Omniture, a company that provides integrated Web analytics and marketing services, announced on Tuesday that its SiteCatalyst measurement tool will now work with native iPhone applications. According to the company, developers and marketers can use App Measurement for iPhone to gain analytics data in real time. The tool will be available in January 2009.
Social online-storage company Wuala on Tuesday announced that it has launched an application programming interface that will allow third-party developers to create applications for the service. The company also said its users can now make selected files available to the community through a link to each file on the user's account. The API and the new features are available now.
Mapping company Rand McNally announced on Tuesday that it has enhanced its Web site with its More Roads-Better Directions initiative. The new service will provide users with driving directions to more than a million more home addresses and 22,000 more miles of roads. The company is using data from Navteq and Tele Atlas, but it claims that it's working with local municipalities to improve its service and find roads that are not included in maps by those providers.
DailyMe, a company that collects news stories on a slew of topics from around the Web, says it will make its various content feeds available through Amazon.com Kindle e-book reader. According to the company, Kindle users will be able to subscribe to the organization's home improvement content, along with top stories and book reviews. The feeds are available now on the Kindle.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced on Tuesday that they have developed a new tool called ContextMiner that allows users to automate the process of collecting links of online videos and blogs. The researchers claim that its tool collects metadata and extracts embedded video to provide users with the number of views a respective video has attracted and what sites are linking to the clip.
DailyMe is a customizable news aggregator with a neat twist--it can be set up to automatically print up the day's news at a selected time each morning, emulating some of the experience of having a newspaper delivered to your door.
The service lets you pick all the topics you're interested in and will group them together on a single page that's updated throughout the day. There are broad topics to choose from, and each one has its own menu of subtopics in case you want to hone your feed. There's also an option to call out keywords you want to track, which can help narrow a wide topic such as technology or sports.
Users can pick what kind of topics they're interested in to shape the news that comes in. Even terrorism.
Besides keywords, advanced users can fine tune the topics by the source. Sources are listed in a directory and with a specific grouping of feeds. In that sense DailyMe becomes more of an intelligent RSS reader, as you can pick the news sites or blogs where you want your stream of information coming from.
DailyMe provides several ways to ingest your news. As mentioned above, using a small desktop application DailyMe will phone home at whatever time you select and automatically print out the latest news from those topics. You can also set up multiple alerts per day if you feel like filling up your e-mail in-box with news feeds.
I found the actual reading experience to be somewhat bland. The news is spread out over several pages instead of being in one place like other news aggregation services. It's not a deal killer, but I found it to be too much work to browse through each category. I think a lot of people who are used to getting a ton of stories on a single page on major newspaper sites or news portals will feel a little out of their element.
The one nice thing is that the stories are all hosted on the DailyMe site, meaning you're not just on a portal page that's going to jump you off. There's also an integrated commenting system that's separate from the original site, as well as a one- to five-star rating system that helps track what's hot on the site. At the moment DailyMe doesn't seem to be taking advantage of these ratings or comments, as they're disjointed from the rest of the content.
Earlier today the company announced that Neil Budde, former vice president and editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Sports is its new president (see News.com story). Budde is also the same guy who helped create The Wall Street Journal Online--so I see big things from DailyMe in the coming months.
Other services that aggregate news based on your tastes include: Tiinker, FaveBot, Spotback, and LeapTag.
DailyMe grabs news from topics you're interested in. If you're feeling old school you can even download a desktop plug-in that prints out the news for you.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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