These businesses are setting the pace of innovation. They’re shaking up markets or creating new ones.

It may have finally found the missing piece it needs to move beyond relying solely on advertising.

When it comes to developing software, few companies can match Google’s prowess. It doesn’t just have the most popular search engine. Chrome is the most widely used Internet browser. Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Docs, and Presentations are legitimate alternatives to Microsoft Office. Picasa, Google’s free photo management software, might be as good as anything from Apple. Android dominates the phone and tablet landscape. Google Maps is becoming the best navigation program on any device.

You won’t believe how these guys redefined viral content on the Web.

Upworthy is one of the fastest-growing websites ever, despite producing only minimal original material. Instead, Upworthy highlights videos that people have posted online about gay marriage, health care reform, racial prejudice, gender equality, and other subjects that interest the site’s liberal curators. The founders—Eli Pariser, who had led the left-wing political group MoveOn, and Peter Koechley, former managing editor of the satirical publication the Onion—started the site to help progressive-friendly content spread virally online, even if that means coöpting some sensational tactics from sites that propagate videos of cute cats. They spoke to MIT Technology Review’s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein.

The Baltimore Code Craftsmanship meetup group will hold its monthly meeting at 7:00pm on Thursday, February 20 in room 107 of the Sondheim Building on the UMBC Campus. The meetup is for students, faculty and software developers in the Baltimore area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

This is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and automated unit testing environment. If you don’t have a laptop, come anyway, we will need only one laptop for every two people. Be prepared to pair up, learn, share and have fun!

Join the meetup and register to attend at the meetup event page.

Frost announces the addition of Fourth Monkey Media to the roster of the distinguished Unity2HTML5 Developer Partner Program providing each accepted development partner with early access to the extremely sought after Unity2HTML5 GDK beta release.

The international gaming community now has Castle Builder available via the Odobo platform and leveraging the latest HTML5 technologies with Rabcat's latest release.

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After Maryland was hit with heavy snowfall last Thursday, WYPR’s Maryland Morning looked into the question: how do our older neighbors plan for and deal with this kind of weather? Sheilah Kast, the program’s host, spoke with Erickson School Dean Judah Ronch about tips and suggestions for helping elders during snowstorms.

Ronch discussed how elders can be vulnerable when they lose power and heat in their homes during storms, which can make them more susceptible to injury, cause them to become disoriented and it can even spoil food which can lead to lack of nutrition.

“That affects both body and mind. Their thinking gets to be a little less clear, and they may make decisions which really aren’t typical of what they can do,” Ronch said.

Ronch added you can help elders by creating a buddy system and forming relationships before storms and emergencies happen. He said having a plan in place and making sure the person has everything they need in advance can go a long way.

“Having a checklist of what the person needs, for example, do you have enough food, do you have enough water, do you have all the medications you would need for let’s say a four to five-day period?” Ronch said. “I think those who are checking in on older adults should check in before, during and after the event.”

You can listen to the full interview on WYPR here.