"GoodGuide, one of my favorite applications for the iPhone, just got a cool new feature — barcode scanning. Users could already consult the app for data on whether a product was healthy, environmentally-friendly, and socially-responsible, but now you don’t have to type in a search. Just scan the barcode, and the app brings up the relevant information. The San Francisco company also announced a $5.5 million second round of funding led by new investor Physic Ventures, with participation from New Island Capital and existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. GoodGuide previously raised $3.73 million."
- Howard Rheingold
"CELLPHONES could soon be used to fight noise pollution - an irony that won't be lost on those driven to distraction by mobile phones' ringtones. In a bid to make cities quieter, the European Union requires member states to create noise maps of their urban areas once every five years. Rather than deploying costly sensors all over a city, the maps are often created using computer models that predict how various sources of noise, such as airports and railway stations, affect the areas around them. Nicolas Maisonneuve of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, France, says that those maps are not an accurate reflection of residents' exposure to noise. To get a more precise picture, Maisonneuve's team has developed NoiseTube, a downloadable software app which uses people's smartphones to monitor noise pollution. "The goal was to turn the mobile phone into an environmental sensor," says Maisonneuve."
- Howard Rheingold
@jerrymichalski Francis Pisani convinced me to start using tags w/ Brain. "Useful" and "Howard's publication" are first two.
"The United Steelworkers (USW) and MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A. today announced a framework agreement for collaboration in establishing MONDRAGON cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada. The USW and MONDRAGON will work to establish manufacturing cooperatives that adapt collective bargaining principles to the MONDRAGON worker ownership model of “one worker, one vote.”"
- Howard Rheingold
"A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word. The default search query is 'data visualization' but a new one can be typed into the text box at the top of the application. You can also enter a Twitter ID preceded by the '@' symbol to see the latest tweets from that user. A parameter to the URL can be used to specify the initial search word. For example, use http://www.neoformix.com/Project... to see the latest tweets about coffee. "
- Howard Rheingold
@slatteryz They would be wrong. Computer and communication industries were not interested in giving up control.