Google Wave has been cancelled. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave. (more)

John Robb notes efforts by Th Culhane to build technology for Urban/Slum Resilience. See esp their BioGas work and their 5-year (2008-12) timeline/Road Map. (more)

Discussion about whether Broad Band providers can/should provide different Quality Of Service/Qo S to different types of applications (data transfer vs VoIP/Video, etc.) (more)

Urban area with high Poverty and no Infrastructure (Clean Water, access to World Energy Grid, etc.); ripe for Urban Development (more)

A couple semi-contradictory posts I ran across... (more)

FaceBook bought a portfolio of Social Networking Patent-s from Friendster for $40M. Hopefully this will be used only defensively. But still a misallocation of capital.

Hunter College High School is going through internal battles over its declining Diversity and how that relates to its use of testing (not Standardized Test-s, but its own) as its only/blind admissions basis. As has happened at other prestigious city high schools that use only a test for admission, the black and Hispanic population at Hunter has fallen in recent years. In 1995, the entering seventh-grade class was 12 percent black and 6 percent Hispanic, according to state data. This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic; the balance was 47 percent Asian and 41 percent white, with the other 8 percent of students identifying themselves as multiracial. Ironically, one argument in favor of such tests is that they take assessor-bias out of the process. (more)

There are a number of alternatives to FaceBook Causes (and the Tip Jar) for Non-Profit Social Fundraising.

WikiLeaks has released thousands of secret documents leaked to it about the war in Afghanistan. (more)

Since paying $350 million for the kids' social network Club Penguin three years ago, Dis Ney has purchased WideloadGames, whose founder helped create Microsoft's (MSFT) hit Halo franchise. Early last month, the entertainment giant acquired TapulOus, a publisher of music-related games for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone. On July 27, Disney made its biggest video game bet yet, agreeing to pay $563 million for privately held Play Dom, the Mountain View (Calif.) maker of Sorority Life and MobSters, which are played on FaceBook, MySpace, and Mobile phones. (M And A, Social Media)

Human urine makes good plant fertilizer. Enough for a Family Farm? The urine that one person produces can fertilize about one square meter of soil a day.

Dan Schwabel suggests Framing Brand You with One Word - that goes beyond Elevator Pitch! (more)

A case study of the Pivot made by Ka Ching, a site for Investment Manager-s and their clients, which started out as something like an investing game. The (original) intent was to discover amateurs who could manage a portfolio as well if not better than professionals (think American Idol) and then facilitate individual investors giving them their real money to manage... Within a month (of Oct19'2009 launch), kaChing observed several interesting things. First, because the amateurs weren’t SEC-registered, the site had to refer to them with awkward terms like “geniuses.” That was confusing for consumers, who already had to figure out what on kaChing.com was a game and what was real. Second, out of 450,000 gamers, only seven had qualified to become kaChing managers. Third, the company expected hundreds of amateurs who performed poorly in the game to realize they weren’t good at investing and therefore become customers. in fact only five people converted into paying customers. (more)

Apple Computer is blocking Time Warner from selling/managing subscriptions for its IPad channel. Last month, the publisher was set to launch a subscription version of its Sports Illustrated iPad app, where consumers would download the magazines via Apple’s ITunes but would pay Time Inc. directly. But Apple rejected the app at the last minute, forcing the Time Warner (TWX) unit to sell single copies, using iTunes as a middleman, multiple sources tell me... No other magazine publisher has approval sell their own iTunes app subscriptions, either. But Apple and Steve Jobs had made a point of reaching out to Time Inc. executives and editors before the iPad’s launch, and encouraged them to build digital editions for the platform. Welcome to the trunk, as Dave Winer might say...

We have a bunch of used pre-renovation kitchen appliances to sell. You need to pick it up in Barrington Il, pay cash, get it loaded yourself, deal with your own installation, etc. No warranty implied, etc. (more)

a mode of Transportation (more)

is a $4.35 billion United States Department of Education program designed to spur reforms in state and local district K-12 education. It is funded by the ED Recovery Act as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 and was announced by President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on July 24, 2009. (Education Reform) (more)

Tom Vander Ark is a partner in Vander Ark/Ratcliff, an education public affairs firm, and a partner in a private equity fund focused on innovative learning tools and formats. He was the first business executive to serve as a public school superintendent and was the first Executive Director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (Gates Foundation) (more)

Less than two months after the nation’s governors and state school chiefs released their final recommendations for national education standards (Common Core), 27 states have adopted them and about a dozen more are expected to do so in the next two weeks... The quick adoption of common standards for what students should learn in English and math each year from kindergarten through high school is attributable in part to the Obama administration’s Race To The Top competition. States that adopt the standards by Aug. 2 win points in the competition for a share of the $3.4 billion to be awarded in September... Adoption of the standards does not bring immediate change in the classroom. Implementation will be a long-term process, as states rethink their teacher training, textbooks and testing. Those states that are not winners in the Race To The Top competition may also have less incentive to follow through in carrying out the standards... he problem of wide variations in state standards has become more serious in recent years, as some states weakened their standards to avoid being penalized under the federal No Child Left Behind law... “We’ll have states working together for the first time on curriculum, textbooks, assessment,” said Arne Duncan. “This will save the country billions of dollars.”

Stanford University has a group working on POMI, the Programmable Open Mobile Internet (see OpenNet). This includes a virtual data system (Data Store) called PRPL that enables users to take back ownership of their data. The PrPl group has built Dunbar, an EMail mining app.