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• 24Jul

  FriendFeed Follows For A Change With “Recommend Friends” Feature

  Business, News, Technology, Travel No Comments

  

  For many features and innovations, FriendFeed has been ahead of Facebook, and even Twitter. It’s usually Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites catching up to FriendFeed, not the other way around. Today, FriendFeed added a Recommend Friends feature, that allows you to recommend subscriptions of friend’s feeds to anyone who subscribes to your feed. The friend suggestions feature was originally born out of LinkedIn and Facebook added the suggestion feature early last year.

  When you send friend recommendations, your friend will get an email with all of your recommendations, including a link to subscribe to all your recommendations with a single click, which is actually pretty useful. Especially if you are a new user, it’s nice to have the option of having a friend do all the work for you when it comes to finding people to follow.

  And whenever you hover over a friend’s name, you will see a “recommend friends” link in the popup image. You will also see the link on the profile pages of your friends who have joined the site recently and may need some help in finding friends to link up to.

  FriendFeed continues to roll out features and tools at an impressive pace, adding real-time search, unveiling a new API, and the ability to disable comments in July alone.

  

  Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

  

  

  
  
  

  

  

• 24Jul

  Why the US Should Import Ideas from India

  Business, News, Technology, Travel No Comments

  I am quite pleased about Hillary Clinton’s five-day visit to India — for one main reason. Her unorthodox itinerary denotes a radical upgrade in US foreign policy towards India from version 1.0 to version 2.0; unlike previous US Secretaries of State, she started off her visit in Mumbai, the economic capital of India, before heading to New Delhi, India’s political capital, to meet with government leaders including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. And yet I think Secretary Clinton can do herself one better.

  Let me elaborate a bit. As the fourth US President to visit India in 2000, former President Bill Clinton ushered in a new era of diplomacy between India and US, one characterized by mutual trust and admiration, after five long decades of mutual suspicion and ideological antagonism, as India sided with the former USSR during the Cold War. Bill Clinton ushered in version 1.0 of the US-India partnership, characterized by “political diplomacy” — i.e., fostering political synergies between the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest one. This version 1.0 of Indo-US state-level partnership culminated in late 2008 with the signing of the US-India nuclear deal by former President George W. Bush, just before he left office.

  Meanwhile, during the decade now coming to an end and riding on the back of growing political cooperation, both countries’ tech economies have also become more integrated. Trade volume between the US and India has skyrocketed from $9 billion in 1996 to $43 billion today. As a result, “business diplomacy” has lately been on the rise — with CEOs of both countries playing an ever more important role in shaping what I call US-India Partnership 2.0, denoted by growing economic integration between both nations. And that explains why Ms. Clinton first broke bread with Indian corporate tycoons Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani in Mumbai days before she had lunch with Mr Singh in Delhi.

  I genuinely believe that the US-India partnership is going to be the most beautiful geopolitical marriage of the 21st century. But for this marriage to work, both nations need to take the partnership to the next level — version 3.0 — this one characterized by “public diplomacy.” Allow me to explain.

  Signing nuclear and defense deals with India may make a few US companies happy, and schmoozing with top Indian CEOs may make them feel like the cornerstones of India’s growing economic ties with the US, but Ms. Clinton won’t score points with the average American until he sees how America’s growing engagement with India is going to affect his daily life. This is where public diplomacy comes into play, as it can help overcome US citizens’ skepticism about US foreign policy in general.

  Here I am not talking about traditional US public diplomacy tools like the Peace Corps. Such tools are still relevant today but they drive goodwill one-way — with US engineers and teachers heading to India to do social work. That’s a noble act in itself. But if Secretary Clinton is really keen to treat India as an equal partner, then she needs to run US public diplomacy as a two-way street, importing Indian talent and best practices to facilitate social innovation across America.

  To put it more bluntly: the US must learn to receive India’s “smart power” as much as it is willing to bestow its own onto India. After all, didn’t Ms. Clinton state in her confirmation hearing that, “America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America”?

  Let’s look at two sectors in the US that can benefit from such a sharing of smart power with India: energy and healthcare. Both sectors are ticking time bombs for the oil-addicted and aging America, and both are currently a mess. Though Obama administration recently announced multi-billion-dollar plans to invest in clean technologies as well as to reform America’s deficit-ridden healthcare system, these mega-projects will take years to yield benefits for the ordinary US citizen.

  Rather than waiting for these long-term projects to bear fruit, how about adopting proven best practices from countries like…India? Indeed, millions of Indians also suffer from growing energy scarcity and a lack of access to healthcare. But rather than waiting for their government to launch US-style mega-projects to fix these problems, two entrepreneurial Indian start-ups — SELCO and Aravind Eye Care — have taken things into their own hands by bringing clean energy and affordable healthcare to millions.

  SELCO is a solar energy firm that sells, installs, and services solar lighting systems to underserved rural and urban Indians. Set up by US-trained Harish Hande, SELCO’s grassroots partner networks have already installed more than 45,000 solar lighting systems across rural India. Why can’t SELCO’s innovative business model be replicated in rural Kansas? And healthcare facilities modeled after Aravind Eye Care — which to-date has treated 2.3 million patients at a very low cost — can be opened all across the US to serve the 45 million Americans who lack health insurance. That would be an “eye-opening” innovation for many Americans — one they could actually “see”!

  Rather than trying to solve its social issues on its own, it’s time for the US to start embracing best practices and innovations emanating from other idea-rich nations. The US State Department can, and should, help facilitate this global knowledge transfer.

  

  

• 24Jul

  Twitter Unveils A Live-Updating Search Widget

  Business, News, Technology, Travel No Comments

  Twitter Search is great. Unfortunately, unlike FriendFeed’s search, it doesn’t update live in real-time. But Twitter has just unveiled a new widget tonight that does just that.

  The widget, found here, allows you to enter any search query, along with a title and a caption. The widget will then be built next to the input fields so you can see what it looks like. You can also edit its color and dimensions. If you like it, you simply grab the code and put it on a webpage.

  You can even do more advanced searches using parameters like “OR”. In their example widget, Twitter uses the following search string “San Francisco OR @sf OR #sf” to make a live-updating San Francisco Twitter Search widget.

  You can also loop old results if you’re doing a search that has a low volume of results, so it doesn’t appear so static.

  There are no shortage of third-parties that do widgets like these, but an official Twitter one will no doubt be useful to many people for events or personal use. We made one for TechCrunch, but the code you get doesn’t appear to work too nicely with WordPress, so the picture will have to do for now.

  This new feature follows Twitter rolling out its “Twitter 101″ guide for businesses to use the service earlier tonight.

  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

  

  

  
  
  

  

  

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