News
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Lessons Worth Sharing: TED Launches New Video Series for High School Students and Teachers
TED, the organization behind the popular conference series with the same name, just launched a new initiative that aims to bring TED-like video content to high school [...]
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YouTube Opens its Live Streaming Service to Nonprofits
Google continues the slow roll-out of live streaming on YouTube. Until now, YouTube mostly worked with select partners and a number of sports leagues to stream events [...]
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Google’s Vic Gundotra: Read/Write API for Google+ Not Coming Anytime Soon
At the annual SxSW conference in Austin today, Google+'s spiritual father and Google's senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra took the stage for a fireside chat [...]
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Study: Two-Thirds of Search Engine Users Don’t Want Personalized Results
According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, most Internet users are, overall, quite happy with the results they find with their [...]
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Path 2.1 Launches With Smarter Camera, Shazam-Like Music Match & Support for Nike+
Path, the up-and-coming private social network, had a couple of rough days last month because it uploaded its users' address books to its servers without their explicit [...]
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Opinion
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As Music Gets More Social, is Apple Getting Left Behind?
When I opened Spotify on my desktop this morning, a pop-up informed me that “Spotify Loves Social” and that I should discover “great music with [my] friends.” To get started doing just that, all I had to do was click “Get Started.” Spotify also conveniently pre-checked the opt-in to Facebook’s new Open Graph feature. I’m not sure most mainstream users will understand that opting in to the pre-checked Open Graph opt-in means that all their listening data will not just be forwarded to Facebook, but that their friends will likely see everything they play on the Facebook ticker as well. As Spotify now forces its users to have a Facebook account, chances are quite a few people will sign up for this “service” unwittingly.
No matter what you think about this, though, it’s clear that the future of music is social. Facebook has partnered with everybody who is anything in this business, including Spotify, Slacker, turntable.fm, iHeartRadio, MOG, SoundCloud and Rhapsody. The one exception: Apple.
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Sorry Facebook, But That Stuff I Share on Your Site is Not the “Story of My Life”
[rant] Facebook’s announcements today represent nothing short of a major paradigm shift of how it wants its users to interact with its service and each other. Sure, [...]
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Want to Join Our Private Beta? Pay Up
A small but growing group of startups now makes its beta testers pay to join their private betas. “Paid beta” used to be a derogatory term for software that was shipped too early and with too many bugs. Now, however, companies like Mightybell and Cabana have decided to use small payments as a way to keep their beta programs small and focused.
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About Time: Gmail, Google Calendar and Docs Get Offline Access
Google just announced that it is finally launching offline access to Gmail, Google Calendar and Docs. Once upon a time, Google allowed users to access their data offline through Gears, but the company shelved this effort in xxx and never replaced it. Now, Chrome users can install a new plugin from Google that will give them offline access to their Gmail emails once again and Docs and Calendar will use HTML5′s ability to cache content on a local machine without the need to install a plugin.
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