Private: some search engines make money by not tracking users. In the United States, two out of every three searches go through Google, which serves up a total of three billion search queries per day. "Googling" has become so ubiquitous that the company has become a verb in English (and in other languages, too). Given that most of us use Google several times a day and may also use it to send e-mail, to plan our calendar, and to make phone calls, questions commonly arise about how all of that data is used. Google has said that it needs access to such large amounts of data as a way to “make it useful” and to sell personalized ads against it—and to profit substantially in the process. However, a March 2012 study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that two-thirds of Americans view a personalized search as a “bad thing,” with 73 percent of those surveyed saying that they were “not OK” with personalized searches on privacy grounds.
One of the top privacy search engines has a name reminiscent of a children’s game: DuckDuckGo. Introducing Tello -- a Faster Way to Solve Customer Service Issues. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Tello Quick Pitch: Review and talk to businesses about your experience from your smartphone or tablet Genius Idea: Tello’s SaaS platform and smartphone app allow businesses to interact with customers instantly to receive compliments or to solve customer service issues. Waiting on hold for an hour to chat with a customer service representative can be frustrating.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just text message an airline — or any other business — when you need help? Tello, a Palo Alto start-up, has created a SaaS and mobile application to help customers communicate with businesses easier and faster. Joe Beninato, Tello founder and CEO, created the service so consumers could give feedback in real-time to large retailers, airlines, hotels, small businesses and restaurants. Location-Based App Maps Nearby Bars, Food and Adventure. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Roamz Quick Pitch: Roamz is a discovery mobile application that aims to help locals and travelers alike find a region's hidden gems. Genius Idea: Pulling real-time data and updates from Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and the application's own data stream to show you what people are doing close by.
Imagine traveling to a foreign place for the first time and knowing your way around. The location-based app aggregates data from social networks into its "Nearby" feed. Roamz curates info about hole-in-the-wall restaurants, little-known theaters, galleries and sights off the beaten path and puts them on an easy-to-read display.
Even with all the tools we have, it can be difficult to really know what's going on around you, Roamz CEO Jonathan Barouch tells Mashable. Gore, Parker urge Web to 'Occupy Democracy' Former Vice President Al Gore and Napster co-founder Sean Parker speak during South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Al Gore: 'Our democracy is being hacked' and the Web can helpGore and Napster founder Sean Parker spoke at South by Southwest InteractiveBoth say money is too prevalent in politics and the Web needs to balance thatParker founded Votizen to help turn social networks into political activism Austin, Texas (CNN) -- When speaking to the tech-savvy attendees of South by Southwest Interactive, it doesn't hurt to lead with a Web reference -- even if you're the former vice president.
"Our democracy has been hacked," said Al Gore. "It no longer works, in the main, to serve the interests of our people. " Gore joined Sean Parker, the mind behind Napster and founding president of Facebook, on a two-man panel at the digital festival Monday during which both decried the influence of money in politics and pointed to the Internet as the answer. Prezi - The Zooming Presentation Editor. Manage (and make cash with?) your data online. Personal lets users store data from multiple sites and then decide whom, if anyone, they want to share it with. New companies seek to help Web users take better control of their personal dataOne company, Personal, says users could one day trade data for perks, cashSingly offers data lockers that developers will use for personalized appsGoogle, Facebook and others have made billions by harnessing user data (CNN) -- It's a truth of the modern digital age: If you're using a Web service for free, you're not the customer.
You're probably the product. The sites we visit, the videos we watch, the purchases we make and the items we reward with a Facebook "like" or a Google "+1" -- all of that, and more, eventually melds together into a data set that lets many of the world's most popular Web companies get to know us better. And they're using it to make billions of dollars.
But what if Web users could reclaim their online data and benefit, or maybe even profit, from it? Intriguing, maybe.
New Photo App Erases the Photobomb. Engag.io Is the 1 Inbox To Rule Them All. Engag.io launches to the public today. Imagine a Gmail inbox (in a good way), but for all your online conversations. That’s Engag.io. But on top of that simple idea, Engag.io has features no one else provides for finding, following and expanding online conversations. If you’re active in lots of places on the social Web, Engag.io will keep you sane. A Gmail inbox for the whole social Web is what Fred Wilson, one of founder William Mougayar’s first backers, asked him to build. Why Is Engag.io the One? Engag.io is hardly the only unified inbox idea out there.
In fact, Engag.io is so helpful, it has given me a more realistic picture of my online activity than the one I had in my head. It’s organized to feel like it does less than other social media management tools, and that’s a good thing. Conversations Each conversation thread gets its own row, like an email thread in Gmail. You can reply to messages in the correct channels from within Engag.io. Contacts Discovery.
'This Message Will Self-Destruct': One Shar.es Erases Data After Transmission. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: OneShar.es Quick Pitch: OneShar.es lets you send confidential data that automatically deletes after the recipient views it once. Genius Idea: Allows your sensitive data from becoming one of the many "read" emails in a recipient's inbox, which could potentially be accessed if his or her smartphone is lost or stolen. Ever wonder if the private emails you send to trusted friends and acquaintances are deleted or if that information lingers in their inboxes?
The web tool allows people to easily share private information, whether its via your mobile device (apps for iOS and Android) or your browser window. "There’s a lot of trust placed with people with whom we share private information," says Jerry Thompson, co-founder and CTO. What do you think about OneShar.es? How To Find That 1 Thing You Lost Online. Argh! What was that video called? Was that on Twitter or Facebook? Where did I save that article? Who was it who made that joke about the Edsel?
Do you find yourself asking these questions often? As we get wrapped up in more and more Web services, things tend to get disorganized. We’ve got inboxes over here, inboxes over there, boards here, there, tweets, docs, posts and shares. Greplin: For Finding Your Stuff Greplin is the way I find that one online thing I’m looking for. It can search Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Contacts (as well as the professional Google Apps versions). Some of them you have to unlock by inviting friends. Here’s Greplin in action: Yes, you’re reading that right. Greplin’s premium service is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year.
What About Sensitive Stuff Like Logins & Passwords? User names, passwords, ID and credit card numbers are hard to remember, too, and we need to use them often online. I’ve taken it for a spin. Career of the Future: Data Scientist [INFOGRAPHIC] Want a job where the talent is scarce — and likely to remain that way for at least the next five years?
Become a data scientist. That, at least, is the conclusion of a global survey of the number-crunching professionals by IT service company EMC. Some 63% of data scientists say the profession is going to be undermanned for the foreseeable future — and half of those see it as a serious shortage. In particular, the explosive growth of sensors — the so-called "physical Internet" — will provide organizations with an unprecedented wealth of data. But not all of them will have the capacity to turn that raw data into anything useful. "Data is the new oil," says Andreas Weigend, Head of the Social Data Lab at Stanford and the former Chief Scientist at Amazon, in a statement. Check out the rest of the survey data in the detailed inforgraphic below — and let us know in the comments if this is a career you'd like to pursue.
3 New Tools for Promoting Your Interests. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Each weekend, Mashable selects startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products. This week we focused on three companies creating new ways to promote your interests. SeeJoeRock is a network for musicians and music industry professionals to connect.
SeeJoeRock: A Musician's Free Community Quick Pitch: SeeJoeRock is a free community for musicians. Genius Idea: Bridges the gap between unsigned musicians and professionals in the music industry. Mashable's Take: Described at the "eHarmony for musicians," SeeJoeRock is a network for unsigned musicians and music industry professionals to connect. Unsigned, independent musicians and bands can create their own profiles and include bios, genre, talents, levels of experience and instruments played. Image courtesy of Flickr, JPott. Citelighter Is Like a Highlighter for the Internet. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.
If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Citelighter Quick Pitch: Citelighter keeps information from multiple web sources in one place. Genius Idea: Making it easy to compile notes — and citations — from multiple web pages. For better or worse, students use the Internet for research. Those in a 2011 ethnographic study, for instance, referred to Google more than any other source when discussing their research habits. The logistical problem with this online research (aside from potential academic ones) is the difficulty of preserving bibliography information while cruising from link to link. Citelighter attempts to solve this conundrum by giving students a note-collecting toolbar that sticks with them as they navigate the web. Citelighter is simple and easy to use.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark. Use YouTube As a Music Player With Tubalr. Chances are you've already used YouTube as a music player. But how much fun was that? You had to return to the page every time a song ended, search for the next one and then load often-crude comments and clutter along with your song. A 23-year-old software developer in Atlanta has fixed the YouTube listening experience with a simple app called Tubalr.
It searches YouTube for the top songs from a particular artist and arranges them in a continuous playlist. If you'd like to mix it up, a "similar" option searches related artists on Last.fm and delivers their top videos on YouTube to your playlist. When you search the same band twice, it rearranges the playlist so you don't get bored. "I was surfing YouTube and found some amazing HD music videos," says creator Cody Stewart, "and I thought it would be a cool idea to play those back to back without having all the other stuff I didn't find interesting — mainly the 10,000s of comments about cats and dogs. " About ifttt. Easy-to-Use Mashup Tool IFTTT Gets Betaworks Backing.
Point and click web mashup startup ifttt ("if this then that") has raised financing from cutting-edge tech incubator Betaworks. News of the funding came to us via NeuVC's bot watching the firm's portfolio page, which is fitting given the nature of the startup. ifttt allows anyone to set up a chain of conditional actions between a wide variety of web services, like "If I post a photo to Flickr, save it to my Dropbox. " The company calls these "recipes.
" We wrote about the service when it launched to the public in September. Ifttt was started by Linden Tibbets, a computer scientist formerly at design powerhouse IDEO, film artist Alexander Tibbets and designer Jesse Tane, also formerly of IDEO. Here's how the startup introduced itself at launch: "We began with the theory that as our digital tools became more domain specific and easier to use, there would be vast amounts of creative potential in how any two tools might be used in tandem.
'Is It Old?' Decides If Links You Share Are Dead, OK or Mad Fresh. Ever wonder whether that link you want to share with friends is still in its prime? Sure you have. And now a "mad fresh" website — Is It Old? — has swooped in to rescue you from embarrassingly distributing old content. Is It Old? Uses open API to analyze how many times a link has been posted on Twitter and how far back it was first shared. The service then creates a hidden numbered value and spits out a worded conversion on a scale of "Dead" to "Mad Fresh!
" (See gallery below). "Internet moves at the speed of light — what is old by Internet standards is very different to what's old in the real world," Is It Old? To use the service, you just paste a link into the site's submission. Although the site can help you determine how long a link has been around, it doesn't necessarily mean the newer the link, the better.
Give it a shot or flip through this gallery to see the designations. The Life of Links: An Interview With the Maker of Kippt. The word "bookmark," referring to a saved Web link, is starting to sound old. "Bookmark" has this connotation of turn-of-the-century Web browsers, when there weren't Web-based services for saving things. Your local bookmarks folder was where you kept links you wanted to go back to.
These days, we're browsing on multiple devices, and links aren't necessarily "sites," "pages" or "articles" anymore. Links can point to all kinds of things. ReadWriteWeb: How did you decide on the features of Kippt, and how do you distinguish it from other bookmarking services? Jori Lallo: "We didn't actually plan to build a bookmarking service. "We both bought iPads right when they came out, both me and [Kippt designer] Karri [Saarinen]. "It got pretty okay traction for a hack project. Beyond the Chore of Tagging "We both had been opposed to the traditional tagging. "I've found that just plain folders actually work pretty well.
What's Wrong With Bookmarking "My girlfriend actually uses Kippt in this way.
Tiny Gadget Hooks You Up With Like-Minded People Nearby. Never Fill Out a Form Again? Personal Seeks to Be the Data Vault for Your Private Information. 8 Killer Web Form Builders for Your Site. Comunitee Wants To Simplify How You Read Your Socially Curated News. How To Get My Attention. My Social Strand Turns Your Facebook Profile Into an Infographic. Startup Pulls Social Media Chatter Onto Publisher Comments. ThinkUp Reaches 1.0: Own Your Social Network Data. Bottlenose 2.0 Is a 6th Sense for the Social Web.