Blog Archive » The Web’s third frontier
Everyone realizes that the web is entering a new phase in its development. One indication of this transition is the proliferation of attempts to explain the changes that are occurring. Functional explanations emphasize the real time web, collaborative systems and location-based services. Technical explanations argue that the interconnectivity of data is the most significant current development. They consider the web’s new frontiers to be closely related to the semantic web or the “web of things”. Although these explanations are both pertinent and intriguing, none of them offers an analytical matrix for assessing the developments that are now underway.
Content Curation for Teachers
Have you ever felt that there is simply too much interesting, educational content on the web? Fortunately, there are also some great, free products that help learners curate all of the many things they can read, watch, hear etc. on the web. The beauty of taking control of your content by saving and organizing links is that you can quickly find, revisit or share content with others. By curating the web, one can essentially build up a library of data in the cloud for free. I know personally as a history teacher, I spend a lot of time surfing the web when I prepare lessons.
Lover.ly Raises $500K To Be An Online, Visual Inspiration Engine For Weddings
Lover.ly, an inspiration engine and Pinterest-like startup for weddings, has raised $500,000 from Joanne Wilson, Michael Edwards, Michael Yavonditte, Charles Smith, Anu Duggal, Jordan Levy, and Rick Webb. Launched in the Fall of 2011, Lover.ly is a centralized place that helps brides discover and save wedding ideas. The site is designed to help brides, vendors, and wedding enthusiasts find inspiration (from wedding blogs), people to hire, and things to buy. Similar to Pinterest, the site allows users to curate board of ideas and make them public for users to view and draw inspiration. Currently, the site has an archive of over 130,000 images organized by editors and its community of users. Lover.ly offers both editor-curated inspiration boards (i.e. bridesmaid dresses for beach weddings, honeymoon ideas) as well as user-generated boards.
Locii Insight tools
Excel Client Microsoft Excel 2007/2010 is rapidly proving to be the de facto Business Intelligence (BI) front end for a whole host of technologies. Excel 2007/2010 Pivot tables and pivot charts connected to OLAP cubes provide the user with a known, comfortable environment whilst delivering incredible performance thanks to the combination of in-memory pivot tables coupled with the power of an OLAP server engine. One issue remains and that is the time it takes for an average user to fully grasp and understand pivot table concepts.
Pearltrees: Slick Social Bookmarking and Curation Tool Now on iPad
WHAT: A web-based and iPad application to organize and curate your social life online. Users collect, or bookmark, web pages, tweets, Google+ posts and more, and arrange them in pearls or pearltrees. A pearl holds anything interesting you find on the web with a URL. A pearltree is a collection of webpages that functions like a folder. On the iPad, you simply organize your pearls by touching and dragging.
Content Curation with PearlTrees
Note: This post is also cross-posted over at the EasyBib blog. I’ve written and spoken before about the essential skill (a literacy according to Howard Rheingold) of students not only being able to collect content from their network(s), but to curate what’s collected. Just like a museum curator pours over artifacts to find the very best to display, we should also do the same not just for our own professional resources, but see it as an obligation to model it for our students. I came across a new resource recently (I believe the hat tip goes to Alec Couros for this find) called Pearltrees. After you sign up for your account, you can start building your own Pearltrees. Pearltrees are made up of “pearls”, or sites you want to curate into particular the Pearltrees (topics) you’ve created.
No Name, No Email, No Problem: nFluence Media Raises $3M For Anonymous Deal-Targeting Tech
Seattle and London-based nFluence Media emerged from two years of stealth mode to announce it has raised $3 million for a deal-targeting technology whose first application will be a daily deal aggregating iPhone app, due out later this month. However, the company is not necessarily just another player in the overly crowded “daily deals” space. Instead, the technology being funded here is an anonymous self-profiling system that can expand into other verticals, including future uses with mobile carriers, cable/satellite TV operators and shopping mall owners. The new round was led by Voyager Capital (Bill McAleer) with contributions from 17 angels in the Alliance of Angels. Along with the news, comes the announcement that Tom Huseby will be chairman of the board at nFluence. Huseby and nFluence co-founder Brian Roundtree (CTO) know each other from previous collaborations at SnapIn, where Roundtree was CTO.
Pearltrees makes Web curation a joy with its 'magical' new iPad app
Not many tech CEOs would have the guts to describe their products as “magical” and as delivering “pure happiness”, but that’s exactly how Pearltrees‘ Patrice Lamothe describes the startup’s iPad app released today. You know what? He may just be right. Pearltrees is a service that takes a visual approach to Web curation. Launched late last year with its browser-based version, it allows you to create networks of ‘pearls’ on screen. Each pearl is a link to a piece of content and you can connect them together in whatever way you choose into a ‘pearltree’.
Pearltrees
I spent at least an hour transferring images from Pinterest (it took up 30% of my space) and it immediately slowed my iPad way down. Not just the app was slow (I had to scroll very slowly so it wouldn’t crash immediately, although it still crashed every few minutes), but literally my entire iPad lagged. Also there needs to be more explanation for the hold/drop functions. Too many times I accidentally sent hundreds of photos somewhere else, including into the Dropbox where I had to replace them all individually which took ages. I couldn’t figure out if there was a way to transfer all the Dropbox stuff back into the collection all at once. Anyway, a tutorial for how to maneuver would be nice.That said, I really like this service and it seems much more useful to me than Pinterest for my needs.
