RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis is slated to take the stage later today in Las Vegas at the CTIA show and all eyes will be focused on RIM’s answer to Apple’s App Store. While we wished that RIM had held off on the launch of BlackBerry App World until Lazaridis’ little talk, there’s nothing that could have prevented this announcement from hitting at midnight. So, ladies and germs, I present to you BlackBerry App World. Please ensure that you have a PayPal account, OS 4.2 or higher and a trackball or SurePress touch screen (aka Storm) BlackBerry before proceeding.

Promising faster Internet speeds than existing 3G networks, Clearwire rolls out a 4G WiMax portable router that can wirelessly connect to up eight devices, including the Apple iPhone, some BlackBerry devices, some Windows Mobile phones, the Android-powered G1 and the upcoming Palm Pre. In addition, the Clear WiMax hot-spot router will work with gaming and music devices, digital and video cameras, and WiMax-embedded laptops.
- WiMax provider Clearwire said March 31 it plans to begin offering a Wi-Fi
device that allows users of Apple’s iPhone and other Wi-Fi-enabled devices to
tap into Clearwire’s 4G mobile WiMax network. Clearwire claims its WiMax
technology will deliver wireless Internet speeds several times faster th…

Despite layoffs thinning the U.S. tech work force, IT companies like Microsoft are expected to be among the companies competing for coveted H-1B visas when the annual government lottery for educated foreign workers gets under way.
- Predictions are that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is again
likely to quickly hit its ceiling of 65,000 H-1B visas when the controversial
program’s annual lottery for educated foreign workers begins April 1. In 2008,
the same quota was met in a single day, not to mention a supplementa…

This is the third part of a five-part series on search engine optimization factors. In this part we will cover topical relevance of links to a site a site s relevance to the search query whether Google manually awards rank to some sites and more. We will also take a look at some factors that can negatively affect your site s ranking in the search engine results pages SERPs and finish up with an in-depth look at different kinds of links….

Adobe Acrobat 9 - Download FREE Trial Unify Documents, Images, Video and More. Create the Richest, Most Engaging PDF ePortfolios.

Gamers in the market for a high-performance laptop that meets their hardcore gaming needs should definitely keep their eyes open for the Gateway P-7811FX laptop. This large laptop gives you the power and resolution you need to make your gaming experience a pleasure at a price that may leave you pleasantly surprised. Keep reading for a closer look….

Adobe Acrobat 9 - Download FREE Trial Unify Documents, Images, Video and More. Create the Richest, Most Engaging PDF ePortfolios.

The LG CU515 is a recent addition to the cell phone market that provides some fairly impressive features at a relatively low price. LG is marketing the phone as a powerful media device but in reality it falls more into the category of an upper-end utilitarian phone….

The All-New Adobe Creative Suite 4 Now Shipping: Adobe CS4: tools to help students express their ideas in video, on the web, or print.

A text is nothing more than a successive sequence of characters. In the old days of programming text was generally stored inside an array of characters. However working with such arrays proved to be problematic as you could easily trigger an overflow of the pre-allocated buffer or call for an invalid index. Fortunately there is an easier way to handle this today which you will learn in this article….

The All-New Adobe Creative Suite 4 Now Shipping: Adobe CS4: tools to help students express their ideas in video, on the web, or print.

Sprout, developer of a unique drag-and-drop widget creation service, announced today that its development platform now supports the Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect, and OpenSocial. According to the press release, this will "enable brands and agencies to focus their time on the creative campaign development and still reap the rewards that social networking applications offer.." Which means, if you are using Sprout for your ad campaigns already, you now instantly have access to three more social platforms to deploy on. If you aren’t using Sprout, why not?

Sponsor

We covered Sprout’s widget creator, product SproutBuilder at the DEMO ‘08 conference. Since then, it had to withdraw their free offerings to concentrate on remaining profitable. The good news is that recently, it is putting a toe back in with the availability of a limited free account type that allows for up to 3 projects (widgets) without reporting features or support. This is perfect if you have an idea for a Sprout widget but you want to try before you buy.

Details on how Sprout’s foray into social media campaigns will work on a technical level are not outlined in the provided documentation. But if it is telling us that a marketing or advertiser can use their product and deploy it cross-platform without any coding skills, it could potentially add up to a big cost savings overall and may make the difference between Sprout and one of its competitors. Plus, one of those platforms is Facebook, which means instant viral exposure to millions of active user accounts.

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A new online community site called Lunch.com has just launched into private beta here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The site, essentially a recommendation network, aims to bring the sort of casual conversations you would have with friends over lunch to the online arena. Using a proprietary “Similarity Network Engine,” Lunch calculates what you have in common with other site members so you can share recommendations with those who have your same interests and perspectives.

Click through for an exclusive invite code to this new site!

Sponsor

In a way, Lunch is somewhat like a “Yelp 2.0.” But unlike Yelp and other sites like it, Lunch’s network aims to make user-generated reviews more of a personalized experience. By discovering your passions and interests, Lunch lets you connect with people who are more like you - and therefore, people who will be recommending and reviewing products and services in a way that you can trust (at least in theory). This idea has merit because it provides a personalized, filtered view of these online reviews.

Why We Need This

Sites like Yelp, Amazon, the iTunes store, and others have been coming under fire for not having trustworthy reviews. Thanks to anonymous user IDs on some sites, reviewers can be anyone with any agenda. Often they are. On Lunch, however, those drive-by reviews contributed by someone associated with the company or product being reviewed (or with an axe to grind) will not be prominently featured. The reason? Lunch.com’s Similarity Network.

The Similarity Network

The Similarity Network is probably the most important feature of this new community - without it, Lunch would just be just another Yelp. After signing up, you kick start the matching engine by playing “ExhilaRATE.” Although that name is somewhat unintuitive, clicking the link takes you to a section of the site where you can - guess what? - rate things like movies, books, food, sports, politics, animals…whatever. The experience of rating items here is a lot like that of Amazon’s recommendation engine. If you’ve ever killed a few minutes on Amazon training it to get to know you better, you’ll find Lunch.com’s engine fairly similar.

The difference is that Lunch.com’s engine groups things to rate into categories with titles that sound a lot like Facebook Apps (Top Movies of 2009, What’s your Favorite Wine?). The Facebook flavor to these “games” makes sense because in the future, Lunch.com will launch a Facebook connected-experience, perhaps even a standalone app. In the meantime, however, you must go to the site to rate items.

The more you rate on Lunch, the better your matches become. You can see your matches and the percentage of compatibility between you and those like you. There are also tag cloud displays that show what items you both like and which ones you don’t.

With Lunch, You Can Rate Anything

If you’re still wondering why you would migrate away from more mainstream sites to something like Lunch.com, there’s another reason this particular community holds appeal: it allows you to make anything ratable. Again unlike Yelp, ratings don’t have to focus on products, services, places, etc. They could also be opinion pieces - like what you thought of Michelle Obama’s new outfit for example. That opens the door for a much wider range of recommendations and - since you’re matched with those like you - those recommendations will be relevant to your interests.

Lunch.com is in private beta, but you can try it now with the invite code “ReadWriteWeb.” To use it, just click the link on the right-hand side of the screen that says “Have an invite code?”

Discuss

Welcome to the fifth installment of a series focused on using the active record pattern with PHP. Made up of seven episodes, this series walks you through the progressive development of a MySQL abstraction class that utilizes the active record approach to perform CRUD (Create, Remove, Update, Delete) database operations and SELECT queries, without having to explicitly code any SQL statements.
- Introduction
Now that you’ve been introduced to the main subject of this group of articles, it’s time to recall the topics that were covered in the last one. In that specific tutorial I explained how to build a basic MySQL abstraction class, which was capable of performing the CRUD tasks mentioned…