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Development

CDC Goes Online for Info on Swine Flu

As concerns spread about the Swine Flu virus, traffic to health, social networking and news-oriented sites continues to spike as users seek out information. The volume of conversations about the epidemic have already exceeded those surrounding the salmonella and peanut butter scares from earlier this winter by nearly 10 to 1, according to Nielsen Online. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services have been using Twitter and YouTube, among other sites, to disseminate information. Three agency heads hosted live…
May 2, 2009
DesignDevelopmentMarketing

Cool Tools for Search 4.0

A cool new tool called DragToTop,  from a pair of serial entrepreneurs in Ottawa, Canada, captures the immediacy of a Twitter or Google Trends, yet adds a powerful toolset to help individual users organize and save searches about topics that are important to them.   (more…)
May 2, 2009
DesignDevelopment

Open Source Trends

Ol' Facebook has launched an open stream API giving third-party developers access to users' activity streams when creating applications. The idea here is to  spawn a new generation of advanced applications. An open source approach helped catapult Twitter into the mainstream as third-party apps like Tweetdeck found a myriad of uses for the micro-blogging service. Now the race is really on between Facebook and Twitter to become the dominant real-time social messaging and commenting platform. Tweetdeck rival Seesmic is one of the first developers to take advantage of…
April 28, 2009
Marketing

Online Sales Increase for Some…

Despite the economy, online entertanment providers report healthy increases in sales. This makes sense -- people are not going out as much, and order needed entertainment -- distractions from the economic woes on the news-- sent to the comfort of home. Amazon bucked the slumping online retail trend, reporting a 24% increase in profits from a year ago, but warned investors not to expect such growth during Q2. Net income totaled $177 million and revenue climbed 18% to $4.89 billion. The…
April 26, 2009
DevelopmentMarketing

Getfugu with Tomorrow’s Trends in Online Advertising

Mobile search company Getfugu signed a marketing deal with Hollywood outfit CP Productions agreeing to be Getfugu's agent in the entertainment sector for its "hot spotting" advertising service, set to launch in fall of 2009. In addition to offering image and voice recognition interfaces, Getfugu allows you to watch a video on a touchscreen phone then touch an item featured in the video in order to purchase it.     (more…)
April 22, 2009