Webware

"We're doing to service industries what China did to manufacturing," CloudCrowd CEO Alex Edelstein tells me.

That's not exactly a warm and fuzzy concept for a journalist, as the particular service industries that CloudCrowd affects are in the writing and editing space. CloudCrowd collects tasks from clients--currently translation and proofreading jobs--via its Serv.io site, and then distributes them to waiting workers via a Facebook app.

Unlike the content farm Demand Media, where a computer assigns writing jobs to waiting workers based on popular search engine queries, CloudCrowd creates work when paying customers ask for it, … Read more

With its own news outlet cut off in Egypt, Al Jazeera is urging the country's citizens to use blogs, social media, eyewitness accounts, and videos to tell the world what's going as the protests against President Hosni Mubarak continue, according to the Associated Press.

Yesterday, the Arab news network's Cairo office was closed down and its broadcast signal cut off to some parts of the Middle East following complaints by Egyptian authorities that Al Jazeera's 24-hour coverage of the uprising was slanted toward the protesters and as such could incite more unrest.

Along with the office'… Read more

Dodge's Challenger is a modern muscle car. The Challenger explosion 25 years ago was a tragic moment. Other than the name they don't have much in common, but for several hours Friday morning, Google's AdWords system considered them linked.

That's just one example of a weak spot in Google's famous AdWords system, which turned an interesting Stanford science project into the world's most powerful Internet company. Simply put, it takes some time for the AdWords system to determine whether an ad triggered by a search query is truly relevant to that query, meaning that … Read more

This afternoon, an e-mail popped into my inbox that--at first glance--looked ripe for immediate deletion. The word "Wal-Mart" in the subject was what set me off. But in that split second before my finger went down to send the message into oblivion, something else caught my eye. And, well, I'll let the e-mail do the talking:

Coming upon this note today--in January 2011--made me chuckle, sigh, and shake my head all in the span of about 30 seconds. Really, it's quite depressing to be reminded that there are still people out there who are stuck dealing … Read more

Home Dash is a new add-on from Mozilla Labs' Prospector project that re-imagines the Firefox interface for Firefox 4 on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It removes nearly all defining features from the interface in an attempt to emphasize the contents of the Web page you're viewing. Gone are the status bar, bookmark bar, navigation buttons and URL bar, leaving behind only the dedicated Firefox 4 menu button from the upper left of the interface.

All those components get replaced with a translucent Firefox logo below the menu button. Click the logo or use the Control + T hot … Read more

Mobile app or mobile Web site?

That's the decision that Dremel and countless companies face today when trying to reach the burgeoning number of customers with smartphones. Many choose to build an app, but Dremel, maker of multipurpose high-speed rotary tools popular among hobbyists and electrical engineers, decided on a mobile Web instead.

The company was planning a mobile sales and marketing push, but building an iOS or Android app would have "limit[ed] the reach of this initiative to one or two mobile platforms," said Henry Schwenk of Triton-Tek, a mobile development company Dremel hired.

Web … Read more

In the competition between native applications for mobile phones vs. Web applications, hardware support often makes native apps an obvious choice for programmers. But the World Wide Web Consortium is tackling one area, touch-screen support, in an effort that could help Web apps catch up.

The W3C published an editor's draft of a new touch-screen standard for Web apps today. The draft specification is designed also for devices such as drawing tablets that don't have a screen, but today's hot market for smartphones makes touch screens the more important focus.

A standard--if designed well and adopted--would make … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Some of Google's next big opportunities may not come out of its traditional product development organization; look out for the do-gooders.

It's been almost two years since Google announced a philosophy shift at Google.org to focus more on attacking "problems in ways that make the most of Google's strengths in technology and information," Larry Brilliant, the former head of Google.org, said at the time. One of the first successes from that shift--Google Earth Engine--may not only help developing countries get accurate data about their environments for the first time, but … Read more

Facebook has released a benchmark designed to help developers test just how powerful desktop and mobile browsers are at running a new generation of games built with a new generation of Web standards.

One of the most important of those standards is the JavaScript programming language, which is ubiquitous on the Web and ever faster in browsers. Enter Facebook's JSGameBench, designed specifically for measuring game issues such as displaying "sprites," the graphics out of which animated characters are made.

"Although there are many other benchmark suites that measure JavaScript performance, we wanted to build one focused … Read more