Change.org: 40M users and still not a server in sight. Change.org, the platform behind all those online petitions — the justice for Trayvon Martin petition is one recent example — uses a ton of technology, just not a lot of it in-house. Change.org’s Tom Hughes-Croucher The company now claims it serves 40 million users, up from 20 million from a year ago and 25 million last January, and it still doesn’t have a server in sight.
Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. “We have Meraki running our office internet in one server closet,” says CTO Tom Hughes-Croucher, a Yahoo and Joyent veteran, who’s been on the job for about 8 months. Now, that 40 million number is highly variable — it’s not like all of those people “live” on change.org — but it’s still impressive and the company says it supports 20 million unique visitors monthly and adds 3 million users a month. Now, the organization which fields 185 people worldwide (but won’t disclose how many serve an IT function) is an extreme example of a born-and-bred-in-the-cloud company. Leaflet - a JavaScript library for mobile-friendly maps.
Hashtags. Other Spaces for Spatial Hypertext | Kolb. 1. Spatial Hypertext Evolution In early hypertext programs such as Intermedia and Note Cards, a visual display showed the items linked to the current node. Each item appeared as a box linked to other boxes. The items were not independently movable, though selecting one might re-center the display and show more linked nodes. Fig. 1: A screen from Note Cards showing both a global and a local link map. A new kind of spatial representation appeared in Storyspace, where the boxes representing text nodes could be moved about independently, forming spatial groupings that might or might not correspond to the link structure shown by lines connecting the boxes. Fig. 2: A Storyspace map showing movable boxes connected by link arrows.
A further step was made by Aquanet and its descendants (VIKI, VKB). Fig. 3: A VKB screen showing spatial groupings highlighted by the spatial parser. The Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB) is a hypertext information collection system. 2. 3. 4. However, these are other spaces. Loc.alize.us - Explore your world through everyone's eyes. Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps? How do machines understand what place you're talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood?
With geocoding technology, that's how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn't a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder available on the market. Steve Coast, the man who lead the creation of Open Street Map, has launched a new project to create what he believes is just what the world of location-based services needs in order to grow to meet its potential. Google Maps says you can only use its geocoder to display data on maps but sometimes developers want to use geo data for other purposes, like content filtering. This has been tried before, see for example GeoCommons, but the OpenGeocoder approach is different.
The way OpenGeocoder works is that users can search for any place they like, by any name they like. The approach is focused largely on simplicity. I hope it does. Yevvo For iPhone Debuts A New Take On Live Broadcasting. Newly launched mobile broadcasting app Yevvo has a different idea about how live mobile video apps should work. Instead of focusing only on a social model where users find and follow other people on the service, Yevvo users can also follow places in the real world, as well as events. Beyond its own walls, the app mainly targets the Twitter ecosystem and is designed to be push-button simple. One tap and slide and your entire Twitter network is alerted that you are live and on-air. Yevvo’s focus is just on live video for now. Currently, only the broadcaster can save the video to his or her iPhone library when the video ends, but more options will be added in the future. Today, there are, of course, a number of tools for recording and sharing live video.
Services like Ustream, Livestream, Justin.tv, and Microsoft/Skype-acquired Qik led the live broadcasting spaces for years, targeting a range of end users from the everyday Joe and Jill up to professional broadcasters and businesses. Early Innovations | PhotoLinker 3.0. Do Instagram users care about news? Lerer-led NowThis News wants to find out. Instagram is known for showing us pictures of people’s food or beautiful sunsets, as well as newsworthy events as captured by journalists and citizens around the world. But a new mobile video site is testing whether Instagram users might also be interested in consuming video news through the app — short explanatory videos about events like the Pakistani election and U.S. drone legislation – all narrated by bouncy VJs. NowThis News is the brainchild of Huffington Post founder and VC Ken Lerer, former HuffPo CEO and Softbank Capital VC Eric Hippeau, Oak Investment Partners Managing Partner Fred Harman, and TV veteran Brian Bedol.
Its C-Suite has former execs from CNN, Vice, Washington Post and NBC Universal, and it has raised nearly $10 million over two years, with both Lerer Ventures and Softbank Capital contributing funds. The 40-person company (roughly equally mixed between production and business) churns 18 to 25, mostly minute-long, videos a day. Google’s Project Loon ‘internet balloon’ takes flight in California. In an effort to bring WiFi and internet access to many parts of the developing world, Google has a new initiative called Project Loon. In what many are calling internet balloons or WiFi blimps Google will be delivering internet using these WiFi-equipped balloons and floating them over emerging markets. They've been testing in parts of Africa and New Zealand, but this week took flight in California too. We first mentioned this project back in May, and many were extremely interested and excited about the potential, but then there will always be skeptics.
In this case it is Bill Gates, who according to ABC News is bashing Google for trying to deliver internet when they should be focusing on fighting diseases like Malaria and AIDS instead. While we agree there are many issues that need to be focused on, lets not downplay the fact that Google's trying to offer a service that has since never been available to many of these regions. SOURCE: Google+ Gpicsync - Automatically geocode pictures from your camera and a GPS track log. ( French Translation ) ( GettingStarted ) ( ScreenShots ) January 30th 2014 : New version 1.32 beta available (see ChangeLog) Missing a dll? (see TroubleShooting) GPicSync automatically inserts location in your photos metadata so they can also be used with any 'geocode aware' application like Picasa/Google Earth, Flickr, loc.alize.us, etc.
Features: Ready to geocode your photos? GPicSync stands for G:GPS Pic:Pictures Sync:Synchronization and is a Free and Open Source tool. Few examples of pictures geolocalized with GPicSync: And also GeolocalizedExamples form users. Thanks for all the contribution/feedback and for the translations! GPicSync also use two great Free Software tools in his back-end: EXIFTool and GPSbabel. I began developing GPicSync as I didn't find any Open Source geocoding software with a graphical interface. Trapit. Yevvo For iPhone Debuts A New Take On Live Broadcasting. The Future Of Google’s Plan To Bring The Entire World Internet With Balloons. The history of Google’s moonshot project to provide global Internet access using high-altitude balloons goes back nearly 1800 years, according to Google[x] chief technical architect Rich Devaul. That’s when, according to legend, a Chinese general sent a floating lantern into the sky to call for more troops.
Devaul first began to consider how to blanket the world with balloon-based wireless Internet closer to a decade ago, when he was at the MIT Media Lab. “I got as far as a napkin sketch,” Devaul says. “No balloons were inflated at that time.” The fundamental insight that would fuel the now (literally) full-blown project at Google[x] was of the “fast, cheap and out of control” variety. “Many people had proposed using either tethered balloons or stratospheric airships,” Devaul says. “I decided that maybe that’s not the right problem to solve.” “Many of our flights did really exactly what we thought they would do,” says Devaul. Take Ibis-74.