williams

AUSTIN, Texas--Twitter announced its @Anywhere platform at the South by Southwest Interactive festival here Monday. It was the one piece of significant news to come out of CEO Evan Williams' keynote address.

For those not up to speed on the new platform, it's designed to make it easy for Twitter partner sites to offer Twitter links with just a few lines of Javacode. As my colleague Caroline McCarthy wrote, the idea is to allow users of other sites to connect with their Twitter accounts in a way similar to Facebook Connect.

If you were paying attention, you may have … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--It's hard to believe, given the power Twitter wields at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here, but not half an hour into his keynote address, people are walking out on Twitter CEO Evan Williams.

Perhaps it's because Williams announced the news everyone wanted to hear--the @Anywhere platform--right at the outset of the talk. But more likely it's because, as much as everyone here loves Twitter, Williams simply is not the most engaging speaker.

And the slow leaking out of people from the giant exhibit hall at the Austin Convention Center where Williams … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Twitter CEO Evan Williams took no time in getting to the juicy part of his keynote address at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Monday afternoon. He announced the "@Anywhere" platform, a way to pull Twitter links and data onto partner sites and media outlets.

A brief demo of @Anywhere showed off "hovercards" that bring up Twitter information with a mouse-over, let readers or users connect with their Twitter accounts much like Facebook Connect, or explore more specific possibilities, like instantly following a newspaper columnist's Twitter account by clicking on his or her … Read more

Natali Del Conte replaces Justin Yu on today's show, as he's out looking for pickles. The name of today's show refers to the news that William Shatner of "Star Trek" fame will star in CBS' new sitcom "S**t My Dad Says," based on the same expletive-filled Twitter phenomenon. We think Jerry Stiller would make a better cranky old man. (By the way, CBS, you own a equally funny podcast/show/Twitter called The 404, available on @the404.)

Jeff has a beef with the number of 3D movie theaters out there right now. Apparently, the success of "Avatar" has led a swarm of 3D films to be released, and many theaters aren't equipped to handle the 3D projections just yet.

Next, we get to Sony building a universal game controller (a la the Logitech Harmony One, but for videogame consoles). We're not exactly sure how they plan on doing this, or whether it's useful in any way. We do, however, reminisce a bit about our favorite game controllers. The original Sega Saturn controller is Wilson's favorite for 2D games. "It melts in your hands," he says.

Finally, we get to some voice mails, and the racist polar bear on Xbox Live has really taken off as a meme now. We're encouraging our fans to send in their renditions of this meme. The best ones we will showcase on the show. Maybe a few Photoshoped images? Maybe a few voice mails as the racist polar bear? Send them in to the404 [at] cnet [dot] com or call us at 1-866-404-CNET (2638).

… Read more

On Thursday, the Symbian Foundation announced that it had completed the open-sourcing of its mobile operating system--the largest such migration in software history.

ZDNet UK spoke to Lee Williams, chief executive of the Symbian Foundation, to learn more about the implications of the open-sourcing process for the venerable OS and find out what people can expect from upcoming versions--and when they might expect to see a Symbian-based tablet or Netbook.

There was a lot of third-party code in Symbian -- how much of that had to be stripped from the OS, and how much did the third parties agree to … Read more

Another famous apple has been in the news this week. A 1752 manuscript revealing how Sir Isaac Newton formulated the theory of gravity is now online for people to view and read.

A conversation between Newton and scholar William Stukeley about Newton's life, notably his alleged encounter with a falling apple, prompted Stukeley to write Newton's 1752 biography "Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life." Experts carefully transformed the delicate 250-year-old book into an electronic version that now is on display at Britain's Royal Society Web site.

The online interactive manuscript can be viewed in full 3D or as a Microsoft Silverlight presentation where you can turn each page, zoom in or out, and magnify any section. Some of the passages beautifully handwritten by Stukeley can be a bit difficult to read, but floating commentaries along the way do a fine job of explaining key sections. The interactive 3D effect is nicely done--you do feel as if the actual manuscript is sitting in front of you.… Read more

Perhaps you were one of those who voted for your favorite corpse to be one who will participate in the Tweance.

The Tweance? Yes, the Halloween seance to be performed upon the heavenly medium that is Twitter.

Famous and entirely reliable psychic Jayne Wallace is to tweet her way to and through heaven and hell this Friday, between the hours of 10 a.m. and midday British Thoroughly Awful Time (3 a.m. to 5 a.m. Pacific)

We, the grieving earthly leftbehinds, were asked by the organizers--some folks called Angels Fancy Dress--to vote for our most cherished and lost … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In anticipation of an onstage interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams at the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday afternoon, conference organizer and Federated Media CEO John Battelle told the audience to expect "a surprise" during the talk.

Turns out that "surprise" was actually a recently unearthed video clip of Williams in 1994, explaining the Internet on behalf of a company called Illumination Labs and sporting a haircut that looked like it belonged on the set of '90s alterna-teen flick "Empire Records." (No, we don't have a snapshot of it yet.)

Williams … Read more

The logic of open source is increasingly clear to a growing number of businesses. Ironically, however, that logic generally dovetails with a recognition of how to marry open source with a proprietary revenue driver.

Once you figure out the scarce good for which customers will pay, open sourcing everything else becomes a no-brainer.

Google, Red Hat, and a wide variety of other businesses have all discovered this. So has Nokia, as Glyn Moody writes:

...Once (Sebastian Nyström, vice president of application and service frameworks in Nokia's Devices unit) laid out the logic of moving to open source, … Read more