Company blogs are a good way to post press releases and make staff and product announcements. But they’re always particularly helpful when startups use them to share “lessons learned” from various stages of the entrepreneurial process. Last month, anonymous neighborhood messaging service BlockChalk announced that it had secured a $1.5 million investment, the company’s first. Today BlockChalk updated its

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Today Apple announced the release of its latest version of the Safari browser. Safari 5, says the company, will perform 30% faster than the previous version. Apple did not announce Safari 5 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference , but only in press release. Neither the browser nor the developer package are available on the Apple site as of press time. While writing this story, the URL for the press release ceased functioning. We have a question in to Apple but have not heard a response as we post. Sponsor Safari 5, for both Mac and PC, features a new Safari Reader for reading articles online and allows the user and the ability to choose Google, Yahoo! or Bing to power its search field. The Safari Developer Program allows developers to customize Safari 5 with extensions based on standard tech like HTML5, CSS3 and Java. Safari Extensions are sand-boxed, signed with a digital certificate from Apple and run solely in the browser. When Safari Reader detects an article, an icon appears in the address field. Click it and it will display the whole article on one clean page, presumably without links, sidebars or dancing banditos . Think print-ready page. There are options to enlarge, print or send via email. 5 uses the Nitro JavaScript engine. According to Apple, it does some heavy lifting. Runs JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6 Loads new webpages faster using Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching Improves the caching of previously viewed pages to return to them more quickly Heavy on HTML5, the new browser allows full-screen playback and closed captions; geolocation, sectioning elements, draggable attribute, forms validation, Ruby, AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket. Discuss

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When Twitter announced in April that it was donating its archives to the Library of Congress, the first reaction of many scholars and archivists was excitement at the recognition – by both a federal institution and by a major technology company – that our digital streams are worthy of archiving. This was followed quickly with questions about the exact processes by which the Twitter archives would be created, organized, and funded. Sponsor How will shortened links be handled? How will conversations be threaded? Can users opt out of having their tweets archived? How much information about a user will be available? Who can access the archive, and how? Many of the scholars and archivists leading the charge to address these and other questions are involved in THATCamp . THATCamp, short for The Humanities and Technology Camp, is a user-generated “unconference” on the digital humanities. The main THATCamp is organized and hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University . This year’s THATCamp was just held last month. As an academic discipline, the humanities typically includes history, art, literature, philosophy, and music. The digital humanities, the purview of THATCamp, operates at the intersection of the humanities and digital technologies. The scholars involved in the digital humanities analyze the ways in which new media and new technologies impact the humanities, but also study the ways in which these academic disciplines can, in turn, impact how we use and develop new technologies, particularly those associated with visualization and archiving. According to Amanda French, Regional THATCamp Coordinator, THATCamp is precisely the kind of place where those involved in the digital humanities can start to figure out the problems related to social media archiving and curation. According to French, ” Social media archiving is the kind of thing that makes traditionally trained archivists (who are better at dealing with paper) tear their hair out: people are not at all sure how it’s going to work or how it should work, and so we’re going to need to do a lot of brainstorming. Historians want to make sure that the social media data is useful for them, for instance, so they need to have input into what archivists and electronic records managers and programmers are going to build together.” French contends that THATCamp is one of the few places where all those people come together specifically in order to work out some of the complicated and wide-ranging problems associated with the archival and academic analysis of our digital lives. In addition to the main THATCamp, regional camps are organized around the world, and the conversations that these scholars have occur not just face-to-face at these events, but are ongoing via various social networking sites, most notably via Twitter. Discuss

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One of the key aspects of the emerging Internet of Things – where real-world objects are connected to the Internet – is the massive amount of new data on the Web that will result. As more and more ‘things’ in the world are connected to the Internet, it follows that more data will be uploaded to and downloaded from the cloud. And this is in addition to the burgeoning amount of user-generated content – which has increased 15-fold over the past few years, according to a presentation that Google VP Marissa Mayer made last August at Xerox PARC. Mayer said in that presentation that this “data explosion is bigger than Moore’s law.” During my visit to Hewlett Packard Labs earlier this month, I spoke to Parthasarathy Ranganathan – a Distinguished Technologist at HP Labs – about this large influx of data onto the Web. Sponsor Like Mayer, Ranganathan compared the online data growth rate to Moore’s Law. He told me that it’s rising significantly faster than Moore’s Law. HP CEO Mark Hurd put it this way in June 2009: “more data will be created in the next four years than in the history of the planet.” 281 Exabytes of Online Data in 2009 In her presentation at PARC, intriguingly entitled ‘The Physics of Data,’ Marissa Mayer noted that there have been 3 big changes to Internet data in recent times: Speed ( real-time data); Scale (“unprecedented processing power”); Sensors (“new kinds of data”). Mayer went on to say that there were 5 exabytes of data online in 2002, which had risen to 281 exabytes in 2009. That’s a growth rate of 56x over 7 years. Partly, she said, this has been the result of people uploading more data. Mayer said that the average person uploads 15 times more data today (in 2009) than they did just 3 years ago. A Sensor Revolution Marissa Mayer talked about “a sensor revolution,” including data from mobile phones. She remarked that “today’s phones are almost like people,” in that they have senses such as eyes (a camera), ears (a microphone) and skin (a touch screen). HP’s Parthasarathy Ranganathan used the term “ubiquitous nanosensors,” which can have multiple dimensions per sensor: Vibration Tilt Rotation Navigation Sound Air flow Light Temperature Biological Chemical Humidity Pressure Location Ranganathan noted that there will soon be millions of sensors working in real-time, with data sampled every second. He said there’ll be lots of different applications for this data; including retail, defense, traffic, seismic, oil, wildlife, weather and climate modeling. Exascale Web HP sees its role as providing the computing platform required to deal with this massive influx of data and the complexity of processing it in real-time. Google clearly sees itself as a provider of exascale web services. We don’t know yet which computing or Internet companies will be most successful over the next 5-10 years, but one thing is for sure. They’ll have to know how to process and make sense of massive quantities of data flowing through the Web – and do it in real-time. Discuss

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Mozilla is following in Opera’s footsteps by porting an AppStore friendly version of their browser over to the iPhone with their upcoming free app Firefox Home . Due to Apple’s restrictions the app will not offer a full fledged browser experience and thus you will not be able to simply navigate to any website. Instead, users will be able to sync their browsing history, bookmarks and open tabs onto their iPhone using Mozilla’s encrypted Firefox Sync technology. Sponsor As shown in the early demo video embedded below, users will be able to search their history, browse their bookmarks or load the tabs they left open on their desktop – all with the handy Awesome Bar functionality which allows for minimal typing. Mozilla says this is useful for “get up and go” situations, such as pulling up a ticket confirmation at the airport, or remembering directions to a restaurant you looked up on your desktop. “Firefox Home for iPhone is part of a broader Mozilla effort to provide a more personal Web experience with more user control,” the company said in a blog post Wednesday night. “For devices or platforms where we’re unable to provide the ‘full’ Firefox browser (either technically or due to policy), we aim to provide users with ‘on the go’ instant access to their personal Firefox history, bookmarks and open tabs on their iPhones, giving them another reason to keep loving Firefox on their desktops.” Fans of Firefox with iPhones may be disappointed they aren’t getting a full browser on their device like Android, Windows Mobile and Maemo users, but this app is still pretty useful with over-the-air syncing. The inability to browse at will may turn some off, and it remains to be seen how well the Firefox Sync technology works, but this could be an interesting spin on mobile browsing from Mozilla. Discuss

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