0. General
- Everything you ever need to know by John Naughton in the Guardian is a long but thoughtful analysis of the impact of the Internet.
- Growth of the Internet from 1998 to 2008 [INFOGRAPHIC]
- Undersea Cable Set To Boost West Africa Broadband (Epicenter)
1. Translation
- The Mojofiti social networking website uses real-time machine translation to allow users to transparently collaborate with others in 27 languages. (SingularityHub.com) The languages aren’t just Latin-based, but Asian languages like Korean, Tagalog or Farsi. The translations aren’t perfect but might be “good enough.”
- Google Translates Multilingual Web Into One Universal Tongue: Chrome (Fast Company)
2. Crowdsourcing
- If you’re interested in crowdsourcing folks to make lists, twtpick.in might be your best bet. See Robert Scoble’s review and interview with the founder.
- So You Want to Try Crowdsourcing? (A field guide for making crowdsourcing work)
- Councilpedia Uses Crowdsourcing to Link Money, Politics in NYC
3. Surveillance & Espionage
- A new technology makes it possible to record keyboards being typed on, analyze the audio signal, and determine what keys were struck (Economist).
- Muslim uses Facebook profiles to find and target Christians (Mission Network News)
- USA: Internet monitoring needed to fight homegrown terrorism (Fox News)
4. Geolocation services
- The Fast-Growing Location Market (Atlantic): knowing where you are can be worth a lot of money.
5. Banking & Finance & Peer-to-Peer Exchanges
- In “Banking on mobile phones: out of thin air,” the Economist looks at the behind-the-scenes logistics of Kenya’s “mobile-money miracle”: banking conducted via mobile phones, used by 9.5 million people or 23% of the population, and transferring 11% of Kenya’s GDP each year—inspiring 60 similar programs across the world.
- PayPal 2.0 “Bumps” Money Between iPhones [Downloads]
6. Information overload and the inability to decide
- The Coming Data Explosion (KurzweilAI.net): more and more things are being connected to the Internet, and a new computing platform is required to deal with this massive influx of exascale data & the demand to process it in real-time.
- Statistics for a changing world: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs
7. Robotics
8. Manufacturing & Replication
- Rise of the replicators: researchers & hobbyists around the world are developing desktop manufacturing plants. Low-cost versions of a 3D printer are already available for a few hundred dollars.
9. Biotechnology
10. Collaboration & Sharing
- Easier sharing in Google Docs: new public/private options are rolled out.
- TinyChat Offers Chat Sessions Controlled by Twitter Usernames [Chat]: easily created one-off disposable chat rooms associated with a twitter client
11. Free technologies (and some cheap ones too)
12. Translation
- Giving a voice to more languages on Google Translate: the ability to hear translations spoken out loud by clicking the speaker icon.
14. Advanced, Edgy Technologies (which we can’t otherwise classify)
- Parrot AR.Drone to attack this September, for $300: your own stable quadricopter drone, controlled by iPhone via WiFi.
15. Government regulation
- Lawsuit Posits Social Network Connects Are a Noncompete Violation: In a first-of-its kind lawsuit, an IT-staffing firm has accused one of its former employees of violating the terms of her non-compete agreements through her conduct on LinkedIn.
16. Power
17. Books & Libraries
- With the latest update, iBooks will now accept PDFs – retaining their full formatting. This means the iPad (or the iPhone) could become significant portable libraries of missions material. Any PDF (e.g. Mission Frontiers, the Perspectives reader, the World Christian Foundation courses, etc) could be easily viewed on an iPad.
18. Mobile
19. Social Networking
20. Technology & Theology
21. Technology & Missions
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