Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Mobile apps and the quiet handling of data

Gina Philips Jamie Gunns Ananda Lewis Kate Bosworth Tamala Jones

Part book, part film, part website

Trista Rehn Moon Bloodgood Kristin Kreuk Molly Sims Monika Kramlik

Laptop Thief Gets Exposed by Hidden Security Camera App

Joshua Kaufman didn’t just sit back and watch when his laptop was stolen — he continued to watch it being stolen, days later. Yup,…

Shanna Moakler Portia de Rossi Jolene Blalock Nichole Robinson Monet Mazur

User: Bexounet1

Jennifer ODell Jenny McCarthy Zooey Deschanel Tara Reid Coco Lee

? Magic

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Publishing News: Curation for the Kindle

Cameron Richardson Chandra West Kasey Chambers Megan Ewing Kristanna Loken

Accept Payments From Your Site in Minutes With PintPay

pintpay-logo.pngFor startups and small businesses operating online, one of the biggest headaches can be setting up the ability to accept payments from one's Website.

The latest attempt at relieving this pain point is PayPint, a Web app created by former Scribd developer James Yu, who also authored a JavaScript API for Gmail called Gmailr.

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PintPay promises to be a hassle-free way of adding payments and recurring payments to one's Website. It forgoes the need to deal with payment gateways, merchant accounts and coding of any sort in favor of a simple dashboard from which one can set up new products, set their prices, track customer history and configure the design of the payment pages.

pintpay-dashboard.png

It's these features that Yu says sets PintPay apart from similar products like Chargify, Recurly and CheddarGetter.

Another difference is in its pricing model. Users pay 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction. There's no monthly fee until you reach $300 in monthly revenue, at which point you start paying $29 per month.

PintPay is ideal for charging customers for things like software upgrades or recurring subscriptions, rather than for building out a complex shopping cart.

Once you've set up your product details and pricing, the result is a hosted product page, which can be customized with any background image and color scheme you desire. PintPay also has an API which can be used to retrieve customer information and manage subscriptions.

To give it a try, sign up and use the coupon code RWW. The first 20 ReadWriteWeb readers to do so will get access to the beta version of PintPay.

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New Samsung Galaxy Tab & Galaxy S Are Coming Sooner Than You Think

Looking forward to buying the upcoming Galaxy Tab 10.1? That device might become obsolete sooner than you think: Samsung plans to launch a 4G LT…

Denise Richards Jennifer Sky Samantha Mathis Samantha Morton Grace Park

Kingmaker

Sarah Michelle Gellar Olivia Munn Melissa Sagemiller Roselyn Sanchez Soft Cell

Why Instagram Can Become The Mobile Social Hub

100 Cameras in 1, a photo app created by Stuck in Customs, can now export photos directly to Instagram, the first app to do so. If more apps export to Instagram, the upstart photo network could become the center of the iPhone mobile photo experience.

Tami Donaldson Padma Lakshmi Sarah Mutch Gabrielle Union Alessandra Ambrosio

VC Firm Jobs Page

VC firms typically don't hire very many people. But our portfolio companies sure do. So what you typically see when you go to a VC firm's website is a jobs page that showcases jobs from their portfolio companies. USV's jobs...

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Monday, May 30, 2011

[Sponsor] Sparrow ? the New Mail for Mac

Bridget Moynahan Noureen DeWulf Nicollette Sheridan Amber Heard Veronica Kay

Social Video Site VHX.tv Could Win the Discovery War

Social video sharing and discovery site VHX.tv is preparing to open up for public beta this Tuesday, after launching for private beta in early April. And with an eye-catching design and plenty of fun features, it might be the ultimate "what should I watch?" solution.

Coco Lee Katy Perry Vinessa Shaw Rebecca Romijn Nadine Velazquez

Cool new tool for finding and perfecting phrases

Olivia Munn Melissa Sagemiller Roselyn Sanchez Soft Cell Beyoncé

How Many Millions Did Amazon Lose on Two Days of 99-Cent Lady Gaga Sales?

Julie Berry Lori Heuring Nicole Scherzinger Jill Arrington Tami Donaldson

ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, May 28 2011

We're always on the lookout for upcoming Web tech events from around world. Know of something taking place that should appear here? Want to get your event included in the calendar? Let us know in the comments below or email us.

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iPad for Business Round-Up: SimpleInvoice, Quickoffice and More

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Each week we take a look at the new or updated business apps for the iPad, and highlight trends in how tablets are being used in the enterprise.

This week week we look at a new app for doing invoices, the new version of the popular office suite Quickoffice, new Zendesk features and more.

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Citrix GoToManage

This week Citrix released an iPad version of its remote IT administration tool GoToManage. IT staff will now be able to use their iPads to remotely control users desktop computers.

Bomgar offers a similar iPad app.

Dow Jones Factiva App

As we reported, Dow Jones released an iPad version of its Factiva business information service this week. It proves feeds from almost 600 news sources in nine different languages, along with personalized views specific industries, companies, regions or topics called "Snapshots."

Quickoffice

Following a wave of iPad office suite updates last week, Quickoffice has has updated its suite of office apps. The new version includes support for advanced PowerPoint editing, a refreshed user interface and support for sharing and syncing files with Huddle and SugarSync.

SimpleInvoice

SimpleInvoice screenshot

SimpleInvoice is a new app for creating and sending invoices from the iPad. This looks like a handy tool for professionals that spend a lot of time in the field and need to be able to manage invoices from the road.

Zenprise

Zenprise, a mobile device management company we covered previously, has released Zenprise Secure Mobile Gateway. The Secure Mobile Gateway is a whitelisting system that makes sure only approved mobile applications have access to an enterprise network. Devices that break the rules can be quarantined from the network.

Help Desk and Customer Support Apps for the iPad

UserVoice iPad

This week, as part of ongoing series looking at different types of business software for the iPad, we looked at help desk and customer support apps. We included UserVoice and Zendesk, both of which have some news this week.

UserVoice launched an iPad optimized version of its site Friday. Meanwhile, the Zendesk iPad app got the following new features this week:

  • Edit ticket requester, subject and CC's on tickets
  • A revised ticket tag interface makes it much easier to add and remove ticket tags
  • Camera support for iPad 2
  • TextExpander Touch integration
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Microsoft applies lessons from PlayStation Network downtime: don?t hunt hackers

Microsoft has chosen to “nurture” the talents of a 14-year-old boy who attempted to hack into the company’s online gaming network, Xbox Live, rather than slap the kid with lawsuits. The lawsuit approach to hackers is presumed to have led to Sony’s online game network being crippled for nearly a month.

Microsoft has clearly learned from Sony’s lesson, because Xbox Live competes directly with Sony’s PlayStation Network ? along with other online networks that sell games and demos like Valve’s Steam network for the PC and Mac computers. Sony�lost around $171 million while the network was down for 24 days. The PlayStation Store, a critical service for Sony that lets it sell games and distribute them�digitally, still remains offline.

Online hacktivist group Anonymous, which routinely takes up political causes like defending Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, brought Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) online gaming network to its knees with a distributed denial of service attack as part of “OpSony.” The group attacked Sony because the company tried to prosecute George Hotz, a 21-year-old hacker who modified his PlayStation 3 to install unauthorized software ? a process called jailbreaking the device.

It was around that time that a group of hackers was able to crack into the PSN and steal sensitive information about more than 100 million PSN and Station.com users, Sony said in a statement.�When the PlayStation Network crashed on April 21, Anonymous said it was not behind the attack. Instead, the hacktivist group said, ?Sony is incompetent.? (We previously published a timeline for the Playstation Network outage and credit card information theft scandal.)

Microsoft General Manager Paul Rellis said the company is working with the teenager to develop his talents for legitimate purposes ? though he wouldn’t specify what that means.

Tags: Anonymous, downtime, hackers, hacking, PlayStation Network, Playstation Store, PSN, Sony PlayStation Network, sony PSN, Xbox Live

Companies: Microsoft, Sony




Laura Prepon Ashley Scott Michelle Behennah Julie Benz Saira Mohan

How else are you supposed to take it?

Grace Park Jill Wagner Susie Castillo Fergie Ivanka Trump

EXCLUSIVE FIRST LOOK: Color has ?real time? social camera competition: CoolIris LiveShare preview

One thing that caught my eye (beyond its $41 million in funding) about Color was its “social camera” capabilities. What do I mean by that? Well, if you use Color, aim it at me in a room, it’ll add my name to your phone. How did it do that? Through the use of all the [...]

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Charlie Miller on Mac Defender

Brooke Burke Thandie Newton Liz Phair Aaliyah Katherine Heigl

91 Years of BoxOffice Magazine Online

boxoffice.pngNearly 3,000 issues of the Hollywood trade magazine BoxOffice have been posted online for free. BoxOffice has been publishing movie news since its beginning in 1920 and continues today. The years 1920-1924, 1927 and 1933-1934 are still being digitized, while the rest are already available, according to the magazine, in a section of the site called The Vault.

"Each week we post five issues from our vast archive which covers everyone from John Barrymore to Drew Barrymore. (Before 1933, Boxoffice was published under different names in various parts of the U.S.)."

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real_chaplin.pngThe issues are offered as PDFs, except for the latest issues, which are page-by-page images of the print magazine.

Unfortunately, this means the vast collection of issues lack metadata and are unsearchable. Still, it should, even with that limitation, provide a valuable resource to movie historians and journalists, film-makers, business people and plain old movie fans.

The earliest issue online, that of January 3, 1925, is a partial of the magazine when it was titled "The Reel Journal." ("The Film Trade Paper of the Southwest.") One of the pages from that partially-available issue, under the heading of "News Nuggets," says:

"Richard Bartholemess has completed for First National distribution his new Inspiration production, 'New Toys,' from the stage play by Oscar Hammerstein II and from Milton Herbert Gropper."

The issue of The Reel Journal from October 3 of that year, one of the few with an illustration on the cover, featured Charlie Chaplin, "Now a Pathe Comedian."

The February 13 issue of BoxOffice featured "The Misfits," the film written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston. It started Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, Montgomery Clift and, in her final role, Marilyn Monroe.

The latest issue features the headline, "Larry the Cable Guy voices Mater in Cars 2."

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