Ambient Proximity New Hype On Location Social Media Sharing Services

From a social media user experience it is not always about where your connections are at a location exactly, but in relative terms how close a user is to another, and that is the relevant factor. 

Following recent years on providing a solution to always provide users exact coordinate check-ins in both Foursquare and Facebook platforms, the user experience is now trending away from this feature capability and focusing more on ambient proximity, which works by constantly and automatically sharing your approximate distance from your nearest connections contained in distance labelled groups. 

The process of ambient proximity permits a user to learn if one their connections is near enough to meet up, without necessarily having the stalking capability of knowing exact locations historically on maps. This new approach could be much more appealing to the wider social media daily users.

In this context, Foursquare’s new ambient proximity app Swarm was announced today to be released very soon. It creates a feed of a user connections into groups based on their present distance. Also launched recently was the Facebook Nearby Friends .

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Financial Data Access for Analysis, Now Available to Developers fromIntuit

It was announced today by Intuit a new API for software developers to access that allows them to use financial data that is present on Quicken, QuickBooks, Mint and FinanceWorks.  As a result, software developers can utilize this new data by re-engineering it in different ways such as categories or create tools/applications that are capable to embed and display data analysis.

It then follows that further from the current Intuit Partner Platform software solution developers can create solutions capable of accessing data or displaying data intelligence analysis to be used and designed on customised solutions, where these solutions can be sold to customers. These customers will only have access to their own data already present on their personal or business banking, including investment accounts in the U.S and Canada.

Hello Late Labs, to Recruit Software Programmers in Return for Equity

An interesting new company called Late Labs offers software programmers opportunities to participate in projects which can be outside their main working activities, to collaborate and contribute to projects where they can earn equity for startup businesses. For futher information, it can be read on the company website a published a summary on mission page.

This new interesting site, can be a great a opportunity for many developers looking to expand and have new challenges, where a list of projects can be found here. The way is works for developers, is that when a registration is completed they are given specific coding tasks, it then follows that as a result, the completed tasks count as equity in the selected project.  Furthermore, interested developers with work to be submitted can do so on the GitHub.

The founder Justin Elof Johnson stated: “It’s not like a 99 designs for coding,”. It is however, inspired on  social ideation, nevertheless in this site the site emphasis is on the recruitment of coders, as opposed to Ahhha where it crowdsources a product development process.

Microsoft Entity Framework is Now Open Source

Following on the pattern of making open source software highly available on Microsoft solutions, the company has now made another step towards supporting open source frameworks by opening its very own Entity Framework that works by helping data manipulation. It first started last year when Microsoft made available quite a few development related tools such as NuGet among relevant libraries linked to ASP.Net programming. Furthermore also last year it sponsored Node.js development projects as well as large data analytics Apache Hadoop for Windows. And as another huge step it is also making Linux available on Azure its cloud computing flagship platform.

The way entity framework is structured within Microsoft is at its Open Technologies, in this context earlier this year projects can be developed using Open Technologies. The source code for Entity is on Codeplex, where codeplex is the Microsoft equivalent to GitHub.

These steps are very much welcome by Microsoft, and it seems it is trying to catch and attract development talent that use those technologies, nevertheless the next challenge by Microsoft may be to consider other parts of its well established traditional technologies that it owns.