Old Keyboard Becomes Laptop Shoeshine Desk

In the West, we make a big deal about recycling, but what we really mean by "recycling" is melting down old crap to build yet more new crap. This is not the same everywhere. In some places, to recycle means to reuse, foregoing the energy-wasting reprocessing for a simple re-purposing of an old object. And if you thought I used the prefix "re-" too many times in that last sentence, then you're just being extravagant. I was recycling it.

Above you see an old, keyless computer keyboard, the kind of bland beige box to be found mouldering on any sidewalk. In Africa, though, it becomes a lap-desk for a shoeshiner, the rough surface of the stripped keyboard offering a platform which grips both shoes and polish while protecting the shoeshiner's clothes.

It's a question of cultural attitude, and it's not confined to Africa. In Barcelona, Spain, where I live, each barrio has a set day for the collection of big trash -- furniture, clothing and the like. The collection happens late at night, so there is plenty of time for trawling the trash for treasure. It's not unusual to see a well dressed businessman, complete with laptop bag, rifling the refuse alongside the students, the homeless, the poor or the tech blogger. And that's great. Dumpster divers should be proud: We're saving the planet and saving cash.

Your Old Keyboard and a Shoeshine Stand [AfriGadget]

Photo: whiteafrican/Flickr

Drive From Sydney Museum Could Unlock NASA Moon Data

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seiko releases Hello Kitty alarm clock

Seiko has announced a new Hello Kitty alarm clock, which triples as a thermometer and a hand mirror. The compact device (92×32×80mm) will go on sale in Japan this week.

It will wake you up with three different chimes. Kitty says (in Japanese):
- “It’s Kitty! You are still sleeping? If you oversleep, I will get angry!”
- “Good morning! This is Kitty’s morning call! Wake up!”
- “Puuhh, good morning. I am sleepy, too, but we have to wake up! Come on, come on!”

The clock is Nippon-only, but people living outside the country can (pre-)order it here for $49 plus shipping.

Incredibly Dangerous Android Bug Executes Every Keystroke as Root User

Warning: This is not a joke. If you are one of the lucky few with the Android G1 Googlephone, try typing the word "reboot".

Sorry. I take it you managed to find your way back here after your phone restarted. This incredible "feature" is not any kind of malware you might have picked up, but a real life bug in the actual shipping version of the Android OS. Anything you type on the keyboard, in any application, is simultaneously sent to a command line shell and executed as the root user.

A rough translation: Imagine you are running a terminal in Linux, the geeky text window into which you type commands for the computer to execute. Imagine, also, that the account in which you are working is that of the super user, or root, a user with permission to do anything it wants, including a simple five character command which will erase the entire contents of the phone, operating system and all.

That is exactly what is happening with the Android OS up to build number RC29 (the version which is hurriedly being pushed over the air as an update to G1 users. We thought that the hackers had scored when we reported that root terminal success had been achieved on the Googlephone, but now the process of downloading the terminal application, PTerminal, seems a little clunky. In fact, you should be able to turn on telnet, the process which enables you to remotely browse to your device over the network, simply by typing telnetd (although you'll need some jiggery pokery to make sure you're first in the correct directory).

Here's what ZDNet's Ed Burnette has to say:

Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges. Wow!

And from user jdhorvat, who posted this on the Google Code bug report thread:

I was in the middle of a text conversation with my girl when she asked why I hadn’t responded. I had just rebooted my phone and the first thing I typed was a response to her text which simply stated “Reboot” - which, to my surprise, rebooted my phone.

Open the keyboard and type these 5 keystrokes: <return>-c-a-t-<return>. That will cause the phantom shell to not listen to commands any more, at least until the next reboot.

Dangerous Android Bug Executes Every Keystroke as Root User

Dangerous Android Bug Executes Every Keystroke as Root User

Miriam Makeba, Rest In Peace.

The great South African musician and human rights activist Miriam Makeba has passed away. "Mama Africa" was 76 years old, and died of a heart attack after a performance in Italy. Link to New York Times Obituary. Above: In 1960, a very young Miriam Makeba performs the song "Into Yam", in the movie "Come Back, Africa."

Make a Giant Poster of Anything in Three Minutes or Less

A simple and free online application can turn your favorite pictures into printable PDF files that you can cull into a huge wall-sized poster.

All it takes is a few minutes of your time, a few cents worth of paper, and a handy printer (if your unruly friend Charlie hasn't thrown it out yet). Better yet, you can make the prints at work and the large piece of wall art will be absolutely free.

Here is how you do it: Upload an image from your computer into the Blockposters server, choose the number of sheets wide you want your poster to be and then select the print settings (Portrait, Landscape, A4, and Letter-US). Then, after you save the PDF file, print out the file while making sure no edges are cut off when they're printed.

Put the pieces together and you'll have a poster that will be about several feet wide and high (mine is 3 x 3). You could do all this with photoshop help, but the speed is the thing: it took me less than 3 minutes to print out a full sized Dharma Initiative logo.

Blockposter creator Steffan Luczyn told us the laborious process of cutting up images to crate a poster is what made him come up with the idea to automate it: "I decided to make a poster for my girlfriend from a (really) small picture she had of Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters). I manually spliced it up in MS Paint(!), counting pixels and saving each segment to a separate file. It took ages!  I then printed each file as 'fit to page.' The resulting poster looked really cool - we really liked the pixelly/blocky look -- each pixel printed out around 1cm squared."

This points to a couple of the app caveats: The smaller the original image file is, the more likely it’ll be pixilated when it’s blown up. It results in a cool optical illusion when it is placed on the side of a building -- up close, the images are weirdly indistinguishable, but from afar, they look just right.   

Also, the sheets of paper I used (regular Staples inkjet white paper) proved to be far too thin and flimsy, even as the picture came out clear and colorful. I recommend that you either purchase extra-thick paper or use photo prints.

Last year, GeekDad's Dave Ebanks went to a local printer to similarly blow up an image of his son's favorite race car but it cost him a bit of a bundle. He also had to get a picture at 150 dpi at full size (you can use pretty much any pic with blockposters) and it cost him about $5 per square foot (not including installation). So this is an alternative that many parents should try.

And if they don't like it, they’ll have plenty of money left to try buy off Junior's happiness.

Check out some of the walls users have created using Luczyn's app:

Onion Peels Back Covers, Compares Snow Leopard and Windows 7

The splendid, many-layered satire-fest that is The Onion has posted this simple infographic, explaining the differences between the two upcoming new operating systems for Apple and Microsoft.

Apple has already made clear that the new OS X Snow Leopard is a streamlining release -- no big new features, just a tightening up of what is already there. It could be argued that Windows 7 will do the same for Vista.

Head over and see the full graphic at the Onion. Our favourite part? The section on touch screen capabilities.

OS X Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7 [The Onion via ★ ]

MP3 player headphones may hinder pacemakers (Reuters)

Reuters - Headphones used with MP3 digital music players like the iPod may interfere with heart pacemakers and implantable defibrillators, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.

Appletell review - Clear Harmony Foldable Active Noise Canceling Headphones

FROM APPLETELL - Able Planet’s Clear Harmony headphones have put active noise canceling technology within our price range, but have they sacrificed performance to do so?
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Textbook Rentals Big Business - Kleiner Perkins Goes After Chegg

Five year old textbook rental startup Chegg is really starting to ramp up sales, we’ve heard. The average college student, they say, spends $900 per year on textbooks. Chegg saves them 70-80% of that by renting them the books instead of selling them outright.

Here’s how it works: students find the books they want by searching by ISBN, author, title or keyword. The rental price for the semester or quarter is just 20-30% of the full retail price, and are delivered within eight business days. At the end of the term, the students receive a pre-paid shipping box to return them. Students are even allowed to highlight books (but no writing in them).

The company was founded in 2003 at Iowa State University as a classifieds site. In the fall of 2007 the company changed their business to textbook rentals.

Revenues have soared to a roughly $10 million run rate, we’ve heard from a source, who also says they’ve just closed a second round of financing from Kleiner Perkins - $15 million at a post money valuation of $60 million.

Chugg had previously raised $2.2 million from Gabriel Venture Partners and Maples Investments.

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Shine The Light on Obama

Spontaneous singing at the first Second Line in New Orleans, Louisiana since the presidential election. November 9, 2008: Shine the Light on Obama (shot by AnorexicRapper). Related videos: Sudan Social Aid and Pleasure Club 2008, also shot today in New Orleans (shot by cjdunn1), and Sudan Kids Getting Down today, to the sounds of the Hot 8 Brass band, who we've profiled before on Boing Boing tv (part one, part two).

Ioke Tries to Combine the Best of Lisp and Ruby

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dell not to launch music player before holidays: report (Reuters)

Second Rotation Raises $6 Million For Hassle-Free Gadget Marketplace

Second Rotation, the company behind gadget ‘reCommerce’ site Gazelle, has closed a $6 million Series B funding round led by RockPort Capital Partners, with existing investors Venrock Associates, Austin Ligon, and Henry Vogel also participating.

Gazelle’s service, which launched in July, allows users to receive cash for their used gadgets without having to deal with online marketplaces like eBay or Craigslist. After entering some basic information about a product (including model number, condition, and accessories) Gazelle will make an instant cash offer. If the user accepts, Gazelle will pay any shipping charges and pays out the cash amount within a few days of receiving the gadget, assuming the product’s condition corresponds with what the user described. Users generally receive less money than they would through eBay, but Gazelle is usually more convenient.

The site will also help recycle any items it can’t resell, which makes it more eco-friendly than most other online marketplaces. And it’s a quick way to get some cash - the relatively small effort involved will appeal to users looking to clear out the random gadgetry filling their desks without having to deal with eBay’s auction process.

Another similar competitor in this space is Venjuvo. Ztail has also experimented with this, but it isn’t the site’s primary focus.

Update:This post originally noted that Gazelle wasn’t much more ‘green’ than garage sales, eBay, or pawn shops. However, the site will help users recycle goods that can’t be resold, so the ‘green’ label is warranted.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Nov. 10, 1983: Gates Opens Windows a Bit Early

1983: Microsoft chief Bill Gates unveils the Windows operating system for PCs. Don't hold your breath waiting until you can buy a copy ... unless you can hold your breath for two years.

Gates, Microsoft's president and board chairman, held an elaborate event at New York City's posh Helmsley Palace Hotel. The debutante at this ball was an operating system with a graphical user interface.

If you were struggling with the arcane and unfriendly MS-DOS, you were ready to get something that was easier to drive. Typing commands at the C prompt may have been a piece of C:\ake for programmers and geeks, but it was a pain in the wrist for the run-of-the-mill office chair jockey.

Microsoft started working on a product first called Interface Manager in September 1981. Early prototypes used MS Word-style menus at the bottom of the screen. That changed to pulldown menus and dialogs (a la Xerox Star) in 1982.

By 1983, Microsoft was facing competition from the just-released VisiOn and the forthcoming TopView. Apple had already released Lisa, but Digital's GEM, Quarterdeck's DESQ, the Amiga Workbench, IBM OS/2 and Tandy DeskMate were all still in the future.

At the November 1983 unveiling, Gates promised an easy-to-use graphical interface with dropdown menus, tiled windows, mouse support, device-independent graphics, the ability to run several applications at the same time and even get them to cooperate with one another. It was supposed to be ready in April 1984, and the cocky young Microsoft chief predicted it would be running on 90 percent of all IBM-compatible computers by the end of 1984.

He was off by only 90 percent. Windows 1.0 didn't achieve retail launch until Nov. 20, 1985, more than two years after its immodest debut. What was modest were the sales figures.

Few third-party applications were available, but the Windows 1.0 package included MS-DOS Executive, Calendar, Cardfile, Notepad, Terminal, Calculator, Clock, Reversi, Control Panel, PIF (Program Information File) Editor, Print Spooler, Clipboard, RAMDrive, Windows Write and Windows Paint. All this was supposed to let everyday users manage their everyday activities.

But things were changing fast. Apple had already unleashed the Macintosh on the world in January 1984. And Windows 2.0 didn't show up until 1987.

Source: Various

A History of Microsoft Windows

Python's Palin Going Around the World Again

Solid Ultralight Lifebook Is Ultraright

Solid Ultralight Lifebook Is Ultraright

Kmart’s pre-Black Friday 2008 game sales (November 9-15, 2008)

FROM GAMERTELL - Kmart’s print insert promotes Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for PS2 for $44.99, Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Army for PS3 for $39.99 and more…
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Google Exec Hints At Future Open Platform

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Target’s $50 digital camera gift card

FROM GAMERTELL - This year’s special holiday gift card at Target is a mini digital camera with USB cable and 8MB of space…
MORE »

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MGM first to post full-length features to YouTube (CNET)

Bush Spy Revelations Anticipated When Obama Is Sworn In

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, Americans won't just get a new president; they might finally learn the full extent of George W. Bush's warrantless domestic wiretapping.

Since the New York Times first revealed in 2005 that the NSA was eavesdropping on citizen's overseas phone calls and e-mails, few additional details about the massive "Terrorist Surveillance Program" have emerged. That's because the Bush Administration has stonewalled, misled and denied documents to Congress, and subpoenaed the phone records of the investigative reporters.

Now privacy advocates are hopeful that a President Obama will be more forthcoming with information. But for the quickest and most honest account of Bush's illegal policies, they say don't look to the incoming president. Watch instead for the hidden army of would-be whistle-blowers who've been waiting for Inauguration Day to open the spigot on the truth.

"I'd bet there are a lot of career employees in the intelligence agencies who'll be glad to see Obama take the oath so they can finally speak out against all this illegal spying and get back to their real mission," says Caroline Fredrickson, the ACLU's Washington D.C. legislative director.

New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh already has a slew of sources waiting to spill the Bush administration's darkest secrets, he said in an interview last month. "You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on January 20. [They say,] 'You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.'"

So far, virtually everything we know about the NSA's warrantless surveillance has come from whistle-blowers. Telecom executives told USA Today that they had turned over billions of phone records to the government. Former AT&T employee Mark Klein provided wiring diagrams detailing an internet-spying room in a San Francisco switching facility. And one Justice Department attorney had his house raided and his children's computers seized as part of the FBI's probe into who leaked the warrantless spying to the New York Times. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales even suggested the reporters could be prosecuted under antiquated treason statutes.

If new whistle-blowers do emerge, Fredrickson hopes the additional information will spur Congress to form a new Church Committee -- the 1970s bipartisan committee that investigated and condemned the government's secret spying on peace activists, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other political figures.

But even if the anticipated flood of leaks doesn't materialize, advocates are hopeful that Obama and the Democratic Congress will eventually get around to airing out the White House closet anyway. "Obama has pledged a lot more openness," says Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was the first to file a federal lawsuit over the illegal eavesdropping.

One encouraging sign for civil liberties groups is that the Center for American Progress's president John Podesta is one of the top three heading Obama's transition team, which will staff and set priorities for the new administration. The center was a tough and influential critic of the Bush administration's warrantless spying.

Among the unanswered questions:

• Were there quid pro quo promises made to the phone companies and internet carriers who cooperated with the secret spying? For example, were co-conspirators promised lucrative government contracts?

• Did the program appropriate the CALEA wiretapping infrastructure? Under CALEA, Congress forced telecoms to build surveillance capabilities into the phone and internet network, but promised it would only be used with court orders.

• What did the first version of the surveillance program sweep into its net? In March 2004, a squadron of top officials at the Justice Department, including then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI head Robert Mueller, threatened to resign over the illegality of the program. The program was subsequently scaled back, but nobody knows what the NSA was doing that was bad enough to horrify Ashcroft.

• What was the legal rationale for the surveillance?FISA explicitly made warrantless domestic eavesdropping illegal, but the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued a series of memos justifying the spying anyway. The ACLU is fighting the Bush administration for access to the documents, as well as secret memos justifying torture.

"It's difficult to see how Sen. Obama could call his administration transparent if his administration continues to suppress non-sensitive information that should have been released a long time ago," says the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer.

The other looming question is whether, as president, Obama will continue the warrantless spying himself. Obama voted with the majority in Congress to legalize the Bush spying program in July, but the constitutionality of the measure is yet untested. An Obama administration is less likely than Bush to devise convoluted legal end-runs around the Constitution, according to Marc Rotenberg, the head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"Keep in mind that Obama is a constitutional scholar and has a deep understanding of checks and balance," says Rotenberg. "It's hard to imagine that an Obama administration would support ... warrantless wiretapping."

With the financial markets and the economy in deep trouble, it's unlikely that Obama will quickly turn to the issue of warrantless wiretapping. But the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T over the surveillance could force the new administration to pick a side quickly. In December, a federal judge in San Francisco will hold a hearing on whether the retroactive immunity granted to AT&T and other telecoms as part of the FISA Amendments Act is Constitutional. Obama voted for the act in order to legalize the spying program, but tried unsuccessfully to strip out the immunity provision.

EFF's Opsahl hopes that if EFF prevails in December, an Obama administration might let the decision stand, clearing the way for EFF's lawsuit to proceed.

"If we are victorious in our constitutional challenge, I would hope the Obama administration would accept that loss and move on without an appeal," says Opsahl. "But we will have to see."

IBM Blocks Mark Papermaster from Working for Apple

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Hot gaming news for the week of 11-02-2008

Section:

No need to scour the interwebs for hot gaming news, Gamertell‘s already done that for you!  Here’s a look at this week’s top stories…

• Playstation 3 firmware ver. 2.52 snuck out while you were voting
• Wal-Mart offering $100 gift card with PS3 purchase
• Hallmark’s Christmas 2008 Pac-Man arcade cabinet ornament
• Sony, Universal Pictures create media vending machine called PoP
• Microsoft offers Developer Diaries of New Xbox Experience

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Study Finds iPhone Twice As Reliable As BlackBerry

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Compare iPhone App Rankings Alexa-Style

MyBefia is a great little site to compare Apple iPhone applications based on their rankings in the App Store. Add up to three applications (the only annoying thing is you have to look up its iTunes Store URL) and see how rank has changed over time. It also shows estimated market share, review rankings over time and popularity. The widgets are embeddable via Gigya.

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The World's Heaviest Robot

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HD videophones by 2012

Section: Video, Portable Video, Communications, Cellphones

The quality of cameras in phones has risen exponentially in the last few years from poor VGA to the fairly good 3 megapixel and beyond.  But there is always progress to be made, and Sony Ericsson have outlined some fairly ambitious aims in the release of their four year plan for smart phones; not only with cameras but other aspects of the phones as well.

However I will begin with cameras, and Ericsson’s vision is that by 2012 the cameras on phones will be capable of 20 megapixels and even the ability to shoot full HD video.  This is incredibly ambitious in four years, especially considering the current economic climate, but there is nothing to suggest that it cannot be done.  This will certainly have far reaching effects regarding home videos allowing near professional home films to be made via phone cameras, which would be pretty cool!

Moving onto the rest of the future phones, we see that they plan to have 1GHz processors in the phones in four years, as well as 1024 x 768 XGA screens.  This will be a massive improvement, although there is a slight discrepancy there since the phone will be capable of taking video of higher quality than it can show, but that is to be expected.  Also the report hinted that by 2012 smart phones will support Long Term Evolution, a possible 100Mb/sec 3G successor.  Personally, I can’t wait to see the devices move away from phones and towards computers, although where this line would be drawn is definitely up for debate.

Source [PCPro]

Full Story » | Written by Christian Milsom for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Dean Kamen Combines Stirling Engine With Electric Car

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tag The World—One Tweet, Yelp, and Flickr At A Time

We all know how tagging makes the Web a richer place (by tapping into people’s desire to categorize things and share those categories, ad-hoc though they may be, with the everyone else). Tagging brings a bottoms-up order to the Web by making information more searchable and thus easier to find. Now it is time to start tagging the world. The real world.

In fact, millions of people are already doing so every time they upload a geo-coded photo to Flickr, add a review to Yelp, Tweet about a specific place, or use any of the dozens of geo-aware social apps springing up all over the place. They are not just tagging the world with keywords, they are commenting on it and annotating it in tiny little bursts. To get a sense of what some of this activity looks like, check out Twittervision or Flickrvision, which show Tweets and Flickr photos, respectively, on a map as they are posted to the Web.

Services such as Plazes (now owned by Nokia), Brightkite, and Nokia’s new Friend View app all combine social communications and location information, making them visible on a map.

Most mobile social networks, on GPS phones at least, put geo-labels on everything you do. FriendFeed just recently started adding Google maps for any messages that contain location information, and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle makes it easy for other services to add their own geo-location layer.

Geo-coded communications are becoming more and more common, and this is just the start. I like to complain about the increased noise level that lifestreaming services are bringing into our lives. While that continues to be a growing problem on an individual basis for people who want to tune in and use these services (”You’re at the bus stop? Great. Keep those Tweets coming.”), on an aggregate level all the seemingly useless drivel has the potential to become useful meta-data.

And this is not limited to GPS-enabled services. You can tag Tweets, for instance, with hashmark codes that act as tags for places and things (”#bus-stop”, “#centralpark”). All of these messages get dumped into databases on the Web, which are then searchable. And that is where things get interesting. Chris Brogan explains in a post titled “Secrets of the Annotated World”:

Services like Twitter and FriendFeed and Flickr and Facebook and LinkedIn and more are hosting conversations around you that might be of value to you. . . . If you’re not using services like Yelp and BrightKite, (and you could name several others), you’re missing some of the glyphs and warnings we’re leaving on the landscape to tell you about the way things are versus the way things are marketed. You’re missing chance encounters. You’re missing stray opportunities.

Again, you don’t have to get involved. It’s just that we are, and we’re passing many more notes than you can imagine.

I am glad there are people out there like Chris who are obsessive about geo-coding everything they do. They are like the early taggers, the two percent or so of people on Flickr, Delicious, and other services who did all the heavy lifting of organizing and categorizing all the data that was dumped into them. The more that data can be sliced and diced, the more useful it becomes. And location data is particularly valuable because it relates to places, people, and events in the real world.

Every geo-coded Tweet, Flickr photo, or restaurant review is adding a tag or comment to the world that is then searchable by others. It is what will make visions like Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera a reality. It is why Fotonauts, an upcoming photo app that launched at TC50, makes it easy to geo-tag every photo in an album via Google Maps or Wikipedia. Everything in the world will be tagged. But it is such a huge task that the only way to do it is if we all pitch in. (Or at least if Chris and his friends pitch in—the rest of us can freeload).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Music headphones can interfere with heart devices

Source: Gizmodo | 9 Nov 2008 | 10:00 pm

TeleNav Rides Shotgun With New GPS

At a time when its peers are running scared, cellphone navigation services provider TeleNav is getting into the GPS device business.

The company has launched a new GPS-based personal navigation device (PND) for the first time, which will compete with rivals such as Garmin and TomTom.

Called the TeleNav Shotgun it will be a two-way, Internet-connected PND. It will offer real-time features such as traffic alerts, business listings and updated gas prices.

TeleNav’s entry comes just days after one of its competitors, Dash Navigation, killed its GPS device  and instead chose to just license its software and system to others.  TeleNav will be doing just the opposite.

The difference between TeleNav and its competitors is that the company will target its products at "business travelers," says Sal Dhanani, co-founder and senior director of marketing for TeleNav. "All other PND makers are going after general consumers while business travelers are ignored," he says. "We see that market as low-hanging fruit."

What is less clear is how exactly TeleNav’s product is business traveler friendly since TomTom offers updated gas prices to its users and Internet connectivity was offered by Dash till recently.

TeleNav says additional features under development include restaurant reviews, address sharing, weather and commute alerts about daily traffic conditions.

Shotgun is also priced differently from its competitors. Buyers have to pay $299 for a device and that includes three months of subscription. After that they have to buy service plans, which cost a pricey $129 for a year and $239 for 2 years. Month-to-month plans cost $12 a month. Its rivals charge a one-time price for the device only.

Not buying the subscription plan means users won’t have access to any of the key features such as real-time traffic and online preplanning.

TeleNav’s entry into the GPS device market comes at a time when the business is sluggish. During its earnings call last month, Garmin said growth in U.S. and Europe has down from a year ago and average selling price for the company’s products declined about 17%.

Since then the economic environment has further deteriorated and consumer spending is expected to be heavily impacted this holiday season, a key period for PND sales.

TeleNav’s Dhanani says he expects the Shotgun to fare better than its peers because it is targeted at business users, a segment he believes is more resilient.

The company’s move also runs counter to what many analysts expect of the PND business. The standalone GPS device is likely to disappear as consumers increasingly opt to have turn-by-turn navigation integrated with their phones and other mobile devices.

Till this launch it seemed TeleNav was betting on that too. The company started as a on screen navigation services provider for cellphones and has partnered with major telecom carriers.

But in the last few months its competitors have gotten into the cellphone navigation services business. Garmin is set to launch a cellphone next year called the nuviphone that will have GPS navigation as its star feature.

Source: Gizmodo | 9 Nov 2008 | 7:30 pm

Tales of the Unexpected

From UK Vogue, "Tales of the Unexpected," starring Tim Burton, Helena Bonham Carter, assorted models, and various others in a strange, surreal reenactment of some of Roald Dahl's greatest hits, James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory among them. Shot by Tim Walker, the set includes eyeball play, interspecial love, and a crazy lift. (Via NOTCOT.)

Source: Boing Boing | 9 Nov 2008 | 7:19 pm

Mark Cuban to Obama: "Entrepreneurs will lead us out of this mess. Talk to Them."

Mark Cuban on who president-elect Obama ought to be looking to for insight on the worsening economic crisis:

If we are going to solve our current economic problems, our President needs to get first hand information on the impact his proposed policies will have on real Joe the Plumbers. People who are 1 person companies living job to job, hoping they get paid on time. We need to know what the impact of his policies will be on the individually owned Chrysler Dealership in Iowa. The bodego in Manhattan. The mobile phone software startup out of Carnegie Mellon. The event planner in Dallas. The barbershop in LA. The restaurant in Boston.

Entrepreneurs that start and run small businesses will be the propellant in this economy. PE Obama needs to have the counsel of those who will take the real risk inherent in creating companies and jobs. Those who put their money and lives on the line with their business.

Without it, the rules of unintended consequences of any economic policy could hit you in the mouth in ways you never expected. Things like forcing companies from being taxpayers to the underground cash economy, or forcing new hires to be independent contractors to avoid having to pay their insurance or higher matching social security amounts. Your current group has no one with 100pct of their networth on the line. I promise you that the possibility of losing it all will provide a completely different perspective than any of the “knowledge” the esteemed, learned members of his current advisory team offer.

PE Obama’s 1st Big Mistake (Blog Maverick)

Source: Boing Boing | 9 Nov 2008 | 5:10 pm

Al Gore: The Climate for Change

In a New York Times op-ed today, Al Gore (or should we say, @al_gore) reprises some of the themes he spoke of at this week's Web 2.0 summit. Snip:

THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.

The electrifying redemption of America’s revolutionary declaration that all human beings are born equal sets the stage for the renewal of United States leadership in a world that desperately needs to protect its primary endowment: the integrity and livability of the planet. The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.”

To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.

Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis.

The Climate for Change (NYT, via @timoreilly)

Previously: Web 2.0 Summit Videos: Lessig, Kelly, Al Gore, many more

Photo: "Treasure Island / The Island" by Aaron Escobar, Creative Commons licensed, on Flickr.

Source: Boing Boing | 9 Nov 2008 | 4:59 pm

Bill Ayers: "What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been."

Former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers says the experience of being made a political prop during the recently completed American presidential campaign was not unlike a vivid LSD trip. In the current issue of the left-progressive publication In These Times, his suggestions on what those swept up in the current wave of hope following Obama's election might do to harness that excitement. Snip:

In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders—and all of us—ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today. Maybe we could welcome our current situation—torn by another illegal war, as it was in the ’60s—as an opportunity to search for the new.

Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics but as fully mobilized political actors. Perhaps we might think of our various efforts now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making.

We might find hope in the growth of opposition to war and occupation worldwide. Or we might be inspired by the growing movements for reparations and prison abolition, or the rising immigrant rights movement and the stirrings of working people everywhere, or by gay and lesbian and transgender people courageously pressing for full recognition.

Yet hope—my hope, our hope—resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.

History is always in the making. It’s up to us. It is up to me and to you. Nothing is predetermined. That makes our moment on this earth both hopeful and all the more urgent—we must find ways to become real actors, to become authentic subjects in our own history.

We may not be able to will a movement into being, but neither can we sit idly for a movement to spring full-grown, as from the head of Zeus.

We have to agitate for democracy and egalitarianism, press harder for human rights, learn to build a new society through our self-transformations and our limited everyday struggles.

At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, “If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out.”

In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.

Looking back on a surreal campaign season (In These Times, thanks Ned Sublette)

Source: Boing Boing | 9 Nov 2008 | 4:49 pm

60 Minutes Crew Roughed Up in China While Reporting On America's E-Waste

Tonight's broadcast of the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes includes a segment with correspondent Scott Pelley about black market dismantling of highly toxic electronic waste, or "e-waste," shipped from the US. The process of reporting the story turned out to be pretty hazardous, too:

Jumped by a gang of men overseeing the e-waste operations who tried to take the CBS team's cameras, Pelley’s crew managed to escape and bring back footage of the hazardous activities. Pelley's investigation will be broadcast this Sunday, Nov. 9, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

The Chinese attackers were trying to protect a lucrative business of mining the e-waste-junked computers, televisions and other old electronic products-for valuable components, including gold. "They're afraid of being found out. This is smuggling. This is illegal," says Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, a group working to stop the dumping of toxic materials in poor countries that certifies ethical e-waste recyclers in the United States. "A lot of people are turning a blind eye here. And if somebody makes enough noise, they're afraid this is all going to dry up."

E-waste workers in Guiyu, China, where Pelley's team videotaped, put up with the dangerous conditions for the $8 a day the job pays. They use caustic chemicals and burn the plastic parts to get at the valuable components, often releasing toxins that they not only inhale, but release into the air, the ground and the water. Potable water must now be trucked into Guiyu and scientists have discovered that the city has the highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. Pregnancies in Guiyu are six times more likely to result in miscarriages, and seven out of 10 children there have too much lead in their blood.

Following The Trail Of Toxic E-Waste (CBS News)

Source: Boing Boing | 9 Nov 2008 | 4:28 pm

‘Sea Monster’ On Verge Of Extinction In Mexico City

Beneath the gondolas in the remains of a great Aztec lake lives a monster-like creature called the axolotl, which looks something like a Muppet with a slimy tail, feather-like gills and mouth that curls into an strange smile.Also known as the "water monster" and the "Mexican walking fish," the axolotl (pronounced ACK-suh-LAH-tuhl) was a crucial part of Aztec legend and diet.  Despite Mexico City’s sprawling development, the foot-long salamander survived until now in the polluted canals of Lake Xochimilco, now a Venice-style destination for tourists poled along by Mexican gondoliers in festively painted  boats.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 9 Nov 2008 | 3:25 pm

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