According to Nielsen, US Android and iOS app users spent 101 billion minutes per month with their apps in March 2012, more than double the amount from a year earlier. By contrast, the amount of time spent with mobile websites grew at a more modest 44% over the same span. (via Apps Proliferate, but How Do Users Engage? - eMarketer)
Burn Note
Burn Note lets you send messages that are deleted after they are read.
You can even set notes to self-destruct after a certain time after opening, Mission Impossible-style, and opt to use ‘spyglass mode’ which prevents a recipient taking screenshots of a message.
The site’s FAQ and technical information pages make for interesting reading.
See also
Letterboxd, the social film diary and review site I’ve been working on with a few colleagues over the past year, is nearing its public beta launch. We’ve continued to add to and improve the site since launching at Brooklyn Beta last October — film pages have had an overhaul as you can see above, among many other improvements.
If you’d like to be part of the private beta, drop your email address at letterboxd.com over the weekend, and we’ll get an invitation out to you early next week.
Gradient makes it easy to generate CSS3 background gradients. The retro sci-fi UI might not be to everyone’s taste, but in practice it’s simple to use, fast and reliable.
For those unfamiliar with CSS and wondering why you’d need a dedicated app for something as seemingly simple as a gradient, here’s the code required to get the grey-to-black fade shown above working across all the popular browsers:
background-color: #dbcfdb; background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, left center, right center, to(rgb(219, 207, 219)), from(rgb(61, 61, 60))); background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(left, rgb(219, 207, 219), rgb(61, 61, 60)); background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(left, rgb(219, 207, 219), rgb(61, 61, 60)); background-image: -o-linear-gradient(left, rgb(219, 207, 219), rgb(61, 61, 60)); background-image: -ms-linear-gradient(left, rgb(219, 207, 219), rgb(61, 61, 60)); background-image: linear-gradient(left, rgb(219, 207, 219), rgb(61, 61, 60)); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorStr='#dbcfdb', EndColorStr='#3d3d3c');
Facebook, It's Biggie Sized
Via Business Insider:
Facebook has as many users today as the whole internet had in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.
The data comes from Royal Pingdom, which cites an internet growth statistics site that plots the amount of users using the internet in any given year.
Facebook has over 800 million active users today, while seven years ago in May 2004, there were only 757 million people using the internet worldwide in grand total.
In other eye-popping numbers: it’s now estimated that over 500 million people are now online in China and it’s estimated there’ll be 4.5 billion global mobile phone subscribers by 2012.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed far-reaching patent lawsuits against Google, Apple, Yahoo, Netflix, Facebook, AOL and eBay, among others, alleging the companies violated patents owned by his now-defunct idea lab Interval Research.
The four patents at issue allegedly cover basics of online commerce, including recommending products to a user based on what they are currently looking at, and allowing readers of a news story to see other stories based on the current one. Two other patents relate to showing other information on a web page, such as news updates or stock quotes.
The lawsuit also alleges that Interval Research was one of four funders of Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s research that eventually became Google. The suit includes a screenshot of a 1998 Google webpage, crediting Allen’s company.
Notably missing from the list of targets are Amazon.com and Microsoft, which Allen left in 1983. Allen made tens of billions from his Microsoft shares, and recently pledged to donate most of his estimated $13.5 billion fortune to charity. Allen also owns the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers.
Interval Licensing owns most of the 300 patents from Allen’s Interval Research, and the suit comes just a week after Oracle decided to sue Google for patent violations over the open source Java programming language in relation to Google’s mobile phone operating system Android. (via Paul Allen Files Patent Lawsuits Against Entire Web … Except Microsoft | Epicenter | Wired.com)
Source: Wired
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