web2

The goal of Tree-Nation is to plant 8 million trees in sub-Saharan Niger, Africa, the world's poorest nation.

The sunny Web site, based out of Barcelona, Spain, provides social networking for would-be huggers and planters of trees. You can donate between $14 to $106 per tree, and then track and map its growth via GPS and Google Maps.

Working with ecologists in Niger, Tree-Nation will nourish the sprouts of the baobabs, acacias and other species in a nursery before transplanting them outside. Although desertification threatens most of the land in Niger, the trees grow in places that receive enough … Read more

Thousands of representatives from international corporations, design firms, government entities, and institutions of higher education, spanning more than 35 countries around the world, attended the CONNECTING'07 World Design Congress last week in San Francisco, the largest and arguably most influential gathering of industrial designers to date.

Did it live up to its promise? The short answer is: yes and no. There were early warning signs for the "no": The opening ceremony was a long-winded and largely self-congratulatory celebration of the two organizing bodies, ICSID and IDSA. In his opening keynote, ICSID president Peter Zech set the tone … Read more

Update: I added a few more details from Picnik.

Flickr plans to expand from photo sharing to photo editing through a deal with start-up Picnik, a major change in the nature of the Yahoo site.

"We are working on a relationship with Picnik, which will be available in the coming months," a Flickr representative said Friday, declining to share further details.

Picnik said in a statement that Flickr users would get access to all the Picnik editing features within the Flickr site. "Picnik will become a seamless and tightly integrated photo editing solution for Flickr uses," … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Flickr was originally designed for sharing photos, but Yahoo is trying to make life easier for those who want to print pictures and not just see them on a screen.

The Yahoo site is working on an upgrade to Flickr's Organize interface, which lets people select batches of photos, to make it easier to print multiple photos, said Kakul Srivastava, Flirk's director of product management. Today, each photo must be selected individually off its own Web page, which rapidly gets tiresome.

"It should be happening in the next week or so," she said in an … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Housework is a lot more fun with a battle axe and a couple of dwarves.

Chore Wars, a game shown off by noted game developer Jane McGonigal at the Web 2.0 Summit recently, gives users "experience" points for various household chores. Collecting those points then lets you advance your profile in the online game.

Swiffer the floor twice a week and get 20 points for charm, that sort of thing. You can also play for virtual gold doubloons. These can be exchanged for rewards, inside your own circle of friends. Earn 200 doubloons and you can … Read more

If you're a Microsoft Outlook user at work, managing your in-box could be one of the most challenging things you have to wrestle with each day. Handling incoming e-mail and categorizing its importance is a skill, and a process people have to learn. There are several third-party apps to help you figure out what's important beyond the stock methods included with the Outlook (colored flagging, and urgency), but many are for the individual, rather than the entire company.

Likewise, as a sender, figuring out how to prioritize the e-mail you're sending to others is a balancing act, … Read more

I've been thinking through Ballmer's comments that he'll buy 20 Web 2.0 companies each year over the next five years, and a biting irony just hit me: Web 2.0 is all about collaboration and architecture of participation. Web 2.0 grows through community. Ballmer plans to get into this market by buying communities...

...which implies that he's not very good at building them. Now, some will cry "Foul!" given the rich partner ecosystem that Microsoft has grown over the years. But Microsoft's extant partner ecosystem is very different from the kind of community that open source and Web 2.0 fosters.… Read more

Dash Navigation is building the GPS gizmo that everyone in the CNET reviews department is waiting for. See this video from 2006. Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, the company is announcing more features for its delayed product.

Dash now plans to ship its GPS product for cars, the Dash Express, in early 2008. Its key differentiator from other GPS units is that it will always be connected to the Internet, which will enable cool features like peer-to-peer (with other Dash devices) traffic reporting, and the capability to program routes on to your device from your Web browser.

The … Read more

Ballmer, not one to be upstaged, decided to outdo his own comments on open-source acquisitions by saying, willy nilly, that Microsoft will buy 20 Web 2.0 startups each year. I guess he was tired of seeing Google and Yahoo! duke it out over Web 2.0 companies with a year's existence and no compelling business model for $30 million a pop. "I can do even better!" he charged.

He even said he'd spend between $50 million and $1 billion on each. That's between $5 billion and $100 billion, The Register suggests, between now and … Read more