Best of Today (6/28)
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-50033" title="5246213670_7dd9620409_z" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2011/06/5246213670_7dd9620409_z.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="480" /> In 2010, the U.S. military had a problem. It had bought over 59,000 microchips destined for installation in everything from missile defense systems to gadgets that tell friend from foe.
Fishy Chips: Spies Want to Hack-Proof Circuits | Danger Room
Today was a religious day for social media. Lady Gaga joined Tumblr with a blog called Amen†Fashion. The Pope joined Twitter, sent his first tweet using an iPad, uploaded a video of him tweeting on an iPad, and managed (so far) not to get a single negative YouTube comment about it. Nice try, Lady Gaga. The Pope wins today. Although he may have had some divine help in that first tweet : "Dear Friends, I just launched http://t.co/fVHpS9y Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ!
Watch the Pope Send His First Tweet on an iPad
The story of WakeMate could be viewed as a warning to all tech-savvy entrepreneurs out there: building a hardware device is much more difficult than most web applications. The promise of WakeMate is compelling — it sells a $60 wristband that tracks your movements during the night, syncs to your smartphone, and wakes you up in the morning when you’re in the lightest stage of sleep, thereby reducing grogginess (hopefully). But the going hasn’t been easy. The company trudged through a year of delays , faulty units , and upset customers before it finally started shipping in December, only to run into another issue: customers who had WakeMate units were having issues with the accompanying smartphone applications, which weren’t properly syncing.
WakeMate 2.0: Helping You Kiss Those Groggy Mornings Goodbye. For Real, This Time.
Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games - Philip Bump - Technology
Text-based adventures were written as much as they were designed, employing tantalizing adjectives to create a sense of the world In my mind, the house is clapboard, with a black, precisely shingled roof and shutters in a bit of disrepair. The sky is always an intangible, faded blue, and the forest surrounding the clearing is dark green. In other words, it's always summer -- and hot, since I imagine the house surrounded by long, tan, untrampled grass. The front door is boarded -- I pictured some plywood, though I didn't think about it much. There's the mailbox: a standard issue, gunmetal-gray, Quonset-shaped affair, slightly askew on its pole.
Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web
Update : For our international readers, this post is also available in French , German , Italian , Japanese , Portuguese , Russian and Spanish . - Ed. Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper or a cheer, we connect with others every single day. Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online.
Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social | Epicenter
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-37309" title="gplus_stream" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/business/2011/06/gplus_stream.jpg" alt="" width="660" height="383" /> Google, the world’s largest search company, is formally making its pitch to become a major force in social networking. The product it announced Tuesday is called Google+, and observers might wonder whether it’s simply one more social effort by a company that’s had a lousy track record in that field to date.
I've been to so many big earth-shaking events from BigTechCo's -- today's Google thing is making me yawn, while my eyes glaze over in boredom. Here's how products like this are conceived: 1. We need to kill Facebook. 2. What will we do.
Google Yawn
During my corporate days, my team attended several leadership workshops led by John Maxwell .
Hey Google…F*** Social.
Tech blogs not sold on Google's 'Facebook clone'
On Tuesday the search giant unveiled a social networking "project" called Google+. Google unveils Google+, a new social network Critics say it's just like Facebook, but less likely to succeed Some blogs say we should hold judgment until people have a chance to use Google+ Google has given out only limited invitations to the online network so far (CNN) -- There's an old joke in the tech world: Google is socially awkward.
Microsoft launches Office 365: Here's what you need to know
If you're a current Microsoft cloud customer -- or even someone just kicking the tires of Microsoft's hosted cloud bundle -- here's what you need to know about Office 365, which Microsoft launched on June 28. Office 365 is not Office in the cloud , even though it does include Office Web Apps, the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Office 365 is a Microsoft-hosted suite of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online -- plus an optional subscription-based version of Office 2010 Professional Plus that runs locally on PCs. The Microsoft-hosted versions of these cloud apps offer subsets of their on-premises server counterparts (Exchange, SharePoint and Lync servers), in terms of features and functionality. Office 365 replaces the company's Business Productivity Suite (BPOS), Office Live Small Business and Live@edu offerings.By tim, on June 28th, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter Today is launch day for Microsoft’s Office 365 , which offers use of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync hosted by Microsoft at commodity prices – not quite as low as $50 per user per year for Google Apps , but low enough that it is likely to be a substantial saving for most customers, versus the cost of installing, maintaining and backing up on-premise versions of the same software. The debate about the merits of Office 365 versus Google Apps is a fascinating one, but the reality is that many organisations are not ready to give up Word and Excel, Outlook and Active Directory. Why? They are too deeply invested in Microsoft’s platform, and depend on home-grown and/or third-party applications that run on it.