News Blog

Trulia builds a Google Street View into its real estate search results in areas where it's available, letting people check the neighborhood of a property for sale.

(Credit: Trulia)

Trulia, a residential real estate search engine, has incorporated Google Maps Street View into its Web pages, the company said Wednesday.

The combination presents Google's view of a particular property from the road and lets users virtually pivot around to see the surrounding area. It works in the 40 cities where Google has supplied imagery for its Street View service.

It's nothing that couldn't have been done manually before by typing an address into a separate window with the Google view, or likely even with an on-page mashup, but having the curbside vantage readily available is certainly handy, and Google worked with Trulia to integrate the feature, the search giant said.

IBM is mashing up its mashups to create a product line aimed at business people who want to make Web applications fast.

An avian flu mashup that matches bird types and wind types that shows bird movement patterns.

(Credit: IBM)

Mashup Center is made up of Lotus Mashups, which lets people combine information from different Web sites and present them on a single screen, and also includes IBM InfoSphere MashupHub, a lightweight tool aimed at IT professionals for preparing data feeds from different sources.

IBM will continue to sell the two products separately.

The products originally came out of IBM's emerging technologies group, which started exploring the idea of giving end-users more power to make lightweight and short-lived applications.

These tools are meant to lighten the load on IT departments that can't keep up with users' requests for new applications.

I bet you didn't know there's an easy way to see what terrorist or suspicious activities are happening around the world, on a map. Are you curious as to where there have been UFO sightings? How would you like to map your photos or, even potentially more useful, find a public toilet near you?

Mike Pegg over at the Google Maps Mania blog has created an entertaining and handy list of 100 things you can do with Google Maps mashups.

The options range from the very convenient, such as how to find cheap gas in your area or how to create a running route, to the slightly more esoteric, like how to map your location in relation to Mecca for Muslim prayers or where to buy beer in Ontario.

Wow, I didn't know that the exact other side of the world from San Francisco is in the middle of the Indian Ocean, just due southeast of Madagascar!

GlobalIncidentMap.com maps out terrorist incidents and suspicious activities on a Google Map.

(Credit: GlobalIncidentMap.com)

At its annual Lotusphere conference, IBM on Wednesday showed off an early version of Lotus Mashups, a tool designed to let businesspeople, rather than professional programmers, quickly assemble Web applications.

The application will let people combine, or mash up, data from enterprise applications and the Web. It uses a browser-based visual tool and a set of pre-built widgets for displaying information.

A mashup that combines mapping and storm-related information with an inventory system.

(Credit: IBM)

IBM has been pursuing the idea of giving end users in businesses powerful enough tools to build their own applications.

These Web applications may be relatively simple and only be used for a short time. But IBM executives have said that it represents a significant business opportunity for its Lotus collaboration software division.

For example, a person could build a mashup that combines weather information with a retail management system to adjust inventories based on project weather patterns.

IBM first started with end user-driven software development when it introduced QEDWiki two years ago, a product with a similar goal.

Lotus Mashups will use the QEDWiki technology, which IBM's Emerging Technology group first developed, but it will be a separate commercial product, said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM's collaboration technologies.

A mashup that combines business social networking and comapny organization charts.

(Credit: IBM)

Heintzman said he thought it could be possible that in the future, IT departments will analyze the applications created by end users and "harden" them for broader deployment within companies.

Last year at Lotusphere, IBM introduced other products inspired by Web 2.0-style consumer applications, including Lotus Connections, social-networking software for businesses.

Updated at 9:15 AM PT with comments from IBM. Screen shots added.

Last week, a group calling itself the Overdub Tampering Committee posted an online manifesto in which its anonymous members claim to have downloaded songs from various sources (Limewire, OiNK, The Pirate Bay, and so on), overdubbed extra parts, then re-uploaded them. The group claims that if you're a frequent downloader of grey-market music from these types of sites, you've probably got one of their messed-up mashups on your hard drive.

(Credit: Overdub Tampering Committee)

Their tactics remind me of guerilla art from the likes of RTmark and Banksy, with one exception: they offer no proof of what they've done, leading some to suspect an elaborate hoax.

Real or not, imagine if this type of remixing becomes a mainstream activity, with everybody posting their personal dubs to their blogs or social-networking home pages. Perhaps some enterprising artists will begin to sell track-separated versions of their work, a sort of raw material alongside their finished product.

I've always preferred prognostication to nostalgia, so rather than replay the best of 2007, I'll use these late December doldrums to make 10 predictions for the coming year. Some editors will warn you that this kind of list is suicide--it's too easy for everybody to look back a year later and see where you were wrong--but it hasn't hurt Cringely, so here goes. In no particular order.

DRM will die. The trendline is clear--Apple's been selling DRM-free tunes on iTunes since May, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store has three of the four majors signed up, and eMusic has become the second-most-popular music download service (after iTunes) thanks in part to its longstanding insistence on selling DRM-free MP3s. A year from now, DRM will be irrelevant and hardly used in digital music. All four labels will agree sell their songs without DRM on Amazon. Nearly every iTunes audio (but not video) file will be DRM-free, and Apple will get rid of the "Plus" designation. Some music subscription services like Rhapsody and Microsoft's Zune Pass might retain DRM so that users can't cancel their subscriptions and keep the songs they've downloaded, but they'll be the last holdouts--and some of them might try eMusic's approach of limiting monthly downloads rather than limiting compatibility and usage with DRM.

3G iPhone and iTunes. A 3G iPhone is a fairly safe prediction, given that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson already let it slip, but I think there'll still be a small surprise embedded in the announcement: iTunes 3G, a service that will come with the phone and give users anytime-anywhere downloads of any audio content in the iTunes Music Store. Impulse buying will go through the roof.

No Zune phone. Microsoft won't release an iPhone competitor this year--at least not one with hardware designed by Microsoft. The company might release some sort of software update or client application that allows Windows Mobile users to play songs from the Zune Marketplace and transfer them from the Zune PC client software to their phones, but even that probably won't happen until 2009. And it'll sink like a lead balloon against v3 of the iPhone, at which point Microsoft will bend to the inevitable and start building its own phone from scratch.

GarageBand will win a Grammy. Not the program itself, but somebody will make a record using Apple's Garage Band--which comes included with every Macintosh sold--as their primary recording and mixing tool, and that record will win a Grammy award. There's already been a critically acclaimed movie, Tarnation, made exclusively with iMovie, so now it's time for all those bedroom musicians to get into the do-it-yourself spotlight.

Mashups will go mainstream. Have mashups already jumped the shark? The controversy about The Grey Album, in which DJ Danger Mouse combined lyrics from Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' untitled white album, is almost four years old. There was a burst of experimentation from big-time artists like David Bowie and Beck around the same time, but not much since 2005. Nonetheless, I predict that artists and even some labels will begin re-releasing their back catalogs as standalone instrumental and vocal tracks, and fans will recombine like crazy using programs like Garage Band and Splice. At least one mashup will get significant radio play, with the complete approval of the original artists. (Although you might say that Puff Daddy accomplished this 10 years ago.) They might even be incorporated into video games like Rock Band--imagine the challenge of having to sing Abba while the rest of the band plays Judas Priest. By the end of 2008, putting a mere song on your social-networking profile will seem hopelessly old-fashioned.

The campaign--don't call it "marketing"--that preceded Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero release will become the gold standard for building audience engagement for tours, albums, or new artists.

Year Zero will become the precedent. On the plane trip home from visiting family over Christmas, I read Eric Davis's analysis of Led Zeppelin's fourth album, part of the 33 1/3 book series. While a lot of it seemed like a stretch--as is the case with any highly intellectualized deconstruction of rock music--it did remind me of a certain sensation created by certain artists and albums, a sense that the listener is more than a mere consumer, but is in fact an active member in a secret club that only other members fully understand, a sort of musical Masonic society. Think of that Zeppelin album, the Grateful Dead, the Residents, or Secret Chiefs 3. In 2007, Trent Reznor, working with 42 Entertainment, took this kind of mystical clubbishness and updated it for the digital era. USB drives with leaked tracks from the upcoming Year Zero record were surreptitiously placed in bathroom stalls at concert venues. Phone numbers with frightening secret messages were encoded in bursts of static or out-of-phase audio signals. Cell phones were distributed to fans who figured out some of the clues; a phone call placed to those phones summoned them to a secret concert. In 2008, we'll see more of these kinds of musical events that use digital technology to break down the wall between audience and artist.

The world's best offline record store will go online. There's nothing else like Amoeba Records. Its three locations in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles offer unsurpassed selection--including cellophane-packaged vinyl I've never seen anywhere else--and seem to be curated by music fans with amazing depth and breadth of knowledge. In 2007, Amoeba took its first tentative steps into digital distribution, releasing exclusive recordings from Gram Parsons and Brandi Shearer in both MP3 and CD formats. In 2008, I predict Amoeba will finally go online in a huge way, offering an unsurpassed quantity of MP3 downloads from every imaginable source: major labels (like Amazon MP3 and the other high-profile stores), independent labels (like eMusic), and do-it-yourselfers (like CDBaby). Look for the nascent Amoeba label to offer distribution on terms never before seen in the recording industry--more of a non-exclusive commission model like CD Baby than a typical all-inclusive marketing-recording-publishing-distribution deal like most labels have favored--and for several high-profile artists who've recently quit their labels to sign on.

The loudness wars will end. It's been repeated so many times, it's become a cliche: today's recordings are mastered too loud, eliminating dynamic range and making it hard to listen to a complete album. In 2008, artists and producers will finally begin to demand a return to proper mastering, and radio stations and record execs will be in no position to contradict them.

The concert business will follow the recorded music business down. It's a bad time to be a big rock concert promoter like Live Nation. According to a recent story in Pollstar, the concert business actually declined in 2007, despite high-profile reunion tours by The Police and Van Halen and David Lee Roth--two acts with so much internal strife that nobody expected to see them on stage again. I say the 15 percent drop in ticket revenues from 2006 to 2007 will be followed by the same or greater drop next year. Music fans are fed up with exorbitant ticket prices, false scarcity, and quasi-legal scalpers, and there are only so many more nostalgia acts to trot out. Where are the young bands that can sell out 20,000-seat arenas for the next 5, 10, 20 years? (And before you call me out on the Arctic Monkeys, let me just counter with Oasis. Huge in the U.K., briefly popular in the U.S., and irrelevant to all but the die-hardest of fans 10 years later.) In other words, the concert business is about to suffer from the main problem that's hurting the recording industry--not MP3s, not piracy, but lack of interest and investment in artists with long-term (as opposed to instant) commercial potential.

Led Zeppelin will play again, but not tour. Speaking of nostalgia, it won't be 1973, but the reunited Led Zeppelin will play a handful of shows in the U.S., focusing on a multi-night stand at New York's Madison Square Garden timed around Robert Plant's 60th birthday on August 20.

Valleywag is reporting that start-up WhatsOpen.com has written the first wireless app for Google's new Android mobile platform.

It's still under wraps, but the report says WhatsOpen.com offers a Web application that shows people nearby stores that are open for business.

Valleywag has screenshots of what it says are the first wireless app written for Google's Android mobile platform.

(Credit: Valleywag)

Valleywag has screenshots that show that the application appears to use a Google map mashup to display stores that are open in your area. It also looks like it includes user written reviews.

Looks like a no-brainer to me; who wouldn't want to get that kind of information on a phone based on your location? Especially if it's easily searchable and displayed on a map.

No word back from Google or WhatsOpen.com about it.

Google announced Android on Monday and said a software developer's kit would be released next week and handsets running Android would reach the market mid-2008.

Microsoft started an open beta program for its consumer-oriented mashup builder Popfly on Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Popfly is a hosted application that enables people to assemble mashups by dragging and dropping components, rather than writing code. It's built with Microsoft's Silverlight Web browser plug-in.

With Popfly, people assemble mashups by connecting blocks.

(Credit: Microsoft)

When Microsoft released the alpha in May, it had prebuilt "blocks," or connections, to popular Web sites Flickr and MySpace.

Now it integrates with Facebook and people can create gadgets (also called widgets) that run on Windows Vista or Windows Live.

There are a growing number of these do-it-yourself Web authoring tools, including Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo Pipes. Here's a link to a review of three of those.

For business users, IBM has developed QEDWiki and Coghead, and other companies have created hosted application development services.

IBM released on Tuesday a tool that it says will let businesspeople, rather than professional programmers, build their own Web applications.

Called the the Mashup Starter Kit, it is an updated version of QEDWiki tool. The starter kit lets people view and access Web information and company databases in order to build mash-ups--applications that combine information from different sources in a single screen.

IBM, which sells to corporate customers, sees a lot of potential in giving businesspeople the ability to build their own applications via tapping into various information sources.

Example: a mash-up application that tracks relevant news and plots Avian flu data using a mapping Web service.

(Credit: IBM )

The Mashup Starter Kit includes a server component called the Mashup Hub, which is designed to make it easier to view data stored in corporate databases. The QEDWiki tool is the visual front-end for accessing that information and combining it.

When working with customers, IBM found that access to content was at least as important as the front-end assembly tool, said Rod Smith, first president of emerging technology at IBM.

"The idea is that the Hub is like a Web 2.0 Web site where people can register feeds, rate feeds--the things are inside the catalog," Smith said. "Business people not only wanted to do mash-ups, they want to have more control of information, like a freshness of it for instance."

Companies can customize the feeds that users can access using PHP, a scripting language that the application is written in.

The product is still in preview mode and available for download at IBM's Alphaworks emerging technology site. It will be generally available in the first quarter of next year, Smith said.

The idea of allowing untrained users to build their own applications has been around for a long time, with little success.

But Web services, such as mapping applications, and more powerful front-end development languages let people build powerful programs without enlisting professional developers.

In May, Microsoft released an early version of Popfly, a hosted application-construction tool aimed at consumers. People customize Web sites by combining information from popular Web services like MySpace and Flickr.

Adobe last week showed off a product in development called Thermo, which is aimed at designers. With the tool, designers can lay out a Web application's look and program the interactivity without having to write code.