Webware

Although some countries around the world argue that Internet access is a fundamental right, one of the "fathers of the Internet," Vint Cerf, doesn't see it that way.

"Technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself," Cerf, who is also a Google's chief Internet evangelist, wrote yesterday in an editorial in The New York Times. "There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It more

The number of mobile phone subscriptions has reached 5.9 billion, an impressive figure in a world of 7 billion people.

Surveying the mobile and online landscape in 2011 for a year-end report (PDF), the International Telecommunications Union found that mobile phone subscriptions have now penetrated 87 percent of the entire world and 79 percent of all developing countries.

Among all those mobile phone users, mobile broadband subscriptions number almost 1.2 billion. Such subscriptions have jumped 45 percent each year for the past four year and now outnumber fixed broadband subscriptions by 2 to 1.

To push forward with more

Mobile devices have surpassed magazines and newspapers in grabbing our time each day, says a new study from market researcher eMarketer.

On average, U.S. consumers now spend around an hour every day with their mobile phones, a 30 percent rise from last year.

In contrast, people are spending only 44 minutes a day reading newspapers and magazines, a small drop from last year. But the results stemming back from 2008 show a sharp rise for mobile devices and a steady decline for print publications.

Despite the popularity of mobile devices, people are still spending much more time watching TV more

If you read the Wall Street Journal, you could be forgiven for thinking that the venture-capital market is starting to crack at the seams. It's a striking premise, all right. Just one problem: it's wrong.

Earlier today, the WSJ reported that argued startups are now having more trouble raising cash than in the not-so distant past. The Journal pointed to Naval Ravikant, an entrepreneur and operator of AngelList, a site that lets nascent companies ask VCs for capital, who said that even though 50 to 100 startups are applying for funding each day, "only one to two are more

I'm writing this article with a large rescue cat draped across my keyboard (yes, it's hard to type). Not every feline is as fortunate to have a home.

Animal shelters have tried out kitty Webcams to boost adoption rates. AprioriControl is raising the bar with iPet Companion, interactive online kitten playrooms that put viewers in control of feathery, flighty, and fluffy cat toys.

The kitty playrooms are currently up and running at shelters in Idaho, Iowa, and Oregon. I stopped off at the site for the Clinton Humane Society in Iowa where kittens named Dori, Nemo, Marlin, and Bruce rolled, tumbled, and attacked the remote-control toys.

Each shelter determines certain play hours. You may end up in a short queue when you drop by to play with the furry critters. The toys are attached to motors. Push the button on your browser to make them dance and whirl.

When it's your turn, you also control the direction of the Webcam. A live chat box lets you join in all the ooing and cooing from other users. You'll see gems like: "they r sooo cute lookit the kittys look it look it." It's easy to turn into a pile of text-speak mush when you're watching kittens play.

You're going out of town for a week and could use some extra cash. Why not rent out your home through a travel marketplace like Airbnb? It can match you with a traveling stranger and you could come home richer.

That's what a San Francisco woman known as "EJ" hoped for until she came back to a ransacked apartment with her personal items stolen or destroyed. She has described her experience with Airbnb as "utter hell."

Airbnb has apologized and implemented new protection measures such as $50,000 for damages for users who rent out their homes.

That hasn't stopped many people from blaming EJ for being so trusting as to leave her credit card, birth certificate, passport, and other important documents at home when her unpleasant guests arrived. She has written about the online vilification of her, which is really blaming the victim.

While the incident was no doubt an exception to the many uneventful and even wonderful transactions that happen through sites like Airbnb and VRBO, it has rekindled discussion of travel marketplaces and the wider issue of trusting online strangers.

What do you think? Has the Airbnb debacle affected your views about accommodations sites? Would you consider using one (as either a homeowner or guest) if you haven't already? Vote in our poll and add your comments below.

And, of course, bon voyage!

If you're like most people, you give yourself high ratings when it comes to figuring out when someone's trying to con you. Problem is, most people aren't actually good at it--at least as far as detecting fake positive consumer reviews.

Fortunately, technology is poised to make up for this all-too-human failing. Cornell University researchers have developed software that they say can detect fake reviews (PDF). The researchers tested the system with reviews of Chicago hotels. They pooled 400 truthful reviews with 400 deceptive reviews produced for the study, then trained their software to spot the difference.

The software got it right about 90 percent of the time. This is a big improvement over the average person, who can detect fake reviews only about 50 percent of the time, according to the researchers.

They say people fall into two camps. One type accepts too much at face value and doesn't reject enough fake reviews. The second type is overly skeptical and rejects too many real McCoys. Despite their very different approaches, each camp is right about half the time.

When Ronald McDonald House in Cincinnati needed a nine-page English document translated to Arabic, the children's advocacy organization turned to Sparked. Someone living in Jordan logged on and translated the prose in a few hours. Then someone from California confirmed the accuracy of the piece. Crowdsourcing skills and bite-size volunteering is what Sparked is all about.

Sparked connects corporate employees with nonprofits via the Internet, giving employees a way to volunteer right from their cubicles. Sparked co-founder Jacob Colker calls this micro-volunteering, a term he's trying to coin.

When I visited the small, barren Sparked office in San Francisco's hip SOMA neighborhood, Colker showed me the company's volunteering platform, which it licenses to major corporations. Employees from companies including new client LinkedIn or Google, Frog Design, Kraft, and SAP can sign in and volunteer during their lunch breaks--and people can focus on certain regions or specific issues. But the volunteer work is not limited to corporate partnerships. Individuals can also sign up at their leisure to help nonprofits with all things digital, from branding issues to blogging advice.

Originally, Colker thought people would volunteer their time while sitting on the bus or lounging by the pool. As it turns out, people out and about are probably not going to be able to help a nonprofit with a branding issue, Colker said. Instead, he maintains, people would much rather help others from their office, right at their desktop, during the free time they have between work-related tasks. The company started as The Extraordinaries in 2008 and within the past eight months rebranded itself to switch its mobile focus more to the Web.

If a house of cards makes you think of old-fashioned aces, jacks, and diamonds, you obviously haven't heard of B-Squares.

A pair of Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates has developed a unique electronics construction kit comprised of the palm-size squares, which snap together via magnets embedded in the corners. There are a number of different types of B-Squares, including one that's a rechargeable battery. There's also a solar energy collector, a square lit by LEDs, and an Arduino microcontroller. A speaker square is in the works)

Like a rave-tastic deck of electric cards, B-Squares in combination can be used by creative types to make modular sound, light, or other structures or installations, with the electricity flowing through the entire array. The squares can be connected in any combination, and the constructions can be flat or three-dimensional.

B-Squares are the creation of Shawn Frayne, founder of Humdinger Wind Energy, and Jordan McRae, founder of Octo23 Technologies. This week, the pair put their project on peer-to-peer funding site Kickstarter.

The founders hope hobbyists and artists looking for new ways to incorporate unique power supplies into their lives or artwork will adopt B-Squares.

"We think that B-Squares will be a great tool for promoting the use of rechargeable batteries and solar energy to students, artists and all makers," McRae says. They cost $15 for a single Solar Square or up to $250 for a kit containing a mix of 15 squares.

Each B-Square has magnetic contacts on the corners so the squares easily connect to each other. The magnets also transmit electronic signals between squares, and how they're snapped together makes a difference: Depending on how the power squares touch neighbors, either the current or the voltage is increased. If you need more power, simply add more squares. Normally, hobbyists and builders need to custom-fit a battery into a solar array and then solder or wire the pieces together.