word

Wordle is a simple Web app that's useful for creating eye-popping "word clouds" just by inputting text.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but with Wordle, a thousand words is worth a word cloud. (Try saying that out loud a thousand times.)

Wordle lets you create custom word clouds like the ones found on blogs and other Internet content sites. A word cloud is a popular visualization of words typically associated with Internet keywords and text data. They are most commonly used to highlight popular or trending terms based on frequency of use and prominence.

In … Read more

Scramble With Friends (99 cents), a new game from Zynga, has rocketed to the top of the iTunes App Store with classic Boggle-like gameplay so you can challenge your friends.

Gaming company Zynga has enjoyed huge success with hit iOS games including Words with Friends, Hanging with Friends, and Texas hold-'em game Zynga Poker. A new word game from the company took the tried and true classic board game, Boggle, and made it into an iPhone-friendly multiplayer game that's as addictive and fun as the original.

Like Boggle, the object of the game is to find as many … Read more

About a week ago I featured Kingsoft Office Suite Professional 2012 in a bonus deal. Since then I've been test-driving the software on an old laptop. And you know what? I like it!

I mention this because although the Kingsoft Professional giveaway is over, you can still get Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012 for, well, free. Update: This program is for Windows.

Until last week, I'd never heard of Kingsoft or this product. I had, however, tried all the usual freebie Microsoft Office alternatives: OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, and so on.

They're all OK--good enough, … Read more

iPad owners searching for software to create Microsoft Office documents now have a new and free app.

The iPad app CloudOn lets you create, edit, and view Microsoft documents using online versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Your documents are stored in the cloud via your DropBox account, letting you access them whenever you're online.

Although it officially hit the App Store on January 3, CloudOn was subsequently taken down when the company bumped into technical difficulties as a result of huge demand. But CloudOn has since caught up with its service issues and is once again ripe for download … Read more

There's plenty of live video broadcasting platforms to choose on the Web these days, but today we're chatting with one of the pioneers.

Justin Kan is one of the co-founders of Justin.TV, and he drops by our studio today for a full episode about the origins of life streaming and how the site paved the road to Justin's new project for live video gaming, TwitchTV.

We'll also talk to Justin about his participation in Y Combinator, a start-up incubator that helps green entrepreneurs through the first three months of genesis.

The boot camp gives founders the seed funding they need for general living expenses, allowing them to focus on the business idea. YC also guides them through the media pitching process and how to grab the attention of venture capitalists and seed investors.

Some of the headline-grabbing companies to grow from Y Combinator include Scribd, Loopt, Grubwithus, and Justin.TV itself.

Tune in to hear about how TwitchTV is bringing competitive gaming to a much larger audience, not to mention a few tips on what it takes to earn a spot in the next Y Combinator batch!… Read more

I was on an American Airlines flight the other day, when the self-righteous man next to me was refusing to turn off his iPhone.

"NOW!" bellowed the flight crew lady, as if she were talking to a recalcitrant child or a loser lover.

I wonder if something similar might have happened to actor Alec Baldwin yesterday, when he was removed from an American Airlines flight after being somewhat slow to turn off his iPhone, on which he was playing Zynga's Words With Friends.

The way ABC News reports it, Baldwin might have gotten a little annoyed. Or … Read more

Microsoft Word templates can be serious time savers; if you find yourself creating similar documents over and over again, using a template can let you save the basic format and then automatically open it as a new document every time you want to work with it. The problem with templates--also known as DOTX and DOTM files--is that Word 2007 is the oldest version of Word capable of opening them. If you need to access the contents of a DOTX or DOTM file but you're running an older version of Word, you're out of luck, unless you have a … Read more

WordPress.com bloggers will now be able to earn a few bucks on their posts courtesy of advertising.

The popular blogging site is kicking off a new feature called WordAds, according to a blog posted earlier today by WordPress.com ads lead Jon Burke. Partnering with Federated Media, WordPress.com will display advertisements on qualifying blogs, letting their owners earn some cash from each ad.

WordPress, which Burke said signs up 50,000 new blogs every day, had apparently received requests over the years to allow advertising on the blogs created by its users, but resisted the temptation because of … Read more

Bill Gates is scheduled to take the stand today in a Novell-versus-Microsoft antitrust case whose origins stretch back as far as 1995.

Launched in 2004 by Novell, the lawsuit alleges that Microsoft used anti-competitive tactics to hurt Novell's WordPerfect and Quattro Pro products by holding back key technical information required to make them compatible with Windows 95. Novell claims that Microsoft initially promised its support for the two applications but then pulled back to combat any potential competition against Microsoft Office.

In its suit filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, Novell is seeking $1.2 … Read more