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We all know the Mobile web is exploding in popularity. Opera Mini, Opera’s mobile browser, grew its monthly users by 11 percent to nearly 40 million users in October from 32 million users in August. In terms of page views, Opera Mini delivered 17.2 billion last month, a 238 percent annual increase, indicating that mobile web usage is growing fast. Since September’s report, page-views have gone up by nearly 15 percent.
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Woot, the popular bargain site that offers one good (sometimes great) deal a day, has just launched a new portal at deals.Woot. The new site is a fairly major departure for Woot, which up until now has been driven by product selections from a team of Woot employees (aside from the main Woot.com site, which is often tech/geek focused, there are special subsites for shirts, wine, and a handful of others). Unlike these sites, Deals.Woot is run by its users — it’s essentially a Digg for bargains.
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Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. have been very vocal about their distaste for Google and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts. Murdoch keeps threatening to stop letting Google index the WSJ.com and his other media sites, and wants other news sites to join him in this self-imposed silence. The folks at Microsoft’s Bing think this is a great idea.
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One of the best things about Twitter is the way that it allows content and information to spread quickly across the network from person-to-person. This happened for two reasons: 1. because Twitter is a one-to-many communications platform and 2. because it allows for content to be easily repeated. In fact, the latter led to what we call the “retweet.” It’s safe to say that the founders of Twitter did not initially envision this as a use for their platform, but the retweet convention organized itself organically and was embraced by third-party apps.
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The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself).
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Remember the flurry of new features Bing rolled out last week?  Bing announced Wolfram Alpha results for nutrition searches, more in-depth weather results, enhanced hover previews, better maps, and turned MSN Video into Bing Videos. Well, it turns out it is also quietly launched another feature which highlights the latest posts from news sites. If you do a search for “TechCrunch” or “New York Times,” for instance, underneath the summary information and deep links there are the three latest headlines under “Latest posts.
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About two weeks after debuting the latest beta build of Opera Mobile for Nokia and other Symbian/S60 smartphones, Norwegian software maker Opera is bringing the latest beta version of its custom mobile browser application to Windows Mobile-powered devices. Microsoft’s operating system for mobiles is taking quite a hit lately, having lost one third of its smartphone market share since 2008 according to research firm Gartner.
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Adobe’s AIR platform has been a major boon to bringing Internet applications to the desktop across all of the major operating systems. TweetDeck, Seesmic, and an array of other popular social apps run on the platform. While AIR has been around since 2007, it’s never received an update like this one. Today, Adobe announced the beta release of AIR 2.0, the next iteration of the AIR platform. AIR 2.0 beta offers a lot of new features, most of them ones that users won’t notice such as improved IPv6 support and global error handling.
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President Barack Obama has one of the most popular Twitter accounts with over 2.6 million followers. It should be no real surprise that most of the time it’s not him tweeting from it, instead its various people within the White House communication team that use the account to send out information. And now that he is the President, certainly there are some security concerns with him using something like Twitter.
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Web-based doctor appointment-setting service ZocDoc has noticed an amazing increase of 6250% in Swine Flu-related appointments over flu-related appointments last year (the numbers have been normalized against time for the increased volume). There has been an almost 14x increase in swine flu activity since September. Because of the massively increased demand, ZocDoc recently added “Swine Flu Shot” as a reason for the visit that patients can specify when searching for a doctor. “We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of flu-related appointments.
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