Ideas and reviews for websites, film, business, products, and designMicroblog your ideas and be discovered

A ReadWriteWeb Guide OMG! Kevin Rose just touched my shirt! Don’t lie – we know you get butterflies at the thought of bumping into iJustine or Robert Scoble at a tech conference. We’ve pulled together a nice little cheat sheet just for you, friends. Whether you want a simple handshake, and autograph on your iPhone or a chance to pitch your idea for the Next Big Web App, here’s ten places, panels and parties where you can track down the Internet famous at SXSW 2010. Don’t forget to leave your tips in the comments! Sponsor This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn’t your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon! Justine Ezarik, a.k.a. iJustine Longtime lifestreaming queen iJustine is famously an Apple fangirl, but it’s Intel that’s giving you the key to tracking her down at SXSW. She’s and Intel Insider, and she might be stopping by some of the Intel Insider events , like Frank Gruber’s Johnny Cash party or Chris Heuer’s Social Media Clubhouse . We don’t have hard and fast details on Ezarik’s whereabouts, but wherever she is, she’ll probably be tweeting, so keep an eye on her Twitter accounts . Christopher Poole Pool may not be a household name in and of himself, but there’s nary an Internet user who hasn’t been in some way effected by the fun and foul play on 4chan. “4chan – often referred to as a ‘meme factory’ – has been responsible for the creation of countless Internet memes but is perhaps best known for its exploits. In this conversation, we’ll explore the game mechanics of online communities. What fosters creativity in an online community? What design elements can we incorporate to increase interaction? How is the game played?” Baratunde Thurston In “How to Be Black,” The Onion web editor and star of Popular Science’s Future Of series Baratunde Thurston will “touch on the black online experience (if there is such a thing) included memes, statistics on usage patterns, popular destinations and issues of representation. For example, are black people as represented among the creators, developers and builders of our future or are we more consumer oriented than average?” Violet Blue Our favorite sex blogger will be kicking off SXSW with a presentation on “How to Not Be a Douchebag at SXSW Aimed at both first-time and long-time attendees to SXSW Interactive, this biting and humorous, yet useful panel takes a look at the common actions and behaviors to avoid if you don’t want to be described as ‘doing it wrong.’” Kevin Rose This year, the Digg founder returns to host Diggnation Live at Stubb’s. The Bigg Digg Shindigg was certainly one of the largest events at SXSW 2009, with fans crowding around the large outdoor stage to take pictures and watch Rose shoot the Diggnation episode. But don’t expect to meet the man himself unless you’ve got VIP status for the party. Chris Messina In his talk, “ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here?,” Messina will explore the nuances of the real-time web. “From Facebook’s newsfeed to Twitter’s relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the ’stream’ has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms – the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live – and how it’s fundamentally changing the social web.” Leah Culver This young developer and successful entrepreneur will be hosting the Web Framework Battle Royale. “Which web framework will rule them all? As an audience member you pick the winner! We will present an introduction to a variety of web frameworks including Rails, Django, Catalyst and Sinatra. You can vote for the best web framework in categories such as URL handling, database integration, forms, HTML templating, documentation, testing and deployment.” Gary Vaynerchuk The WineLibraryTV founder is a true Web guru and an inspiration to entrepreneurs and content creators around the globe. He’ll be giving one of his signature, unforgettable presentations again this year as part of the Interactive Speakers Series. Evan Williams Three years after his web app hit it big at SXSW 2007, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams takes the main stage to be interviewed by Havas Media Lab director Umair Haque in front of a live audience . All we have to say is that you’d better get there early if you don’t want to get stuck watching a simulcast in an adjacent room! Molly Wood A last-minute stand-in for Natali Del Conte at this event, BOL founder Wood has a fanbase of her own. “CNET’s Buzz Out Loud will broadcast live from SXSW. While discussing the day’s tech news, hosts Tom Merritt, Jason Howell, Molly Wood and others will chat with the audience and invite special guests to talk about what’s happening at the show and beyond.” Bonus Round! If you stalk him on Twitter, Foursquare, Plancast and Gowalla, you might get to bump into Robert Scoble , as well. Or, you can catch him at the Rackspace party Monday evening. And of course, while we don’t consider ourselves celebrities, the RWW crew will be present and accounted for at the PBS/NPR/RWW party Sunday night ! Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for web celeb stalkers of all stripes. If you’ve got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin, folks! Discuss

Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API. Sponsor How Will Facebook’s Users React? It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users – who are famously averse to change – will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook “has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.” From Facebook’s Privacy Policy : Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate. When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service’s users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it. Will Facebook’s Users Care? It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn’t seen a very strong response from users and developers so far. Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.? According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn’t trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook’s users. It’s also important to note that Facebook’s API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however. Discuss

Mark Hedrickson is 24 years old. He grew up in Menlo Park, California, down the street from Stanford, raised by a high-tech marketer Dad and a Mom in banking. Then he went to college and studied Nietzsche. He has now set out to build The Future – specifically your future, your intentions, your plans as a platform for analysis and software development. The story became particularly interesting today: Hendrickson’s new company Plancast is submitting its much-anticipated iPhone app to Apple days before SXSW and announced on Hendrickson’s alma matter tech blog TechCrunch that it has raised just short of $1m from a list of industry stars. We offer below some perspective on what Plancast aims to do: nothing less than “to be the platform for all ‘intent’ data,” Mark Hendrickson says. Sponsor Plancast is a website where people post their plans. Plans to attend a conference, plans to go to a party, perhaps plans to get a haircut. “We have the same ‘who wants to share that?’ issue as Twitter,” Hendrickson told us today, “the standard ‘I dont use Twitter because i don’t care you’re eating a sandwich.’ What we’ve learned though is that semi-mundane stuff is actually interesting. So, perhaps we wont have a lot of the ‘getting a haircut’ stuff because that’s indeed quite mundane, but we will get ‘getting drinks tonight downtown’ or ‘heading to Palo Alto for the day’ type stuff. Which actually leads to very cool serendipity.” Now that Twitter is such an unqualified success in all but monetization, it’s cool to say you’ve got the same problems Twitter had. Mash up all those plans from friends and you get an interesting stream of forthcoming events. The site is simple, if smart, today. The little company has big plans for the future, though. “We want to host and distribute all content that pertains to what individuals, organizations and businesses have planned for the future,” Hendrickson says. “If you break the idea of an ‘event’ down into its basic units (what’s going to happen, when, and where), there’s a ton of relevant social content through the long tail. We’re designed to host a superset of all this event data.” Leveraging the Future If the web first enabled people to publish diaries of their past actions, then moved on to status updates and check-ins about current thoughts and locations, then Plancast aims to be focused on the Future. “I think [the future has] been a neglected area in geo-location discussions,” Hendrickson says. “Check-ins have dominated the conversation over the past year, and check-ins are great for what they are – but they have a certain limited value. If someone checks in somewhere across town, what are the chances you’re going to get up and hustle over there to join? You also have limited data — often you dont know why they’re there. From an advertiser’s point of view, you have to grab their attention immediately. Whereas if you have intent, you have more time to give them an offer and have them consider that offer and act on it. The scope of planning data is larger than check-in data in other ways too. Check-ins are really specific to particular venues — bars, retaurants, parks etc. so the scope of content/ads you can serve up is quite local.” This conversation about the future needed to move on to something other than advertising. “It’s absolutely a platform,” Hendrickson told us. “It’s not just a consumer destination. We’re building our API early [expect to see it launch very soon] because we want to be the plumbing for future intent data. We want to power third party website calendar systems, third party apps, mash ups, etc. We want to do analysis on big data sets that compile intent data from all over. Once we start pulling from lots of sources — Facebook, Meetup, Linkedin, Twitter, Dopplr, Tripit, etc etc — we can then match intents and figure out really cool stuff. 50% more people are planning to see Avatar this weekend vs Hurt Locker. And we can pump this data back out to other companies that have special needs for it. “Let’s say one day you can search ‘movies’ on Plancast and it knows A) your location, B) your past behavior, C) your friends’ activity, and D) aggregate activity. The top result could be a movie showing that 2 of your friends have already planned to see and which is very popular in aggregate in your city.” Hendrickson says he’s hard at work building out privacy settings that will help more people feel more comfortable sharing more plans. That’s easier said than done, of course. This young, philosophically-trained startup co-founder from Palo Alto would be well-served by reaching out and bringing close to the company some advisors who specialize in understanding the privacy concerns of everyday people online, if he’s going to build a platform for the future of our communication around intent. Location based social networks in general face a big challenge in making people comfortable using them and demonstrating their utility before they can become mainstream phenomena. For now Plancast is hiring engineers with its new money, which was just announced today. Investors include SoftTech VC, True Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, and Zelkova Ventures. Angels Aydin Senkut, Saul Klein, David Cohen, Joshua Schachter, Dave McClure, Dan Martell, Ron Bouganim and Paige Craig put in money as well, bringing the total to $800,000. Things have come along quickly since Hendrickson was writing blog posts at TechCrunch, he left the staff there one year ago this Wednesday, and bought the domain Plancast.com for $500 last summer. (“I thought about buying Plancaster,” he says, “but some guy named Paul Lancaster had it.”) Can this young man and his team build “the platform for all ‘intent’ data?” Marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang has been bullish on Plancast for months. He described it as a leading example of the forthcoming “intention web” in December. Expect the real-time web to quickly evolve into the intention web. People will work together to share their information about what they plan to do, and improve how they work or organize. Expect Social CRM systems (Salesforce, SAP), Brand Monitoring vendors (Radian6, Visible Technologies), and Search Engines (Bing and Google) to quickly try to make predictive models on what could happen, and what are the chances. Businesses that have a physical location like retail, events, or packaged goods can use this data to anticipate consumer demand. They may offer contextualized marketing, or increase or decrease inventory or store hours to accommodate. Don’t be surprised in the future and you walk into a store with your preferred items, meal, or drink already nicely packaged for you. Plancast may or may not play a big role in transforming visions like that into reality, but it’s definitely a startup worth watching either way. Look for the company’s iPhone app later this week (built by high-profile developer Leah Culver ) and check out the many listings of SXSW events on the site already, including our very own ReadWriteWeb event on Saturday night . We’d like to know if you plan on joining us. Discuss

Our readers know ReadWriteWeb as the blog that’s ahead of the technology curve. Our sponsors know us as that, too. Once a week we introduce our sponsors to our readers and let them know a little more about who they are and what they do. You can say thanks to the companies that make ReadWriteWeb happen by tweeting them (see the link below each sponsor) or following them using our Twitter list. Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? Our readers are smart, tech-savvy decision makers; 40% have a graduate degree or PhD, and over 45% play a key role in information technology purchasing decisions. More than 1 million people on Twitter follow us to stay abreast of the latest Web technology trends from around the globe. To find out more about our sponsor packages, visit our advertising page or email our COO . Sponsor Skip to info about: Tableau : Data visualization | Crowd Science : Demographic data | Medill School of Journalism : Digital journalism programs | Mashery : API management services | Rackspace : Cloud computing experts | Sproutbox : Start-up investors | Aplus.net : Web hosting | Clickatell : SMS provider | .Me : Domain Registrar | Conduit : Customized components | MyDomain.com : Domain registrar | Toopia : Our iPhone app developer Tableau Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the web in interesting and compelling graphs. Download Tableau Public and in minutes, you can create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog in minutes. Anyone can do it. You don’t need to be a programmer or hire one – no language to learn, no plug-ins, no API. Your blog or website will stand out with colorful, interactive data visualizations. Bloggers using Tableau Public are averaging 3 times more reader comments. And, once on the web, anyone can interact with your graph and the data. They can re-embed your work, download the data, or create their own visualizations. Check out our gallery to see some of the cool graphs bloggers have created. Or learn how in our 5 minute video . Thank Tableau on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Crowd Science Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we’ve struggled to get in the past. It’s important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use. Sign up to get demographic data from Crowd Science. Thank Crowd Science on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Medill School of Journalism The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University offers programs that combine the enduring skills and values of journalism with new techniques and knowledge that are essential to thrive in a digital world. You might have a passion for creating finely crafted prose, or for telling stories using visual tools. Maybe you are invigorated by the possibilities of interactive publishing , or by videography for the small screen . Maybe you are an experienced professional looking to renew and retool your multimedia skills. You can find your niche in Medill’s graduate journalism program. Thank the Medill School of Journalism on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Mashery Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery’s expertise. At the “Business of APIs” conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper ” Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services ” to discover how you can use APIs for your business. You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com . Thank Mashery on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Rackspace Rackspace is one of the world’s largest hosting providers, but it’s also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution. Explore Rackspace ’s hosting and cloud computing solutions. Thank Rackspace on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Sproutbox SproutBox is an elite team of product developers, creatives, and business experts that invest their talent full-time in start-ups. SproutBox’s new approach to venture capital has helped launch several successful companies including: CheddarGetter , a subscription billing and analytics tool; ScheduleThing , an online scheduling and reservations app; and Squad , a web-based collaborative code editor. To apply for start-up funding or find out more information visit sproutbox.com . Thank Sproutbox on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Aplus.net Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration. You can register for Aplus.net here . Thank Aplus.net on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Clickatell Clickatell has over 22,000 customers utilizing our service from small mom & pop outfits to large Fortune 500 companies including Avaya, Oracle, Shell, Barclays, BP, CNN, BBC and more. Here’s why you should trust us to mobilize your business: Our SMS gateway offers you wider coverage than any other SMS provider delivering messages to 600 network operators in 200 countries. Our gateway is not limited to SMS text messaging. You can also send a number of other message types including Ringtones, VCards, Binary, EMS, Unicode, Flash SMS, WAP Push, and more. Clickatell offers you direct connectivity to its core SMS gateway platform via a number of APIs (application programming interfaces) including; HTTP (internet post), SMPP , FTP , XML , SMTP (email to SMS), SOAP and COM Object . Each API has full documentation with sample code where applicable. Learn more about Clickatell here . Thank Clickatell on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. .Me .Me is a Top Level Domain of a small, south-east European country of Montenegro, which restored its independence in 21st century. Due to its unforgettable meaning and truly personal tone, most of the registration restrictions have been cancelled. Some of the prominent tech and advertising savvies recognized TLD’s potential and grabbed their .Me domain name. In less than 20 months 360.000 domains were registered by people from 200 different countries.ME is perfect for ” yourname.me “ blog or ” yourname@surname.me “ email address. It is also widely used as a call-to-action domain ( notify.me , retwt.me ) and as a social (YouAnd.Me) or community network (Missouri.Me, Oklahoma.Me). One may also choose to send a cool personal message (WillSheMarry.Me). In addition, some of the biggest companies recognized its branding potential and started using .ME for various purposes. Check out Facebook (Fb.Me), Wordpress (Wp.Me), USA Today (USAT.Me), Universal Pictures (Despicable.Me) or Zappos.com (Zapp.Me).  It seems that some countries are luckier than others when it comes to domain names. Are you lucky enough to grab your own .ME? Thank .Me for making ReadWriteWeb possible. Conduit Conduit enables Web publishers to distribute their offerings both directly and through its global network of 220,000 publishers and their 100 million users. The Conduit platform is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to offer the best of your site through a custom App or Community Toolbar , send desktop alerts to your users, and much more. The Conduit platform opens a new world of content sharing. Your site visitors can add your content right to their browser by clicking on a branded 2go button that you place on your site. You can also share your content in the Conduit Marketplace , where all the publishers and users in the Conduit network can grab it. The platform has been adopted by major brands such as Fox News, iWin, Major League Baseball, TechCrunch, and Travelocity, as well as thousands of small and medium organizations in 120 countries. If you would like to Conduit your website, go to www.conduit.com . Thank Conduit on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. MyDomain.com MyDomain is a leading ICANN-accredited provider of domain name registration and online business solutions. For over 10 years, MyDomain has offered low-cost domain names and free domain services including complete DNS management. Today, sub-$10 domains without the constant upsells you’ll find at some competitors are the norm at MyDomain. MyDomain’s complete range of solutions include Web hosting and VPS hosting, email, SSL Certificates and more. Toopia Nicolas Koenig is the developer who made our beautiful iPhone app a reality. He runs an iPhone development shop from the Netherlands called Toopia . Toopia also created the Thermometer iPhone app, which enables your iPhone or iPod touch to get the current temperature based on your location. The RWW app lets you read us on the go, follow us on Twitter, share stories on Facebook and Twitter, and browse at your leasure using Read it Later and Instapaper. Download the ReadWriteWeb iPhone application here . Thank Toopia on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible. The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you’ll stop by their sites and see what they’ve got to offer. Have you got a smart company that could use some more visits by the sophisticated readers of a blog like ReadWriteWeb’s? Drop us a line and let’s talk. Thanks to all our sponsors and our readers for your support! Discuss

Every one of our blog posts around here is like a delicate, magical snowflake that we nurture lovingly (if quickly) before we push it out the door into the harsh lonely world of the web. Many of them are well received (otherwise we couldn’t do this for a living) but sometimes we write something we’re really proud of and it just melts into the river of news without being read by as many people as we wished. Thus we present to you, our staff’s hand-picked posts this week that we think you may have missed but would likely enjoy quite a bit: Sponsor Frederic Lardinois has been covering the e-book market closely for months. This week he wrote up… E-Books: After the Hype and Before the iPad The e-book hype reached its apex just before the holiday season. Now seems like a good time to take a closer look at the e-book market, especially given that this business is heading for another disruption once Apple’s iPad launches. Richard MacManus has been focusing on an emerging trend called The Internet of Things. Check out this interview he put up at the end of last month: Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part 1 Last week I had the privilege of meeting Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. It’s one of my favorite books about the Internet of Things and is still ahead of the curve, even though it was written in 2005 and published in 2006. Greenfield was in my city Wellington for the week, so I sat down with him at a local cafe to get his views on the current state of Internet of Things and where it’s headed. Sarah Perez lives in Florida and she’s regularly got super smart content posted before the rest of us have even rolled out of bed in the morning. Her latest sleeper fave? Beyond Twitter Search: Semantic Analysis of the Real-Time Web Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company’s new partners in receiving the “firehose” of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft. What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter’s 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting – the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets – it provides an understanding of the world’s conversations. What would a new newsman say is news if a new newsman could say news was news? We asked Mike Melanson, our newest addition to the news writing team. He said his favorite under-read post this week was… Ads with Eyes: Keeping Digital Signage in Check While geolocation based services have been in the forefront of our minds lately, with websites like PleaseRobMe making us second guess announcing our whereabouts, another industry has been quietly ramping up its data collection practices. The Center for Democracy & Technology issued a report yesterday addressing the growing “digital signage” industry, suggesting a number of privacy practices it might adopt. Alex Williams helps make Enterprise tech news interesting and he posted some very important coverage of enterprise innovation this week in…. Will StatusNet Be Another Open-Source Star in the Enterprise? What a week for StatusNet, the open-source, microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, one of the first services to emerge as a focal player in the movement around the real-time Web. Last week, the company launched StatusNet Enterprise Network, a microblogging service with a support program for the corporate market. Initial customers include Motorola Corporation and Canonical Ltd. Kaliya Hamlin is a frequent guest contributor, events partner and friend of the family here at ReadWriteWeb. She wrote a great post this week titled… Bending the Identity Spectrum: Verifiable Anonymity at RSA Today at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, spoke – opening his talk with this question: “Do you want anonymity or accountability? YES!” But how can you have both? I created a spectrum of identity to help understand the different forms that exist on the internet. On one end is Anonymous Identity. Basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site – no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week. Finally, my personal pick from my own archive. I’ve been having a great time writing up narrative tales of leading technology innovators. This is one you may not be familiar with but I think it’s really a moving and important story. What Does it Mean to Make 5 Million Maps? Platial’s Legacy It’s not every day that a business shuts down but declares itself a success in helping kick off an unstoppable movement to change the world. Community mapping service Platial announced this week that it is turning off its servers and asking users to move their content onto the servers of other providers. Just short of 5 years old, Platial raised some venture capital, bought other small companies and made a name for itself, but in the end wasn’t able to build a business. Co-founder Di-Ann Eisnor defiantly says that Platial changed the world anyway. Cartography used to be an elite practice of drawing borders around resources and power. Platial helped transform it into an accessible practice for millions of people to share how they have experienced the world around them. Those are our picks for this week! Come back daily for the best tech blog coverage we can provide. Snowflake photo CC by Flickr user YellowCloud Discuss