Quora is now available on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Question-and-answer site Quora has launched a new app for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

The application, which was made available in Apple's App Store today, offers much of the functionality users find with the Web site version of the service. Users can ask questions, add answers on topics they're well-informed on, and search for questions on more than 60,000 topics, the company said.

To add a bit more functionality to the application, Quora is also utilizing the iPhone's location ability to add a new feature, called "Nearby." That feature lets users view topics on a map, and add questions about (and read answers about) the places or things around them. The Nearby feature also lets users explore other areas around the world to ask questions on topics related to a particular place.

Related stories: • Q&A search site Quora opens to everyone • A perfect storm for Q&A site Quora • Amazon cloud outage downs Netflix, Quora

Initial work on Quora began in 2009, and the service was officially launched to the public in June 2010. Since then, the question-and-answe... [Read more]

Among hundreds of Internet domain names Amazon registered yesterday are a few that indicate at least the possibility that the company will bring Silk, its new browser beyond just Fire tablets.

Fusible spotted a long list of domains related to Fire and Silk yesterday. Among them are silkfordroid.com, silkformac.com, silkforpc.com, silkfortablets.com, and silkforwindows.com. Clearly some are defensive moves to fend off would-be typo squatters or other opportunists, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some of those addresses presage broader Silk usage later.

Another bit of evidence supports the idea of Silk beyond Fire. As reader jason_untulis points out, the Silk terms and conditions state: "If you use Amazon Silk on a Kindle device, your device will automatically send Amazon Silk crash reports to Amazon. You may choose to send these reports when using Amazon Silk on oth... [Read more]

Adobe Systems has updated Lightroom and Photoshop to support a number of new small, higher-end cameras from Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, and Pentax.

The software packages handle the raw photos that higher-end cameras can produce, offering higher image quality and better flexibility at the expense of convenience. And as new cameras arrive, Adobe must build support for the new models proprietary formats.

Lightroom 3.5 of and version 6.5 of Photoshop's raw-image plug-in (available on Adobe's download site) now can support a host of new compact interchangeable-lens cameras (ILCs) that lack the bulk-inducing reflex mirror of SLRs. In addition, it supports high-end medium-format cameras from Hasselblad, Phase One, and Phase One's Leaf subsidiary. The full list:

• Fuji FinePix F600EXR

Sony's NEX-5N is among the new cameras that Lightroom 3.5 supports.

• Hasselblad H4D-60

• Leaf Aptus II 12

• Leaf Aptus II 12R

• Nikon Coolpix P7100

• Olympus E-P3

• Olympus E-PL3

• Olympus E-PM1

• Panasonic DMC-FZ150

• Panasonic DMC-G3

• Panasonic DMC-GF3

• P... [Read more]

Amazon Silk has the potential to dramatically improve the mobile Web--but its "split browser" design also poses two worrisome problems.

Silk is a browser designed with one device in mind, so far: Amazon's forthcoming Fire tablet. Its purpose in life is to make browsing faster on the 7-inch Android-based tablet.

To do so, it relies on the fleet of servers that make up its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. When a Silk user clicks a link, the browser passes the request to EC2, which fetches all the page elements, boils them down so they won't be so taxing on the tablet's limited hardware and network abilities, then transfers the data to the tablet itself.

Mobile browsing is desperately in need of a speed boost, and Amazon deserves credit for trying to help. Unfortunately, though, I have concerns about making Amazon a middleman in the Web browsing operation.

First, I worry that Silk's design is at odds with the explosive growth of Web applications. Second, I worry that Silk will give the company a valuable view of what a huge number of people are doing on the Web.

Proxy browsing Amazon's claims that browsing hasn't fundamentally changed since the 1990s are a bit off target. Amazon's "split browser," though, isn't the first such devia... [Read more]