SAN FRANCISCO — News events as varied as the commercial jet landing in the Hudson River and the uprisings in Egypt have demonstrated that people armed with cellphones — not professional reporters — are often the first source of breaking news, uploadingTwitter posts, photos and video to the Web. But the result can leave people drowning in too much information.

A Web start-up named Storify, which opens to the public Monday, aims to help journalists and others collect and filter all this information.

Using the Storify Web site, people can find and piece together publicly available content from Twitter, Flickr,Facebook, YouTube and other sites. They can also add text and embed the resulting collages of content on their own sites. During a private test period, reporters from The Washington Post, NPR, PBS and other outlets used the service.

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US education grants beckon Pye

Early education publishing empire founder Wendy Pye is chasing a big share of new multibillion-dollar United States federal and state government grants to improve child literacy, capturing the first rights in the world to use her multimedia products on new Texas electronic textbooks.

Texas is offering US$650 million (NZ$902m) of "oil money" to fund initiatives to make sure every child in the state is "21st century literate", Ms Pye told the Global Women Forum 2010 in Auckland this week.

Ms Pye's NZ$100m Auckland business is also targeting New York, Florida and California for sales of its multimedia literacy and maths learning products.

She said the US Federal Government had committed US$3.4 billion to improve teacher performance and lift child literacy standards.

She urged the 150 businesswomen at the forum to write down their dreams, advising that about the only thing they probably could not achieve in their lives was to be president of the United States because they did not have a US passport. Everything else was achievable, the entrepreneur said.

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