projects

TripVerde, a company that provides online carpooling services in an attempt to reduce U.S. vehicle mileage by 3 percent to 5 percent in three years, announced Monday that it has launched a new site to connect those people who plan on traveling to Washington, D.C., for President-elect Obama's inauguration in January. According to the company, it will pair up like-minded people from the same region to carpool to the event. In order to be considered, visitors need to sign up for TripVerde's service and fill out information about themselves. Once complete, TripVerde will find individuals with … Read more

Project Playlist has struck a deal with Sony BMG to bring the label's catalog to its streaming-music service. It's the first major-label deal for Project Playlist, which recently brought former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta on as CEO but has been dealing with legal problems that have seen its widgets banned from social network MySpace.

Currently, Project Playlist has been sued by Warner Music, EMI, and Universal Music Group, as well as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), because of the amount of unauthorized content that members have uploaded to the service. Industry rumors have persisted that … Read more

MySpace has officially blocked access to embedded widgets from Project Playlist, one of the myriad start-ups that lets members create music playlists and share them with friends.

This could come across negatively because MySpace runs MySpace Music, a service that competes with Project Playlist. And that's probably why the News Corp.-owned MySpace is making it very clear that it has blocked Project Playlist because of complaints from major music labels.

"MySpace is an open platform that welcomes all developers to build rich and legitimate applications for its global community," according to a statement from the company. &… Read more

Step aside, keyboards, laptops, and 9-to-5 jobs. A survey of more than 1,000 Internet activists, journalists, and technologists released Sunday speculates that by 2012, those quaint relics of 20th century life will fade away.

It's not a formal survey of the sort that, say, political pollsters use. Nor are computer journalists especially known for their prognosticative abilities. Still, the Pew Internet and American Life Project hopes the effort will provide a glimpse of the best current thinking about how online life will evolve in the next decade or so.

Lee Rainie and the other Pew researchers asked their … Read more

If you're going to be traveling solo in a few weeks for round two of the holiday season, worth checking out is the Boarding Project. It's a social service that uses Twitter to helps you meet up with others at the same airport. To use it you simply tweet #boarding along with your airport code. It'll send you a reply with a link to the other Twitter users who you can message directly to meet up with.

What's neat is that Boarding Project's system does not require users to sign up for anything. It also … Read more

Microsoft blames add-ons for its Internet Explorer security woes, according to InternetNews, yet in separate news from TechCrunch Mozilla's Firefox just hit its one billionth add-on and yet delivers better security, according to several studies.

Is Microsoft out of line?

Probably not. Microsoft is almost certainly right to pin some blame on add-on functionality to the browser as a security vulnerability. But given that add-ons are a fact of life now, what is Microsoft doing to protect its IE users against malware attacks?

Plenty, and in perhaps in the most important place: the update service. Both IE and Firefox include automatic update services, but researchers for the Honeypot Project discovered that Firefox's mechanism may actually be more effective:

We suspect that attacking Firefox is a more difficult task as it uses an automated and "immediate" update mechanism. Since Firefox is a standalone application that is not as integrated with the operating system as Internet Explorer, we suspect that users are more likely to have this update mechanism turned on. Firefox is truly a moving target. The success of an attack on a user of Internet Explorer 6 SP2 is likely to be higher than on a Firefox user, and therefore attackers target Internet Explorer 6 SP2.

The Honeypot research was done in 2007, however, on older versions of both IE and Firefox and, as Sean Michael Kerner writes in InternetNews, the game may have moved on, and neither Firefox nor IE may be fully ready to "play":… Read more

File this one as improbable, but it's interesting that this rumor continues to crop up. Project Playlist, a little known start-up with 9 million monthly visitors, is supposedly kicking the tires on social media site iMeem, according to music industry sources.

The alleged acquiree, iMeem, which has 20 million monthly visitors, denied the rumors are true. "Project Playlist buying us is like us buying Apple. This is just not accurate," said Matt Graves, iMeem's spokesman and a longtime straight shooter.

So why is this acquisition scenario still being passed around the music industry?

Beverly Hills, Calif.… Read more

Around the holiday season we get a lot of e-mails from readers agonizing over what TV to buy. With the economy the way it is, consumers aren't completely shying away from buying new TVs, but they're on tight budgets and appear to be predominantly interested in screen sizes 52 inches or smaller. The big problem with going bigger is that you jump into a whole new price class when you start looking at the Panasonic 58-inch plasma--and it gets worse when you check out Pioneer's 60-incher.

The exception to all this is DLP-based rear-projection HDTVs, where Samsung … Read more

Around the holiday season we get a lot of e-mails from readers agonizing over what TV to buy. With the economy the way it is, consumers aren't completely shying away from buying new TVs, but they're on tight budgets and appear to be predominantly interested screen sizes 52 inches or smaller. The big problem with going bigger is that you jump into a whole new price class when you start looking at the Panasonic 58-inch plasma--and it gets worse when you check out Pioneer's 60-incher. The exception to all this is DLP-based rear-projection HDTVs, where Samsung … Read more