NEW RESOURCES

An online archive of images of turn-of-the-century Hungary are now available. “Pictures taken by the legendary German-born Hungarian photographer György Klösz (1844-1913) are now available online in the Fortepan digital photography archives after a total of 1500 photographs from his estate have been made available for unconditional usage by the Budapest Municipal Archives.”

Periscope lets you stream what your phone’s camera sees. Now there’s an app that lets you stream what you’re doing on your phone. “Now comes Unicorns, an app that streams whatever you’re doing on your phone—playing a game, texting, swiping through Tinder. It’s like a combination of Periscope or Meerkat and Homescreen, the app that takes a shot of your homescreen and serves as a discovery platform for others, a peek into what apps people are using and what essentials get the coveted dock spot.” Um, no thank you.

A new online tool allows users to do due diligence on brokers. “BrokerCheck is free online database intended to provide the investing public with an east way to research brokers and investment advisers before working with them.”

A startup has aimed to clone Google’s Knowledge Graph. “Diffbot says its database now spans about 600 million objects, and the hope is that it can spur all sorts of contextually aware services along the lines of Google Now. ‘In the future, you’ll interact with thousands of intelligent apps that will need something like what we offer,’ says Mike Tung, the CEO of Diffbot, a company that grew out of his artificial intelligence work at Stanford University.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Periscope now has a global view of active videos/streams/broadcasts/periscopes/whatever you call them. Sunday Danny Sullivan went live at the Eiffel Tower and it was a sight. “Instead of just selecting from a feed, users will have a second option of opening up a map that will show hotspots where people are broadcasting video live. It can get as granular as a specific spot in a city, which users can zoom into in order to see where exactly the video is being broadcast.”

Encyclopedia Virginia and Google Street View have teamed up for Street View tours inside Enyclopedia Viginia. “…a Google employee traveled to the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and trained [Matthew] Gibson and [Peter] Hedlund on how to use the camera and the software necessary to stitch together the digital images online. Thus armed, Gibson and Hedlund traveled across Virginia creating virtual tours of everything from Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, near Lynchburg, to James Madison’s Montpelier. The Virginia General Assembly allocated $85,000 to help fund the endeavor, which will include creating virtual tours of the Virginia Capitol and Governor’s mansion. The Street Views are published as Street View panoramic tours on Google Maps and subsequently embedded on Encyclopedia Virginia. Currently, a viewer can find virtual tours of 16 historical sites attached to relevant entries. Viewers click on the tour and ‘walk’ through the location site as if they were there.” There are more tours planned.

FindMyPast has added a huge number of Irish newspaper articles to its site.

PayPal is letting users opt out of some horrible parts of its new Terms of Service. “While PayPal at times may need to call or text you regarding account activity or to settle disputes, the new agreement also broadly gave the company the ability to send out surveys, offers and promotions through automated means. What’s worse is that there was no opt-out mechanism provided for these actions. But now there will be, the company tells us.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Oh now this is fascinating. The Mayor of New York City is using Genius to annotate media coverage about himself.

From the Guardian: How librarians are protecting online privacy. “The first politician to discover the danger of underestimating what happens when you have thousands of librarians on your case was attorney general John Ashcroft who, in 2003, accused the American Library Association of ‘baseless hysteria’ and ridiculed their protests against the Patriot Act.”

Lycos, a search engine/portal name from long ago, has announced two wearables: a band and a ring. “Perhaps the most interesting piece of this launch is that Lycos is also starting something called the Lycos Life Project, a not-for-profit that intends to provide free water sensors and air sensors to households that may not know if they’re receiving clean air and water. Five percent of sales from the two devices will fund the project.”

OTHER STUFF I THINK IS COOL

Yay! Minecraft doesn’t need Java anymore because Microsoft is bundling it with a standalone version. Good morning, Internet…

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