Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 9th February 2009
3 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google Australia have created a map to keep track of the awful bush fires burning through South East Australia in the aim of helping to coordinate traffic and assist the country’s emergency services.
The fires have already reached a death toll of over 108 people, the worst in the country’s history – with many reports that the fires are being set alight intentionally.
The flash map gives real time information about the fire locations and their status from the State of Victoria’s Country Fire Authority (CFA) website via RSS feed. The map also provides an address search functionality which should be a big help.
The number in each marker shows the number of fires at the location. A green marker means the area is called “safe” by the CFA. Yellow means “controlled”. Orange means “contained”. Red means “going”.
You can view the map large here or see it embedded below.
Written on 12th September 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remote spell checking service Spellr.us has launched at Techcrunch50. Bloggers who have problems with spelling and grammar (like me, since English is my second language) can now count on the services of the Spellr.us scan. They remotely monitor your blog or website and send you updates when they find errors and typos. This service will eventually cost money, but is free for the first month.
In a triumphal email, the Australia-based service tells its beta users that it has also improved several features – like reporting and custom dictionaries. Spellr.us has also introduced RSS feeds of errors, scheduled scans, and content filtering.
Boris was the first Next Web editor to report about this service, which was then in closed beta. He expressed the hope that Spellr.us “don’t just do a regular spell check but also look for obvious mistakes like mixing up “there” “they’re” and “their”. These errors are common on a lot of blogs and unfortunately aren’t corrected by most spelling checkers.” I’m not sure Spellr.us has introduced yet, since the mistakes Boris discusses also pop up in Spellr.us emails:
Written on 31st July 2008
0 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent
This map represents how the Internet assets are distributed across the world; there is a lack of internet accessibility in big parts of South America, Australia and especially Africa. Without the web it’s hard to get online information, and social networking is even harder to do. Or is it? Juan Esteban Rios Delgado created a way for socializing with your network without the use of the Internet.
The humanitarian designer just graduated at the design academy in the Netherlands, and made a communication tool based on a FM transmitter. The goal is to create communities like Myspace and Facebook available to everyone. The transmitters are cheap, portable and mechanically powered.
The devices allow people to talk, write and podcast with others that have a device. Everybody joins the broadcast channel. Rios said: “The transmitter is a tool that brings people together. While new technology brings us further from those who can’t get online, makes the “Sharing culture, sharing media” alternative distribution for the people that are online and offline” -through Bright.nl
Written on 3rd June 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As my co-editor Boris has mentioned before, most of the Next Web’s contributing editors aren’t native English speakers. That’s why we’re quite fond of Spellr.us, an Australian start-up that develops a remote spell checking service. Boris blogged about them two weeks ago. After mentioning we all hate typos and ask you to notify us as soon as you see one, he wrote: “the solution Spellr.us promises to offer sounds even better. They remotely monitor your blog or website and send you updates when they find errors and typos.” I figured it was about time to mail founder Kevin Garber to see how Spellr.us is coming along.
Garber: “We have been working hard at refining the spell check engine to have it free from as many “false positives”. We are almost at a stage where we are happy with the results.” After that, Garber and his team will set up an introductory pricing plan and start working on the automatic monitoring: “The developers would shoot me if I locked anything in, but we are hoping to have introductory pricing offers in a month, and monitoring a month thereafter.”
Spellr.us is a really relevant service for all the main-land European bloggers out there who blog in English. But we have to wait for another two months. Luckily Garber has decided to give you 80 private beta invites, that makes the waiting less hard. Get yours here.
If we all use the service, Garber and his team could check what the most common mistakes per country are. So every Frenchman, German, or Italian would be able to check where the danger in spelling lies for him.
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