Tech Money: Ideas

Wikis are always a great way to promote and organize the information about a specific topic with a collaborative team. Wikis allow users to edit the content or add more information, even if they are anonymous. However, you almost always can restrict permissions on your wikis.

Wetpaint is maybe the most easy way to build a wiki page and also to promote it or share it with friends. Besides that, Wetpaint is free.

Although there are many alternatives to build a wiki, the advantage of this system is its simplicity. There you don’t need to be a geek or programmer to build a decent and nice wiki page. It is built by using a set of tools and the process is like writing a document in Word.

In this system, the pages are not only wikis. Actually, the pages have enough tools to be a combination of blogs, forums and wikis: “Wetpaint is different. With Wetpaint, anyone with a passion can create an entirely new website and invite others to help them build it. And it’s easy — adding to a Wetpaint site is as simple as click and type. And when you put thousands of heads together to solve a problem, the results can be astonishing. And we really believe that”.

The pages can be configured with a subdomain (xxxx.wetpaint.com) or you can use your own domain, which is great. Recently Wetpaint added social networking functionality to its wiki offering. This increases the value of the system and it is certainly a good step forward. Very appropriate in these “Web 2.0″ times.

Take a look at Wetpaint.

On Friday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced the discovery of evidences of past life on Mars, after some exploration on the red planet.

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), located in California, found evidences of salt deposits on Mars that suggest the presence of water in the past and, therefore, the probability of past martian life.

“These deposits show where water was once abundant and may also provide evidence for the existence of former Martian life”, the scientists said.

NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter would have found up to 200 places with evidence of old salt deposits, according to a laboratory statement. The deposits range in area from about one square kilometer to about 25 square kilometers.

More info

When Melanie McDaniel was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in 2001, no one expected that an experimental new therapy would help her live to see her seventh birthday.

On 17 March, the European Commission decided to inscribe the DVB-H system (Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld) for TV (by phones and other mobile devices) in the European Union standards registration.

Once the standard is published in the Official Journal of the European Union, the EU countries will be required to encourage the use of DVB-H, which is developed by a consortium headed by Nokia. Currently, there are other standards like DMB (developed in South Korea), and a third standard developed by Qualcomm (an American company).

However, the decision doesn’t prevent the commercialization of the other systems, but it grants an important advantage to DVB-H because the EU countries are required to guarantee its presence.

Brussels presented its decision, previously consulted with national governments and the European Parliament, as an incentive for the development of the mobile television services because it guarantees a homogeneous market for the operators.

More info

New technology is allowing law enforcement cars to go looking for trouble. Computers now installed in cruisers automatically run license plates and alert officers to wanted drivers, Heather Brown reports.