MakeUseOf is a Scout favorite as it provides a large amount of relevant tech news in an organized and digestible way. We especially enjoy the Top List, a section of the site dedicated to the best apps, games, and services from across the web. The collection of Ebooks is incredibly helpful for those readers looking to learn more about current online resources like Pinterest and Spotify. In general,...
Cooltown is Hewlett-Packard's ambitious vision of a pervasive computing environment, where mobile services, Internet, and intelligent devices are intertwined to make an omnipresent networked experience. This vision of the future makes up a high profile research effort to develop technologies that will enable such a connected world. The program's homepage has a great deal of information about...
The birth of the Internet is the subject of this utterly engaging and well-thought out special report created by the National Science Foundation. After a brief introduction, visitors can browse through a multimedia site that includes video clips of early pioneers talking about their work on this endeavor, along with maps of Internet growth from the 1960s to the 1990s and documents such as the Lax...
More and more research institutes are interested in examining how the Internet has reshaped human interaction, governance, and industry, and the Oxford Internet Institute is certainly one that people will enjoy learning about. The Institute offers several academic degrees, and their site offers up their latest research findings for consideration by the press, scholars, and members of the general...
If you're a website designer, you are probably very interested in how your site appears on mobile devices. The Page2Images site makes this entire process quite seamless. Visitors just need to type in the desired URL, choose the device, screen size, and orientation and voila: a no-frills but reliable thumbnail of what the site will look like. This version is browser-based and thus compatible with...
Are you a pollster? Would you like to be one? PollCode makes all of this quite simple. With this handy application, visitors can type in a poll question and up to 30 possible answers. Visitors can customize the poll with their own colors, font, and settings. After visitors have completed their poll, they can use the HTML code provided here to share their poll with others via social media networks...
Do you want to turn back time? It can be a mighty task, but Rogue Amoeba makes it possible. This tiny application affords users the opportunity to pause and rewind live audio on their computers. It's a rather fine free device, but visitors can also purchase the complete version for $15. This version is compatible with computers running Mac OS X 10.7.0 and newer.
If you're interested in checking out the social media shares for various websites, the Shared Count tool is a nice find. Visitors just need to enter the URL in question and then can find out how often the site has been shared on a range of social media platforms. This version is compatible with all operating systems.
SRI International is a research institute with interests in engineering, information technology, and a variety of other fields. One of its current projects is dubbed Digital Earth, an effort "to create an open infrastructure that allows anyone around the globe to publish or to search for data based upon a specific location." This report describes the multiple technologies that are being integrated...
Have you ever tried to give a friend specific instructions for what to do and where to go on a website? Perhaps you wanted to show them a series of navigations but were unsure about how to tell them using written instructions. Surfly makes helping from a distance possible, "by showing what to do from your perspective." After registering on the site, visitors can create a unique URL that contains...