"mainstream acceptance" entries

Second Life Gets a Paper Book

Second Life has been on Techmeme a lot lately. Most of this has been about the continuing inroads that larger companies like Dell and Reuters have made into the world. Some of it has been about strife within the world due to things like land price increases and copybot (a recently released program that can copy any artifact in…

Meebo's Release and WidgetsLive

On Friday, web-based IM company Meebo (Radar post) launched a new version of their site that pulled them out of Alpha. The release added a number of necessary features to their product. In addition to a cleaner design and improved performance they added the following: Pop outs – This is really nice. Now you can move a chat or your…

Open Street Map Makes a Commercial Deal

Open Street Map (OSM), the open data, community mapping project, has just made its first commercial deal. Nestoria, a UK realty company, is now providing the option to use OSM's data for the Isle of Wight. They use Google exclusively for the rest of the world. The Nestoria map below shows the OSM integration: Cowes, Isle of Wight – property…

IE7 is Now Available

IE7 is now available for download. I did this last night and I find the browser to be a big improvement over IE6, but it is not big enough to get me to leave Firefox. Here are some of the things that I feel are good improvements: Search: IE7 has added a search box in the top right corner. During…

Location Awareness in Hardware

Location, location, location. Location awareness is going to become standard on newer gadgets (just as it is becoming commonplace with cars). This has of course been coming for a while and I am not the first to say this or write about it, but recently i have seen 4 interesting GPS hardware add-ons that I think signal that its actually…

Sony Reader finally ships

Just a quick appendix to Brady's post about the Iliad digital ink reader he saw at EuroOSCON: The Sony Reader is finally ready to ship. From the screenshots it would appear that the screen is slightly bigger and the interface less cluttered as compared to the Reader's ancestor the Librie. I've just put in an order and can't wait to…