ReadWriteWeb:- There are now some 250,000 mobile applications for Apple's iPhone and iPad, and over 70,000 for Android. How on earth do you find ones that are actually worth using? You could use a recommendation engine or website, an app that recommends apps or ask a friend.

ReadWriteWeb:- The Palo Alto Research Center is releasing new semantic technology, based on Xerox PARC IP, in the form of an Outlook plugin called Meshin. At first glance, Meshin looks like the ugly stepsister to a similar Outlook tool called Xobni, as it also loads into an email sidebar window, displaying sections dedicated to recent conversations and a summary of attachments shared back and forth via email, among other things. But what makes Meshin different is the engine powering it underneath: a semantic technology that uses "natural language processing" to understand entities, how they connect and what they mean.

ReadWriteWeb:- One big theme to emerge out of our conversation last week about the future of the workplace was remote working. I thought it would be beneficial to start this week off by thinking about the disadvantages of remote work and the technologies and policies that may be able to mitigate some of those problems.

ReadWriteWeb:- Running a site doesn't only require Web development skills. Any site where the users can add content and communicate with each other requires a great deal of care and attention if it's going to be a success.

TechCrunch:- It's been about a month since Twitter turned on its people recommendation engine, a set of algorithms that enables the service to automagically suggest people you don’t currently follow but may find interesting. Twitter has indicated that these suggestions are based on a variety of factors, including the people you already follow and the people they follow. They are, for now, only visible on Twitter.com and the Find People section. And based on my experience, the algorithms seem to be doing their job

TechCrunch:- Is Facebook testing its location based service Places for imminent rollout in the UK? Notes on Twitter started to surface over the weekend indicating that might be the case. And as you can see from this screengrab from @kierondonoghue on Saturday, it did work for a short time. However, we've checked with Twitter's official spokespeople and they say "We weren't testing it this weekend contrary to reports." And a simple check of the iPhone app reveals that even if some people can access their location via mobile in the UK, most can't. So there you go. But, the imminent arrival of Facebook Places in the UK and across the rest of Europe is clearly going to have an interesting impact not least on local location-based startups who already compete...

TechCrunch:- "He’s a classic Aussie in the sense that he’s a bit of a male chauvinist.” That quote comes at the end of a piece on the recent escapades of Julian Assange, founder and chief spokesman for Wikileaks. It seems apt, because it's becoming increasingly clear that an organisation which aspiries to transparency and the high ideals of open information is going to have problems going forward if it continues to entertain an individual who lacks transparency and whose private life is alleged by his female accuses to be be riddled with low ideals. Because let's be clear, delicate diplomancy and skirting the choppy waters of international issues which involve thousands of lives - like releasing highly sensitive government information...

Ajaxian » Front Page:- I recently saw the new HTML5 Search input element and wondered what the heck it does: PLAIN TEXT HTML: <input name="s" type="search" />   Chris Coyier has posted an in-depth article going into this new HTML5 input type to appease your curiosity. The HTML5 spec actually says you don't have to do much with it, but Webkit actually has a [...]

TechCrunch:- A trusted source has confirmed that French-blogging platform, Overblog, will soon be part of the Wikio family. Rumor has it that the growing Luxembourg-based news portal is apparently trying to develop European Google News for blogs. For anyone who isn't familiar with Wikio, all you really have to know is that it's a news portal founded by Pierre Chappaz in 2005 after his previous company, Kelkoo, was acquired by Yahoo in 2004 for some 475 million euros. For acquisitions à la Française, that's not too shabby.

TechCrunch:- If ever a trailer did not depict what a movie is actually about it's this trailer for Universal Pictures' "Catfish", a movie about Facebook the subject matter of which could not be further from that other movie about Facebook. I'd like to use this sentence to say "Spoiler Alert" about fifteen times because the next couple paragraphs are going to be full of them. If you hate spoilers do yourself a favor and stop reading now. That said, the following exposition shouldn't prevent you from seeing the movie, I've seen it twice and enjoyed both times. "Catfish" is a movie about Nev Schulman, a 24-year-old New York photographer and his relationship with eight year old Abby Pierce and her 19-year-old sister Megan Faccio whom he meets on Facebook in 2007. I'm sure all of you can see this coming, but Megan isn't who she claims to be and neither is Abby. Nev and Ariel Schulman,...

ReadWriteWeb:- Must include at least one number. Must be longer than six characters. Cannot have more than four sequential characters from your previous seven passwords. The rules for password creation vary wildly from site to site, an effort to protect users from those who would hack their identities.

TechCrunch:- Online publishing company Wetpaint has been undergoing a strategic shift in its business model over the past year. Wetpaint began as a simple wiki/social publishing tool but then started to build entertainment sites for big brands, including MSN. And the heavily funded startup succumbed to layoffs last July and December. But today, Wetpaint is taking the company in a new direction: original content. The startup is launching Wetpaint Entertainment; a TV news site that covers news and gossip from over 15 major TV shows, such as Glee, Grey's Anatomy, and Gossip Girl. Each show has a dedicated online channel...

TechCrunch:- Adam Penenberg. If you call yourself an online journalist, and yet that name doesn’t immediately prompt a node of recognition - a smile, even - then it’s time to close your laptop and bow your head in shame. Or at least head over to Netflix. It was Adam Penenberg who, back in 1998, first forced traditional journalists to sit up and take online reporting seriously. And he did so with a double whammy: scooping them on a big story - a scandal that went to the heart of one of America’s journalistic institutions - while also exposing a rising star of print journalism as a hack and a liar. The lying hack was New Republic wunderkind

ReadWriteWeb:- There were no reporters present in Laurel, Miss. when a jury handed down a $131 million verdict against Ford after an Explorer rolled over, killing a young man who was on track to play baseball for the New York Mets. Hours after the verdict, there was no coverage of a case that involved a high profile victim, a major corporation, and the possibility that more than four million Ford Explorers are dangerously unstable.

TechCrunch:- This weekend, I've been catching up on some reading. One post that was of particular interest to me was David Beach's article from last week about developing for Android. Beach, who is a product manager at eBay Mobile and a co-founder of 12seconds, basically says that the experience sucks for a number of reasons (all of which Google can fix, but will take quite a bit of work and time). But one quote in particular stuck out to me: Android has succeeded despite Google. In fact it's safe to say that Android is successful for one primary reason. The iPhone is only available on AT&T. If the iPhone was on Verizon a year ago. Android would be no where near as popular. Obviously, Beach isn't the first person to bring

TechCrunch:- Bob Dylan once said that 'money doesn't talk, it swears', but in Hargeisa the capital of Africa's Somaliland it stinks. It literally stinks, reeking of rotten paper, like a leaky library in a monsoon. That's because there's so much of it. For every dollar there are almost 17,000 Somaliland Shillings and the highest-denomination note is 500 Shillings, which is by no means the most common note in circulation. Money-changers sit within self-built stacks of money (picture left, video below) and children take wheelbarrows of it from one place to another, reminiscent of 1930s Weimar Germany when the Deutsch Mark became worthless. By all criteria, cash doesn't work here. Could tiny, unknown Somaliland become the first nation to become a cashless society? It is not only possible, it is...

ReadWriteWeb:- Heading outside this Labor Day weekend? (Or, as we spell it in Canada, "Labour Dauy"?)

ReadWriteWeb:- ReadWriteWeb Co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick recently extolled the virtues of Amazon's Mechanical Turk for "rocking conference blogging." He's not the only person who's seeing some real benefits from outsourcing small tasks to the service, as I've noticed a number of people talk about the ways in which they use - or could envision using - Mechanical Turk to help them. Ewan McIntosh, for example, wonders if teachers could utilize the service to outsource some of the "larger scale time suckers" in education -- entering attendance records, generating letters to parents, and so on.

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ReadWriteWeb:- As you work to develop your product - before and after launch, it's important that you use more than just "gut feelings" to ascertain what's working and what's not. Along those lines, last week, Ryan Carson, co-founder of Carsonified offered a list of six key metrics for your web app and how to track them.

TechCrunch:- If I ever write another book it will probably be about one of three topics. The first is the truth about how the press and journalism really works - the sausage making - to show just how much of a beautiful, subjective and chaotic mess it all is. The second idea is to talk about how perfect blogging is, with its constant feedback loop, as a training ground for mass psychology and manipulation. The third idea I'm keeping to myself for now, but it's more startup focused. It's the second one that's been on my mind lately. Mostly because it's become pretty clear to me that any blogger worth her salt could start, say, an extremely successful militant religious cult. Any blogger will tell you how frustrating the early days are. Getting someone, anyone, to link to you. Your first comment! etc. And as your audience grows you are introduced to the first rule of anonymous...

ReadWriteWeb:- German authorities have recently expressed skepticism about cloud computing and the potential it has for breaking data protection laws.

TechCrunch:- Stealth Mode Match, a searchable data spider of often very revealing SEC form D filings, is the brain child of Denis Papathanasiou, who came up with the idea while researching funding options (a.k.a spying) for his ebooks startup Fifobooks, "I was just using it to keep tabs on specific investors and other competitors in the ebook space, but I mentioned it to a few people, and they were interested enough to want to use it themselves." Papathanasiou then added a public API and launched it in beta under its own domain. Right now the site allows a simple search mode which shows results for the past four weeks and then an extended API...

TechCrunch:- The term "social network" is of course synonymous with online networks like Facebook. But think about what you're actual social life is like for a second. Are you really closest to the people whose items you "like" the most on Facebook? What about the people you @reply or retweet on Twitter? The people you reblog the most on Tumblr? If you're anything like me, probably not. Instead, the best indicator of who I actually interact with socially the most in real life are the calls I make and the texts I send -- it's all mobile interaction. I've written before that I think location is the bridge between social networks and actual social life. But why do we even need that bridge? Why are so many startups content to build on...

ReadWriteWeb:- I recently had an urge to pick up an MMORPG again, but after checking on the profile for my favorite Everquest 2 character - clocking in at over 138 days played - it's probably best I not devote myself to the life of hardcore raiding at particular juncture. That being said, as a self-described gamer, I'm pretty sympathetic to any argument made that playing MMOs makes you a better person.

ReadWriteWeb:- We're always on the lookout for upcoming Web tech events from around world. Know of something taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or email us.

TechCrunch:- A couple weeks ago, Facebook officially opened their new office in Seattle, WA. At the time, Facebook's Ari Steinberg (the main engineer in charge up there) wrote a post and shared a few pictures of what it looks like. But those pictures sort of made it look like a dismal, dreary version of Office Space (I know Seattle is cloudy all the time, but come on). So we've got a few better ones that show actual signs of life. Just as when Facebook opened their new Bay Area office, and when

TechCrunch:- According to new research from Pew Internet, 82% of American adults own a cell phone, Blackberry, iPhone or other similar devices. And 65% of adults who own them say they have slept with their cell phones on or right next to their beds. Yet consumers don’t know what these devices are made of exactly, and what their environmental and health impact may be. Phone manufacturers aren't required to share all the details. Some do anyway. Not Apple, though...

TechCrunch:- Editor's note: The following guest post is by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the CEO of WatchMojo, a producer and distributor of premium video content. Read his other posts here, or follow him on Twitter @ashkan My cohort at Revision 3, CEO Jim Louderback, recently wrote an article called "Screw Viral Videos." Why? Because according to Louderback, “viral videos deliver little or no value to anyone.” Which led me to wonder: what about content farms? The Definition of Content Farms While no official description exists yet, a content farm is the term given to a website or media organization that seeks to maximize content production...

TechCrunch:- You'll forgive me for sneaking in some pop culture in the mix because it's Saturday and all, right? Rapper Kanye West is having a bit of a moment on Twitter the past few hours, apologizing for the Taylor Swift incident from last year when he stormed the stage during the artist's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards to complain that Beyonce should have won the Best Female Video award instead. But not just that. He's also making it crystal clear, as others have before him admittedly, that Twitter has changed the way celebrities interact with their fans and anyone who's interested in what they have to say really. And slamming mainstream media in the process.

TechCrunch:- When I was ready to transition from computer programmer to project manager, my employer, Xerox Corporation, sent me to its huge training center in Leesburg, Virginia. Over two weeks, the people there taught me some of the skills I needed in order to succeed in my new role: managing projects, motivating people, complying with employment regulations, and preparing status reports and presentations. The company also encouraged me to complete an MBA, on a part-time basis, at New York University. It gave me lots of time off and paid for the tuition. Tech companies in the internet era offer their employees some great perks. But do you think that Facebook, Groupon, or Zynga provide budding professionals with any serious management training? Not at all. Given the way tech companies grow and the HR challenges they face, management training and career development are more important than ever. But few have the...

ReadWriteWeb:- For the second week in a row, Digg topped our most-read-stories list. Also this week we launched a brand new channel - ReadWriteHack - and continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010: We learned how to use the Internet of Things to hack Nike+ to do automatic Foursquare check-ins; augmented reality helped tennis fans "see through walls"; and Google Docs got real-time collaborative highlighting. Read on for more.

TechCrunch:- Look out Plancast and Upcoming, here comes Lanyrd. Ok, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but if it's possible to have a SXSW "tipping point" at an event then Lanyrd just had it at dConstruct, a popular design and developer conference in the UK. So what is it? The guys behind Lanyrd say they are not trying to build a general purpose events site but instead they are just interested in conferences and everything associated with them: speakers, attendees, venues, books, video and audio, twitter conversation, blog coverage - you name it.

TechCrunch:- The Funded founder Adeo Ressi was arrested and briefly detained earlier this evening over an altercation with a flight attendant. The airline? Virgin America, which I've been holding up as virtually the only airline that doesn't suck (See Virgin Airlines Fails To Commit Atrocities On Flight VX746 and Delta Flight 1843 From JFK To Hell). Ressi's description of the incident is below, and he has sent this to Virgin, he tells me. I've reached out to Virgin America for their position. I can't help but note the similarities with Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater, who has...

TechCrunch:- Apple CEO Steve Jobs' obsessive focus on design detail is at least partially responsible for why the tech sphere and the design sphere are so intertwined at the moment. Which makes the ire that Jobs has received for the current iTunes 10 logo (not to mention the foibles of Ping) particularly poignant. The universal hatred for this thing has spawned an @BPGlobalPR-esque Twitter account, some pretty impressive suggestions of alternate logos over on design collaboration site Dribbble, and an email to Jobs himself. ValuLeads...

TechCrunch:- Bad news for Craigslist users who like to peruse the Erotic Services Adult Services section of their site. It's gone, replaced by a large black and white "censored" logo. I've reached out to Craigslist for comment and await their reply. But the choice of words is significant - the section wasn't simply removed, the censored word was used. The site has been embattled as old press and state attorneys general use any excuse to blame sex crimes on the site. From South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster's failed crusade against them to a variety of press...

ReadWriteWeb:- Java gets a bad rap. It's considered old-school. People say that young developers prefer Ruby-on-Rails and other Web-based hot stuff. True - but these are not bad times for Java at all.

TechCrunch:- The Obama administration promised $8 billion in funding for cities and states to build high-speed, intercity rail projects back in January. This week, the Department of Transporation issued its specifications for the manufacture of new fast trains, namely double-decker coach, dining, baggage, and business class passenger rail cars that can travel between 79 MPH and up to 220 MPH. Bi-level rail cars not typical in the US today, would accommodate more passengers, and hopefully alleviate congested roads and some resulting air pollution...

TechCrunch:- As a longtime Apple TV owner, I'll admit a dirty little secret: I really like the device. Sure, it has been one of the rare flops for Apple in recent years. And it could be so much more with say, a Blu-ray player or a web browser. But it is really good at its core functionality: bringing iTunes content into your living room. And that's why this new version of the Apple TV makes sense -- at least for now. When I first bought the Apple TV, there were two varieties: a 40 gigabyte version and a 160 gigabyte version. I was torn between which one to get, but I ultimately went with the 160 GB one thinking I could put most of my movies on it. Big mistake. I basically never use the hard drive on my Apple TV, so it's a 160 GB hard drive sitting there doing nothing. Instead, I stream everything to the Apple TV. In fact, the only time I do use the hard...

TechCrunch:- Location-based service Echo Echo recently posted the above image to their blog in a (successful) attempt to garner some media attention as the debate around online privacy continues to rage. As extreme as their "If Mark Zuckerburg Cared About Privacy" example is, it does call attention to the needless complexity of various web service privacy agreements, settings and policies. In the wake of an $8.5 million lawsuit settlement today, search giant Google made a gesture of good faith in the "caring about privacy" department, assuring users that they were...

TechCrunch:- Vidyo, a company that specializes in high-quality video conferencing technology for the enterprise, is betting big on bringing video conferencing to mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones. Similar to Skype, Vidyo offers a technology that allows people to connect with each other over the web via video conferencing. However, the company says that Vidyo system is focused more on the enterprise, providing a reliable system, allowing conferencing for many parties at once, and offering high quality video. And Vidyo has built a big business licensing its technology to large electronics companies, such as HP, Intel and Hitachi. Vidyo’s technology is also used by Google to power video for Google Chat.

TechCrunch:- Curious what Google's Gmail Priority Inbox means for those of us who use an IMAP or POP client like Mac Mail or the Mail function on an iPhone? Well as of yet the feature is not fully enabled on either IMAP or POP-compatible third party or mobile clients, leaving a large percentage of people who hate viewing email their email on a standard web browser out in the cold. If you try to use the service in Mac Mail right now the emails determined by the Priority Inbox algorithm to be "Important" are sent to an "Important" folder under Gmail. In order to reach them in Mail for the iPhone you have to search for the "Important" folder under your Gmail account.

TechCrunch:- Can someone please explain this Bloomberg Businessweek story to me? I've read it a few times and am still having a hard time understanding what is or what isn't being implied, or not implied, about a partnership between Coinstar and Apple. First of all, the title is awful because most people likely don't know that Coinstar owns Redbox (they acquired them last year), the DVD rental kiosk company. Instead, most people know Coinstar as those machines in supermarkets where you turn in your loose change for cash or silly things, like Facebook Credits. So why on Earth would they be partnering with Apple on some online venture? Well, again, it's about Redbox, as they sort of note in the first paragraph. But what are...

TechCrunch:- It seems that one of the beta testers for Google TV couldn't keep all that goodness to himself, and has posted several pictures and some video of the near-finished interface and hardware. It's a brief and not particularly shocking video, but seeing it running on a home TV and hearing a regular guy expressing legitimate (if subdued) excitement make it a lot more real.

ReadWriteWeb:- Baidu is the most-visited website in China and has captured 70% of search revenue in that country. Alexa's Top 500 Global Sites list puts it at number 6. But with virtually no penetration outside Asia, can it really be considered a global company at all, or just an awfully big one?

ReadWriteWeb:- One quote from an IBM executive stands out in the post that Chris Cameron wrote today about IBM's augmented reality app for the U.S. Open.

ReadWriteWeb:- The Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon have made a commitment to broadband for its largely rural population. Taking advantage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's broadband funding, the Tribes will spend $5.4 million in extending broadband infrastructure throughout the reservation and making it affordable for tribal users.

ReadWriteWeb:- Tumblr is quickly becoming one of the Web's most popular and unique platforms on which to share and discover interesting content of all media. According to Tumblr, over 5.3 million posts are made each day by the service's over 7.5 million users. Posts are passed on over and over through Tumblr's "reblog" feature, but at such a high volume it's easy to loose track of where content originated. Tumblr hopes to solve this dilemma with some new attribution functionality launched earlier today.

ReadWriteWeb:- First up at this week's Strategy Roundtable was Cheryl Yeoh presenting CityPockets, an online destination, and an app for managing daily deals across a wide range of sites. The daily deal and group buying market has really heated up, with numerous sites offering variations on the basic value proposition. But for Cheryl, the problem is that she needs critical mass.

TechCrunch:- First we had the Google vs China debacle, then came Saudi Arabia's tussle with RIM. And now it's India's turn: threatening to block RIM, Google and Skype unless the companies agree to set up localised servers, all the better for state monitoring of communications. Curiously, compared to the outrage levelled at the