Community

How to navigate Apple's crowdsourced product support

Apple owners in need of help can now tap into community support sections at the company's product pages.

Launched a few days ago, the new sections are set up like standard Q&A forums where you can post your own questions and answer those of other people. Getting to a particular support section is just a matter of launching Apple's Web site, navigating to the page for the product in question, and then clicking on the Buy button in the upper right corner. Scrolling down the page then reveals the Answers from the community section for that … Read more

3D printing and the future of product design: Inside Quirky

How far can you get with a 3D printer and a dream?

CNET photographer Sarah Tew and I took a tour of Quirky's new Manhattan offices this morning. As depicted in her frankly great shots in the slideshow below, we got a firsthand look at the inner workings of a serious, professional product development company.

Normally I don't go in for facility tours. The articles that tend to result from such things too often take the appearance of marketing material. It was the promise of the chance to see how a real design company uses a 3D printer that drew me to accept Quirky's invite.… Read more

Thumb through user opinions

Thumb for Android gives you an easy way to pose questions to and get instant opinions from the public. If used correctly, this simple app can be a valuable tool for casual research or daily decision-making. It's also fun if you just want to have people chime in on random topics.

If the concept of Thumb seems familiar, that might be because the app was originally released under the name Opinionaided. Though its name is different now, the app has retained all of its core functionality and is more or less the same as before.

There are two ways … Read more

Spare a little computing power to fight malaria

After IBM's Watson computing system defeated two human competitors on Jeopardy this year, it partnered with the nonprofit Scripps Research Institute to direct the tournament prize money toward finding a cure for drug-resistant malaria.

Now all the team is asking for is a little help from around the globe. It's using the World Community Grid, described as a "supercomputer of the people," to use spare computing power from volunteered PCs.

Since the Grid was set up seven years ago, some 575,000 people in more than 80 countries have donated spare computing power from nearly 2 … Read more

Nextdoor: First private social network for neighborhoods

Writer Walter Kirn tweeted something mid-summer that rang so poignant and true, I immediately "favorited" and re-tweeted: "The brilliant dark governing insight of social media is that most people prefer socializing alone."

Sure, all of this newfound sharing and real-time communication is awesome indeed. But the very same digital tools that heighten our reach and accessibility are somehow alienating us from each other more so than ever before. Human-to-human connection and communication, it seems, tends to get too intermediated by gadgets and gizmos.

Today, there's a new social network rolling out nationwide to help bridge … Read more

Wheelz launches car sharing for college campuses

Another car-sharing service is launching today. Wheelz does the same thing as RelayRides and Getaround: If you have a car that sits unused from time to time, it lets you rent it out to other people, like AirBnB can do for an apartment that you leave vacant.

Wheelz is more focused than its competitors. It's designed exclusively for college and university campuses. The service is going live initially for Stanford students and employees.

CEO Jeff Miller made it clear to me that his company has learned from the hit that AirBnB took when one of its members' homes was … Read more

Feeding the meter for public space (audio slideshow)

As part of an urban-design movement that began in San Francisco in 2005, parking spaces around the world were reclaimed as public spaces yesterday, with artists and activists feeding meters to build temporary community spaces and small parks for Park(ing) Day. Across San Francisco, pop-up communities of restaurants, hair dressers, yoga classes, and gardens created new forms of temporary public space, re-envisioning the metered parking space as a public gathering space--a place for meeting people, cultural expression, teaching, playing, or just hanging out.

Reddit spins out, sort of

Reddit, the community-curated site that's picking up the pieces that Digg dropped, today announced that it's spinning out from the company that acquired it, Conde Nast. Sort of.

Reddit is moving up a notch in the org chart. No longer will it be a part of Conde Nast, which publishes among other things, Wired, Vanity Fair, GQ, and Ars Technica. Instead, Reddit becomes an independent company under Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast.

By becoming a bigger wheel, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin (see his blog post) says, the site will be able to "go back into … Read more

W3C works to speed Web standard creation

The World Wide Web Consortium has begun its effort to speed its processes for standardizing Web technology.

Those wishing a less cumbersome way to evaluate and create new standards now can use what the W3C calls Community Groups, an idea that's been under development for months. The W3C also announced the formation of eight such groups, including ones focusing on the Web payments, Web education, and semantic news.

"Innovation and standardization build on each other," said W3C Chief Executive Jeff Jaffe in a statement. "As the pace of innovation accelerates and more industries embrace W3C's … Read more