the finalized details. After the event is over, you can also upload photos from the meal and share them with your friends.

One nice aspect of the site is that it allows you to pick a set of favorite restaurants, so if you decide to use the service regularly, you won’t have to pick and choose the same restaurants again. You can also group your contacts into lists.

Privacy

One aspect of the site that not everybody will appreciate, however, is that – by default – all your invitations, comments and events are public and will appear on your profile page. If you want to keep your lunch plans private, make sure that you change the privacy settings for your profile. Even then, though, the event page remains visible to anybody who has access to the URL.

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Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera just launched Mediagazer, a new memetracker for topics related to media news. This new site will be based on the same technology as Techmeme, memeorandum, the gossip site WeSmich and the baseball memetracker Ballbug. The content on Mediagazer will be edited by Megan McCarthy.

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As McCarthy notes in her announcement, “media business is in tumult” and this is a news vertical that lends itself to memetracking. Not only are there lots of interesting news stories from a large variety of sources, but these sources all tend to link to each other a lot, which makes it easier for the algorithm to find related stories.

Mediagazer is the first new service that Rivera’s team has launched in four years. As both Rivera and McCarthy note, the team has spent the last four years learning about what works (and what doesn’t). Based on this experience, the team has “outfitted the site with the latest iteration of our automation engine, and have launched it from the outset with a dedicated human editor.”

It will be interesting to see how Rivera’s team will manage the overlap between the tech news and media news sites. Currently, for example, this VentureBeat story – which is about both the tech and the media business – is featured on both sites.

Unlike Techmeme, Mediagazer doesn’t feature a leaderboard, but there are mobile sites for smartphones and feature phones.

Judging from what we have seen so far, Mediagazer will surely become another must-read site for anybody interested in the media business, be it blogging, e-book or the state of the newspaper industry.

For more information about the role of the human editors at Techmeme, also have a look at our interview with Megan McCarthy.

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Just about a month after acquiring the popular iPhone email client reMail, Google and the reMail team have decided to open source the application’s code. While current reMail users were able to use the app, Google decided to pull the application from the App Store after the acquisition. Given that the reMail team was joining Google to work on projects unrelated to reMail, this looks like a smart move. The source code is already available on Google Code under the Apache 2.0 License.

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When Google acquired reMail, we noted that this was a rather strange acquisition for Google, given that reMail is a native iPhone app and that Google is moving away from native apps. If anything, today’s move towards open-sourcing the application clearly shows that Google acquired reMail for the team behind it and not for the application or the technology behind the app (which makes it easier for iPhone users to search their emails).

Open Source and the iPhone

As reMail’s Gabor Cselle notes in his blog post today, open-sourcing this app will hopefully allow other developers to take some of the app’s core features (handling IMAP, attachments etc.) and use it for their own ideas without having to reinvent the wheel. If You are interested in getting in touch with Cselle about using the source code, head over to the reMail Google Group.

Currently, there are only a few open source iPhone applications on the market. The most well-known open source iPhone project is probably the WordPress iPhone app.

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Google just launched the latest developer version of Chrome, which now includes preliminary support for Google’s the W3C’s geolocation API. Google’s Geolocation API allows developers to pinpoint your computer’s location by looking at the WiFi networks around you,

similar to SkyHook‘s technology that is part of Apple’s OSX and iPhone OS. For now, this new feature is still hidden behind a command line toggle and only available in the developer builds for Windows and OSX Leopard (it doesn’t work on Snow Leopard yet).

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To enable these built-in geolocation features, you have to run the browser with “–enable-geolocation.” It’s typical for Google to first hide these features behind a command line toggle before exposing them to a wider group of testers. The Chrome team also notes that the geolocation UI is still incomplete and that Chrome will forget the permissions you set.

Preparing for Chrome OS?

It makes sense for Google to enable geolocation for Chrome, especially given the impending release of the Chrome OS, which will also benefit from these new features. Mozilla already offers a built-in location API for Firefox and with Geosense for Windows, Windows 7 developers can now also make use of Google’s Geolocation API in their native apps.

Location for Every Browser

Thanks to the current efforts by most browser developers, location APIs will soon become ubiquitous and hopefully more developers will make use of them. While a number of mobile apps for the iPhone, for example, now make use of the location feature in the mobile version of Safari, only a small number of browser-based apps are currently aware of your location. While using WiFi location isn’t quite as precise as using a GPS, the precision is usually much better than relying on a user’s IP address.

For more of our thoughts about location as a platform, also have a look at this post: The Era of Location-as-Platform Has Arrived.

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YouTube may be one of the biggest success stories of the Web 2.0 era, but if you are hearing impaired, the site is only of limited value. Starting today, however, Google will begin to offer auto-captioning for all English-language videos on YouTube. Until now, only videos from a select number of YouTube’s partners were captioned using the Google’s automated speech-recognition software.

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As Google notes, there will be over 700 million people who suffer from hearing impairment by 2015. As more and more content on the Web moves towards video, it’s commendable to see that Google is working to make more of this content accessible to its users. Thanks to Google’s translation technology, these captions can also be translated into over 50 different languages.

It will surely take a while before this feature becomes available on all videos. After all, over 20 hours of video are now being uploaded to YouTube every minute. Whenever auto-captioning is available, however, you can simply click on the captions link underneath the video and turn the caption on.

Google notes that its speech-recognition algorithms are obviously not perfect. If you spot a mistake in one of your own videos, however, you can easily download the captions and correct the error.

Here are the current requirements for enabling auto-captioning on your YouTube videos:

• While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken.
• Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can’t be auto-captioned. President Obama’s speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions.
• Auto-captions aren’t perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they’re accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient — our speech recognition technology gets better every day.
• Auto-captions should be available to everyone who’s interested in using them. We’re also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you’re having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers.

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According to Gartner, the worldwide market for mobile devices with touchscreens will grow over 97% this year. Last year, consumers bought 184 million devices with touchscreens. Gartner predicts that this market will surpass 362 million units this year. By 2013, Gartner predicts, touchscreen mobile devices will account for 80% of all sales in North America and Europe. Once the domain of high-end devices, touchscreen are now finding their ways into midrange phones and a growing number of consumers now expects all of their screens to be touch-enabled.

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As Gartner analyst CK Lu notes, a touchscreen alone won’t be enough to convince users to buy a specific phone, however. According to Lu, “Consumers won’t buy a mobile device purely for the touch UI, Touch technology is just an enabler, and ultimately, it is a compelling user experience — which includes good UI design, applications and services — that will make or break a product.” Indeed, Gartner advised manufacturers to double down on their efforts to create good touch-driven UIs. While Gartner doesn’t mention the iPhone explicitly, it is clear that Apple’s popular phone has set the standard for touch-driven UIs and most manufacturers are still struggling to catch up.

Bonus: What Does the Mobile, Touch-Friendly Web Look Like Today?

The mobile web, according to a new report from mobile search engine Taptu, is currently all about shopping and services. Taptu – which specializes in indexing mobile sites – surveyed about 326,000 sites that are optimized for mobile, finger-friendly browsing and found that the largest concentration of these sites falls into Taptu’s “shopping and services” category. In total, Taptu found 83,000 mobile-enabled commerce sites, ranging from mobile shopping assistants to banks and mobile real estate sites.

According to Taptu, mobile shopping and services sites make up close to 25% of all mobile-friendly sites in the company’s index, followed by sites in the “photo and design” category (17.7%). Social sites rank third with 9.2%. Personal blogs only make up 1.5% of Taptu’s index, a number if is easily bested by adult sites, which account for 3% of all mobile-optimized sites.

It’s worth noting that if we combine news and weather sites (3.3%) together with sites about world affairs (8.1%), this category would easily fall into Taptu’s top 3.

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Google PowerMeter is part of a series of efforts by various large and small companies, including Green Goose and Microsoft, to launch better and smarter home energy monitoring services. Today, Google took the next step in its efforts to make PowerMeter a ubiquitous service by launching an API for PowerMeter that allows device manufacturers to create PowerMeter-compatible devices. This, according to Google, will allow hardware manufacturers to integrate “in-home/plug level energy monitoring devices with Google PowerMeter.” Thanks to this, you may soon be able to check how much power your lamp or TV is currently using by simply checking the PowerMeter gadget on iGoogle.

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It’s important to note that this effort is separate from Google’s work with utility companies to provide PowerMeter-compatible data to consumers. This new PowerMeter API is about providing a far more granular per-device or per-plug view of your power consumption. According to Google, the company decided to launch this API “in order to help build the ecosystem of innovative developers working towards making energy information more widely available to consumers.”

How Will this Work in the Real World?

According to Google’s developer guide, consumers who purchase a PowerMeter-compatible device would activate the device by surfing to the device’s built-in HTML server (every PowerMeter device must have one) and configure and activate it. After linking the device to a PowerMeter account – and Google is clearly taking privacy seriously here judging from the instructions – the device will then ping Google every 10 minutes via a secure HTTPS connection to upload its data.

Google and Energy

Google has obviously been very interested in the energy business lately. Just last month, the company got regulatory approval to buy energy in bulk. Google is also using solar panels to power it’s Mountain View, CA headquarters and has invested in a number of green energy projects and companies, including eSolar, a company that plans to develop numerous large solar energy projects around the world.

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The e-book hype reached its apex just before the holiday season. Now seems like a good time to take a closer look at the e-book market, especially given that this business is heading for another disruption once Apple’s iPad launches.

According to the latest stats from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), e-book usage is growing fast, but continues to represent a very small part of the publishing industry’s bottom line. Currently, only about 2% of American book buyers over 13 are active e-book users.

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E-Books Today: PCs, Kindles & iPhones

While 2% is still a very small number, the BISG (which represents numerous large publishing houses) found that e-book usage increased about 25% over the holiday season. Most people still read e-books on their PCs (47%), followed by the Kindle (32%) and the iPhone and iPod Touch (21%). As Michael Mace notes, it’s important to remember that this doesn’t take into account how many e-books these users actually bought. Chances are that Kindle users buy a lot more e-books than those who read e-books on their PCs.

According to the BISG, a slight majority of e-book buyers is men (51% compared to 42% for paper books) and, unsurprisingly, these buyers have a higher than average income.

How Many Kindles has Amazon Sold?

Amazon, sadly, doesn’t give us any hard data about how many Kindles and e-books it has actually sold so far, which makes it rather hard to pinpoint any exact numbers for e-book usage. Based on the BISG’s data, Mace extrapolates that there are currently about 200 million active book buyers in the U.S. – which would mean that Amazon has sold roughly 1.3 million Kindles.

What About the iPad?

While a lot of (digital) ink has been spilled about Apple’s (and the publishing industry’s) pricing structure for e-books on the iPad, the far more interesting question is how publishers will use the iPad (and similar devices) to adapt their content for this new environment. While traditional e-book readers like the Kindle are great at recreating a book-like reading experience, the iPad, with its color screen and fast processor will be able to do a lot more – and readers will expect iPad e-books to be more interactive because of this.

Earlier today, Penguin showed off some of the e-books it plans for the iPad (including DK’s guide to the human body and various travel guides). We can only hope that more publishers will follow Penguin’s lead. We already know that a lot of magazine publishers are planning to launch their own native iPad apps.

It’s interesting to see that Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch are already the Kindle’s closest competitors. As Mace notes, iPhone users are probably less active e-book buyers than Kindle users, but Apple has clearly managed to capture a lot of the e-book mindshare thanks to the third-party e-book apps that are currently available for the iPhone and iPod touch.mindshare thanks to the third-party e-book apps that are currently available for the iPhone and iPod touch.

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According to German law, Germany’s ISPs and phone services had to retain data about every citizen’s phone calls and emails for six months. Today, however, Germany’s Federal Constitution Court suspended this law and ordered that all the data stored to date must be deleted immediately. According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, the court said that it wasn’t sufficiently clear that the data storage was secure enough and what exactly the data would be used for.

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Suspended, But Not Dead

It’s important to note that this isn’t necessarily the end of this law and that the court hasn’t ruled the law unconstitutional – the court only ruled that the implementation of the law was severely flawed. The German constitution, according to the judges, doesn’t disallow saving this information. The European Union issued guidelines for data retention in 2006 that requires all E.U. member states to implement national data retention laws. According to the guidelines, all ISPs and phone carriers have to keep a record of all their customers’ phone calls and emails on a rolling six-month basis. The actual implementation of these guidelines remains up to the E.U. members, however.

For now, the court has suspended the law until it has been amended and its scope has been limited by the German government. The court recommends that the data will be stored by the ISPs and phone companies, but argues that there shouldn’t be a central, government-controlled repository for this data. In addition, the court also recommends that the data should be encrypted.

For ISPs, keeping all these records is a significant burden and many ISPs and phone companies had hoped that the court would rule the law unconstitutional so that they wouldn’t have to store this data anymore.

The next stop for the opponents of this law is the E.U., though it remains to be seen if there is enough support among E.U. countries to fight these guidelines.

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The browser wars are back with a vengeance. In no small part thanks to the efforts of Google Chrome, we have seen a resurgence in browser inovation and a new emphasis on speed over the last year and a half. Today, Opera is launching its newest weapon against Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Billed as the “world’s fastest browser,” Opera 10.50 for Windows – which also sports a new user interface – might just be Opera’s best browser to date. The question, though, is if this new release will be enough to help Opera gain new users and market share.

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For now, Opera has only released the final version of Opera 10.50 for Windows. Mac and Linux versions will follow soon. You can already download beta versions for these systems here.

Currently, Opera commands somewhere between 2% and 3% of the desktop browser market, which, if we look at it from a glass-half-full perspective, means that there is a lot of room to grow for the Norwegian browser developer.

Speed and Features

With this new version, Opera introduces new features, as well as a new JavaScript engine (Carakan) and an improved rendering engine (Presto 2.5). In our own informal tests, Opera managed to best both the latest releases of Chrome and Firefox. For users, however, these artificial benchmarks are only a small part of the user experience and the speed difference between most modern browsers is relatively negligible compared to other bottlenecks in the rendering process.

New features, besides the updated user interface, include better integration with Windows 7 and Vista, an enhanced private browsing mode, visual tabs and improved support for CSS3 and HTML5. Opera now also features an Office 2007-like menu button that replaces the standard menu bar and packs all of the program’s settings and options into a more compact interface.

Just like earlier versions, Opera 10.50 also includes a built-in mail and RSS client, as well as Opera Turbo for faster surfing on slow networks, Opera Unite (an integrated web-servers – see our full review here) and Opera Link, which allows you to synchronize bookmarks, preferences and notes between different machines that use Opera.

Verdict

Without doubt, the biggest draw of Opera 10.50 is its speed, however. The browser feels extremely snappy, though in our tests, Opera 10.50 also used quite a bit of memory. The Opera team also worked hard on improving the user interface, which is now a lot cleaner.

So is this a browser worth switching for? In terms of features, it definitely bests every other major browser on the market, but the absence of a thriving extension and plugin ecosystem will surely hold a lot of people back from even giving it a try. If you are not bound to a certain Firefox or Chrome plugin, however – or if you are using Internet Explorer – Opera 10.50 is definitely worth a try.

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Picnik just announced that it has been been acquired by Google. While the details surrounding the acquisition are still somewhat murky, the Picnik team just announced the acquisition on the company’s blog. Picnik currently has 20 employees and, according to its own data, “millions of visitors every month.” The company offers a free service as well as paid accounts and a number of third-party services, including Box.net and Flickr, use Picnik’s API to offer the company’s services to their customers. According to the company’s announcement, the service will remain online and unchanged for the time being. The price of the acquisition has not been disclosed.

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What Will Happen to Picnik?

For Google, this acquisition would make a lot of sense. After all, with Picasa Web Albums, Google offers one of the most popular online photo sharing sites and while it offers some basic editing features, it doesn’t offer anything close to Picnik’s feature set. Picasa, too, is one of the few Google services that still relies heavily on a desktop client and as Google continues to push its online services, it’s only natural for Google to want to offer a better online photo editor as well. Indeed, according to Google own announcement, the company will work “hard on integration and new features.”

The Picnik team will move to Google’s Seattle offices and judging from the announcement, there will be no changes in the company’s management and engineering time.

What about Picnik’s Relationship with Flickr?

Picnik has a close partnership with Yahoo’s Flickr, where it is the default photo editor. It will be interesting to see if Flickr plans to make any changes to this agreement in the near future. In today’s announcement, Google notes that it plans to continue to support “all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.”

We contacted Yahoo and Flickr for a statement, but all we got so far was “no comment.”

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Location-based services are definitely a hot topic right now, but sadly, Windows 7 doesn’t offer an easy to use, built-in platform for detecting a computer’s location. Due to this, the number of location-aware and location-enhanced applications for Windows 7 remains extremely low. Thanks to Geosense for Windows, however, which was developed by Rafael Rivera and Long Zheng and released today, it has now become a lot easier for Windows 7 developers to access location data and use it in their apps.

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Windows 7: Location API but No Default Vendor

While Windows 7 offers a built-in location API, Microsoft decided against integrating a default geolocation provider. Due to this, implementing location-aware features on Windows is a lot harder than integrating similar features on OSX or most mobile platforms and this API remains mostly unused. Mac and iPhone developers have long been able to use SkyHook‘s built-in, system-level services to triangulate a Mac’s position based on local WiFi hotspots. Mozilla, too, offers built-in support for Google Location Services in the latest release of Firefox and a few sites are already making good use of this service.

How Geosense for Windows Works

Geosense for Windows was developed on top of the Windows Sensors and Location Platform and uses Google Location Services for WiFi and IP triangulation. Geosense for Windows does not support built-in or external GPS units, but the developers are looking into offering support for other location services like Skyhook and Navizon. The team is also looking at Google’s Location Services for cell networks, which can use a computer’s built-in wireless broadband hardware to triangulate location data based on the location of nearby cell towers.

Will this Kickstart the Development of Location-Aware Apps for Windows 7?

Only a very small number of programs currently supports location data on Windows 7. Rivera has developed a location-enabled Google Maps client for Windows 7 (you can download it from the Geosense homepage). The Sidebar Weather gadget and MahTweets can also access location data. Hopefully, we will soon see Windows twitter clients and other services (FourSquare for Windows?) that will hook into this service. Hopefully, Geosense for Windows will kickstart the development of native location-aware apps on the Windows platform in the near future.

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