POV.HD camera offers advanced video for outdoor enthusiasts
The POV.HD camera offers a ruggedized design, super wide-angle lens, and in-field edition options.
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Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Rrrewind: A time machine for social media, news and trends
If you pride yourself on knowing the latest Internet memes and current trends, you’re likely someone who spends a fair amount of time on the web. But, what if the unthinkable happens and you’re forced to spend a few days offline? How will you ever catch up?
Enter Rrrewind.
A Montreal-based startup aims to prevent you from missing out on popular trends, memes and media through its online time machine Rrrewind.
Rrrewind’s web app contains a wealth of information dating back to 2009 and it enables users to browse through a series of channels like Digg, Reddit and Hacker News. Aside from news, Rrrewind also brings users channels for Hulu, YouTube, Yahoo Video, Dribbble, ffffound, iTunes, We are Hunted, Instagram, Picplz, Amazon, Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz.
The media channels can be best described as history channels which display the popular trends of each day, allowing users to easily navigate posts by day. As an example, if you selected the Flickr channel you’d be immediately presented with the most popular images on Flickr from yesterday. Rrrewind seamlessly flips through past days, transporting you to a history of trends by clicking a “back” arrow.
In case you’re only looking for a specific day, Rrrewind has also included an archives feature that enables users to easily jump to any date. It’s a nice option but we should note the dates vary by channel. While the Flickr channel went back as far as June 2009, the Dribble channel was limited to posts dating back to October of 2010.
New Channels Coming Soon
We had a chance to speak with the founder Roberto Martinez via email. He tells us he launched the site at the end of December and shared that he’d developed the site to scratch his own itch. He wanted a way to save stuff he’d missed from Hacker News and Dribbble.
Martinez said as of this weekend, Rrrewind will be getting a new set of channels. He additionally mentioned a few he wishes he could offer.
The new channels include Imgur, Twitter (popular tweets), Slideshare, WordPress and Pinboard. Tumblr, Posterous and Soundcloud are three Martinez said he’d love to implement but due to limitations of the various APIs, he says there’s no way to do it.
The Bottom Line:
The layout and design of Rrrewind coupled with the archives feature, provides users with an easy way to discover posts, trends and memes that were missed. It definitely has some addictive qualities and it may be one of the only (if not the only) service of its kind. If you happen to check it out please let us know your thoughts.
Roll Your Own Foursquare: Ushahidi Launches Open-Source Location Service
Until now, Ushahidi has been most known as a service for reporting location during times of crisis. From its use during the earthquake in Haiti to, most recently, the revolution in Egypt and Libya, the service has been used to help humanitarian workers quickly report location using SMS technology. Today, the company has taken a bit of a turn with the release of its open-source check-in service.
Now, anyone with a bit of PHP knowledge and a server can create a Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places or check-in service of their own and keep their location data out of the hands of the public and corporate alike.
Sponsor
Earlier this year, the company announced that it would be releasing a mobile check-in app for their open-source Crowdmap service. Today, the app has gone live for the iPhone and makes it simple for anyone to create their own location-based check-in service of any variety. The app does one simple thing – allows users to send a picture and bit of text, attached to GPS coordinates, to any Crowdmap-based service. On the server side of things (which is also completely open source), everything can be set to either be public, private, or username and password protected. The data never hits Ushahidi’s servers (though they do collect anonymized statistics through the app), meaning that there is no need to worry about your location data being collected and sold or misused in any way.
Brian Herbert, director of Crowdmap, called the app a “roll your own Foursquare,” saying that, with its release, Ushahidi became the only open source check-in platform available across mobile platforms.
Why, you might ask, would you want to “roll your own Foursquare?” The answer is simple – complete control over your own data. At a recent discussion of privacy and location-based services, Reputation.com’s COO Owen Tripp discussed the various ways that location data could be used to negatively impact the end-user, from insurance companies using it to deny coverage requests to employers spying on their workers. Just as Status.net and Diaspora work to provide open-source alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, respectively, Ushahidi could provide a number of alternatives to any of the mainstream check-in services. It could also lead to an entirely new realm of specialized check-in services wherein the users control how their data is stored and used.
Beyond the ability to create your own location based service, the Ushahidi checkin app also increases the usability of Ushahidi for smartphone-bearing crisis workers.
"In some cases, it doesn't make sense to fill out full-on reports on Ushahidi, because it can be complicated," said Herbert. "Sometimes you want to be able to just drop a check in on a map, with maybe a photo."
In certain crisis situation, said Herbert, the smartphone app would simply be a “more simple reporting mechanism for something that’s happening right now.”
The iPhone application is available in the app store now. You can get it from the App Store and the Android app can be downloaded from the Android Marketplace.
If you download the app, make sure to check out SXSW.crowdmap.com where Ushahidi check-ins will be aggregated over the coming week.