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This morning, the crew of the International Space Station opened the hatch of the SpaceX Dragon capsule and went inside. The Dragon docked with the ISS yesterday, becoming the first private spacecraft to rendezvous with the station. NASA astronaut Donald Pettit was the first aboard, remarking that it "smells like a brand new car." Pettit and the crew now have until Thursday to unload Dragon's cargo and refill it with equipment to return to Earth. The main purpose of the flight was to demonstrate that the Dragon capsule and the Falcon 9 rocket that delivered it were capable of reaching the station. SpaceX plans to begin regular cargo missions this year. The Dragon capsule is capable of accommodating up to seven astronauts, and the company hopes to begin manned missions within three years. The station crew wore oxygen masks and protective gear as a precaution when boarding Dragon, but they found the capsule to be clean and free of debris. "It looks great," Pettit said. SpaceX represents...

Is someone illiterate if they can't code? Microsoft's new social network So.cl launches. Views on YouTube decrease as Web video evolves. Learn more about these stories and many more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-Up. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more. Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy Some programmers believe that the knowledge of programming will eventually be included in literacy standards. However, others believe we have too far to go to achieve current literacy standards to see programming added any time soon. Let us know what you think in the comments on Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy. Microsoft's New Social Network, So.cl: It's Like Google+ for Wonks Microsoft released its social network, So.cl, this week. Richard MacManus says it's a derivative...

Today's theme is movers and shakers. How about some straight-up tech news for once? There's a lot of interesting maneuvering going on right now, and since RWW doesn't tend to report on rumors, this seems like a good opportunity to round up some of the stories we're watching with interest. For all we know, these could be major headlines tomorrow. Pocket-lint has a "man in the know" who thinks that Facebook might be poised to buy Opera Software, which makes the speedy Opera mobile browser. Robin Wauters at The Next Web connects a few more dots on that story. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea for Facebook insiders to dump so much stock immediately after the IPO. Chris Ziegler has a great scoop on The Verge: HP's Enyo team, the core of what's left of WebOS, is going to Google. On the television front, NBCU is reportedly thinking about buying back MSNBC.com, which it sold to Comcast last year. Groupon is testing a payment system to compete with Square and PayPal, according to Rocky Agrawal...

Even as all sorts of questions swirl around last week’s initial public offering and this week’s release of a camera app that looks a lot like the camera app it paid $1 billion for last month, Facebook has taken its usual quiet stance, issuing as few public statements and offering as few public answers as possible to the questions that business journalists and tech bloggers have been asking. It’s a tried-and-true public relations tactic: While startup companies crave the kind of exposure that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to public relations firms, established tech players often pick and choose when they speak, if they choose to speak at all. None of Facebook’s top executives, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, gave interviews last Friday as the company became the third-largest IPO in history, and none have publicly commented as shares slid this week. Zuckerberg’s last interview was a fawning report of the company’s announcement on ABC News about an initiative...

After a flawless launch on May 22, the SpaceX Dragon capsule has become the first commercial spacecraft to berth at the International Space Station. After a flyby last night, the capsule approached the station, and station flight engineers Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers brought the vehicle to berth with the station's robotic arm. The capsule was bolted to the station's Harmony module at 12:02 PM Eastern Time. This first flight delivered non-critical cargo for the crew of ISS Expedition 31. It's mainly a test mission for SpaceX's capsule and the Falcon 9 rocket that delivered it to orbit. Everything has gone off without a hitch. #Dragon grappled to the International Space Station!!! twitter.com/SpaceX/status/… — SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 25, 2012 The successful flight of Dragon paves the way for the first private, manned spaceflight. In addition to cargo, the SpaceX capsule is designed to carry up to seven astronauts, meaning that Dragon missions launched by the Falcon 9 rocket can help take...

Since this 2006 article on RWW about the Top Web Apps in India, a lot has happened in the Indian web industry. Some new entrants have made a mark for themselves and some existing ones have strengthened their market positions, while still others got lost somewhere in between. We take a homegrown look at the changes in India during the past five years. Shilpi Choudhury is a marketer at DiscountPandit, an Indian startup focusing on daily deal search and product price comparison. She blogs on topics related to startups, entrepreneurship, e-commerce and the daily deal industry. First, some quick stats. According to a report, Internet in India 2011, published by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) as well as a short video published by Nielsen: There are currently 112 million Internet users (88 million urban dwellers, and 24 million more from rural villages) in India, out of which 90 million are active users; 240 million Indians accessed the Internet on their mobile phones...

Faking a computer science degree cost Scott Thompson his CEO job. But with one notable exception, most observers thought he was doing OK, under lousy circumstances. Sure, the lying was wrong, but apart from that, would Thompson’s lack of a computer science degree have hurt his career? Does having the right degree - or any degree - really matter that much any more? There’s plenty of evidence that in a world where a 9-year-old can write an iPhone app, degrees may be obsolete. After all, Bill Gates and Michael Dell did just fine without finishing college, and dropouts like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson have questioned the value of traditional education. Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel is offering standout youngsters $100,000 in angel investments to start companies instead of going to college. To find out what a degree means today, we asked a Bay Area headhunter. She specializes in financial services, but also works with medical and high-tech clients. Under condition of anonymity, she...

A study released last month breaks down patterns on how narcissists use social networks and finds differences in patterns on Facebook when compared with those on Twitter. An individual’s level of narcissism is displayed not in how many Twitter followers they have, but is more closely correlated to how many Tweets they send about themselves, according to a study by Bruce C. McKinney, Lynne Kelly, & Robert L. Duran in the spring issue of Communications Research Reports, an academic journal. But on Facebook, the opposite holds true: Narcissism was directly correlated with the number of friends a person has on the social network, and not necessarily by the number of status updates they post about their personal lives. “These findings suggest that Facebook is not dominated by narcissistic millennials, as some have proposed, although, consistent with previous research, those higher on narcissism appear to be driven to amass a larger number of Facebook friends,” the researchers wrote....

Many startups seem to be powered solely by excitement over the new business (occasionally mixed with some Red Bull and Starbucks). Startup founders typically devote every waking moment to their companies, and probably even dream about it too. But while pure passion can propel entrepreneurs 24/7 for a while, eventually even the most committed startup teams need to learn to manage their time. Burnout is one obvious danger of poor time management. But even more important is the risk that something important will fall through the cracks. If you fail to respond to a potential partner or prospect in a timely fashion because there’s too much on your plate, you could be blowing a make-or-break opportunity. Time management is one of the top challenges for every entrepreneur I know. After years of experience working with entrepreneurs and business owners, I have learned a few tricks for getting more done in the 24 hours we all have. 1. Know thyself. Everyone has a natural rhythm - some of us...

Tonight, starting at 11pm PT, the SpaceX capsule Dragon will rendezvous with the International Space Station for the first time. It's streaming live on UStream and you can watch it here. To prepare you for this historic event, we've profiled the stellar career so far of SpaceX founder Elon Mask. Tonight's rendezvous is the latest milestone in the 10-year journey of SpaceX. The launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket earlier this week ushered in a new era of private spaceflight. The decade long build-up to that launch is testament to the long-term vision of its founder Elon Musk. Live video for mobile from Ustream 40-year old South African Elon Musk has had a stellar career. As well as SpaceX, he's founded or co-founded three other big idea ventures: the company which would become PayPal, electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors and a solar panel company called SolarCity. Retired serial entrepreneur Steve Blank recently named Musk as one of only 3 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of this era to...

It's perhaps the one way that database interaction can work reliably using any format, any server and any client on the Web today. It happens to be a protocol created by Microsoft. But in a symbol of how Microsoft is now perceived today as just another major player instead of a dominant force, the leading platform makers are joining Microsoft in a formal move to standardize OData, the Open Data Protocol. The reason Microsoft and IBM are now on the same side? The real competition is no longer just amongst these old-line technology companies, but largely between them and a new breed of competitors often based around new mobile devices and consumer platforms. Nearly six years ago one of the most bitter standards battles in all of computing was fought between OASIS, caretaker of the OpenDocument format, and Microsoft. The issue was whether, by making the document formats for Microsoft Office available as open standards, the company was unfairly leveraging Office's broad base of...

Just a month after announcing its plans to devour hit app Instagram to the tune of $1 billion, Facebook has released its very own photo sharing app. But is two a crowd? Camera, Facebook's brand new photo sharing app, is built to do precisely the same thing as its wildly popular stepsister, but it feeds directly into Facebook rather than into Instagram's walled garden, population 40 million and growing. It may not officially have Instagram DNA, but Facebook Camera offers up a palette of 14 filters to please any budding mobile photog, though they sport more literal labels ("Neon" and "Golden") than in Instagram's own moody toolkit. Tinker with your photo (you know you want to crop it into a square, go ahead), apply a filter to set the tone, tag a friend and send it straight to Facebook. Like Instagram photos on Facebook, it'll appear on your Timeline at full-width - and fast. Facebook Camera, which was built independently of Kevin Systrom and co., runs circles around the regular...

There’s a lot of money in poor people. KPMG reports that America’s 88 million consumers who are “unbanked” (no bank account) or “underbanked” (no credit) earn $1.3 trillion a year. At least one venture capital firm is out to make money helping them out. Despite the huge dollar amounts controlled by the underbanked, most financial institutions want nothing to do with them - too much hassle and not enough profit potential. Core Innovation Capital has decided to help. The Minnesota-based VC firm has raised $45 million in funds it plans to use to back startups that give low-income consumers somewhere to go for financial services other than the local check-cashing shop. “We operate as a ‘double-bottom line’ fund,” explains Core Innovation managing partner Mike Harris. “We seek excellent financial returns and a positive social impact on the lives of the underbanked." Emerging Middle Class The market opportunity is real, Harris says, and so is the social need. “This is an important category...

The ownCloud project is adding features fast and furiously. The open-source file synchronization and sharing project announced the Milestone 4 release earlier this week, taking ownCloud in an interesting direction for corporate users. Forget Dropbox killer - ownCloud could be something even better, someday. We all know that where the data is, the money is. What ownCloud is doing, then, is sort of surprising. The project (and the company behind it) is all about helping users and companies keep control of their data. That means giving up control of the software, and hoping that money comes from services and support. Understanding ownCloud Like Dropbox and others, ownCloud has a client piece that synchronizes data from your desktop to a server. The big difference here is that ownCloud also provides a server that's free software (under the Affero GPL), and ownCloud isn't in the business of storing user data at all. Instead, it's up to third-party providers to offer hosting, or for...

Axis, Yahoo's "new kind of browser" that launched yesterday, is an attempt to do something noble and important. Yahoo has taken away the search results page, the intermediate step where a search engine makes most of its money, in order to get the user straight to where she's going. Axis is a gamble to redefine search. Unfortunately, Yahoo lost the bet. On paper, Yahoo played Axis just right. It skipped trying to compete with the dominant desktop browsers, instead offering a plug-in that works on all of them. That enables Axis users to extend their browsing habits to the Axis apps for iPad and iPhone, which is much less settled territory. Mobile and tablet browsing is the next frontier, and Yahoo is wise to focus the next stage of its business there. But what does that business look like? Axis tries to reinvent search by getting rid of the results page. When you search, it displays a bar next to the page you're on with little previews of the sites it finds. This is supposed to be...

Today's theme is real artists ship. Everyone wants their tech to be fun. iPads get close, but it's quite another thing to build actual space stations or robot exoskeletons... or the actual Starship Enterprise. But people are going for it, anyway. A man named Dan with a lot of time on his hands has drawn up detailed plans to buld an actual, working Starship Enterprise. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, confirms that it plans to build a moon base. The Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) combat exoskeleton is almost ready for field trials in Afghanistan. Here are detailed specs and videos of what the HULC can do. The privately built Dragon capsule has made its first fly-by of the International Space Station, thanks to SpaceX founder and real-life Iron Man Elon Musk. It's time to let go of our nostalgia for the space program of old and make room for even wilder possibilities. Image credit: Chris Martin of Evil Starship Factory via BuildTheEnterprise. Past entries from Read/Write Daily

Today the X Prize Foundation announced a $2.25 million Nokia Sensing X Challenge to produce a new generation of health care and biometric sensors. This adds a new health-related prize to their roster of other scientific challenges, including a $10 million prize to produce a wireless health monitor like the Star Trek Tricorder, another $10 million prize for gene sequencing, and a $30 million prize sponsored by Google to bring back robotic lunar landers. Bio-sensors have lagged behind other kinds of sensors. Robert McCray, the CEO of the Wireless Life Sciences Alliance, mentioned how many sensors could be found in your average car or phone, which eclipse what is available in the life sciences market. For example, your typical cellphone includes sensors such as a camera, a microphone, a GPS, haptic/touch and an accelerometer. The alliance claims to be the only trade organization focused exclusively on identifying collaboration opportunities within the wireless health sector, and was...

It is time for another look at enterprise IT from our friends Chief and Chuck. If your management still thinks Facebook and Twitter are fads, then perhaps this cartoon will hit home. After all, if we could only just not be bothered all the time from our customers when they have problems, right? One way is to just ignore them, and the message from this cartoon is clear: You do so at your own peril. We've written many articles on the need for using social media to engage your customers, including the analysis of Oracle's acquisition of Vitrue earlier this week and this infographic we linked to last year that shows customers want to use social media for support. Maybe it is time you re-examined your own policies to make these tools both easier and more popular in your enterprise. CA Technologies' CHIEF & CHUCK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://www.ca.com/cdit.

If your boss asked you to identify all of the various SaaS-based providers that are being used across your corporate network, how long would it take you to put together a report? This isn't academic: As more of your end-users sign up for these cloud-based services, it becomes increasingly harder to maintain the appropriate enterprise security policies as the number and kinds of files stored there increases. One solution is to set up stringent firewall policies to block these services, or at least make using them more onerous. But there is another way: better and easier reporting. That is the route that Spiceworks is taking today with an enhancement to its v6.0 service that includes cloud discovery services. “Knowing which cloud services are running on my network is essential to maintaining security and helping save money,” said Andy Phelps, an IT Manager at HPS Group and a Spiceworks user. “The new free cloud service discovery features offered by Spiceworks make it simple for me to...

Social scientists are increasingly looking at online friendships and trying to figure out if they carry the same emotional baggage that real-world friendships do. A preliminary study suggests that breaking up, even if it’s on Facebook, is hard to do. The more you use Facebook, the more likely you are to experience “rumination and negative emotion” when someone unfriends you, according to a study published in the July 2012 edition of the scholarly journal Computers in Human Behavior. The study by Chapman University researchers Jennifer L. Bevan, Jeanette Pfyl and Brett Barclay is one of the first to look at the psychological consequences of so-called relationship termination on social networks. Other factors that increased the pain of being unfriended included: How close the person was to the person that had removed them from their friend list. Whether they were able to figure out who unfriended them, as opposed to just seeing a drop in the number of active friends they had. Who...

PayPal co-founder and Facebook pre-IPO stockholder Peter Thiel Facebook's tainted public offering, which has attracted the attention of federal securities investigators, has grown a bit darker with the filing of a class-action lawsuit. Los Angeles-based law firm Glancy Binkow & Goldberg filed the suit Tuesday in state court in San Mateo County, Calif., on behalf of all investors who lost money in the IPO. The suit rides on allegations that days before Facebook raised the price range on its soon-to-be-public stock, executives warned the lead underwriters that their financial estimates for the company were too high. The bankers, which included Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Securities and Goldman Sachs, lowered their estimates and then told a handful of large investor clients, leaving everyday investors in the dark. "At best, this 'selective disclosure' of the estimate cut is grossly unfair to investors who bought Facebook stock on the IPO (or at any time since) and didn't know about it,"...

The generally accepted definition of "cloud services" - even the one prescribed by the U.S. Government (PDF available here) - includes the existence of metered or measured service - usually a flat rate that scales along with the service consumed. Now one of the cloud's most prominent competitors is opening up its enterprise license program to negotiation, enabling big customers - perhaps including the government itself - to name their price and enter into long-term, fixed-price deals. Box.net's move, announced this morning, opens the door for potentially very large customers to enter into long-term arrangements that would otherwise be quite expensive. Think businesses with tens of thousands of users - for example, P&G. The Return of Deal-making "It's not at all uncommon for software providers to have an enterprise license agreement [ELA], but very atypical to date in the world of cloud," acknowledges Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck, Box's general manager for enterprise products, in an...

UpNext Maps for iPhone is beautiful. It's the smoothest, fastest map I've ever used. It renders 3D buildings for virtual exploration of certain cities. Its look and functionality are distinctive. It's free. And both Google and Apple want to build these features themselves. Is this a kamikaze mission for UpNext? "We've been hobbyists in maps since 2004," says UpNext co-founder Raj Advani. "At the time, I was fond of coding video games, and the gulf in interactivity between the video game experience and the digital mapping experience was striking. A video game world is animated, alive, interactive; things can change. There are weather patterns, sunsets, noise and immersion. In the digital mapping world back then, there were just roads - and ugly, static roads at that." UpNext's goal from the outset was to write a vector-based mapping engine. Traditional mapping systems, including Google, Bing and OpenStreetMap, are tile-based. They download whole pieces of the map as you need them....

Web-only, original programming. If there's one trend in TV this year that has the potential to shake things up moving forward, this is it. Throughout 2012, we've seen headline after headline about players like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube investing in the production of video content that feels more like the stuff we used to switch on our TVs to watch. The latest example is Hulu's announcement that it will start streaming ten new original shows next month. It's not the first such news from Hulu. They got started earlier this year with Battleground, right around the same time Netflix launched Lilyhammer, a drama series that felt like it would have been right at home on HBO. Hulu has since unveiled one set of new programs after another, giving viewers more reasons to turn to the Internet for their TV needs. These aren't just generic, low-budget productions starring no-name talent. Each press release out of Hulu's headquarters reads like a who's-who of TV industry veterans, from producers to...

Steve Wozniak, two years later It’s been fun to watch the normally exuberant tech press go through the rationalization process of what went wrong with Facebook’s IPO, starting with claims that Friday’s flat opening meant the IPO was perfectly priced to outright ignoring the story. It’s been almost as much fun as watching the business press declare Facebook dead on arrival. Before we dig too deeply into either discussion, let’s remember that the same doubts, along with the same proclamations that an issue had chilled the tech IPO market, were being bandied about eight years ago in the days after Google went public. ''I'm not buying,'' Apple Computer co-founder Stephen Wozniak told The New York Times in August 2004. ''Past experience leaves the taste that a few people - never ourselves - will make out the first day, but that it's not likely to appreciate a lot in the near future or maybe even the long future.'' Google, as we all know, now trades at more than $600 per share, up...

shopfront: the front side of a store facing the street; usually contains display windows (Dictionary.com) Yahoo's search app Axis, launched earlier today, is being marketed as "a new kind of browser." It's not a browser though, it's an app that is available on PC, iPhone and iPad. On the PC, it's a plug-in (which is a type of app) for actual browsers, like Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. So what is Axis exactly? In effect, it's a new shopfront for Yahoo's search. Yahoo has always been a shopfront, from the online directory in the mid-90s to the personalized homepage of the past few years. What's different about this new shopfront is that it's a group of apps, instead of a webpage. The question is: will people use it? Let's give it a test drive... The main feature of Axis is search. In the apps, you search for things - just like you would on yahoo.com or google.com. A key part of Axis is that it syncs a user's search activity across computer, iPhone and iPad. It also taps into one...

Yahoo just joined the browser game. The veteran Web company, which has been struggling to define its focus for years, is suddenly betting on the mobile space with a new browser called Axis. The product combines an iOS Web browser with a plugin for most major desktop browsers that syncs a user's Web history and bookmarks across their devices. How does Axis stack up? Effective Design and Seamless Cross-Device Syncing One feature that Axis offers - and should be standard in any tablet or smartphone Web browser - is its ability to sync bookmarks and recent activity across devices. Safari does this to some extent, but could go further. Frankly, this is one area in which Google could do a better job on iOS. Its official iPad app could almost serve as a Web browser, but it doesn't sync with a user's Chrome browsing or search history. Web browsing is far too fractured across our desktops, smartphones and tablets. Axis makes a noble attempt to address this issue. Yahoo has taken great care to...

T he jury is still out in the patent phase of the Oracle vs. Google trial over the use of Java in Android and it does not look like it is coming to a verdict any time soon. So, it is time to turn our attention to corollary aspects of the Oracle vs. Google gauntlet. For instance, Oracle is a company that had spent years on fostering relationships with developers with its products like MySQL and its NoSQL Database. Oracle’s good will may have started to evaporate when it became the steward of the most fundamental of open source languages in Java and immediately sued Google. How badly has Oracle damaged its reputation since acquiring Sun Microsystems? That is the topic of this week’s ReadWriteMobile poll. Sun Microsystems was a well-loved company by many developers. It created Java and unleashed it on the world, asking little in return. It took on the big, bad Microsoft in court, and won. Java is one of the most important software innovations of the Web era. Sun was a darling and, while...

Google updated its search app for iPhone today with a complete redesign that makes it more like the iPad version. This was already Google's best iOS experience by far, and now it's faster, more attractive, and consistent across devices. This month, it looks like search is back in the driver's seat at Google. The start screen is now the same as on the iPad app. It is the classic Google search box reimagined for the touchscreen. It's just a plain, off-white background, the iconic Google name (and even a mobile-friendly version of the day's Google Doodle), and three other buttons: "Apps," "Voice" and "Goggles." Voice search lets you speak your query aloud, and it's impressively accurate. Goggles lets you search visually using the camera. It recognizes text and objects, and it's learning more over time. The "Apps" section is a launcher for all the various Google Web apps, which is probably why this app is so good. Google's other native iOS apps, like Gmail, Translate and especially Voice...

Google founder Larry Page’s shot across Facebook's bow in an interview with Charlie Rose on Monday night generated plenty of headlines Tuesday, but Page got off without really answering Rose’s original question: Is Google “worried or not worried about Facebook’s competition in search?” We spent Tuesday tracking down experts who could speculate on if and when Facebook may try to compete against Google in search, and envision what Facebook’s version of search may look like. As the social network’s share price continued to tank in its first full week of trading, and with former AdWeek editor Michael Wolff saying it was nothing more than another ad-supported website, Facebook will face pressure to find new revenue streams. For many observers, search seems like a likely tactic. “I have a strong feeling that Facebook will almost likely have to do something like this if they want to keep their investors happy,” said Maciej Fita, the SEO director at Brandignity LLC. “It is really going to be...