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Phonevite does party invites by phone, not email

Phonevite is a new free invitation and RSVP service that turns your Web browser into a personal assistant of sorts, letting you call a large group of friends, family, or contacts without having to spend all day on the phone. Instead Phonevite provides an asynchronous solution, giving you an easy way to record a personalized invitation message using your computer's microphone, and send it out to a list of hand-picked phone numbers. From there you can send out the "invitation" right away, or schedule it in for a later date.

When an invitation goes live, Phonevite will … Read more

What does MySpace news about removing 29,000 sex offenders mean for parents?

MySpace has quadrupled its estimated number of registered sex offenders posting profiles on the site, from its May estimate of 7,000 to a current tally of 29,000. The pages of identified offenders have been deleted. What does this news mean for parents? How do we assess risk and keep it in perspective, and what best practices should be implemented on family, corporate and societal levels to keep kids safe?… Read more

Marten Mickos at OSCON: Open source produces better software...

Tim O'Reilly had a fireside chat (minus the fireside) with Marten Mickos during today's Executive Radar at OSCON. Marten, ever insightful and pithy, didn't disappoint.

Here are a few of the things that caught my attention most in Marten's comments:… Read more

Learning through adversity

Today is Pioneer Day in Utah, a day when Utahns reflect on the sacrifice that brought 70,000 people 1,300 miles across the United States into present-day Utah. My own family was part of this group. In fact, there's a wonderful quote from Brigham Young about the Asays when he bumped into them while traveling in Southern Utah. He critiqued their sloth in still living out of their wagons, but said they made him the best fish dinner he'd had. Some things never change.... :-)

As I look back on what my family and others did, I'm impressed by how hardship focused and shaped the thoughts and feelings of a people. While some of the pioneers suffered greatly in making the trek, for others it was more hearty inconvenience and discomfort. But for all, it was a formative time.

Years later, a group that hadn't been through the ordeal criticized those who had for foolishly leaving late in the year, such that the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies were caught in a terrible winter. Here's the response from one who had lived through it:… Read more

MySpace Mexico to exit beta on Tuesday

On Tuesday, MySpace will take another step in its gradual global expansion by fully launching the MySpace Mexico portal. The site has been in beta since January; MySpace has highlighted its success with ComScore statistics that put MySpace Mexico's total unique active visitors. at approximately 1.5 million per month.

MySpace, which gained much of its early buzz in the U.S. by catering to the independent music community, has aimed for a similar strategy in Mexico--in May, it sponsored the Vive Latino festival in Mexico City. To commemorate the launch of MySpace Mexico, the News Corp.-owned social … Read more

Open source applications...magnets for open source infrastructure

Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer, did some analysis of the company's customer and user community, and I found the results interesting. I've been hearing rumblings for some time that Windows increasingly serves as a great evaluation platform for open source, but most companies use Linux when they're serious and want to go into production. Ian's data confirmed this, and more. (Zmanda has published data that corroborates our findings.)

First of all, the Alfresco data shows that Windows is plays a healthy role in the open source ecosystem. (In the graph, Windows = green, and Linux = blue, in case you can't see it well.) We have plenty of companies going into production with open-source Alfresco sitting on top of closed-source Windows. From my work with SugarCRM, JasperSoft and others, I know the same holds true for them. I don't suspect that this is going to change anytime soon.

Windows plays a large role because it's the OS sitting on the most desktops. But when customers are serious about production, the majority favor Linux. Again, I think you'd find very similar results were you to talk with MuleSource, Funambol, SugarCRM, etc.… Read more

The numbers driving 'Unbreakable Linux'

It would seem that Oracle is serious about its Unbreakable Linux. The company announced today that it has pulled in Symantec (Veritas data center software) as a certified partner. This is a good step forward for the program, though Oracle still has to pull in the thousands of other applications that Novell and Red Hat have to be credible as a standalone Linux vendor. But the more I think about it, the less it seems to matter how relevant Oracle's Linux is beyond Oracle. It's a question of numbers.

I talked with Monica Kumar from Oracle's open source team yesterday about this announcement, and asked about the significance of the deal as well as why Oracle continues to push its own strain of Linux. She said something I found funny, though true:… Read more

Google's Earth from above: A 3D look

"Google Maps is changing the way we see the world," journalist Evan Ratliff declares in a June article for Wired magazine. I couldn't agree more. Google's universal mapping project isn't just changing the portals for viewing the world online, it's also changing offline understandings of how the world is best viewed--from Google's services, of course. Google has gained influence fast, by ambitiously developing innovative, interactive mapping software; integrating multiple online services into the majority of desktop and online apps; and familiarizing users with a particular Google-branded aesthetic.

In creating a suite of map apps to encourage users to contribute to Google's greater project and personalize locally-stored versions of a map, Google is not just bringing cartography to the masses, Ratliff points out, but is getting users to help build out its universe. This, of course, makes complete sense. With Google Earth, Google SketchUp, and MyMaps (watch the CNET News.com "how-to" video,) Google's mapping software has surpassed competitors like NASA in digitizing the world. In so doing, Google has captivated the imagination of loyal users who will return to the company's Earth and maps programs to find business listings, explore culturally significant architecture, and plant personal photos and videos.… Read more

5 absurd Facebook apps

Just two months after the launch of Facebook's f8 developer platform, there are nearly 2,000 applications. While a good portion of them are useful and work well as social tools, there are also a handful that are simply absurd. In no apparent order, I've rounded up five of my favorites below.

Vibrating Hamster. The vibrating hamster is a simple picture of a lovable rodent you can put on your profile. As the name suggests, every time you click the picture, the hamster vibrates violently while playing the Web meme-famous hamster dance song. To keep anonymous hamster vibrations … Read more

New Tech Meetup: From Talking Llamas to Taming Teamwork

I'm sitting on the exquisitely uncomfortable benches in the San Francisco Metreon, listening to companies at the New Tech Meetup give their pitches. Two of them we've covered recently: AdPerk and Truemors. The news about Truemors: a Facebook port is forthcoming. The other three companies are also worth some bits:

Blabberize is a freaky little product that makes Monty Python-like animated graphics of faces from photos you upload. Then you upload a recording of your (or someone else's) voice. It syncs the audio or recorded speech to the moving mouth. Good for a laugh. Likewise the pitch. … Read more