Amazon Studios, the original film and series production arm of Amazon.com, announced Amazon Storybuilder. Based on the practice of outlining a screenplay with paper notecards, Amazon Storybuilder takes notecarding and makes it digital, giving screenwriters the ability to lay out digital notecards on a virtual corkboard. Users can access their projects whenever and wherever on their computer, tablet, or smartphone.

Brainshark, Inc., a provider of cloud-based business presentations, announced the availability of an online assessment tool to help companies evaluate their sales content effectiveness. The purpose of the assessment - made available for free by both Brainshark and Profitable Channels, a provider of sales enablement consulting - is to help sales and marketing professionals understand how well their content is driving sales performance and to identify steps to maximize the return on their content investments.

XTM International, a provider of web-based translation technology, has released XTM Version 8.0. Incorporating many features requested by its users, Version 8.0 provides customers with an even more powerful computer aided translation (CAT) tool and translation management system (TMS).

Based on initial results with Ford Fiesta, Chiquita, Xbox, Salvation Army, United Way of Southeastern Michigan, Moosejaw, and Kabam, Are You a Human-- a Detroit start up that specializes in game-based verification systems -- has broadly launched PlayThru a verification ad unit that allows marketers to deliver a brand message while users play a quick game to prove they are, well, human. PlayThru can replace CAPTCHA, a series of distorted characters traditionally used by websites.

Marrying a collection of cultural content with a proprietary e-commerce system, Mediander LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fine Creative Media, Inc., announced the launch of its new website mediander.com.

First there was Blogger. Then there was Twitter. Now, somewhere in between those concepts is Medium, the ambitious new creation of co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, who are responsible for all three social media online publishing tools.Launched recently by Williams' and Stone's Obvious Corp., Medium offers a fresh take on blogging by combining some of the best features already built into competitor sites such as Tumblr, Pinterest, reddit, and Zeen. Medium's design lets users collaborate on works consisting of words and/or images that are published on the site. After reading a work, users can provide feedback to the author, indicate if they liked it, and supplement it with additional content.

It used to be that the only data publishers had to work with to determine if a book was a success or a failure were the sales figures. But those numbers only scratch the surface and lead to many more questions than answers. For example, are readers actually finishing a book? And who, exactly, is buying the book?Well, now, thanks to the power of analytics, ebook publishers have the ability to uncover a treasure trove of information about their readers and their behavior. Not only can a publisher find out how many copies have been sold, but it can also determine who is doing the purchasing, how much progress those readers are making, and how much time they're spending with a particular ebook.

Big brands in non-media industries (beverage and automobile companies, for instance), as well as smaller companies and even nonprofits - none of which are likely to have either the extensive volume of content or the in-house personnel and expertise to manage that content that the big media companies do - may begin looking for video management and publishing solutions that match more modest needs. thePlatform now offers just such a solution aimed at those potential customers.

Occupy Wall Street protestors have been drawing the media's attention to the influence of corporations on the America political system for months. With primary season now in full-swing it seems that the web is getting in on the action. This week has seen announcements from LegiNation as well as MapLight, both of which aim to keep voters informed about what their elected representatives are up to and who is influencing them.

Content in the cloud is a natural evolution from storing files on our desktops-but the content creation explosion that has overfilled our inboxes and overwhelmed our social networks won't be solved by moving the growing mass of data from a private realm to a public one.In fact, there's a solution on the horizon that promises to keep the clouds fluffy and the content contextual. It's the "curated cloud," and it's the next big thing. By one measure, we created 5EB (exabytes) of data from the beginning of time until 2008. Now we're creating 5EB every 2 days. Where did that statistic come from? The folks who should know: Google.

Meet the five new fundamentals of the information experience. Whether it's on a desktop monitor or a tiny mobile screen, ‘information experience' is the moment when the user experience and information-intensive applications meet. Over the past few years, as the volume of structured and unstructured data within organizations has exploded and the channels on which that information is consumed has diversified, content consumers have been revising their expectations for what qualifies as an acceptable information experience.

The government sector finds itself between two pressure points: the public's demand for content access and up-to-date information and that same public's demand for costs to be kept down. As a result of these technological and economic requirements, open source technology—which allows source code to be publicly available—has quietly become the solution of choice for government entities at the national, state, and local level.

Can you easily find the government information you need? Do you feel empowered to share your ideas? Do you think your ideas are being heard and acted upon? Do you believe government is spending our money more wisely? If you can't answer yes to these questions, then we need to look at what's being done and what can be done to improve our government's credibility and ability to serve the American people.

Organizations of various sizes and industries are using XML in equally diverse ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their business operations. The technology is also helping companies discover innovative ways in which to generate new revenue opportunities.

As technical and cost barriers fall and security issues are addressed, the cloud has become a viable platform not only for back-end operations but also for key business practices, including content management and distribution.

That little bump on your arm that looks like a mole. But what if it is something worse? You don't remember it being there last month. Maybe it's just a bug bite. Although it has been bothering you for a few days. So what do you do? Of course you approach this problem like any other rational human with a college degree and a smartphone. You ask the internet.

Yes, the typical website registration and login process sucks, to be blunt. It's a user experience nightmare and pretty much everyone agrees. The problem starts when well-intentioned marketers employ site registration systems that prevent consumers from getting to the content they desire unless they are willing to give up an increasing amount of information. Usually it's a laundry list of all sorts of personal, financial, and demographic information.

I'm really tired of being inundated with contextually irrelevant information. I don't want to know what I don't need to know. I don't. Really. And, neither does anyone else.The sheer volume of information available to me in the digital age is overwhelming. Everywhere I look, there it is. Even when I'm not looking, it's there, waiting to be found. Unfortunately, most of what is presented to me is of little use -- or is difficult, if not impossible to find -- especially on the web.

It is a worthwhile exercise to review what I thought were trends in the technologies and tools that I follow and to examine my predictions over the past year. It improves my assessment of important technologies and can refine my forecasting approach. This past year I emphasized three trends: the potential benefits of XML as expressed in the eXtended Business Reporting Language (XBRL); a legal issue combining digital documents (Microsoft Word) and XML—i4i's suit against Microsoft's alleged patent infringement in Microsoft Office Word; and the importance of a new product category, e-readers.

Adobe's recent acquisitions, such as Adobe Connect (web conferencing), Omniture (web analytics) and Day Software (website design), make it clear that it understands the increasing importance of the web. Most of its acquisitions are web-based enterprise solutions that augment one of its primary applications-Adobe Acrobat.