Rumors this morning suggest T-Mobile was hoping to spring a fresh white G1 phone for the holidays. The word is there is a problem with the white paint causing the delay. The Android phone was launched only in basic black.
Website TMO suggests the white paint is chipping. Thankfully, the faulty paint was caught by T-Mobile but the delay will push an intro until after Thanksgiving. This could push the hot phone’s sales downward as Black Friday brings out the masses in a buying mood.
The tipster originally said the white should be in stores by October 22. We’ve pushed well past that date and now we hear after Thanksgiving. Surely few are waiting for the white if they desire the G1, but T-Mobile has to wonder how this will hurt them this holiday season.
I like the white option. And hey, without the iPhone’s cracks, it could be a better deal.
That thing on the right is “The Aquos Experience,“ a Christmas tree made up of 43 Sharp televisions and it’s at Grand Central Terminal in New York City. What’s the gimmick? Sharp is running a sweepstakes where you can win one of the televisions in the display.
While it’s a rather cool display, it’s pretty much the antithesis of being “green.“ However, the sweepstakes helps a good cause. When you register for the sweepstakes, The HOPE Program will receive a dollar donated by Sharp. More pics after the break.
When you take a look at all the netbooks out there, they all seem to have the same or similar specs. The one thing that links a vast majority of them is the Intel Atom chip, and it seems to be doing well. ARM, the company that makes between close to 80% of the processors used in cell phones wants to enter the market, as well as the desktop market. That sounds good, right? You’d probably expect a fairly clunky Linux distro or Windows XP to come with the machines. Not so. ARM has teamed up with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu for these machines.
The machines will be built upon the ARMv7 architecture, specifically taking advantage of the Cortex A8 and A9 processors. Of course, the operating system will take advantage of the best open source software available. Not much else about the machines has been detailed yet, but seeing as ARM makes cell phone chips, it would make sense for the portables (whether they be MIDs or netbooks) to have terrific battery life, though we’ll have to wait and see for that.
This isn’t the first time Ubuntu will be featured in netbooks, the Dell Mini 9 has the option, and the upcoming HP 1000 is based on Ubuntu (even though the MIE interface looks more like an tv). The trend certainly is promising. Having used the Ubuntu Eee distribution (not an official Canonical distribution) on my Eee PC 901, I can say that it makes everything so much easier, even if finding some software can be a bit of a pain. It’s certainly easy to navigate, and there’s no worries about viruses. I can only hope these new Ubuntu ARM machines are cheap enough to justify purchasing once they come out in April 2009.
While Fujitsu certainly isn’t the first to launch a tiny 2.5-inch 15,000 RPM hard drive, it’s the first to launch one with 147GB capacity. The new line from Fujitsu come in both the aforementioned 147GB size and also a 73.5GB size. The HDD has an average seek time of 2.9ms with a buffer size of 16MB and the super fast, high capacity laptop drives should drop sometime in the Spring for a yet to be announced price.
Earlier this year we wrote about Slydial, a free service that lets you dial any mobile phone number and get directed straight to voicemail. It may sound counterintuitive, but it can be a godsend for avoiding awkward phone conversations - I’ve had it saved in my phone’s ‘Favorites’ menu since the service launched (though I’ve never used it, honest).
Unfortunately the system is a little cumbersome: to place a call, you have to first dial Slydial’s number (267-SLYDIAL), then manually enter the number you’d like to call. Today the service is streamlining the process by releasing free applications for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile platforms. Now instead of having to manually enter a number, you can simply launch the application and select a contact from your address book. From there you’ll be directed straight to their voicemail (they may see a missed call depending on the carrier, but they won’t have a chance to pick up). You can download each application here.
Slydial says that since its July launch it has seen over one million calls placed, and expects to see that number rise dramatically with the new applications. I won’t be surprised if it becomes one of the more popular apps on each of these platforms, but I pray that it is used sparingly - Slydial may be nice for avoiding awkward conversations, but if people start using this in place of Email or text messages it will become incredibly annoying. Remember: always think before you voicemail.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
InfoWorld - Election fervor has calmed down, and the economy is melting down. Are you down with the latest in high tech? This week's quiz ranges from new Sony handsets to new Live services from Microsoft. Also: A spam-friendly ISP gets its just desserts, and Yankee Stadium gets a high-tech makeover. Correct answers are worth 10 points apiece. Ready to test your wits against our fiendish quiz master? Then let's play ball. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 17 Nov 2008 | 2:00 pm
The "Flipbac" adds a pull-down mirror to your camera's LCD screen, making it possible to place the camera at odd angles but still see the screen. (Albeit upside down!) It can open in both landscape and portrait positions after it's been attached using an adhesive, which is included.
Next time you're down at the diner you might try out the CupSpeakers from Dmitry Zagga. His minimalist speaker design consists four paper cups, a couple of toothpicks and an iPod.
It is, as he puts it, an iPod Ghetto Accessory. There's something very right about these cheap horn speakers -- the clean white lines perfectly match the 2003 2G iPod. But we very much doubt the sound would be louder than that from the earbuds alone. On the other hand, they're likely to be a lot better than some passive speaker systems you can buy.
White label social networking software maker ONEsite is launching its very own advertising platform InteractAd today, essentially declaring traditional online advertising is past its prime and that it’s time for social advertising to take its place.
Whether that notion is true or not is subject to debate, but we’ve noted earlier that online ad revenue growth seems to be grinding to a halt.
ONEsite wants to provide an alternative ad platform that leverages community features, content-driven participation and viral elements like relationship and profile data from other social networks (through OpenID-enabled user signup integration with Facebook, MySpace and Google Friend Connect), and introduce intelligent, interactive banner ads that can track who is viewing them and also allow for brands managers to solicit feedback from users throughout campaigns.
InteractAd will only work with online communities powered by ONEsite, which is of course a major limiting factor.
Facebook and MySpace have their own ways of leveraging social relationships to serve more engaging ads designed to increase the ROI of social media campaigns, and companies like SocialMedia, Adknowledge / Cubics, Offerpal Media and SplashCast are hoping to cash in on social network monetization efforts as well across various websites and application platforms.
Also, if social ads are the future remains questionable. One of the highlights of the recent Social Ad Summit was a panel of media buyers who confessed that currently advertiser interest in social advertising is driven more by curiosity than urgency (read this Clickz report for more highlights). With the current economic downturn, it will be interesting to see if that curiosity will prove sticky enough.
ONEsite is one of the pricier proponents in an increasingly saturated market of social network software providers, which includes players like Ning, SocialGo, Mzinga, KickApps, and many more. The company is actually a subsidiary of Oklahoma hosting company Catalog.com and recently forecasted revenues of $30 million by the end of 2009 as a stand-alone business. They claim to power 3,000 communities mounting up to almost 2.2 million members.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
AP - Before he ran for president Barack Obama quit smoking. Now that he's won the job, he may have to break another addiction: Checking his BlackBerry for e-mail. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 17 Nov 2008 | 1:48 pm
The well-received Dell Inspiron Mini 9 is now available in two more colors, if that type of thing matters to you. (I’m colorblind.) Yup, now you can run Windows XP on the bite sized Mini 9 in red and pink.
It’s the same machine otherwise: up to 32GB solid state storage, 1.60GHz Intel Atom processor, 512MB RAM, etc. You know the drill.
What concerns me is that this info isn’t up on Dell’s U.S. site yet; we found this on the Japanese Dell site, where it wants ¥34,980 (around $360) for the entry level system.
Fujitsu says conventional vehicle-mounted camera systems are helpful in reducing the risk of accidents but fail to adequately reduce the need for visual checks by the driver. The company claims their “3-D virtual projection/point of view conversion technology”, a combination of producing a 3D video and giving the user the freedom to decide from which perspective he or she wants to view the vehicle’s surroundings (”omni-view”), makes it possible to obtain an overview from a single image.
ASUS’s smartphones have always impressed and the latest is no different with a monstrous 800MHz processor. The P565 has been rumored for a while but ASUS has gone official with the phone and its ready to rock Windows Mobile 6.1. Besides the 800MHz CPU, the phone is loaded with HSDPA capabilities, 2.8 VGA touchscreen, 256MB of flash memory, 802.1b/g, Bluetooth, and a microSD/SDHC slot which all adds up to show that ASUS knows how to pack a whole lot of goodness into one phone. A custom-built GUI, Glide UI, tries to hide the fact that Windows Mobile 6.1 is still someplace in there which peering at the specs, seems like its Achilles Heal.
Here at the G-Lab we loveMake, the magazine for hackers, modders and DIY freaks. And, by extension, we dig Makezine, the online home of the mag. Sometimes the projects are a little too ambitious (DIY DNA sequencing, anyone?) but once in a while there is a true gem, a project so cool that you can't not do it.
The Scanner Camera is one of those projects. It's a perfect destination for your useless scanner and better still, it's reversible, meaning you can always go back to scanning boring old pieces of paper.
The video shows you just what to do: essentially you tape a 7"x7" black box the the top of an old flatbed, fit a magnifying-glass lens into a smaller box and slide that inside, and then punch a few different sized holes into black cards to use as apertures.
That's it. The image is focussed by moving the inner box in and out, and the light levels can be controlled with the black cards. The images are amazing, and best of all, if you have a Canon LiDE scanner like the one in the video, it's powered from the USB bus so you could even hook this up to a laptop and go shooting outside.
I will be trying this out over the next few days. I'll let you know how I get on.
AfriGadget takes a look at a clever garbage incinerator deployed in Kibera, Kenya, that turns waste fuel and garbage into cooking heat for residents. The design of the furnace actually allows plastics and other waste to be burnt without releasing harmful fumes:
What kind of garbage? Any, plastics, food wastes even clothes - anything that will burn really! But doesn’t that produce toxic fumes you ask?? This is what’s so clever about the project. Using technology that I don’t understand the oven burns at temperatures of up to 930 degrees F. which basically detoxifies many hazardous pollutants.
“It uses a superheated steel plate inside the incinerator box to vaporize drops of water. The oxygen released then helps burn discarded “sump” oil from vehicles – itself a pollutant in the slums – driving temperatures higher”.
Hugh Pickens writes "Discover magazine has an interesting article on the multiverse theory — a synthesis of string theory and the anthropic principle that explains why our universe seems perfectly tailored for life without invoking an intelligent creator. Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. While most of those universes are barren, some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life. The idea that the universe was made just for us — known as the anthropic principle — debuted in 1973 when Brandon Carter proposed that a purely random assortment of laws would have left the universe dead and dark, and that life limits the values that physical constants can have. The anthropic principle languished on the fringes of science for years, but in 2000, new theoretical work threatened to unravel string theory when researchers calculated that the basic equations of string theory have an astronomical number of different possible solutions, perhaps as many as 101,000, with each solution representing a unique way to describe the universe. The latest iteration of string theory provides a natural explanation for the anthropic principle. If there are vast numbers of other universes, all with different properties, at least one of them ought to have the right combination of conditions to bring forth stars, planets, and living things."
I was with David Carr until he got to the classical music critic. Using Circuit City’s ill-fated decision to get rid of its veteran clerks as a metaphor, Carr laments newspapers getting rid of their... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Nov 2008 | 1:04 pm
Good thing we’ve resolved the global financial crisis, the global terror crisis, and the global warming crisis. Otherwise the blogosphere wouldn’t have had time to rail about a Web video ad campaign from Motrin over the weekend.
The story: Big pharma Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) has rolled out Web clip (below) in which a snarky, knowing commentator gripes about the social pressure to “wear” babies in slings, carriers, etc — and the Motrin-ready aches that “wearing” a baby can cause. And in the last few days lots of blogger/Twitterers have agreed that:
The ad is offensive.
Motrin/JNJ doesn’t “get” social marketing.
Something should be done! Maybe a boycott.
How many bloggers/Twitterers are actually complaining about this? And are there enough to hurt JNJ, which made an estimated $1 billion in profit from Motrin each year? Mmmmmmaybe.
Tools like Google’s blog search and Twitter’s Summize search will tell you that, yes, some number of people are chattering about this on the Web. And as of 8:07 am Monday, the Motrin.com site was down, whatever that means. But from what I can tell, only a few thousand people have actually seen the add on Google’s YouTube (GOOG). I’ve asked video-watchers TubeMogul for info on the ad’s audience and will update when I get it.
But even if the outrage is widespread, it’s going to be hard make a connection between online chatter and real-world results. Otherwise Ron Paul would the 44th President of the United States.
Meanwhile, at the risk of a cyber-stoning, let me say that I don’t think the ad — which seems to be aiming at the same set of people that buy very expensive strollers, but feel a bit conflicted about doing so – is an outrage. And neither does the person who does most of the baby-wearing in my house.
I ran it by her in the twilight hours this morning, in between feedings, and she shrugged: “It’s true.” Then she went back to sleep.
This enterprising Japanese hacker kitted his Nintendo DS Lite with at least a dozen LEDs, creating the most powerful portable seizure machine on the planet. (Skip to 4:40 if you just want to see the lights, not the build process.)
Last Friday, BoomTown paid a visit on James Joaquin, who has just been officially appointed the new CEO of Foxmarks, the Mitch Kapor-backed start-up that makes a free bookmarking and password syncing add-on for the Firefox browser.
The San Francisco-based company had also has gotten $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures earlier this summer. Initially, Foxmarks had been founded and seed-funded by Kapor, the well-known tech entrepreneur, and also got an additional investment from First Round Capital.
With the arrival of Joaquin, Foxmarks is trying to move into a mode of carving out a business with its assets, including using its data and expanding beyond the Firefox browser.
Here is the video interview with Joaquin about all that and more:
By combining several hundred photographs and then printing the composite lighting differences into a grid of transparent hexagons, a group of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute's Martin Fuchs have developed these pictures that change as light moves through them during the day.
From New Scientist:
The researcher's prototype device, which can be attached to a window, comprises three layers: a lens array at the rear focuses light onto a transparency film on which a photograph is printed; the light passes through and is projected onto a "diffuser" in front, where the image is revealed.
When the Sun rises in the east, the projected image shows objects casting a long shadow to the west. As the Sun climbs towards midday, the shadow shrinks, before extending to the east in the evening.
Provided the ink or dye does not fade over time, these would work indefinitely. It's easy to think these could be the next gimmick for advertising and (as prices fall) portraiture.
Have you tried Google's new voice-enabled search application for the iPhone yet? No, and neither have we. Amidst the big launch on Friday, and the corresponding ballyhoo in the New York Times, one thing was forgotten: the application itself. Apple didn't get around to actually putting it in the App Store.
As of now (Monday morning in Europe), only the old, non-voice version is available at the store. According to Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch, Google is subject to the same arbitrary application approval scheme as everyone else. The search company fully expected Google Mobile App to go live on Friday, but nothing showed up. The only indication of the app's status was the message displayed in the iPhone Developer Tools which read "In Review".
Arrington paints Google as the wounded party in his piece. Here's what he says about Google launching first on the iPhone, and not on its own Android platform:
The fact that they decided to launch first on the iPhone shows a willingness to embrace what’s right for the user
We doubt it. The fact is that next to nobody has the T-Mobile G1, and more than ten million people have an iPhone. Still, Apple needs to sort out the App Store, and quick. It's clearly a broken model, and the only person hurt is the iPhone user.
Ricoh will be installing this $3 million billboard in Times Square (7th and 42nd) that will be powered entirely by wind and solar. If there's not enough sun or wind, explains the Times, the 16 floodlamps that will shine on the unit will simply...turn off.
Quick. Hurry! FAST! Woot has a hella good deal today on a Memorex Blu-ray player but it will only be available ’till the end of the day or it sells out. Best of all, you don’t have to wait in Black Friday lines to get a Blu-ray player under the $150 mark. True, this player is a Profile 1.1 player and therefore cannot do any of the fancy BD Live features but still, it’s not a bad deal at $139. Could be a good gift for ‘ol Dad.
My Guardian column this week argues that we’re witnessing not just the collapse of the financial (and auto and newspaper…) industries but the birth of a new economy best seen through - you... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Nov 2008 | 12:34 pm
This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net I’ve been impressed by Steam for a long time, and am always more than happy to purchase a new title via the service. I think Valve really... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Nov 2008 | 12:22 pm
ButtKicker has announced a new wireless version of its low frequency audio transducer to be sold on Amazon on Black Friday for $300. You can piece all the same gear together separately, but the whole package together is new. (The wireless stuff goes for about $70 now; the actual amp and shaker price varies depending on which model you get.)
The Buttkicker stuff is pretty amusing, adding a vibration to your chair or couch when triggered by low-end audio frequencies in games or movies. It definitely does add something visceral to a movie watching experience, although perhaps not as much as $300 more worth of speakers might (provided you live in a home where turning up the sound won't cause your neighbors to plotz).
For some reason the whole kit is listing as $400 now, so I wouldn't buy it yet. Buttkicker just sent out a press release announcing the price at $300.
Update: Speaking of which, the Tulsa Emergency Medical Services Authority has started installing "Howler" sirens on their 77 ambulances. Each Howler generates a low-frequency noise that can be felt from up to 200 feet away, cutting through even loud engine or stereo noise that might cause a driver to miss the screaming, blaring, flashing explosion of light and sound that is a modern ambulance. Each unit costs about $400.
True to its word, Amazon is throwing its global retail reach into the OLPC XO mission this Christmas season. The site is now offering buy-one, send-one to a developing nation notebook program. Or if you as a seasonal philanthropist choose, Amazon will ship one to a child of your choice. ‘Tiss the season of giving, folks.
This ball jointed bendy man juxtaposed against a yellow triangular caution sign is certainly worth the $12 bucks, just to put him in some of the poses seen above. To the left, a perennial Haight Street favorite, the "Keep On Truckin'" caution sign. To the right, a stern warning concerning the dangers of marauding breakdancers.
This is the Escape Clock, from Argentine designer Santiago Cantera. Details about this concept alarm clock are so sparse that some other writers have simply started making up features. We're fully aware of the irony of inventing extras for a non-real product, but mistaking the bottom view of the clock (top left in picture) for a set of wireless speakers (and "dock") is, well, escapism.
What we can infer from the picture, though, is that a quick whack on the top will put this clock into snooze mode, and that the LED display is big. Also, the clock looks like a giant escape key.
(TrendHunter.com) Victorias Secret models wore tons of glamorous fashions with 20s themes, large earrings, and even goddess fashions complete with gladiator sandals and arm bands in Miami Beach, FL... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Nov 2008 | 11:59 am
Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome have crafted a line of gorgeous watches called Moon Dust DNA, using materials such as the eponymous moon dust, fragments from the Apollo XI and International Space Station, and presumably the deoxyribonucleic helixes of some Martian moon man.
I think the designs are hit or miss, and there's something tacky about these watches, like the occasional luxury gadget containing a splinter off the hull of Titanic aimed at rich idiots with dysenteric bank accounts. Still, I really love the design of the watch to the right: perhaps it is just the juxtaposition against the velvety black background, but it reminds somehow of the Le Voyage Dans La Lune aesthetic of a silvery man in the moon with a rocket stuck in his eye as a monocle.
Needless to say, don't expect cheap: retail price for these watches are between $15,000 and $500,000.
I spent time over the weekend pouring over the latest DTCC weekly credit default swap data release. I compared the current release with the prior week in terms of notional, net, and total contracts. The... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Nov 2008 | 11:55 am
(TrendHunter.com) Hermes recently launched their new flagship store in India in the high end Oberoi Hotel in Delhi. The French fashion house is attacking full-force at a time when most brands are cutting... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Nov 2008 | 11:55 am
• Netbook – The Asus Eee 3G Surf (Celeron M 900, not the Atom one) for $260, shipped. A fine deal, but bear in mind this is the first generation netbook platform, not the newer one. [Dealnews]
• Blu-ray Player – Today's Woot is a Memorex Blu-Ray Disc Player for $145, shipped. Looks like this is the Christmas that Blu-ray goes mainstream. About time.
By Evan Ackerman When taking a picture, timing is everything. Focus, exposure, lighting, composition, angle, depth of field, white balance, and subject are also everything, but timing is at least as important... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Nov 2008 | 11:41 am
(TrendHunter.com) Bizarre beauty trends can be traced back to ancient times, but still reign as supreme and shocking today as they ever were. From Bird-poop facials to mayonnaise skin cremes, these... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 17 Nov 2008 | 11:39 am
The 270X was a stunning project car from Nissan, combining the lean, lupine look of the time with the practicality of a Paceresque hatchback. It's an aggressive style — aggressively ugly, even — but there's nothing about it I don't like, right down to the redline Bridgestone tires.
Although built in 1970 for the 17th Tokyo Auto Show, it is still branded a Nissan, not a Datsun. That brand existed in the U.S. until 1983-1984 until the company underwent a transition that was rumored to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars in signage, advertising, and sales lost to confusion.
The new four-finger trackpad gestures found on the new MacBook and MacBook Pro could be coming to older Mac notebooks, too. A curious (and jealous) member of Mac Rumors – michaelb – was so envious of the four-finger gestures his girlfriend was enjoying on her new MacBook that he stole the installation disk and popped it into his first-gen MacBook Air.
Because the installer discs that Apple ships with its computers are ror restoration purposes only, you can't use it for a fresh install on other machines. However, there are ways and means, and michealb ended up with the new system on his old machine.
But it didn't work. Michael had to do some rummaging deep in the system to make it recognise his trackpad, and then up popped the new options right there in the System Preferences. Michael now enjoys the same four-fingered fun as his girlfriend.
Now, reinstalling the entire system to grab a new feature is a little extreme, but this proves that the older trackpads are capable of the new multi touch goodness -- this should also work for MacBook Pros. We have our hopes that Apple will bake this into the next OS X software update (10.5.6). I took a new unibody MacBook for a test run in the store last wek and the four finger gestures, which invoke Show Desktop and Exposé behaviour, are great.
AOL is about to shut down its Uncut/AOL Video Upload service, a move that caused a small stir over the weekend. But the move wasn’t actually news: Uncut has been on AOL’s hit list for quite some time.
What’s AOL’s hit list? Just what it sounds like: A list of 50+ projects that Time Warner’s (TWX) Internet service is shutting down this year. I first ran the list, pulled from an AOL internal report, earlier this fall. But for anyone who missed it (or perhaps was distracted by, say, the collapse of the world’s economy) I’m re-running it at the end of this post.
Note that a lot of these cuts are just different components of the same project. I’m assuming that’s because this list, which comes from an internal AOL PowerPoint, is supposed to convince someone that AOL is cutting lots of dead weight. So there’s some grade inflation going on here. And least one of these cuts is confusing — for more information about AOL’s relationship, or lack thereof, with Magnify.net, see this story.
But some AOL users are going to be or have already lost features they really cared about. The folks who use AOL’s message boards, for instance, are quite despondent. There is an upside for a few people, though — the handful of startups that have been able to capitalize on the void AOL is leaving.
In the case of the uploaded video service, for instance, AOL is recommending that people use Motionbox, a startup run by my neighbor Chris O’Brien. Even if you’re not an AOL video uploader, it’s worth checking out Motionbox’s freemium service: Basic uploading storage and distribution are free, and unlimited uploads are $30 a year.
And if you happen to have, say, compelling footage of your child doing something that is simultaneously embarrassing and amusing, Motionbox will let you take a 15-second excerpt of said footage and turn it into a cool paper flipbook for $8.99. I just bought four for holiday presents.
The Hit List:
Video/radio/Winamp
UnCut brand
HiQ
Fugu
Windows Media Streaming
AOL Video 10ft
10ft on 2, HiQ
AMoD on MCE
AMoD on TWC
Video Commerce
Predixis on Winamp
Ceased ingesting 3rd party videos
AOL Video DRM
Onstream
2CMedia Productions
UnCut on Mobile
UnCut Payloaders
HP IP enabled TVs
Magnify.net
Direct File Downloader
H.264
Userplane enabled-syndicated video player
New content management and ingestion system
Messaging/social platforms/homepages/toolbars/personal media/community
Transition US Chinese Portal
AIM Today
ADP-based AOL.com Apps
Transition AOL Pictures to Bluestring
AOL Hometown
ICQ Universe and ICQ Labs
ICQ2Go Java version
ICQ Pro, ICQ Lite, ICQ 4, ICQ 5, ICQ 5.1
Older AIM clients
Old ICQ Welcome Screen
Journals
FDO Chat
10″ Vista Applications
UNPT-based welcome screens
Big Bowl-based AIM dashboard
AOL message boards
X-Drive Desktop
Email
Old Webmail product and infrastructure (Atlas)
AOL communicator mail client
Old mobile mail product and infrastructure (PigeonMail)
Old calendar product and infrastructure (Tardis)
Old sync infrastructure
InfoWorld - Many companies have implemented virtualization to reduce their physical server infrastructure, free up precious datacenter space, reduce power requirements, and make server management more flexible, but few adopted virtualization as early -- or pushed the technology as far -- as Qualcomm. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 17 Nov 2008 | 11:00 am
Here’s a lovely video from a dinner All Things Digital held last night for the staff of both our annual D: All Things Digital conference and the AllThingsD.com Web site.
It’s a yearly event where Walt Mossberg and I gather our staff to talk about the upcoming year and plans going forward.
The site just added a new New York-based writer, Peter Kafka, as well as a director of operations (also for the conference), Christine Mohan, who is also in New York.
And D7 takes place in late May again, and we are already at work on another stellar lineup, as well as moving forward with a possible European version of the conference–EuroD–for fall of 2009.
This is a little off-topic, but I'm actually amazed at the audacity of Motrin in drumming up their little social networking play aimed at Mommy bloggers. The video itself looks like they took something from column A that could cause pain ("Baby slings!") and added a body part ("Backs!") and got Motrin. The easiest equivalent to this I can think of off hand would be something like "You're a Japanese woman and you wear a kimono with those crazy wooden shoes! Ha! You're crazy and sleepy! It sure is hard on the back! Take Motrin." The reasons behind the kimono and the baby sling are far more detailed and varied than Motrin implies and, in reality, a baby sling isn't that bad nor is a Kimono nor do you wear both every day. Try getting your hand trapped in a fold down stroller one evening and then we'll talk pain. Also, try pushing a baby out of your hooha, but I don't know much about that.
This is a little off-topic for CG at least, but I’m actually amazed at the audacity of Motrin in drumming up their little social networking play aimed at Mommy bloggers. The video itself looks like they took something from column A that could cause pain (”Baby slings!”) and added a body part (”Backs!”) and got Motrin. The easiest equivalent to this I can think of off hand would be something like “You’re a Japanese woman and you wear a kimono with those crazy wooden shoes! Ha! You’re crazy and sleepy! It sure is hard on the back! Take Motrin.” The reasons behind the kimono and the baby sling are far more detailed and varied than Motrin implies and, in reality, a baby sling isn’t that bad nor is a Kimono nor do you wear both every day. Try getting your hand trapped in a fold down stroller one evening and then we’ll talk pain. Also, try pushing a baby out of your hooha, but I don’t know much about that.
The fairly big but the company does deserve to be taken to task mostly because this kind of thing isn’t fair to companies who actually do a good job at social networking. By good job I mean they take it one step at a time and they have a real message, not some drummed up animation made by an associate at the ad agency who happened to really like MySpace. The best and only example of social network marketing I can think of is Obama. That’s it. I’ve seen others try and succeed on a limited scale, Samsung Mobile being a notable example, but remember: social networking is about “social networking.” It is perceived as a way to keep your friends up to date on what’s going on and I hardly consider Motrin a friend. I’d consider it a troll until proven otherwise and that process requires a building of trust.
I’ve been on a lot of calls recently with PR folks trying to help them figure out this whole social media thing. In fact, they consider an email with HTML a “social media” message. It’s thinking like this - the idea that if it has more than one color it’s premium content - that is helping marketers create social media explosions in the blogosphere rather than the dull roar they’re looking for.
What could Motrin have done? As MarketingPilgrim notes, they could have sent the video to some blogger moms who could have told them that it was condescending. The blogger moms would have had some say in the message, Motrin could turn their gimlet eye to fixing the ads, and the campaign would have subsumed itself into the background noise of the Internet and, interestingly, could have turned moms to Motrin. Now, however, I doubt any baby luggers, male or female, would consider Motrin an option. After all, generics are cheaper.
Ben Seberry writes "It appears Dell has been caught red-faced by yet another pricing mistake on their Australian website. Many customers thought they had spotted a fantastic deal when they came across a 55%-off offer. Dell later denied that this was a valid special and telephoned customers to offer them a choice of the standard price, or a cancelled order. Dell's senior manager of corporate communication came out and apologized for the mistake, promising processes would be reviewed to prevent it from happening again. In the days after the original 'incorrectly priced' offer was fixed, Dell made a different error leading to an even cheaper price being advertised. This time, on many user forums and blogs, users are debating Australian contract law as it applies to this matter — it is not as clear-cut as many originally believed."
Reuters - Banking on the global appeal of Japanese pop and video games, social networking site MySpace said it would more than double the number of artists on its Japanese pages to get more clicks internationally.
By Randall Stross, Professor, San Jose State University
Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at M.I.T., wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. female? She published a 124-page paper, “Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?”, that catalogued different cultural biases that discouraged girls and women from pursuing a career in the field. The year was 1991.
Computer science has changed considerably since then. Now, there are even fewer women entering the field. Why this is so remains a matter of dispute.
Whenever I counsel clients about the use of social media, I always advise they speak to their target audience and figure out what messaging (and channel) would appeal to them.
I’m not sure if the manufacturer of Motrin followed that advice, but judging by the enormous backlash the company is facing over its new Motrin “Mom-Alogue” video, I suspect they didn’t speak to a single mother (at least, they didn’t speak to any who use Twitter).
Taking a look at the negative Twitter conversations surrounding #motrinmom demonstrates that Motrin is, in just a few short hours, facing a huge reputation disaster–initiated by the very audience Motrin hoped to target, “Mama Bloggers.”
You can always tell when the weekend is approaching. If it isn’t Twitter getting killed, it’s podcasting dying, death of blogs, slaughter of the record labels or one or more form of Heritage media. It’s honestly quite difficult to top it every week. On the one hand, we bloviators have generally no compunctions re-using the same media type, but for it to really generate a respectable bitchmeme, you’ve got to really be creative.
Steve Rubel, well known for predicting economic doom and gloom due to over-investment in technology, this week predicts the death of all tangible media.
Is YouTube making Google (GOOG) a political player? The video-sharing site, with its stratospheric bandwidth bills and questionable new ad formats, may never pay Larry and Sergey back in cash for the $1.65 billion they shelled out to buy it in 2006. But it doesn’t have to. YouTube, having conquered online video, is taking over political broadcasting. The conventional unwisdom in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., is that this election made YouTube. Pah! It’s true that campaign videos spread faster than ever thanks to YouTube. But they made up a tiny fraction of clips and traffic on the site. Politicians owe YouTube a debt that Google is just starting to collect on–and hosting President Obama’s 21st century fireside chats is just a down payment.
Google has plenty of business in Washington these days, from the Federal Communications Commission to the Department of Justice. Convenient, then, that CEO Eric Schmidt endorsed Obama weeks before the election, joining his board of economic advisors and appearing in Obama’s primetime infomercial. Schmidt doesn’t need a government job–he’s clearly volunteering to be America’s CTO in his spare time.
It would appear that Wal-Mart’s lawyers need to come up with excuses to keep billing Wal-Mart every year around this time. Despite the fact that Wal-Mart employees admit that sites posting “Black Friday Ads” help drive more business, Wal-Mart’s hired guns keep threatening sites for posting the ads, falsely claiming a copyright on the content (hint: you can’t copyright prices). This year, they’ve stepped it up a notch and are claiming that it’s illegal to even link to a site that has such content.
Specifically, Wal-Mart’s high-priced law firm has sent a takedown notice to the site SearchAllDeals.com, which is a search engine/aggregator of various deals sites.
Read the rest of this post
Realizing that Flash is a better name than Flex for a platform, Adobe is now referring to everything it does related to Flash (including the Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Flex developer tools, and Flash media servers) as the Flash Platform. That’s what I’ve been calling it anyway, so I’m glad they finally caught up.
Beyond the marketing shift, Adobe will be making some more significant announcements at its MAX developer conference this week. Here’s a summary:
1. Release of Adobe AIR 1.5. The Adobe AIR client now has better performance and memory handling, but most importantly it supports Flash Player 10 and Webkit (which is what the mobile browsers in both the iPhone and Android are based on). Flash Player 10 means more 3-d graphics. This version of AIR will also include an encrypted database that should appeal to developers of enterprise apps.
2. Flash Catalyst and Gumbo. Adobe is reaching out beyond its core base of developers with a new set of tools. Catalyst (previously known as Thermo), streamlines the hand-off between graphic designers and developers. It creates a two-way bridge between files created in Adobe’s Creative Suite products such as Photoshop as Illustrator, and Web apps built in Flash or AIR.
Adobe will be making some announcements at its MAX developer conference this week. Catalyst basically converts everything back and forth. In a similar vein, Gumbo (aka, Flex Builder 4) will try to appeal beyond core Java developers to script kiddies of all stripes and sizes. It will be available as a preview release
4. A 64-bit Flash Player For Linux. A preview will become available at Adobe Labs.
5. Dynamic streaming comes to Flash media server. The server software can now deliver Flash video at different quality, depending one the bandwidth and device of the viewer.
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An anonymous reader writes "As a third-year PhD math student, I am currently taking Partial Differential Equations. I'm working hard to understand all the math being thrown at us in that class, and that is okay. The problem is, I have never taken any physics anywhere. Most of the problems in PDEs model some sort of physical situation. It would be nice to be able to have in the back of my mind where this is all coming from. We constantly hear about the heat equation, wave equation, gravitational potential, etc. I'm told I should not worry about what the equations describe and just learn how to work with them, but I would rather not follow that advice. Can anyone recommend physics books for someone in my position? I don't want to just pick up a book for undergrads. Perhaps there are things out there geared towards mathematicians?"
FROM GAMERTELL - Microsoft is willing to give away a lot of points in order to commemorate the New Xbox Experience. Click through to find out how to enter enough MP to purchase more than half the entire Xbox Live Marketplace… MORE »
EMC Corporation is announcing the creation of a new subsidiary this morning called Decho (for Your Digital Echo), which has been formed from the assets of two acquisitions: Mozy (acquired in September 2007) and PI Corporation (acquired in February 2008).
The new company is focused on protecting and managing personal digital data. It will continue to offer Mozy’s personal backup product and will add new products over time. The Mozy platform, which now stores over 10 petabytes of user data, has over a million users, 200,000 of which are paying customers. We were particularly impressed with its Mac product, first launched in mid-2007.
There isn’t much information on what new applications the company will launch. But if PI Corp. is anything to go on, look for rich metadata and contextual information to be a part of it. PI Corp. was acquired before launching their flagship storage/backup product. But their website suggests they are far more focused on managing, organizing and searching files than simply backing them up - something Mozy never tackled. The combination of the two platforms is more than interesting.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Adobe's Flash Player is on 98 percent of all desktop computers, but it is still struggling to make the jump to mobile phones. If you want Flash on a mobile device, right now you have to settle for a compromised version: Flash Lite. But Adobe is committed to bring the full Flash Player experience to mobile phones, as evidenced by its Open Screen Project. On Monday, at its Adobe MAX developer conference, it will demonstrate Flash Player 10 running on a Windows Mobile phone. (However, Flash won't actually ship on Windows Mobile until late next year). Product manager Michele Turner tells me:
We will be showing the first delivery of Flash on mobile phones, on other platforms. You will see it on Windows Mobile.
Turner also indicates that an "Android port" is coming. But what about the iPhone, which famously doesn't use Flash? (Although there's been some talk of that happening). Turner will only say:
InfoWorld - Adobe Systems is adding dynamic streaming, which adjusts to the bandwidth rate on the desktop, and DVR capability to its Flash Media Server for streaming of Flash content. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 17 Nov 2008 | 5:01 am
CNET - Starting to answer the clamorous demand from open-source fans, Adobe Systems plans to release an alpha version of its Flash Player technology on Monday for those using 64-bit Linux software. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 17 Nov 2008 | 5:01 am
FROM GAMERTELL - Dance Dance Revolution: The Musical is promised to be a “futuristic dance spectacular” that “fuses unmerciful Japanese rave music with deeply regrettable sophomoric comedy.” No, really… MORE »
Conveying the excitement people feel about music in a still image can be like describing sight to the blind. The 10 reader-elected finalists of our music photo contest may not make you hear music, but they expertly capture a musical moment. Blair takes home the gold with his photo "The Horn Player" at left. Click through the gallery to see the contestants who were nipping at his heels.
Since we had so many great photos that we thought should've received more votes, and because we love to anger readers with our selections, we've also compiled a Wired.com Editor's Choice Music Photo Gallery.
Our next twice-monthly photo contest is Heat. It's cold outside this winter and we need to warm our feet by your photographic fire. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
The Horn Player
Submitted by Blair
Photographer's comment:
"Covent Garden, London.”
:
DreadHead
Submitted by Amaiia
Photographer's comment:
"Guitarist of the famous French ska band Fizcus live @ Seasplash Festival, Croatia."
:
Jeff Locke
Submitted by Christie Hemm
Photographer's comment:
”He's good.”
:
Fizcus
Submitted by Podi
Photographer's comment:
"French ska band Fizcus on concert
"13/1 sec, f/3.5, flash on, second curtain"
:
The Underbelly
Submitted by Elizabeth Kovach
Photographer's comment:
"Messing around with the organ."
:
On the Outside
Submitted by Ross Gilmore
Photographer's comment:
"Old busker plays his banjo, against a 14-foot-high security fence, at an outdoor rock concert."
:
Tickling Ivory
Submitted by Bob
Photographer's comment:
"Hands playing piano."
:
My Stepfather's Piano
Submitted by Tin Man
Photographer's comment:
"I'm no photographer, I'm a musician, and this is my art. My stepfather left me this piano when he died in 1998, and I use it to compose. Its sound is not great by traditional standards, but to me it is wonderful.”
:
Tandoori Tunes
Submitted by Joakim Lloyd Raboff
Photographer's comment:
”A musician sat down and played a tune while I tried to listen to a podcast on the beach in Goa, India."
:
Yaya
Submitted by amaiia
Photographer's comment:
"Jadranka Bastajic Yaya, lead singer of Croatian band Jinx.
This photo contest, Heat, is inspired by San Francisco's unexpected November heat wave. And since fall hasn't been shining so brightly on other cities, we figure the rest of the country could use some heating up as well.
Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best Heat photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. Show us sweaty glasses of ice water, oasis mirages in the middle of a baking desert, and flaming foundries filled with molten metal. Make us sweat on the doorstep of winter as we face the months of rain and snow ahead.
The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.
We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. Using an online photo service that requires that you log in will not work. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).
Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!
1749: Nicolas Appert is born. He will invent the modern food-canning process while trying to help Napoleon conquer Europe.
By 1795, France was in an expansionist mood and quarreling with its neighbors. As the army and navy found themselves increasingly embroiled in foreign entanglements, the realization that an army travels on its stomach began forcefully hitting home. Looking for a way to efficiently provision its troops in the field, the revolutionary government offered a prize of 12,000 francs to whoever could devise a way of doing just that.
Nicolas Appert, an experienced chef living on the outskirts of Paris, took up the challenge. More than a decade later, he had the solution.
Through experimentation, Appert eventually concluded that the best method of preservation was to heat the food to the boiling point of water, then seal it in airtight glass jars.
Appert's principles were tested successfully by the French navy, which found that everything from meat to vegetables to milk could be preserved at sea using his method.
Napoleon was running things by now and immediately recognized the benefit to his far-flung armies. He was so grateful to have the problem of victualing solved that in 1810 he had the revolutionary government's Directory award Appert the 12,000 francs.
Appert took the money and opened the world's first cannery. The cannery was destroyed in 1814 as Napoleon's world came crashing down.
A few years later, Englishman Peter Durand refined the process even more by switching from glass to the tin containers we associate with modern canning.
Fortunately for Appert, Napoleon did not retain his services as chef on his ill-fated invasion of Russia, and so lived on until 1841, dying at 91.
Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our music photo contest, we here at the photo department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.
Our next twice-monthly photo contest is Heat. It's cold outside this winter, and we need to warm our feet by your photographic fire. Check out the contest page for more information.
Left:
Arcade Fire Encore
Submitted by Ryan Muir
Photographer's comment:
"The Arcade Fire set up their in-crowd encore right in front of my face. Spotlights shining on them from a distance — thousands of people scattered around thinking the show was over. Took me by surprise as much as anybody else.... This was pretty much the most memorable concert-going experience of my life. So glad to have had my camera.”
:
Gospel Groove
Submitted by Anonymous
Photographer's comment:
"A group of young South Africans perform a special gospel set for me and a group of visitors to their school in the Cape Flats."
:
1898 Piano
Submitted by Dan Snyder
Photographer's comment:
"In my backyard."
:
Stephen Malkmus of Pavement — Houston, 1999
Submitted by Scot Ferguson
Photographer's comment:
"Stephen Malkmus of Pavement — Houston, 1999, their last tour."
:
Adding to the Noise
Submitted by throughHislens
Photographer's comment:
"Music means a lot to me, so that's why it was saddening to see this on the ground. But, you can see this transition in music, in that the different mediums that make it up are slowly transitioning into something that was not available at the start. Bittersweet.”
:
Barefoot Rock
Submitted by Casey Moore
Photographer's comment:
"Land of Talk — SXSW 2008."
:
Bunny Surf
Submitted by M. Young
Photographer's comment:
"Taken at the Vans Warped Tour, Mansfield, Massachusetts, August 2008."
:
Achtung Accordion!
Submitted by Fritz Speilemann
Photographer's comment:
"Although far from my favorite instrument, this young dude played his instrument like a god!”
:
Drum
Submitted by Casey Cramer
Photographer's comment:
"Drum in empty prayer room in Hunder Gompa, Nubra Valley, Ladakh, India"
:
One-Man Band
Submitted by Elias
Photographer's comment:
"Took this photo in Bath, England. This man was playing on the sidewalk, with both a violin and a guitar simultaneously. He had hooked up the guitar to a foot pedal that played certain notes as he turned the crank."
James Bond spends a fair amount of time in Quantum of Solace behind the wheel of a sexy Aston Martin DBS, which continues a fine tradition. But he tempers his gas-guzzling ways by getting behind the wheel of a hydrogen fuel cell Ford Edge, and FoMoCo's fuel-sipping Ka makes a cameo as well, and it's great to see eco-friendly cars getting screen time in a blockbuster film.
Adobe’s Flash Player is on 98 percent of all desktop computers, but it is still struggling to make the jump to mobile phones. If you want Flash on a mobile device, right now you have to settle for a compromised version: Flash Lite. But Adobe is committed to bring the full Flash Player experience to mobile phones, as evidenced by its Open Screen Project. On Monday, at its Adobe MAX developer conference, it will demonstrate Flash Player 10 running on a Windows Mobile phone. (However, Flash won’t actually ship on Windows Mobile until late next year). Product manager Michele Turner tells me:
We will be showing the first delivery of Flash on mobile phones, on other platforms. You will see it on Windows Mobile.
Microsoft, if you recall, was also early to adopt Flash Lite for Windows Mobile, despite its parallel development of Flash-competitor Silverlight. So it’s not too surprising that it would be the first to run Flash 10 on Windows Mobile. Turner also indicates that an “Android port” is coming.
But what about the iPhone, which famously doesn’t use Flash? (Although there’s been some talk of that happening). Turner will only say:
We are working on Flash on the iPhone, but it is really up to Apple
One of Apple’s objections to Flash is that it is a CPU hog and is not optimized for the ARM11 processors that power the iPhone. In what seems to be an effort to address that concern, Adobe will also be announcing a closer collaboration with ARM to accelerate the adoption of both Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR on ARM-powered devices.
Once that collaboration bears fruit, maybe we’ll finally see Flash on the iPhone. But I’d be willing to bet my iPhone that we’ll see it on Android phones first.
FROM GAMERTELL - Information on Circuit City’s 2008 Black Friday sales have slipped out and revealed quite a few great video game deals. The best sales are on DS, Wii and Xbox 360 related items. MORE »
James Mathew writes "This is an interesting story from Kerala, India, where the ruling Communist Party organized a national conference in its efforts to hijack the Free Software Movement, which has enviable roots in the state. They got Novell to sponsor it. On the second day of the conference, a few free software activists who displayed posters against Novell were manhandled by the organizers and police — typical of what is expected from them. Most of the snaps taken during the scuffle were forcefully deleted by the organizers, after seizing the protesters' mobile phones. Still they couldn't delete all. Here is another blow-by-blow account."
In this week's Wired Gadget Lab Audio Podcast, Dylan Tweney, Priya Ganapati and I review the fall season's first cellphone aimed at female users, the LG Lotus. We'll go over the reasons why its makeup compact appearance seems more desperate than savvy and why companies should concentrate on real hardware problems (like a bunched-in keyboard) as opposed to cosmetic changes. Basically, we're just not that into it.
In addition, we'll talk about the $585 million price-fixing judgement just leveled against three LCD panel makers and explain why it could be the beginning of a larger scandal.
Finally, we'll discuss the new CPUs from AMD and Intel and go over the reasons why the next couple of years will be a critical time in the industry.
Thank you for listening to the podcast. Please remember, if the embedded player above doesn't work, you can download the Gadget Lab podcast MP3 file.
Like this podcast? Check out the Gadget Lab Video Podcast. It's got hands-on video reviews of the latest hot products and gadgets from the world of consumer electronics and beyond.
By now you have probably heard the warning: Playing Mirror's Edge will make you vomit.
The hot new videogame is a sort of "first-person runner": You're a courier who travels across the rooftops of a locked-down, police-state city, delivering black-market messages by using acrobatic feats of parkour. You're constantly leaping over gaps 40 stories in the air, tightrope-walking along suspended pipes and vaulting up walls like a ninja.
It doesn't do justice to call the action in Mirror's Edge "intense": It quivers, like a hummingbird, and your first-person view is constantly whipsawing like a paranoid cameraman hunting for the best shot.
Only 15 minutes into the game, my mouth began overproducing saliva, and I had to pause the action for a few seconds to avoid carsickness. I would feel like a total lamer, but apparently even the Penny Arcade guys wrestled with nausea.
Still, it made me wonder: What makes Mirror's Edge so different? Sure, the action is swoopy and vertiginous, just as it is in many other games. But I've played plenty of first-person shooters that required me to navigate ridiculous, zero-G boss lairs that were suspended over improbable heights, and none of those ever made me feel nauseated.
Why does this game get its hooks into my brain so effectively? Why does it feel so much more visceral?
I think it's because Mirror's Edge is the first game to hack your proprioception.
That's a fancy word for your body's sense of its own physicality — its "map" of itself. Proprioception is how you know where your various body parts are — and what they're doing — even when you're not looking at them. It's why you can pass a baseball from one hand to another behind your back; it's how you can climb stairs without looking down at your feet.
Most first-person shooters do not create any sense of proprioception. You may be looking out the eyes of your character, but you don't have a good sense of the dimensions of the rest of your virtual body — the size and stride of your legs, the radius of your arms. At most, you can see your arms carrying your rifle out in front of you. But otherwise, the designers treat your body as if it were just a big, refrigerator-size box.
Worse, in most games your virtual body cannot do even the most simple things that it ought to be able to do. Every time I'm playing a first-person shooter, I'll inevitably try to jump or walk up onto an object — a ledge, a curb, a railing along a wall — and discover that I can't. The designers decided they didn't need to worry about those subtle physics, and the resulting limitation completely breaks the illusion that I'm in that virtual body.
Mirror's Edge, in contrast, does something very subtle, but very radical. It lets you see other parts of your body in motion.
When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot — precisely as they do when you're vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your thighs as the world spins around you.
What's more, the Mirror's Edge world feels tactile and graspable. Because the game is designed around the concept of parkour, or moving through obstacles, most times when you see something that looks like you could jump on it, you can. The gameplay requires it.
The upshot is that these small, subtle visual cues have one big and potent side effect: They trigger your sense of proprioception. It's why you feel so much more "inside" the avatar here than in any other first-person game. And it explains, I think, why Mirror's Edge is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's neurologically realistic.
Indeed, the sense of physicality is so vivid that, for me anyway, the most exhilarating part of the game wasn't the obvious stuff, like leaping from rooftop to rooftop. No, I mostly got a blast from the mere act of running around. I've never played a game that conveyed so beautifully the athletically kinetic joys of sprinting — of jetting down alleyways, racing along rooftops and taking corners like an Olympian. It's an interesting lesson of game physics: When you feel like you're truly inside your character, speed suddenly means something.
The opposite is also true. Without a sense of physicality, speed feels lifeless. In Halo, you're playing as the cyborgically enhanced Master Chief, so your top speed at an open run is — according to Halo nerd canon — 30 mph or something. But it doesn't feel very fast at all, because your avatar doesn't appear to be actually exerting himself. When you run, your body bobs along not much differently from how it moves when you're walking, except the scenery goes by more quickly.
The combat in Mirror's Edge felt more believable than doing battle in Halo, too. When the cops were shooting bullets at me and I was frantically racing to escape, I kept thinking: "Damn, I'm going so fast I might just escape!" In most first-person games, I usually wonder the opposite: How are these guys not hitting me? So the brilliant physicality of Mirror's Edge isn't just a boon to the game's physics. It also makes the narrative and drama more plausible.
So yes, by all means, I'll keep on playing Mirror's Edge, even though it occasionally makes me want to vomit. In the past, I've often wanted to wretch because a game is so bad — but I've never felt sick because it was so good.
- - -
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
Don’t worry, I can sense your confusion, either there is a serious contender for the phone top spot (so why haven’t you heard of it yet?) or I have gone crazy. Admittedly, I am stepping out of line here, and perhaps I was being a little pretentious (maybe even ostentatious) but I think that this is seriously a good concept and if it takes of it can, and maybe will, be big. So what is it I hear you cry, read on…
The INQ1 Specs
I think it is only fair that I give the INQ1 (pronounced ink-one to those in the know) an overview first, before explaining why this could be big, so here it is. The INQ1 is a new phone set to be released by 3, a mobile phone network running in Hong Kong, Australia, and Europe and although no release date has yet been revealed (neither for Europe or the US) one can’t imagine they will want to miss out on the Christmas market. Essentially, it is a slide phone with a metallic-cum-steel look which although is sleek, is nothing special.
It has a 3.2MP camera, which is by no means poor, it is slightly smaller than the iPhone as well as being lighter, and has all the usual Bluetooth and external storage options that you would expect. So “nothing special” I hear you say, “How can this rival the iPhone?“ I think it will do this not because of specifications, but for two crucial reasons that will greatly appeal to the younger audience who are oh-so-important in dictating the mobile phone market.
iPhone killer?
Firstly, it is a lot cheaper than the iPhone (3G), the INQ1 has a price tag of $120. However, that is not as crucial as my other point: this phone is built for Facebook. This social networking site has been massive for a long time, and it has become clear that many youngster use this extensively, as well as many adults. It has become so big that even some university’s are checking prospective students Facebook pages to see what they are like.
3 is banking on people wanting to utilize this even more by buying a phone that is tailored towards making Facebook easy to use. It does this in a multitude of ways like combining your inbox so that it will also show pokes, comments, and messages you receive through your account. Also IM and Facebook alerts will pop up to keep you informed of everything that happens. There are also a whole host of other Internet linked applications that are embedded in this phone, including MSN messenger, Skype and RSS all of which corroborate with your contacts list to show all possible ways of contacting people.
So I think you can see why it is good, but an iPhone rival? I seriously think that if this starts a trend, if it can sufficiently jump onto the social networking band wagon, then it can attract potentially more people than the iPhone. Obviously not businessmen, but the younger generation may well flock to this because of how it will integrate with their online lives so well which could give the iPhone a run for its money. The jury is still out though, and only time will tell, but I do think that could be a serious contender.
The Wall Street Journal has a look at global warming research using rubber duckies. The toys have been employed in tracking ocean currents since 1992; but recently NASA robotics expert Alberto Behar released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in a Greenland glacier. "Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier's edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier's slide to the sea."
The Wii has been a massive success, and has transformed the gaming but predictably sold out incredibly quickly. The Wii Fit brought a whole new fitness aspect to the world of gaming, and that mirrored the console it played on by being great, and selling out. However EA thinks that they have come up with a competitive alternative to the incredibly hard to get Wii: EA Sports Active which they hope to release next year.
Aiming itself at the more physically demanding gamer, EA claims that it is more of a rigorous workout than the Wii Fit, which it has to be said is mainly aimed at being fun. It supports multiple people, so it means that families will be able to “get fit together.“ Ahh, how sweet! Instead of using an expensive board like the Wii Fit, it will use specially designed leg straps to hold the Nunchuck in, which will monitor lower body movements, which work in conjunction with upper body resistance bands to track workouts.
This product will be more fitness, and less fun-based and will focus on getting you fit without the illusion that the Wii Fit can give. It has a whole host of features through which you can do this, such as the “30 day work out,“ which does sound incredibly off-putting to any lazy-inclined (no pun intended) person. It claims to be a “customizable and personalized fitness product” with emphasis on the customizable, personalized fitness. There are also suggestions that the EA Sports Active will support the use of the Wii Fit board to create a broader spectrum of exercises.
But will it challenge the Wii Fit? In my opinion, no. I feel that what made the Wii Fit successful was that it lured you into exercising with its smiley characters, comforting graphics, fun games and air of lighthearted competitive nature. I think that these crucial features will be missing form the EA version, and that although the price may be smaller, the Wii Fit offers more and people may rather wait.
A set of carrying cases molded with a gun, an axe, or a knife, designed by PinkWolf, and I can't read French well enough to figure out anything else about these slick, screw-you-TSA suitcases. (Via NOTCOUTURE.)
FROM APPLETELL - Does the comfort of ergonomically designed game pads make you long for the days of horrible, crippling hand cramps? Legacy Consumer Electronics is here to put you back in pain. MORE »
For President-elect Barack Obama's plans — which call for millions of new green jobs — to work out, dozens of green tech companies will need to rapidly scale up. The most promising, like the biofuel-making synthetic biology startup Amyris, are marching steadily toward getting to market, but will they arrive in time to save the economy?
KentuckyFC writes "An international team of physicists has applied the ideas of cloaking to the quantum world and worked out how to hide quantum objects such as molecules. In the quantum world, seeing is equivalent to detecting a quantum object. In the case of molecules, that means looking for the terahertz radiation they produce when they vibrate (abstract). By designing a 'quantum corral,' an elliptical nanostructures that absorbs terahertz waves at a precise frequency, the team says it is possible to hide molecules that emit at exactly that frequency. They say their quantum corral would be ideally suited to detecting molecules of specific species while ignoring others. And that may mean a new generation of molecular detectors on the horizon."
perlow writes "Just how many books a year would you need to read before the cost of Amazon's Kindle is justified? The answer is not so cut-and-dried. If you're a college student and all of your texts were available on Kindle (possible but unlikely), you could recover the cost of the reader in a semester and a half. For consumers to break even with Kindle's cost in that time, they would have to be in the habit of buying and reading four new hardback books per month — if the convenience factor wasn't part of the equation. At two books per month, breakeven would be in three years." Here is the spreadsheet if you want to play with the numbers.
The Times Online has a lengthy story about the work being done to solve mysteries regarding the brain and various aspects of neuroscience. They discuss some of the "brain-training" myths and look at the quest to determine when and where creative thought originates. Quoting: "In fact, the whole process seems to be centred on one small part of the brain: the anterior superior temporal gyrus. This seems to be the point at which bits of information stored far apart in the brain are brought together. This may be an important clue as to how the brain organises itself. But it's only the beginning. At Goldsmiths College in London, Dr Joydeep Bhattacharya says the real issue is not the 'Aha!' moment itself, but the way it is produced in the brain and how we recognise it. 'We need to know the brain processes involved, to find how this moment is strong enough to reach consciousness. We know insight does not come from the sky.' This is the problem with all neuroscience. We don't really know what we are seeing."
AP - The music industry's courtroom campaign against people who share songs online is coming under counterattack. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Nov 2008 | 7:37 pm
The gadgetry in the Infiniti EX35 we tested was intense. Not only is there XM Satellite Radio there is a Bose sound system, front and rear curb sensors, and an amazing external viewing system that initially took my breath away. After driving around in a 2000 Beetle for six years, hopping into the $35,000 EX35 was like visiting Epcot Center after riding around on a carnival merry-go-round for most of your life.
My goal in reviewing this car is to talk about how it made me feel as a geek, not a driver. As a car, it got a respectable 24 mpg on the highway and had strong acceleration. It’s powered by a 297-horsepower V6 engine and features all wheel drive. You’ll get about 17 city and 26 highway mpg and a calm, quiet ride without the height of an SUV.
We took a test drive to Columbia, Pennsylvania, taking the car on turnpikes and smaller highways. The drive was quiet and solid with good handling and excellent acceleration when needed - although the car really revved up when you called any of its horses into play.
So what of all these gadgets? First, you have the sound system. It’s a Bose-branded system with CD, optional hard drive Music Box, and iPod/component input for external devices. The model we tested included XM Radio. All of the features are controlled by a touchscreen and set of buttons on the dash and there are a few basic controls on the wheel which changed inputs, volume, and track/channel while driving. I had mixed emotions about the touchscreen/button combo at first. For example, there was one button marked Status and another marked Info. What did they have to do with each other? What was the difference? In many situations, both would fall back to a “status” screen with current track information as well as some other info. The center dash info screen offered the same odd situation. The center OLED read-out could tell you the outside temperature, the miles left on the tank, and your fuel efficiency - but never at once. You also had control over this read-out in a settings menu that offered more oddness. I didn’t want to read the manual so we fumbled our way through and found all there was to find: in short, you’re dealing with a complex car system that has been dumbed-down in UI in order to improve efficiency.
The audio itself was fine - the XM radio sounded better than the music on the iPod but that could have been the bit-rate on both sources. The dedicated iPod cable in the center compartment, between the two seats, connects your iPod and shows all of your tracks on the screen and allows for easy browsing of the iPod while driving.
The car also included built-in GPS that, in its out-of-the-box configuration, stops responding to input while driving. This was, in short, infuriating. It often got a strong signal while driving, but this limitation was unnerving.
Finally, there is the Around View Monitor. This is honestly what sold me on the car’s value as a family crossover. The Around View Monitor consists of multiple cameras - some in the rear view mirrors and two in the front and back - that creates a 360-degree view of your surroundings. This is an amazing addition to a fairly low-priced car and it was a great help while parking in our tight driveway or on New York streets. The system basically creates an extrapolated, fish-eye view of the world and shows you what you are facing and what’s behind you. You can see folks walking around on all sides and the distance sensors tell you how close you are to walls and other obstacles.
All together, this gadgetry package adds quite a bit of pep to what would otherwise be known as a family station wagon. The back trunk is a bit cramped but by pulling down the seats you have enough room to haul almost anything you need - as you see in the photos we were able to lie a buggy flat in there with room to spare. We wouldn’t recommend the Music Box feature - it’s just a hard drive - but the iPod connector was great.
As a vehicle, the EX35 was strong, handsome, and the gorgeous deep brown paint job - a color verging on scarlet - was striking. As a rolling gadget trove the EX35 was something else entirely. It is a road-hugging crossover with acceptable gas mileage with an internal computer system that will keep any geek happy for miles.
theodp writes "Intellectual Ventures (IV) will be setting up shop at the top of a Four Seasons this week as Headline Sponsor of the Ready to Commercialize 2008 conference hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. It's the patent firm's 100th university deal, though some, such as Professor Michael Heller at Colombia University, warn against such deals. '... their individual profit comes at the cost of the public ability to innovate. The university's larger mission is to serve the public interest, and some of these deals work against that public interest.' It's a follow-up to the conference IV sponsored last summer for technology transfer professionals entrusted with commercializing their universities' intellectual property, and should help IV, a friend of Microsoft, snag even more exclusive deals (PDF)."
The much-anticipated second expansion to World of Warcraft, entitled Wrath of the Lich King, launched on Thursday, introducing a new continent, raising the level cap to 80, and bringing a wealth of new items, spells, dungeons, and monsters to the popular MMO. Crowds gathered and lines formed outside stores around the world leading up to the release. Massively has put together a series of articles for players wishing to familiarize themselves with the expansion, and CVG has a piece discussing the basics as well. It didn't take long for the first person to reach level 80; a French player called "Nymh" reached the level cap on his Warlock only 27 hours after the expansion went live. Not to be outdone, a guild named "TwentyFifthNovember" managed to get at least 25 raiders to 80 and then cleared all of the current expansion raid content less than three days after the launch. Fortunately for them, the next three content patches are each expected to contain new, more difficult raids.
Facebook just added another extremely useful feature for users, and in doing so took out a slew of applications that do that same thing. You can now get a weekly email telling you, simply, which friends have birthdays coming up.
That’s good news for all of us who want more birthday information. It’s bad news for Birthday Alert and its clones that already do that on Facebook. Birthday Alert has 180,820 active monthly users.
Lest you think this is just some random feature: Birthdays are big business. Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch started their social network Bebo with a simple birthday reminder service. That service had 100 million users at one point and still brings in $4 million per year in revenue from ecards and gift purchases. Bebo was funded in the early days from birthday reminder revenue.
The title of this post is meant to be a joke, but it definitely sucks to be one of the very many birthday reminder Facebook apps today. Such is life. With a flick of the keyboard Facebook can make your app redundant and pointless. Meanwhile, I happily turned on the new feature, and I can’t wait to be prompted to send people virtual birthday gifts for a small fee.
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Maybe you have an 85-year-old grandfather who still whips through the newspaper crossword puzzle every morning or a 94-year-old aunt who never forgets a name or a face. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 16 Nov 2008 | 5:00 pm
When Google ran their big push about their new voice search application for iPhone, the plan was that it would go live Friday and all would be well. TC has word that the app his hitting tomorrow and that Apple inexplicably refused to push the app on Friday. It was, it seems, “in review.”
This is, as they say in the business, absolutel bullshit. While I agree that the iPhone ecosystem must be protected from varmints lest it end up like Windows Mobile - a slatternly tart that HTC and Sony-Ericsson are now forced to gussy up just to take out into the public - I can’t believe that Google couldn’t make a few calls to get this launched when they said it would launch. Is this a power play? A mix-up? A case of bad shellfish eaten by Steve which pulled him away from his desk from 4pm to 4:40 and so did not allow the lackey who carries the key to the golden “Launch to iPhone” button to reach the Pixar King in time? Perhaps we’ll never know.
Michael Stephan Fuchs's 2006 novel The Manuscript is just what a technothriller should be: taut, violent, smart, and very, very technical. There's plenty of "technothrillers" where the two key elements -- weapons and computers -- are treated as magic stage-props, able to do anything (or be confounded by anything) that moves the plot along. They're written by writers who confuse "programmers" with "network administrators" and think that 200 years from now, "mainframes" will be important and sexy (rather than ancient and useless).
In The Manuscript, an enormous cast of characters comprising many sysadmins, many gun-freaks, several combat veterans, spooks from a number of agencies, named and unnamed, ten zillion cops, a group of murderous avenging Taoists, and Sir Richard Francis Burton and a group of Andean holy men who have discovered the secret of the universe.
Fuchs does a remarkable job of staying within the confines of what technology actually does (both the guns and the computers) while still putting together an immensely entertaining book filled with likable, bloodthirtsy people doing incredible things while the whole world is on the line.
It's everything a technothriller should be. I don't care much about guns, but I do know an awful lot about computers. Fuchs manages to make the gun geeking every bit as interesting as the computer geeking, which is the definitive sign of really good geeking. Hell, he even makes the philosophy geeking as interesting as the computers (he's got a graduate degree in philosophy and Big Questions are the Maltese Falcon of this book).
Though the technology is out of date (the story revolves around shenanigans on Usenet's alt.* hierarchy), The Manuscript packs several kinds of punch -- it's as if The Da Vinci Code had been written by someone who wasn't an idiot.
We all know online advertising decelerated in the third quarter, but how bad was the slowdown overall? To find out, we added up the online advertising revenues for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL, which together account for the majority of online advertising. In the third quarter, growth pretty much ground to a halt. The combined ad revenues of those four Web bellwethers eked out only 0.6 percent growth, quarter over quarter. That sequential growth rate was 12.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, to 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 2008, and 1.1 percent in the second quarter (see chart above).
On an absolute basis, the combined ad revenues for all four companies during the third quarter increased by only $50 million to $8.2 billion. The year-over-year growth rate was still a healthy 18 percent, but those comparisons will likely flatten out as well starting in the fourth quarter.
For the purposes of this analysis, I took the total advertising revenues from both Google and Yahoo, including their network revenues paid to affiliates, the online revenues reported by Microsoft, and only the advertising portion of AOL’s revenues. There were other companies I could have added, but these four serve as good proxy for the overall online advertising market. Below are the absolute revenue numbers, broken down by company:
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There is nothing like waking up on a chilly morning and pulling on a pair of copper socks? How about using a copper towel when getting out of the shower? Maybe you should use a copper railing when getting on the subway. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 16 Nov 2008 | 1:50 pm
Rumors this morning suggest T-Mobile was hoping to spring a fresh white G1 phone for the holidays. The word is there is a problem with the white paint causing the delay. The Android phone was launched only in basic black.
That thing on the right is “The Aquos Experience,“ a Christmas tree made up of 43 Sharp televisions and it’s at Grand Central Terminal in New York City. What’s the gimmick? Sharp is running a sweepstakes where you can win one of the televisions in the display. 
When you take a look at all the netbooks out there, they all seem to have the same or similar specs. The one thing that links a vast majority of them is the Intel Atom chip, and it seems to be doing well. ARM, the company that makes between close to 80% of the processors used in cell phones wants to enter the market, as well as the desktop market. That sounds good, right? You’d probably expect a fairly clunky Linux distro or Windows XP to come with the machines. Not so. ARM has teamed up with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu for these machines.
White label social networking software maker 
This is a little off-topic, but I'm actually amazed at the audacity of Motrin in 
EMC Corporation is announcing the creation of a new subsidiary this morning called 
Adobe's Flash Player is on 98 percent of all desktop computers, but it is still struggling to make the jump to mobile phones. If you want Flash on a mobile device, right now you have to settle for a compromised version: Flash Lite. But Adobe is committed to bring the full Flash Player experience to mobile phones, as evidenced by its 
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Don’t worry, I can sense your confusion, either there is a serious contender for the phone top spot (so why haven’t you heard of it yet?) or I have gone crazy. Admittedly, I am stepping out of line here, and perhaps I was being a little pretentious (maybe even ostentatious) but I think that this is seriously a good concept and if it takes of it can, and maybe will, be big. So what is it I hear you cry, read on…
The Wii has been a massive success, and has transformed the gaming but predictably sold out incredibly quickly. The Wii Fit brought a whole new fitness aspect to the world of gaming, and that mirrored the console it played on by being great, and selling out. However EA thinks that they have come up with a competitive alternative to the incredibly hard to get Wii: EA Sports Active which they hope to release next year.
Facebook just added another extremely useful feature for users, and in doing so took out a slew of applications that do that same thing. You can now get a weekly email telling you, simply, which friends have 
Michael Stephan Fuchs's 2006 novel The Manuscript is just what a technothriller should be: taut, violent, smart, and very, very technical. There's plenty of "technothrillers" where the two key elements -- weapons and computers -- are treated as magic stage-props, able to do anything (or be confounded by anything) that moves the plot along. They're written by writers who confuse "programmers" with "network administrators" and think that 200 years from now, "mainframes" will be important and sexy (rather than ancient and useless).
