40 Things You Need to Watch in 2011. If the popular misreading of Mayan mythology is correct, we have fewer than two more years left on this Earth. That leaves precious little time for the tech industry to develop and perfect of all the cool technologies that sci-fi authors have dreamed up over the years. Still, while a December 2012 apocalypse may spell doom for the commercial viability of hovercars, it doesn't mean that the next couple of years in tech will be dull — quite the contrary. 2011 is already shaping up to be a banner year for tech and web innovation. Below is a list of over 40 websites, apps, companies, gadgets and technologies that the editors of Mashable think that you should keep an eye on over the coming year.
None of them let you zoom through the air over traffic, but they're definitely all worth a look. Be sure to click through to each article to see our full write ups on individual entries, and let us know in the comments what you're looking out for in 2011. 10 Websites to Watch 10 Apps to Watch. 6 Free Chrome Apps and Extensions for Small Businesses. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Google recently launched its Chrome Webstore for dedicated applications and extensions. Although the store is still in its early stages, there is already a wealth of choice for any small business owner. This post highlights six noteworthy apps and extensions ranging from note-taking to project management.
For small businesses with limited budgets, these resources can aid in productivity and time-management and let you concentrate on the more important aspects of your business. Let us know in the comments below about any additional Chrome apps or extensions you would recommend. 1. Google Shortcuts This extension brings all the Google services to your browser in a space-saving pop-up next to your address bar. The support for Google Apps is what makes this really stand out from the crowd of Google-related extensions. 2.
5 Free Annotation and Collaboration Tools. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Specific, contextual feedback is crucial for teams collaborating online, which is why it's so important to make receiving it as fast, efficient and easy as possible. Asking for feedback can be tedious and is often done out of context, for example, via e-mail. However there are numerous tools available to make the task of gathering and giving feedback for web projects simpler and swifter. This article is interested in those that focus on annotation and are available freely to the widest possible audience.
Here are five of the best free tools to annotate and collaborate on the web. If you’re partial to a particular tool available, let us know in the comments. 1. MarkUp lets you express your thoughts and ideas quickly and easily on any webpage. 2. 3. 4. 5. Are you currently using any of these tools? Tony Vincent's Learning in Hand - Blog - Recommended iOS Apps for 2010. Trunk.ly | Home. Google Demo Slam: Epic Docs Animation. The 70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet. Back in April, we looked at an ambitious European plan to simulate the entire planet. The idea is to exploit the huge amounts of data generated by financial markets, health records, social media and climate monitoring to model the planet’s climate, societies and economy. The vision is that a system like this can help to understand and predict crises before they occur so that governments can take appropriate measures in advance.
There are numerous challenges here. Nobody yet has the computing power necessary for such a task, neither are there models that will can accurately model even much smaller systems. But before any of that is possible, researchers must gather the economic, social and technological data needed to feed this machine. Today, we get a grand tour of this challenge from Dirk Helbing and Stefano Balietti at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. These and other pursuits are now producing massive amounts of data, many of which are freely available on the web. 2 Impressive Alternatives To Animoto That Will Help You Make Slick Home Videos. While Animoto is a stellar (and free!) Service that simplifies the process of making professional-quality home videos from your pictures, it isn’t the only one.
With these next products, you will soon be on your way to creating some stunning videos in a few clicks. Flixtime Flixtime is a slick video-making web app that will take your pictures and effectively creates a “flix in a flash”, as its motto says. After you create an account, you can upload your pictures, video clips (in .AVI, .FLV, .WMV, .MP4, .MOV) and music, or select some from the Media Lounge, which is Flixtime’s library of stock images from Fotolia (which contains an enormous collection of royalty-free photos) and the Music Lounge, which features songs for use from the stock music community, AudioMicro. You can also add a cover image for your clip and text slides, which you can freely move around to fit whichever photo it’s for. While Flixtime is pretty nice overall, there seems to not be any additional video styles.