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Is this the new Palm Nova phone? iPhone killer name dusted off?Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Email / IM, Smartphones  As our expectations of the new phone from Palm set to be announced this Thursday skyrockets, John Biggs over at CrunchGear says he’s got a source that says the phone is a full QWERTY slider with a large touch screen. Shown here is a PhotoShop job. The phone is described as “iPhone like” which worries me, but I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here. Palm itself has been ratcheting up our expectations for the launch and we are told it will blow our minds and revolutionize the phone biz. I hate myself for believing this just a little bit. If there was ever a time for Palm to shine, this is surely it. Their Linux-based Nova software has been expected since fall of 2007 and the delays have not helped the brand stay afloat. Despite success with its low-dollar Centro, Palm needs a pro level phone hit to keep going. The aptly named Treo Pro was a good looking and thinnish phone, certainly the best design they’ve had in years, but its high unsubsidized price has kept consumers from flocking, that and the the fact it offered little new other than design. While this mock up is not from Palm, I believe the artist showed one thing that could help Palm: Verizon. If this OS is above expectations and the device offers a legitimate challenge to the iPhone, Palms ubiquity of carriers could allow it to become the phone for AT&T hating users. The iPhone is still tied to AT&T for some time to come. Early speculation also says this Nova powered phone will be a bargain. Call it poor timing, but Palm is introducing this phone at what we hope will be the bottom of the economic downswing. That should mean the price will be low to attract quick sales. Again, I want to believe this Nova will be amazing and the design will be more than palatable. These are two combos we’ve not seen from Palm in quite some time. Anyone think they can pull it off? Source: [CrunchGear] Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:18 pm New California energy regulations would remove certain plasmas, LCDs from store shelves
Looks like California is doing everything in its power to destroy the consumer electronics industry. That is to say a batch of newly proposed regulations would bar retailers from stocking energy inefficient TVs. The worst offenders? Plasma TVs, the kind popularized by very talented singers and athletes on shows like MTV Cribs. The California Energy Commission wants to reduce the strain on the state’s delicate power grid, so it’s fingered energy-hungry TVs, which include LCDs and plasmas, as an easy-to-eliminate commodity. The Los Angeles Times wants you to know that LCDs consume 43 percent more electricity than tube TVs; it doesn’t mention that LCDs look 9,000 percent (approximately) better in the average living room than big tubes. If passed, the regulations would first take effect in 2011, something that the Consumer Electronics Association—the same organization that puts together CES, which starts later this week—says would be devastating to the industry. If retailers can’t sell the TV sets that actually sell, in this economy, oh dear, then the whole industry is doomed. (Of course, you could just buy the TV from Amazon and ignore this whole debate.) To put this in video game terms, it’s like Fable: do you want to be altruistic and save the environment and the energy grid, or do you want to be a selfish jerk and watch a 60-plus inch plasma after work? We worship Dionysus here, so you can guess our pick. Source: CrunchGear | 5 Jan 2009 | 12:44 pm Vegas gadget show gets smaller (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 5 Jan 2009 | 12:24 pm Apple's last Macworld beginning of new era - CNET News
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 5 Jan 2009 | 12:00 pm Video Camera Spy WatchBy Evan Ackerman This little piece of spy equipment is something that could possibly make that Bond James Bond guy a little jealous, if his watches weren’t consistently endowed with badass weaponry...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:59 am UPDATE 1-Nigeria's Oando buys stake in Akepo offshore fieldLAGOS, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Nigerian energy firm Oando Plc said on Monday it had acquired a stake in the Akepo offshore oilfield as it diversifies from fuel distribution and retail into oil refining and...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:54 am Amazing Japanese Bowl-Balancing Bike
This extraordinary bike-hack allows a takeaway driver to speed helter-skelter through the mean Japanese streets without spilling a drop of miso. The rather precarious looking appendage on the rear is a counter-weighted, hanging shelf onto which the bento boxes and bowls can be placed. As the bike tips upon cornering, the platform stays level and keeps the food where it's supposed to be and not on the tarmac. Of course, if you drive like the typical pizza delivery boy you'll still end up with sloshing soup, but keep it steady and this swinging shelf should work fine. An elegant and simple hack. Dangerously delivered dinner [Tokyo Times] 
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:54 am PS2 the Most Played Console In 2008 - Slashdot
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:38 am Blurb!I don’t intend to quote every review What Would Google Do? gets but I can’t resist this one from Michelle Archer in USA Today, short and sweet: Blogger/columnist Jeff Jarvis’ treatise...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:28 am DRAM maker Powerchip seeks to cut costs, sell assetsTAIPEI, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Loss-making Powerchip Semiconductor Corp , Taiwan's biggest DRAM maker, said on Monday it will look to trim costs further and sell off non-core assets in a bid to survive the...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:24 am StatoilHydro surplus gas sold to liquid EU marketsOSLO, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Norwegian oil and gas producer StatoilHydro said on Monday it would sell its surplus natural gas, not contracted in long-term supply deals, to "liquid markets" in Britain and elsewhere...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:22 am Hamlet Au's Second Life Tweets Of The WeekMixed Reality Tweets follow me on TwitterSource: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:16 am UPDATE 1-San Miguel takes option to buy 50.1 pct of PetronMANILA, Jan 5 (Reuters) - San Miguel Corp , Southeast Asia's biggest food and drinks group, said on Monday it had an option to buy 50.1 percent of Philippine oil refiner Petron Corp from a unit of Ashmore...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:15 am UPDATE 1-Formosa shuts 700,000tpy naphtha unit on demand fearsSINGAPORE, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Taiwan's Formosa Petrochemical Corp is shutting its 700,000 tonnes per year (tpy) No. 1 naphtha cracker in phases on Jan. 5, and the unit will be completely offline on Tuesday,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:12 am NASA rovers survive five years on Mars - Register
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:09 am NuageProduction Helps iPhone and iPod touch Users Access Global Media Content and Business Information With Geolocalization and Security FeaturesPARIS and HOUSTON, Jan. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- href="http://www.nuageproduction.com">NuageProduction today released four applications for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 11:00 am White-Balance Lens Cap. Possibly Pointless?
But if you actually know about white balance, then you'll probably have a DSLR. And if you have a DSLR, you should be shooting in the RAW format, in which case the color temperature of the lighting can be easily and quickly fixed in post with no loss in quality. This is why the White Balance Lens Cap is getting this week's Pointless Gadget Award. It is a $45-$65 (depending on size) lens cap with a light-transmissive dome on the front, like an old-fashioned light meter. With the cap still on, you snap a picture to set a custom white balance for that scene. You then continue as normal. The advantage is supposedly that you don't have to carry a neutral gray card with you, but as the fiddly menus of modern DSLRs make custom setting anything in-camera a pain, it's still better to do this at home in the comfort of your favorite editing software. We also wonder if the cap will be fooled if you point it at a brightly colored wall. Still, at least with this you have an excuse when you take a photo with the lens cap on. Product page [PhotoJoJo via Life Hacker] See Also:
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:54 am Monster Skin Rug Looks Warm, ScaryBy Evan Ackerman It’s been a long time coming, but finally, there is a physical trophy that those of us who are awesome at fantasy gaming can proudly display in our homes. This rug is the pelt of,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:44 am iPhone 3G Carrier Unlock Released and Working Fine
Why now? Because the iPhone Dev Team, those tireless iPhone hackers, have finally released Yellowsn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G. As promised, it was released on the first day of the year, and as expected, it works. A simple download of the Yellowsn0w application is all you need, although you'll have to have a Jailbroken (hacked to run non-App Store applications) iPhone to do it. From there it's easy -- run the application and reboot with the new SIM installed. That's it. You now have an iPhone 3G that will run on any network. One note -- you'll need the latest baseband firmware for the iPhone, numbered 02.28.00, and you'll have to disable the PIN unlock code on your SIM. Other than that, what's stopping you? Don't eat yellowsn0w! [Dev Team Blog]
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:34 am Software Development Predictions For 2009snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister lays out his development predictions for 2009. These include further struggles from Microsoft in retooling its image, a more open source mindset for Java, twilight for Sun, the Web as platform of choice, and a dearth of innovation due to dwindling economic prospects. 'When customers aren't buying, tool vendors don't innovate — so don't expect many groundbreaking new technologies to debut this year,' McAllister writes, adding that smart companies will realize that 'process automation is one of the best ways to reduce costs in any business,' making 2009 the ideal time to 'revisit old software schemes that got shelved back when staffing budgets were flush.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:25 am San Miguel says in agreement to buy 50.1 pct of PetronMANILA, Jan 5 (Reuters) - San Miguel Corp , Southeast Asia's biggest food and drinks conglomerate, said on Monday it has signed an option agreement to acquire 50.1 percent of Philippine oil refiner Petron...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:22 am Leaked Kodak Cameras Expected to Sweep 'CES Ugliest' Awards
Oops! More CES leaks, this time an official press release from Kodak. The company has a few treats in store -- a new weather-resistant mini camcorder, and a pair of new stills cameras, clocking in at 10 and 12 megapixels. All products have two things in common. They have terrible, letter-jumble names, and they are ugly. Really ugly. The Z980 (above) is the 12MP still camera. Stoundout features are the detachable vertical grip with second shutter release and a 24x optical zoom complete with image stabilization (for when you actually use that zoom). Price: $400, plus a few bucks for the paper bag to cover its ugly face. The ZX1 is the name for the new ruggedized videocam, seen below. This toughened version of Kodak's Zi6 will shoot 720p hi-def video at 60fps, save it to an SD card and do the whole thing on AA batteries. The Flip competitor is, however, even uglier than the Z980, somehow managing to riff on both the original 1980s Cylons plus Kitt from Knight Rider and still get it wrong. It will at least be cheap, at $150. Kodak Z980, M380 and Zx1 [Photography Bay]
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:20 am Poland's gas via Ukraine still lessWARSAW, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Gas deliveries to Poland via Ukraine remained lower by 5 million cubic metres daily on Monday, Poland's dominant gas distributor PGNiG said in a statement on Monday.Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:19 am Fedora 10 + Acer Aspire One = damn fine computer - ZDNet
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:16 am For Sale at The New York Times: The Front Page [MediaMemo]The New York Times (NYT) is already trying to mortgage its headquarters and unload assets like its stake in the Boston Red Sox. So what’s left to sell? The front page. Given that it’s a historic move, the ad in question is a pretty dull piece of marketing: A modest little thing promoting programming at CBS (CBS). Behold! (It’s all the way at the bottom, in case you’re confused.)
Then again, this is only historic because the Times management has been so stubborn about keeping its front page pristine. It’s hard to imagine that any reader will care. As the Times itself informs us, The Wall Street Journal (which is owned by Dow Jones, which also owns this site) sold ads on its front page even prior to its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (NWS); so does Gannett’s USA Today (GCI) and Tribune’s Los Angeles Times. Now the only major holdout is the Washington Post (WPO). But the Washington Post is owned by a parent company that’s still actually relatively healthy (because it’s not actually a media company, but an education company). And you can’t say that about the Times, which reported a miserable November and has a looming cash crunch. So if the paper can find anything else it can sell, expect to it part ways with that, too. Source: Gizmodo | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:10 am UPDATE 1-Eni says Nigeria break cuts oil output by 12,000 bpd* Cannot say how long Agip pumping station will be shutSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:08 am Leak: Palm's New Touch Screen Nova iPhone-Alike
Embargoes are a Gentleman's Agreement, unlike NDAs (Non Disclosure Agreements) which carry some legal weight. And here's the problem: A blog, say, CrunchGear, might decide to run a story early to get the scoop. As it may have done with the new Palm Nova device. Described by "a trusted source" (Palm PR flack, perhaps?), the new phone is an iPhone with a keyboard, a portrait-format touchscreen device with a slide-out QWERTY. Running the whole show is the hot new Nova OS, which is being described as "amazing". No real surprises here. The picture you see was 'shopped together by BoingBoing Gadgets' Rob Beschizza, a man whose legendary pixel-pushing skills mean he can mock up a picture of his breakfast before breakfast. In fact, he may have missed his coffee this morning as the keyboard here is in the wrong orientation. He has, though, fully captured Palm's design ennui. We'll see if Nova is super enough to rescue the ailing Palm. That's the thing with touch screen phones. The software just has to be awesome. Exclusive: New Palm phone to have slide-down keyboard, large touchscreen [CrunchGear]
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:01 am Ceragon Networks'(R) Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2008 Financial Results Scheduled for Release on February 4, 2009TEL AVIV, Israel, January 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ceragon Networks Ltd. (NASDAQ & TASE: CRNT), href="http://www.ceragon.com">http://www.ceragon.com , a...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 10:00 am Completely Pointless Custom Desert Eagle Wii Gun Ill Take TwoBy Andrew Liszewski eBay seller ‘fordelite_76‘ currently has an auction running for this custom Wii gun they created, which they refer to as being “***** AWESOME ******”. You just...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 9:22 am Electronics trade shows change with times - USA Today
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 5 Jan 2009 | 9:01 am Ceragon Networks'(R) Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2008 Financial Results Scheduled for Release on February 4, 2009TEL AVIV, Israel, January 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ceragon Networks Ltd.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jan 2009 | 9:00 am Yes We Can (Um, Can’t We?) [BoomTown]
President-Elect Barack Obama arrived in Washington, D.C. over the weekend, which was the first step in what is likely to be one of the most historic inaugural events in American history. The official inauguration takes place Tuesday, January 20, the exact date stipulated by the Twentieth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Obamas arrived Saturday and took up residence at the Hay-Adams Hotel, right across Lafayette Park from the White House, which was caught better than any news footage I saw by a tourist with a video camera and posted quickly online. So begins the YouTube Presidency. Well, one thing is certain from looking at it: Yes, President-Elect Obama can do massive motorcades! Here is that video, along with the popular celeb-packed video “Yes We Can,” which was done early in 2008 by will.i.am. Curiously, it feels a bit out-of-touch now that what needs to be tackled by the new administration is quite a bit more serious than we all thought back then. Source: All Things Digital | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:32 am Player Piano Roll Production Ceasesboustrophedon writes "The Buffalo News reports that QRS Music Technologies halted production of player piano rolls 108 years after the company was founded in Chicago. QRS continues to make digitized and computerized player-piano technology that runs on CDs. 'We're still doing what we always did, which is to provide software for pianos that play themselves. It's just the technology that has changed. But I would be lying to say [the halting of production] doesn't sadden me,' said Bob Berkman, the company's music director. Piano rolls can last for decades, but not forever. Volunteers at the International Association of Mechanical Music Preservationists build piano-roll scanners to scan rolls optically and convert them to MIDI files. The IAMMP archive and others contain thousands of scanned rolls."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:28 am 'Wireless power' spells end for cablesExperts believe that 'WiTricity' could do for battery life what WiFi did for internet. The Guardian reports. No more batteries, no more chargers and no more wire spaghetti. This is the future promised...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:05 am Dailies go Darwin [Voices]By Adam Reilly, Columnist, Boston Phoenix, Don't Quote MeIf you’re a tree, you’re probably feeling pretty good right now. We’ve long known that the traditional newspaper–a hard-copy compendium of the previous day’s events, printed on an obscene amount of wood byproduct–was terminally ill. But two of 2008’s big media developments–the Christian Science Monitor’s plan to kill its daily print edition outright, and the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press’s decision to radically scale back their print operations and refocus online–suggests that the traditional newspaper’s death will come sooner than anyone imagined. But the term “newspaper” has another meaning, too: it’s an organization staffed with men and women who report and analyze the news for the public. Newspapers in this sense aren’t about to go extinct. They are being reinvented, however. Source: All Things Digital | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:04 am Digg This, HuffPo: What’s $200 Million Divided by 2009 Reality? [Voices]By Simon Dumenco, Columnist, Ad Age, The Media GuyWhat if the privately held Huffington Post is worth not $200 million–a cracked-out number floated last year–or even $100 million, but, say, $2 mil? This is not entirely an academic question, given that in December HuffPo astonished media watchers by securing $25 million in additional funding from Oak Investment Partners, a Palo Alto, Calif., venture-capital firm. The timing was particularly amazing, given that the lefty uber-blog’s traffic has lately been plummeting–a possibility my colleague Nat Ives examined way back in October. At the time Arianna Huffington insisted to Nat that the “Huffington Post is no longer as dependent on politics,” and so she wasn’t particular worried about the usual post-election readership swoon of politically-focused publications. That $200 million figure first appeared in a Brian Stelter piece in The New York Times last spring. “According to one person who was briefed on discussions but was not permitted to speak for attribution,” Stelter wrote, “the company has at least looked at the value of the site if it were put up for sale, and a figure around $200 million was used.” Source: All Things Digital | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:03 am All a-Twitter About Stars Who Tweet [Voices]By Noam Cohen, Columnist, The New York Times, Link by LinkThe golfing star Natalie Gulbis recently joined the microblogging site Twitter, where she gives the public frequent updates of her life in short text messages, or tweets. First, though, there had to be a meeting between her media consultant, Kathleen Hessert, and other advisers. “I had to talk her management team into it,” recalls Ms. Hessert, whose company, Sports Media Challenge, represents athletes and professional teams. Deciding to join a service devoted to spontaneous, often spectacularly mundane updates throughout the day apparently was something to be thought out carefully. Ms. Gulbis and her team were concerned about who would be reading what she writes on Twitter and what they would do with the information. “There is a risk,” Ms. Hessert conceded. “Whenever you open yourself to the public there is risk. The way I convinced her to do it, is to say that people see you one way and there is so much more.” Source: All Things Digital | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:02 am Friended by Mom and Dad on Facebook [Voices]By Alexa Davis, Reporter, ABCNews, On CampusThe Facebook group entitled “For the love of god — don’t let parents join Facebook” has 5,819 high school and college-aged members who want to stop the growing number of parents who are joining Facebook, the massively popular social networking site, from “spying” on them. Many Facebook users already know that employers, teachers and admissions officers at universities use Facebook to check up on potential employees or students, but the recent dramatic increase in the number of parents using Facebook seems to disturb many younger users more than the presence of any other demographic. Source: All Things Digital | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:01 am RWW Live: Running a Startup in a Down EconomyIn the first RWW Live of 2009, we tackle an issue that is of vital importance to all startups right now - how to navigate through the choppy waters of the current economy. Join the ReadWriteWeb authors...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:01 am Cartoon: Social Media ShakeoutYears from now, our grandchildren will gather at our knees saying: "Tell us again about those wild days of Podango! And Pownce! And I Want Sandy!" Misty-eyed, we'll tell them about a glorious time when...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:00 am Now for My Next Trick, I’ll Turn Brand into Cash [Voices]By Sarah Lacy, Journalist and Author, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0"Back in May 2008, I was on top of the world. Viewers were soaring for my newly launched Yahoo (YHOO) show, TechTicker, my book was about to come out and was boasting a beautifully low three-digit Amazon (AMZN) rank, several of my BusinessWeek columns had been among the most read stories on the site, and traffic on this blog was doubling month-over-month. (Sure it had only been open two months, but details like that don’t matter when you’re on top of the world.) I was also in New York doing a slew of press interviews for the launch of my book. Not even a torrent of rain and a wind storm that eviscerated my umbrella could dampen my spirits as I Mary Tyler Moore’d all over Manhattan in a DVF dress feeling like I’d turned the world on with my ability to tell a great story and enviable access to people whose stories actually mattered. And let’s be clear: No one had handed me all this. Source: All Things Digital | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:00 am Zinc Different [Digital Daily]
While the notion of a fixed power source in a pro laptop will almost certainly send the dueling-battery crowd into paroxysms of indignant rage, the performance of this particular battery pack maybe worth the design tradeoff, lasting as much as 50 percent longer on a single charge than its predecessors. How is that possible? With silver-zinc rechargeable batteries, which not only offer vastly improved run-time over traditional lithium-ion battery technology, but are safer as well. Recylable too. Over at Apple Ink, Seth Weintraub ably lays out the case for a silver-zinc-powered MacBook, leading one to think that the announcement of such a machine in the near future is pretty much an inevitability.
With the life of the 50-watt-hour lithium-polymer batteries topping out at 5 hours, my guess is complaints about a fixed battery pack will be few and far between if Apple can deliver 9 hours of charge from a silver-zinc battery. Now if it would only begin offering that matte screen option again … [Image Credit: ZPower] Source: All Things Digital | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:00 am CrunchGear Week in Review: Smackers Edition
Exclusive: New Palm phone to have slide-down keyboard, large touchscreen Source: CrunchGear | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:00 am VoicePHP: Indian Startup Marries Voice with PHPMarrying web applications with voice has long been seen as the proverbial pot of gold: easy to dream about but hard to actually find. A few startups (and some large companies) are trying to solve the problem;...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:00 am Autonomy CEO Declared Entrepreneur of the Year 2009CAMBRIDGE, England and SAN FRANCISCO, January 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:00 am Tower Semiconductor to Present at the 11th Annual Needham Growth ConferenceMIGDAL HAEMEK, Israel, January 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Tower Semiconductor (NASDAQ: TSEM, TASE: TSEM), a pure-play independent specialty foundry, today announced that Mr.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jan 2009 | 8:00 am Hand-made wooden computer monitor
BBG reader Scuba_SM crafted a wooden enclosure for his 22" computer monitor, making it look like something our great-grandchildren might end up worshiping after the Prius Wars. The base and top cap are made from solid maple, and the vertical columns from pine dowel. Everything was stained with a light cherry stain, and coated with a layer of satin finish polyurethane. The brass arms are originally from gas lamps. I removed the valves and rotating joints before attaching them to the monitor. The buttons are lengths of brass rod that I hammered into flat topped rivets. They're held in place by the switch circuit board. The light uses a panel mount LED holder, with a clear plastic tube running from the actual LED to the chrome panel mount. The LCD panel itself sits in a cradle made from aluminum angle, and it is held in place and cushioned by weather stripping. Gallery [Scuba's photobucket] Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 5 Jan 2009 | 7:09 am Southeast Asian Optoelectronics Market to Tap the Eco-friendly Solid-state Lighting Applications SegmentSINGAPORE, Jan. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Solid-state lighting could effectively address global warming concerns, as it is expected to halve energy consumption by lighting, if fully deployed.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jan 2009 | 7:07 am /C O R R E C T I O N -- New Oriental Education and Technology Group Inc./In the news release, "New Oriental to Report Second Fiscal Quarter Financial Results on January 19, 2009", issued on Dec. 31 by New Oriental Education and Technology Group Inc.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jan 2009 | 7:00 am Lenovo says the IdeaPad Y650 is the thinnest, lightest 16-inch laptop - CNET News
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:58 am 2009: Products I Cant Live WithoutAt the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I've done this - previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:54 am 2009: Products I Can’t Live Without
This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them. The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs. I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer. I’ve removed six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati. I still use the products I’ve removed, just not as much as in previous years. I find I’m just using Netvibes and Technorati less this year (Netvibes because Google Reader is so excellent, Technorati has fallen in favor of Google Blog Search mostly because it’s too slow and has too many internal links). I tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of my news feed (I use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch. As in past years, there are a gaggle of other great products that I use regularly but didn’t add to the list in order to keep it manageable. I also haven’t added individual iPhone apps that I use daily, even though they are nearly as important to productivity and fun as the products that did make the list. Next year I expect more than a few will be added. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without: 800-Free-411 800-Free-411 first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too. Animoto Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service. Delicious Digg Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well. I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone. Friendfeed Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service. Gmail I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP. Google Reader Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today. Hulu Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television. iPhone 3G The first gadget I’ve included over the years - the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing. MySpace Music MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music. Pandora Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users. Scribd & Docstoc We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post. Skype Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have - I’d give up email before I gave up Skype. TechMeme TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse. TripIt If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device. Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day. Wordpress We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend - without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them. Yammer Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch. YouTube YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em. Zoho Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity. Update: I’m seeing other bloggers put together their own lists. Let me know in the comments if you do one and I’ll link to it. Here’s one by Tony Bain. More: Guilmain, NewsCred, Honkin (Chinese blogger) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 Source: TechCrunch | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:54 am Lenovo announces dual-screen Thinkpad - TG Daily
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:54 am China targets big websites in Internet crackdown (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:52 am Happy Public Domain Day 2009!January 1 was Public Domain 2009 day -- the day on which the works of authors who died in 1938 entered the public domain in most countries. As in previous years, the Public Domain blog has a long and fascinating list of the authors whose works are finally free to be reprinted and spread around the world:Some of the more interesting members of the 1938 class of deceased authors include:Public Domain Day 2009 (via Michael Geist) Source: Boing Boing | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:48 am Bruce Sterling's state of the world 2009Bruce Sterling's doing his annual "state of the world" public interview on the WELL's Inkwell.vue conference, and taking all comers, dropping science and bon mots. I could read this stuff all day.I'm a bohemian type, so I could scarcely be bothered to do anything "financially sound" in my entire adult life. Last year was the first year when I've felt genuinely sorry for responsible, well-to-do people. Suddenly they've got the precariousness of creatives, of the underclass, without that gleeful experience of decades spent living-it-up.Topic 343: Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2009 (via Beyond the Beyond) Source: Boing Boing | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:44 am Vader joins the Lutheran Church of IcelandA prankster in a Darth Vader suit joined the annual procession of the clergy of the Lutheran Church of Iceland. And you know what? It works.
Cult Procession Fail
(via Making Light) Source: Boing Boing | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:42 am RIAA ditches MediaSentry, will now stop suing dead people and children in favor of asking ISPs to censor Internet and spy on the publicThe record companies have fired their outsource enforcement thugs, MediaSentry (a sleazy outfit that changes its name as often as it changes its testimony). This is part of its new strategy: rather than suing fans, the record industry will confront the 21st century by asking ISPs to voluntarily spy on their customers, throttle their Internet connections, and disconnect people from the Internet on the basis of unproven allegations of infringement.It's a measure of just how unbelievably stupid the lawsuit campaign was that this new tactic is actually marginally preferable. And, of course, it does mean that plenty of MediaSentry's goons will end up on the breadline, so that's good news. Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who maintains the Recording Industry vs. the People blog and who has represented more than a dozen clients fighting the RIAA, said he considered the decision to drop MediaSentry a "victory" for his clients. MediaSentry representatives "have been invading the privacy of people. They've been doing very sloppy work," he said.Changing Tack, RIAA Ditches MediaSentry (via /.) Source: Boing Boing | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:40 am How Web Advertising May GoAnti-Globalism sends us to Ars Technica for Jon Stokes's musing on the falling value of Web advertising. Stokes put forward the outlying possibility — not a prediction — that ad rates could fall by 40% before turning up again, if they ever do. "A web page, in contrast, is typically festooned with hyperlinked visual objects that fall all over themselves in competing to take you elsewhere immediately once you're done consuming whatever it is that you came to that page for. So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention. ... We've had a few hundred years to learn to monetize print, over 75 years to monetize TV, and, most importantly, millennia to build business models based on scarcity. In contrast, our collective effort to monetize post-scarcity digital media have only just begun."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:24 am Palm’s last stand: Slide-down keyboard and touchscreen? - VentureBeat
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:23 am CES-Lenovo unveils 2-screen notebook, consumer PCs - Reuters
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:07 am Cue the complaints: 17-inch MacBook Pro without a removable battery? - VentureBeat
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:03 am Video games and TV are the culprit for lack of learning in 2 year oldsSection: Video, HDTV, Communications, Gadgets / Other, Household, Lifestyle, Miscellaneous, Gaming, Games
We all love video games and watching television on our big HDTVs, but there is always a time for learning and a time for playing. At a young age, television programming and video games are detrimental to a toddler’s growing brain and can cause bad communication skills. There is a study going on that has found that many toddlers are lacking good communication skills and could possibly spark screenings for speech problems. Some are skeptical to the severity of this problem but some researchers are saying that this problem is more common than dyslexia and autism. In addition, a tenth of all 2 year olds know nursery rhymes and, worse, know their own name. Knowing nursery rhymes and your own name is a true reflection on how good your parents are in giving you attention, which leads me to my next point. Less and less families have quality meal time, in which they all eat dinner together and talk to each other, they spend long hours working and less time caring for their children. Seeking some form of entertainment, children often turn to video games and television that they can play and watch with older siblings. At a young age, it is critical that parents do not leave their children under the supervision of a television or the Nintendo Wii. Tory MP, John Bercow, has this to say about the speech problem:
I remember when I was around this age, I would spend my days watching Sesame Street and other PBS shows, reading books with my parents, or drawing in my coloring book…how I miss those days. Anyway, hopefully this sheds some awareness on this problem and parents spend more time with their kids and help them learn basic skills. Via [The Telegraph] Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 5 Jan 2009 | 6:00 am Gadget Cocoons
Cocoon is a lineup of laptop 'n' gadget bags that evoke what my favorite Swiss surrealist would be doing if he fell on hard times and had to go and work for Prada.  Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:59 am We don’t need no stinkin’ TV to play a video gameFROM GAMERTELL - When Ron Stanley, a guest writer for The Washington Post, wrote an article reminiscing a time his nieces and nephews were banned from playing a video game or watching television, it was what the children did next that was surprisingly heartwarming. As he spoke of his six-year-old nephew trying to… MORE » Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:53 am MacWorld Rumor Roundup Roundup
There are MacWorld rumors, and then there are roundups. And then there are roundup roundups. Gizmodo: iLife 09 for sure; Mac Mini and 30" Cinema Display refreshes likely; 28" iMac is a maybe. No to home servers, because they're for pirated movies and Steve Jobs is Disney too. Shut up about iPhone Nano already. MacRumors: iMac and Mac Mini most likely. 17" MacBook Pro with fixed battery. iLife in The Cloud. Personal Snow Leopard demo from Schiller. "Unsure" about iPhone Nano and big Cinema Displays, and No on Mac Pro updates. Home servers: "no-one knows." Brings up Apple Tablets just to remind us that it's not going to happen. TUAW: Separated into sub-roundups by different authors. Among the highlights are Phil Schiller is Dull, new iMacs and Mac Minis, iPhone Mini, a new Mac Cube, 17" MBP, and Snow Leopard release date. There is also much silliness. Apple Insider: Mac Mini with dual video-out is confirmed. 28-inch iMac. Also Nvidia in new computers. 9to5Mac: 17" MacBookPro with non-removable battery and "Mentor," celebrity Garage Band lessons. Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:32 am Lenovo Brings Wii Functionality to PCs (PC World)PC World - Taking a page from Nintendo's Wii gaming console, Lenovo on Monday announced an all-in-one PC with a remote control that doubles as a motion-based gaming controller.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:30 am Al Franken Does Mick JaggerThis made my night. As news is coming out of Minnesota that the state Canvassing Board is ready to certify Al Franken as the winner of the very close senate race there, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo was ready and waiting with this oh-so-excellent vintage Franken and Davis clip from Solid Gold. --Bruce (via TPM) (Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers) Source: Gizmodo | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:01 am Netbooks five: Lenovo's S10 brings the color wheel and instant-on Linux
Lenovo's IdeaPad S10 is described in the literature as an "affordable secondary PC," but the pitch quickly segues to addressing the "first-time PC user" and, finally and inexorably, "some mainstream consumers." It's a telling transition between what netbooks were supposed to be—geek toys—to what they really are—main machines for nontechnical users. It sums up a computing zeitgeist that few seem comfortable with. Among that few, however, is my 63 year-old mother-in-law, who is replacing a crappy old Dell laptop with a new 10.2" model. She doesn't even know that the new one is in a category that Intel insists she couldn't possibly want to use. Lenovo's new model is a pretty one, with the increasingly-ubiquitous Splashtop Linux: awake within seconds of the power switch being flicked, it offers browser, music player, instant messaging and Skype. Other new features include a multitouch trackpad and facial recognition software. The specs are otherwise standard fare, with a 10.2 display, Atom CPU and 1GB of RAM, just like all the others. It'll be available in March for a pleasantly modest $350. Source: Gizmodo | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:00 am Top 10 Things Launched Into Space in 2008Among the best things launched into space in 2008 were a tourist, a heat-seaking missile an Indian moon probe and the first Chinese astronauts to do a space walk.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:00 am Cheap Thrills: Gadget Makers Bet on Budget Gear in 2009CES 2009 is the largest American electronics tradeshow, and it opens this week in Las Vegas. On tap: the industry's latest crop of budget gadgets, which manufacturers hope will offset an otherwise bleak economy.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:00 am Lenovo's IdeaCenter A600 iMac Killer has Blu and TV Tuner
Lenovo's A600 is a 21.5-inch monolith of an all-in-one, with 4GB of RAM, a terabyte of hard drive space, a 512MB ATI video card, Blu-Ray and a TV tuner. Most interesting of all is what's not there: bulk. An inch thick through most of its height, it's claimed to be the thinnest-in-class. It'll be out later this quarter, with loadouts starting at a penny short of a grand.Here's detailed specs: 21.5-inch frameless screen, full HD resolution 1920 X 1080 resolution Beautiful. Beautiful? Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:00 am Jan. 5, 1972: Nixon OKs 'Low-Cost' Space Shuttle1972: President Richard M. Nixon announces that NASA will develop a space shuttle system, touting its reliability, reusability and low cost. The Mercury and Gemini programs had put Americans into Earth orbit. Apollo had been to the moon seven times — landing four times — and would return to land twice again later in 1972. But NASA wanted a reusable rocket ship to explore Earth orbit and to supply and staff a space station. Nixon gave the go-ahead: I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980s and '90s. This system will center on a space vehicle that can shuttle repeatedly from Earth to orbit and back. It will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it. It will take the astronomical costs out of astronautics. In short, it will go a long way toward delivering the rich benefits of practical space utilization and the valuable spinoffs from space efforts into the daily lives of Americans and all people. NASA director James Fletcher's remarks referred once again to the shuttle's "modest budget" and reduced complexity. The plan was to make 48 flights a year (.pdf) at about $50 million per launch ($250 million in today's money). Starting in 1981, the shuttles have made 124 space flights in 28 years, averaging four or five missions a year. The years immediately following the Challenger and Columbia disasters saw no flights. 1985 had a record high nine missions, and 1990 to 1997 averaged eight flights a year. University of Colorado researcher Roger Pielke Jr. calculated in early 2005 that the shuttle program to that point had cost $145 billion, or about $1.3 billion per flight. (Based on a 1995 midpoint, that's about $1.9 billion per flight in today's dollars.) The Apollo program cost a total $19.4 billion from 1960 to 1973. That averages almost $2.2 billion for each of the nine lunar missions. (Based on a 1967 midpoint, that would be about $13 billion each today.) So, space shuttle flights have certainly been less expensive than Apollo lunar missions. But even adjusting for inflation and despite their many achievements, shuttle launches cost seven or eight times what was promised. Source:Various
Source: Wired Top Stories | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:00 am Cheap Thrills: Gadget Makers Bet on Budget Gear in 2009CES 2009 is the largest American electronics tradeshow, and it opens this week in Las Vegas. On tap: the industry's latest crop of budget gadgets, which manufacturers hope will offset an otherwise bleak economy.Source: Wired: Gadgets | 5 Jan 2009 | 5:00 am A new Gadgetell design for 2009Section: Features, Announcements
Our goals with the new design were:
A few things to notice:
Please leave any and all feedback you have in the comments below. We are sure there are still a few bugs that we missed, so drop those in here as well. We hope you like it! Full Story » | Written by Adam Berger for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 5 Jan 2009 | 4:15 am Say hi to the iTreo: Palm's Nova Phone "iPhone-like" Details of Palm's new phone, to be announced next week at CES, are up at CrunchGear. It'll have a full QWERTY slider-keyboard, but otherwise be like an iPhone.
The new operating system is described as “amazing” and there will be a full software bazaar on launch. It will have media playback functions along with standard Palm calendar, email, and contact functionality. I whipped up a quick shop of what this might imply, assuming that Palm has no imagination. A fair assumption? Exclusive: New Palm phone to have slide-down keyboard, large touchscreen [CrunchGear] Source: Gizmodo | 5 Jan 2009 | 4:00 am Aerial7 blinds us with candy-colored headphones
See the spectrum-murdering wonder of Aerial7's Graffiti headphones, teleported in from a universe created by the artists who made Rude Dog and the Dweebs. The Artistry of Sound [Aerial7 via Gizmodo] Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 5 Jan 2009 | 3:54 am Pogue sings "Imagine there's no Apple.""Imagine there's no bloggers: it isn't hard to do." Pogue goes Rogue [CrunchGear] Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 5 Jan 2009 | 3:50 am Girl gets Android Tattoo
Compare Natalie "Kommodore" Thompson to the infamous Zune Guy. Zune Guy had a Microsoft logo tattooed on him to show his appreciation Kommodore, however, got inked with the Android robot to demonstrate Except Tux. Tux is sad, because he's shiny and fat and has creepy eyes and the top The Kommodore [MySpace via Engadget] Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 5 Jan 2009 | 3:37 am WSJ Confirms RIAA Fired MediaSentrynewtley writes "Two days ago we discussed the earlier p2pnet report that the RIAA had fired MediaSentry (now called SafeNet). Now the Wall Street Journal is confirming this report. MediaSentry has been 'invading the privacy of people,' the WSJ quotes Ray Beckerman; 'They've been doing very sloppy work.' Beckerman cites MediaSentry's practice of 'looking for available songs in people's filesharing folders, uploading them, and using those uploads in court as evidence of copyright violations.' MediaSentry 'couldn't prove defendants had shared their files with anyone other than MediaSentry investigators.' The WSJ notes, 'In place of MediaSentry, the RIAA says it will use Copenhagen-based DtecNet Software ApS. The music industry had worked with DtecNet previously both in the US and overseas, and liked its technology...' "Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 5 Jan 2009 | 3:23 am Calling all hypochondriacs: It’s the Zicam Cold & Flu CompanionSection: Communications, Mobile  Designers of mobile applications will attempt to appeal to all types of people. Apparently, this will now include hypochondriacs. Introducing the Zicam Cold & Flu Companion mobile application, a program that tells you how many people are sick in your area. After downloading the application onto your phone, you simply put in any zip code in the United States. A screen will then appear and let you know the sick level for your town (low, moderate, high). It will also tell you what symptoms are common and which symptoms you should be aware of. If you are sick, you can get coupons for Zicam products from the application as well as directions to the nearest retailer that sells their medicine. They also have cold and flu related stories that you can browse. However, before you pull out your face mask, after a search of Zicam’s website it did not state how the data is collected. Also, knowing that there’s a lot of people sick in your area does not necessarily mean you have to avoid all human contact. You might want to bulk up on your vitamin C though, just in case. The application is available to Android Powered phones, including the TMobile G1 as well as Apple iPhones. You can get it directly from the Zicam site or find a version on Apple’s App Store. Product Page [Zicam] Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 5 Jan 2009 | 3:12 am Traditions That Make You Feel Good As 40somethings raising kids, we seem to have finally outgrown celebrating the start of the new year by getting real drunk and staying up late. We still stay up past midnight as a matter of pride, but we’ve slowly shifted the emphasis to New Year’s Day festivities, which include eating traditional meals, plus discussing the highlights of the previous year and hopes for the new one. In other words, we focus on traditions that make us feel good, not hungover. Growing up in New Mexico, it was instilled in me that it's absolutely necessary to eat posole on January 1. And since my ancestors moved to New Mexico from Arkansas and other southern locales, it's also imperative that everyone in my family eat at least one bite of black-eyed peas on Jan. 1 to secure good luck for the new year. A few years I made a cheesecake or lemon tart for New Year's Day, hiding one almond in the pie. This is another good luck token, which I must have read about somewhere along the line. I find these traditions, almost always related to food and celebrations, to be fascinating, and I hope lots of you readers will share your traditions in the comments. Along those lines, The New York Times put up a fun slideshow about new year's traditions from around the globe. The highlights of 2008 for all of us were the outcome of the election and various family trips we took. Bruce loved NYC, Kindy enjoyed a couple of overnights in San Francisco, and Arlo loved spending a week hiking and swimming on the Eel River. That reminded me of one of my highlights -- seeing an albino redwood tree during a hike on that trip. As for aspirations in 2009, Arlo, who's 6, started the conversation by saying, "I hope we do lots and lots of yoga!" This was interesting to the rest of the family; as far as any of us know, Arlo’s only ever done yoga once in his short life, but it apparently made a big impression. Kindy, 13, wanted the self-absorbed things you’d expect from a teen: a winning basketball team at school and more free time, less homework. I wanted to take more hikes and go to the beach more often, which I'm pretty sure is my declaration almost every year. Bruce was the most selfless: he hoped for fewer wars in the world, and more peaceful times for everyone. Amen to that. --Shawn (image courtesy of Susan Beal) Previously: (Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers) Source: Boing Boing | 5 Jan 2009 | 2:40 am Investors will love theTheStreet.com Blackberry applicationSection: Communications, Smartphones  Once you own a Blackberry, you may not want to waste the time trying to sort through the thousands of applications you can download onto your phone. You’ll likely download and dump dozens before you find a select few that you actually use. However, if you’re an investor, you’re going to want to try out TheStreet mobile application. TheStreet powered by Polar Mobile is a free application that you can download onto your Blackberry from TheStreet.com website. It provides real time market news and updates, including your portfolio’s current stock quotes. You can customize your online portfolio and view the data within seconds in order to make smart investment decisions. Although you can find a lot of other mobile stock market sites, this one has a very user friendly interface. You’ll find no load times since content is downloaded automatically without the need for you to search for updates. When you want to read the site’s articles and very rarely will you receive any error message when you try to access portions of the site. You can also set up homepage notifications to let you know when new content is printed. Don’t worry if you don’t happen to have a Blackberry, it’s expected that within the next few months TheStreet will become available to other mobile devices, like SmartPhones, iPhones and Windows Mobile. You can check at TheStreet.com to stay updated on the status of the application’s availability. Product Page [TheStreet.com] Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 5 Jan 2009 | 2:10 am UK Police To Step Up Hacking of Home PCstoomanyairmiles writes "The Times of London reports that the United Kingdom's Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain to routinely hack into people's personal computers without a warrant. The move, which follows a decision by the European Union's council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state that drives 'a coach and horses' through privacy laws."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 5 Jan 2009 | 1:13 am CAPTCHA PoetryHeather Moore, the talented proprietor and blogger of Skinny Laminx, recently wrote a couple of CAPTCHA security code poems that speak to the wordsmith inside me. The comments about them are pretty interesting and creative as well. Here’s one of Heather’s poems: Aingee--Shawn (Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers) Source: Gizmodo | 5 Jan 2009 | 12:00 am Cheap Thrills: Gadget Makers Bet on Budget Gear in 2009
by Daniel Dumas Get ready for an onslaught of the cheap. With the economy more unstable than Plaxico Burress' mental state, electronics manufacturers are putting the e-brakes on their budgets, flattening their costs, and rolling out their cheapest, most practical gadgets. You know, the ones that people like you and me can afford. You'll get a glimpse of this "fashionably cheap" approach to gadgets at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The show, which runs from January 6 to January 11, is the electronics industry's biggest North American conference. This year's tradeshow will no doubt feature some excessively large HDTVs, as it has in the past. It will still attract more than 100,000 attendees, mostly members of the electronics industry, plus a few thousand journalists, though CES attendance will be down a bit compared to last year. And it will still have its celebrity appearances (including Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder and Akon), paid for by companies hungry for publicity. But behind the glitz, companies will be showing their bread and butter for 2009: A lot of inexpensive, no frills devices designed to perform expertly without sucking up the last remaining drops of your severance package. Cell Phones Convention show speculation will invariably focus on what form the next the iPhone will take. Be like Public Enemy; don't believe the hype. There are other cooler, better, and yes, more capable handsets out there. Shredding a path through the tangled cellular jungle is, surprise, Palm. The company everyone thought had flatlined is taking the defibrillator to itself with the potentially awesome Nova operating system. The Linux based OS -- which will launch at an undisclosed date in 2009 -- is being pimped as "a next-generation operating system with much more capabilities, driven around the Internet and Web-based applications," by Palm CEO Ed Colligan. We know it's all marketing hype, but Palm's seemingly endless financial woes might be just enough to spark a minor revolution in cell software. With the company's declining market share, it's a sure bet that Nova-based Palm phones will be cheap buys in 2009. And fans of the OG Palm OS need not fret, both of you can still pick up a Centro for just $99 well into the New Year. Notebooks and Desktop PCs Netbooks netbooks netbooks! Yes, these wee wonders have broken into the mainstream and are now considered legit devices. Look for refreshes on existing netbook lines from Dell, HP, Asus, and MSI. We expect one from Sony too: We're predicting Sony will show a fully-featured netbook, with its trademark Vaio styling, in the $500 to $700 range. Also expect to see a lot of all-in-one desktops that are less about design and more about functionality. We've seen iMac clones like the beautifully rendered Dell XPS One and the Gateway One before. Those days are over. In their stead will be ugly, obtuse, yet practical all-in-one boxes that trade a slim profile and processing power for a sub-thousand-dollar sticker. Televisions and Displays The schoolyard contest of who can build the biggest TV won't exactly stop mid-shove. Sharp, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony will roll out some retina-searing, 100-inch-plus LCDs, but behind the big screens there will be more of an emphasis on screens that can deliver bang for the buck. Third-tier manufacturers like Vizio, Westinghouse, and Sceptre will be offering screens that have just as much resolution, color, and calibration options as their second- and first-tier brethren. They'll just cost thousands less. Miniature pocket projectors will be huge. Instead of dropping ten thousand ducats on a 1080p home cinema caliber projector, corporate VPs will be pocketing portables like the Toshiba Pico to project their PowerPoint presentations on the go. We've already seen a chorus line of projectors like the Pico emerge in recent months. The G-Lab crystal ball predicts more of these handhelds at cheaper prices.
Cameras and Camcorders A few titanic, feature-heavy SLRs (Exhibit A: Canon 5D Mark II) will sail through CES but so will a fleet of thrifty shooters that anchor cheap thrills by way of thoughtful touches. Look for small shooters that incorporate printers, Wi-Fi, and web browsers. Also gaining a deep foothold will be mini video cams like the Flip Mino and the Kodak Zi6. Designed to upload footage to the web (alright, basically just to YouTube), these devices record in hi-def and often cost less than two hundred bucks. Until now they've been the pet projects of borderline boutique manufacturers like Pure Digital. But now mainstream camera companies will be rolling out their own versions of pocket video cameras, putting still more price and feature pressure on this category. And you know what that means: Cheaper, better products for you and me. Wired.com is sending a 9-person team to cover CES with news reports, photos and video. Follow all the latest news at wired.com/ces. Photo of CES 2008 by mobil'homme/Flickr
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 5 Jan 2009 | 12:00 am Kodak Zx1: tiny, weather-resistant 720p for $150
The Zx1 is set to be released in April for the extremely reasonable price of $150. My dad likes to take video when he’s skiing and I can’t think of a better option for him (aside from the Canon 790IS we got him for Christmas… Chris you still owe me for that) and others who need something compact, durable, and straightforward. It does the YouTube thing, will work with SDHC cards up to 32GB, and even comes in several colors. Only testing will tell, but from what I can tell the Zx1 appears to make mincemeat of the MinoHD for $100 less. I’ll make a point of hitting this thing up at CES and give you all updated impressions. Here’s the full press release:
Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jan 2009 | 11:28 pm Yamaha offers HTIB to upscale your DVDsSection: Audio, Home Audio, Video, Accessories, DVD Players/DVRs
Yamaha has realized this and released its new Home Theater In a Box, the DVX-700. It features a 2.1 channel sound system that Yamaha claims creates a “360-degree sound stage.“ Each speaker has 2.125-inch woofer and a 1-inch tweeter which isn’t bad at all for consumer-grade speakers. The subwoofer has a 6.5-inch driver inside to power your bass. The speakers also come with an upscaling DVD player. The player can connect via HDMI and upscales the picture on your DVDs to 1080p. Sure, an upscaling player isn’t quite the same as Blu-Ray, but not everyone can see the difference. There’s actually a surprisingly large amount of people that can’t spot the difference between DVD and Blu-ray movies. If you’re one of these people, or you just don’t care to spend a huge amount of money to make your entire collection Blu-ray, this set might be for you. Though it is a bit expensive at $1,199.95, keep in mind that the speakers are wireless, and it can also connect to USB devices including iPods. For a good home theater system, the price isn’t actually that bad. Read [CE Pro] Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 4 Jan 2009 | 11:17 pm RIAA dumps evidence-gathering firm (CNET)CNET - The Recording Industry Association of America has dumped the company charged with gathering evidence for use against people accused of illegally sharing copyrighted music, according to a report Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 Jan 2009 | 11:05 pm The Exact Cause of the Zune MeltdownAn anonymous reader writes "The Zune 30 failure became national news when it happened just three days ago. The source code for the bad driver leaked soon after, and now, someone has come up with a very detailed explanation for where the code was bad as well as a number of solutions to deal with it. From a coding/QA standpoint, one has to wonder how this bug was missed if the quality assurance team wasn't slacking off. Worse yet: this bug affects every Windows CE device carrying this driver."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Gizmodo | 4 Jan 2009 | 11:00 pm Exclusive: New Palm phone to have slide-down keyboard, large touchscreen
The new operating system is described as “amazing” and there will be a full software bazaar on launch. It will have media playback functions along with standard Palm calendar, email, and contact functionality. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Source: MobileCrunch | 4 Jan 2009 | 10:49 pm Me2: Swap contacts on your iPhone to the squeals of a 56k modem
Me2, a new app that just went live on the App Store, allows users to transfer their contact information in a way that is sure to stir up some familiar (and perhaps not so fond) memories for any computer user over the age of 12. Using similar technology to the modems of yesteryear, the free application transfers data between two iPhones using a brief series of audible chirps. To send a contact, users simply push their phones together, select which contact they’d like to send, and wait for the 1-second burst of sound to transfer their information. It might be old school, but it’s very cool. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 Source: MobileCrunch | 4 Jan 2009 | 10:48 pm NYT Op-Eds: End of the Financial World As We Know It / How to Repair a Broken Financial WorldJesus, *everyone* is twittering/emailing/suggesting this 2800+ word monster op-ed in today's New York Times by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn. Here's a snip:Americans enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.The End of the Financial World As We Know It (NYT). When you're done with that, don't miss the companion piece in the same NYT edition, How to Repair a Broken Financial World, which is another must-read, clocking in at 2,000 words. And when you're done with all that, go watch "Keeping up with the Kardashians" or "Dog The Bounty Hunter" and eat some Hot Pockets, because AFAIAC, you'll have paid your thinkin' dues for the week. About the writers: "Michael Lewis, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of Liar’s Poker, is writing a book about the collapse of Wall Street. David Einhorn is the president of Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund, and the author of Fooling Some of the People All of the Time." Source: Boing Boing | 4 Jan 2009 | 10:48 pm Exclusive: New Palm Phone to Have Slide-down Keyboard, Large Touchscreen
We have information from a trusted source that the latest Palm smartphone running the Nova operating system will be launched Thursday. The new phone will have a full QWERTY keyboard that will slide down under a portrait-oriented touchscreen. This only a mock-up based on information received.
The new operating system is described as "amazing" and there will be a full software bazaar on launch. It will have media playback functions along with standard Palm calendar, email, and contact functionality.
Source: TechCrunch | 4 Jan 2009 | 10:40 pm Exclusive: New Palm phone to have slide-down keyboard, large touchscreen
We have information from a trusted source that the latest Palm smartphone running the Nova operating system will be launched Thursday. The new phone will have a full QWERTY keyboard that will slide down under a portrait-oriented touchscreen. We’ll have a mock-up shortly. The new operating system is described as “amazing” and there will be a full software bazaar on launch. It will have media playback functions along with standard Palm calendar, email, and contact functionality. As expected, the phone is described as “iPhone-like” and will probably be sourced by HTC like the Palm Pro. The official Palm announcement should happen this Thursday at CES.
Source: Gizmodo | 4 Jan 2009 | 10:00 pm Data Mining Rescues Investigative JournalismJohn Mecklin sends in word of initiatives through which the digital revolution that has been undermining in-depth reportage may be ready to give something back, through a new academic and professional discipline known as "computational journalism." "James Hamilton, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, is in the process of filling an endowed chair with a professor who will develop sophisticated computing tools that enhance the capabilities — and, perhaps more important in this economic climate, the efficiency — of journalists and other citizens who are trying to hold public officials and institutions accountable. The goal: Computer algorithms that can sort through the huge amounts of databased information available on the Internet, providing public-interest reporters with sets of potential story leads they otherwise might never have found. Or, in short, data mining in the public interest."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 4 Jan 2009 | 9:49 pm Consumer Reports takes a look at cell phone based GPSSection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile, Gadgets / Other, GPS/Navigation  GPS was a huge gift this year for the holidays. CR noticed GPS via cell phone is starting to become a bigger player and decided to dig into if the hype lives up. Cell phone GPS allow you to eliminate a standalone device and turn your phone into an accurate, voice-enabled navigation device. CR uncovered several pros and cons and as an avid GPS industry observer, I’ll add my two cents as well. Many smart phones these days such as BlackBerry’s, Samsung Instinct, iPhone, etc. come with GPS capabilities, a useful feature. The facts: cell phone GPS usually costs either $3 a day per usage or $10 a month, which isn’t too bad, but standalone units are free, of course. Some phones also come with traffic information, a good feature that is also present in standalone units. Now, they also offer turn-by-turn directions so you don’t have to look at the small phone screen. However, standalone units offer this too and their screens are generally big - 3.5 inches to 5 inches are common sizes. I like looking at my GPS screen even if it is speaking out turn-by-turn directions. In addition, standalone GPS speakers are specifically meant for clarity and spoken directions, while cell phone speakers aren’t necessarily the best. Also, not all cellphones such as the G1 and the iPhone offer turn-by-turn directions. CR finds that cell phone based GPS is good if you travel a lot with your cell phone, because it would be better than to lug around a GPS. It is very possible to have a standalone GPS unit stolen or lost because they are pretty small and coveted electronics, but you will always have your cell phone with you. CR also reports that cell phones such as the Instinct and the Glyde that come with big screens and QWERTY keyboards are more beneficial to use. Lastly, CR says that GPS subscription costs can end up costing you the same amount as a standalone unit. At this point, you probably are better off getting a standalone unit because you can travel with it easily, give it to a family member when they go someplace and it won’t drain your cell phone battery. Personally, I would recommend getting a standalone unit if you travel a lot even if you do have a cell phone with GPS capabilities, however, if you travel often for business then a cell phone should do the job. For more information on GPSs and what is good for you, check out Gagetell’s Buying Guide for GPSs. Read [9News] Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 4 Jan 2009 | 9:29 pm Madoff victims selling memorabilia on eBay (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 Jan 2009 | 9:25 pm Computer program analyzes brain activityA computer program developed at a Pittsburgh university can offer limited insights into one's thoughts by analyzing brain activation patterns, researchers say.Source: Gizmodo | 4 Jan 2009 | 9:00 pm Me2: Swap Contacts On Your iPhone To The Nostalgic Squeals Of A 56k Modem
Me2, a new app that just went live on the App Store, allows users to transfer their contact information in a way that is sure to stir up some familiar (and perhaps not so fond) memories for any computer user over the age of 12. Using similar technology to the modems of yesteryear, the free application transfers data between two iPhones using a brief series of audible chirps. To send a contact, users simply push their phones together, select which contact they’d like to send, and wait for the 1-second burst of sound to transfer their information. It might be old school, but it’s very cool. And while the technology involved may be relatively ancient, it’s also potentially more practical than some of the other solutions we’ve seen. Apps like FriendBook and Nameo use geolocation to figure out when two nearby phohnes are attempting to send information, and then relay it over the network. This works fine if you’ve got a full signal, but you might not be so lucky in the depths of a corporate office. Because Me2 doesn’t rely on GPS or the cellular network, it should work everywhere. That said, this ‘beeping’ form of communication also has its issues. Because the phones literally have to ‘hear’ each other, you’ll need to position them so that their speakers and microphones are touching, which might be a bit awkward in a business environment. And while the screeching sounds of yore might have their charm, it would be nice if the apps used an inaudible frequency to transfer the data (which we’ve been told is possible). Me2 is currently only advertised as working on the iPhone 3G (some reviews indicate that it won’t allow users to communicate to the first generation iPhone), but it’s likely that these issues could be remedied in future updates. The application is also only allows for one contact transfer at a time, though this too could probably be easily changed. I’ve made no secret that I think business cards are a pain in the ass. Me2 probably won’t be the app to replace the paper cards once and for all (I suspect a wireless technology like Bluetooth would be more secure and less awkward), but it’s still a cool idea and is worth checking out if for nothing else than its novelty factor. Last month we saw a similar modem technology employed by Electric Smoke, a virtual cigarette app that uses audio to communicate with Smule’s Sonic Lighter. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. Source: TechCrunch | 4 Jan 2009 | 8:37 pm Image of Popeye Enters Public Domain In the EUSeveral readers wrote in to mention that the copyright on the image of the character Popeye expired in the EU as the year began, 70 years since the death of its creator Elzie Segar. The US will have to wait until 2024, 95 years after Segar's death. Only Popeye's image is free of trademark in the EU; the name "Popeye" is still under copyright by King Features Syndicate. Popeye made his first appearance in a comic strip in 1929 and became hugely popular in the 1930s. The Times claims that Popeye now moves $2.8B of merchandise per year. Le Monde's coverage (in Google translation) mentions the real-life people in Segar's early experience who inspired some of the Popeye cast of characters. Popeye himself was based on the prize fighter Frank "Rocky" Fiegel.Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 4 Jan 2009 | 8:34 pm Kodak unleashes the 24x megazoom Z980 digicam
First up, the glass is 26-millimeter wide angle lens with that mega aforementioned zoom. Behind that is a 12-megapixel sensor housed in a dSLR-like body that even features a detachable vertical grip, hot shoe, and a vertical shutter release. (nice) Plus, it comes packing with an HD video capture mode Kodak’s so-called Smart Capture feature that automatically adjusts the settings for brilliant images. Sounds like you, Mr. P. Tom? MSRP is set at $399 when it drops sometime this Spring.
Press Release: Kodak expands its line of Smart Capture enabled digital cameras New models include Powerful 24x zoom and sleek compact with 5x zoom Rochester, NY, January 8, 2009 — Eastman Kodak Company (NYSE:EK) today announced new additions to its digital camera line, led by the high-zoom KODAK Z980 Digital Camera, featuring outstanding control and Kodak’s innovative Smart Capture feature that consistently delivers high quality images. Featuring a wealth of power and versatility, the KODAK Z980 Digital Camera offers a 26 mm wide angle, professional quality, 24X image stabilized optical zoom lens, a vertical shutter release and a hot shoe, all at an affordable price. The Z980 enables serious photographers to easily handle both long-distance and wide-angle shots, and boasts Kodak’s innovative Smart Capture feature, which automatically adjusts the camera’s settings to deliver brilliant images automatically. “The Z980 is an ideal camera for photographers looking to do more and get more from their digital camera,” said John Blake, General Manager Digital Capture and Devices, Vice President, Eastman Kodak Company. “The versatile lens, combined with our exclusive Smart Capture feature, lets consumers shoot great pictures in any setting — from daylight to night or from close-ups to landscapes, the camera makes adjustments automatically.” The new KODAK Z980 Digital Camera offers:
Also new to the KODAK M Series Digital Cameras are:
A range of accessories will be available for the new KODAK Digital Cameras including KODAK Li-Ion Rechargeable Digital Camera Batteries and battery charger kits; KODAK SD and SDHC High Performance Memory Cards; KODAK Camera Bags and much more. As the world’s foremost imaging innovator, Kodak helps consumers, businesses, and creative professionals unleash the power of pictures and printing to enrich their lives. To learn more, visit the newly redesigned http://www.kodak.com and follow our blogs and more at http://www.kodak.com/go/followus.
More than 70 million people worldwide manage, share and create photo gifts online at KODAK Gallery –join for free today atwww.kodakgallery.com
Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jan 2009 | 8:25 pm (PRODUCT) Red iPhone is fake
Nowhereelse has photos of what is purported to be a (PRODUCT)Red iPhone but the lack of (RED) branding on the back definitely puts this in the fake category. As we see below, the (PRODUCT)Red branding always appears above the iPod branding.
Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jan 2009 | 8:24 pm Exclusive First Look: BeeJiveIM 2.0 for iPhone
On Tuesday, January 6th, BeeJive will be pushing version 2.0 of BeeJiveIM for iPhone to the iTunes App Store. We were able to get our hands on a pre-release copy of it, and we’ve brought back pictures of everything new and noteworthy. Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jan 2009 | 8:05 pm Exclusive First Look: BeeJiveIM 2.0 For iPhone
On Tuesday, January 6th, BeeJive will be pushing version 2.0 of BeeJiveIM for iPhone to the iTunes App Store. We were able to get our hands on a pre-release copy of it, and we’ve brought back pictures of everything new and noteworthy. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 Source: Gizmodo | 4 Jan 2009 | 8:00 pm Windows Vista Capable stickers might have been a Microsoft cash cow
Microsoft is currently in court over the dubious claim and that’s where this tantalizing detail was revealed. According to expert, Keith Leffler,
Makes you wonder just how bad Microsoft wants Windows 7 to succeed. Enough that everyone will forget about Vista. Windows ME was quickly forgotten after XP launched so it can be done. Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jan 2009 | 7:59 pm Exclusive First Look: BeeJiveIM 2.0 for iPhone
On Tuesday, January 6th, BeeJive will be pushing version 2.0 of BeeJiveIM for iPhone to the iTunes App Store. We were able to get our hands on a pre-release copy of it, and we’ve brought back pictures of everything new and noteworthy. For the sake of folks scanning the page for word of a price drop: No such luck. BeeJive IM 2.0 will continue the $15.99 tradition set forth by the original release. The good news? If you’ve already purchased BeeJiveIM 1.0, the upgrade is free.
Image transfers: Half of the fun of IM’ing on the go is sharing what’s around you, and BeeJive 2.0 does it really well. You just tap the top bar, tap the camera icon, and then choose a photo from your library or take a new one on the spot. Transfers function well in both directions. From PC-to-iPhone, it shows up right in the chat. From iPhone-to-PC, it defaults to sending the image as a link, though users can change it to use the protocol’s default file transfer method.    Voice Notes: Sometimes you just don’t want to type, but a full-on phone call seems like over doing it. Like a funky offspring of Push-to-talk and IM, “Voice notes” are becoming more and more common in IM apps - and now BeeJive’s doing it. Sending a voice note is similar to sending an image - tap the top bar, tap the microphone, record, and send away.   File transfers: In addition to image sharing, BeeJive 2.0 can also handle incoming transfers of a whole bunch of file types, rendering them properly directly within the application. So far, we’ve tested and found support for a number of audio, video, and image formats, Office documents (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), and PDFs. You can also forward on transferred files to other buddies.    Address Book Linking: Clicking a buddy’s icon brings you to that person’s Buddy Info, which now has a “Link to Address Book Card” button. If you’re frequently calling up the friends from your Buddy List whilst IM’ing, it’ll save you a few steps and keep you from needing to leave the application.  Sound Options: It’s trivial, but it’s a nice touch: If you don’t like the IM sounds provided by BeeJive, you can configure it to use the default AIM or Yahoo sounds instead.  Image transferring was probably the most sorely missed feature of the original release, so that alone is enough to warrant the 2.0 label, with file transferring and voice notes coming in as tremendous bonuses. While the $16 price tag seems a bit crazy when surrounded by competing products going for as little as free, we’d still positively recommend BeeJive for heavy IM’ers - with this release, it does just about everything you could want of it, and it’s still the most stable and well designed IM app of the lot. Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies Source: MobileCrunch | 4 Jan 2009 | 7:59 pm Appletell at Macworld ExpoFROM APPLETELL - The Appletell @ Macworld Expo news site is now open, and it’s already filled with the latest Macintosh, iPhone and iPod news and rumors surrounding the show. MORE » Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 4 Jan 2009 | 7:55 pm MacBook Nano to show up at Macworld?FROM APPLETELL - It’s complete speculation, but UK technology news site ElectricPig believes a Macbook nano will be announced at Macworld Expo next week. MORE » Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 4 Jan 2009 | 7:45 pm Amtrak Photo Contestant Arrested By Amtrak PolicePhotographer Duane Kerzic was standing on the public platform in New York's Penn Station, taking pictures of trains in hopes of winning the annual photo contest that Amtrak had been running since 2003. Amtrak police arrested him for refusing to delete the photos when asked, though they later charged him with trespassing. "Obviously, there is a lack of communication between Amtrak's marketing department, which promotes the annual contest, called Picture Our Trains, and its police department, which has a history of harassing photographers for photographing these same trains. Not much different than the JetBlue incident from earlier this year where JetBlue flight attendants had a woman arrested for refusing to delete a video she filmed in flight while the JetBlue marketing department hosted a contest encouraging passengers to take photos in flight." Kerzic's blog has an account of the arrest on Dec. 21 and the aftermath.Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 4 Jan 2009 | 7:22 pm Developing "Eyes-Free" Gadgets and ApplicationsThe New York Times is running a story about Google engineer T. V. Raman, who lost his vision at age 14 but didn't let that stand in the way of his interest in technology. In addition to modifying a version of Google's search engine to give preference to pages that were more compliant with accessibility guidelines, Raman is now working on making cell phones easier to use without needing to look at them. "Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction — up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion." Raman and a co-worker, Charles Chen, are also attempting to extend various phones' ability to read back scanned text to include signs that are anywhere in the phone's field of view.Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 4 Jan 2009 | 6:06 pm Recession to steal some glitz from gadget show (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 Jan 2009 | 5:54 pm Waltz With BashirI went to see the Israeli animated documentary feature "Waltz With Bashir" (Vals Im Bashir) last night. The autobiographical film was written and directed by Ari Folman, with illustration and art direction by David Polonsky. It is a powerful piece of filmmaking, and I hope everyone reading this blog post will go out and support it, if it's still playing in a theater where you live. Given the escalation of conflict in Gaza this weekend, the film's message seems all the more timely and poignant. I couldn't help but think as I was watching last night (in a mostly empty art-house theater on the other side of town) that this captures what the young Israeli soldiers must be experiencing right now, and what the Palestinians in Gaza must be experiencing, as well. Waltz is about memory. It's a story about conflict trauma and PTSD. It's a story about how the responsibility for atrocities tends to be passed from one set of hands to another, never resting, and how the impact of violence is also passed down, never resting. It's a story about what combatants on both sides have in common: we are human beings. Here are some stills from the movie. Here are higher-quality trailers on Apple. Here are some of the critics' reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. When the DVD comes out, I am buying it, and buying copies for friends. Oh, and Susannah Breslin points us to these guys, Asaf and Tomer, who were credited as artists on the film. Here is my favorite still (contains nudity). PS: Wiley Wiggins told me on Twitter last night that Folman's next project is an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's book The Futurological Congress . That oughta be amazing. Incidentally, Waltz reminded me a lot of the film through which I first became aware of Wiley Wiggins' work, too. Below: Speaking of the power of memory -- for me, hearing this great OMD song again, in this context, was potent. I loved that band, and was happy to see them included the film's '80s-heavy soundtrack.
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Jan 2009 | 5:49 pm Pogue goes rogueHow dare he. Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jan 2009 | 5:01 pm Clever tech cartoons of 2008
Sadly, this one will be come apt this year, probably. Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jan 2009 | 4:49 pm British police may remotely hack into personal computers and e-mail without warrantBritain's Home Office will allow police to remotely hack into anyone's computer without a warrant. From the Times: The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room. The move follows a green light from the European Union, and also permits British police to access U.K. residents' computers at the behest of investigators from other countries. This could allow the British to conduct searches on behalf of local agencies bound by more restrictive policies, sharing the results back with them. I've been talking folks in the U.K about this, and I think their opinion sums up why no-one there takes this sort of thing seriously. Americans assume a level of competence in bureaucracy, no matter how disorganized its visible operations. The British, however, believe their civil service and police are institutionally stupid, barely capable of executing their basic functions. So the Brits simply can't take seriously the idea that assigning police more powers will affect much of anything.
Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 4 Jan 2009 | 3:54 pm Is AppLoop Fading Already?
Last October, the startup came out with the App Generator, a nifty tool that turned any online publication with an RSS feed into a separate iPhone application. Now, we’re hearing rumors that the startup is in trouble, and they appear to hold some truth. For one, the company’s website has been down for the past two days. Worse, a quick glance on Twitter suggests that the service’s downtime is also causing iPhone apps using AppLoop libraries to crash. We would hate to see the young company fade away, so we’re hoping this is a technical glitch which is simply taking a lot of time to repair. But the two startup’s founders are eerily silent about the downtime on their blogs and Twitter accounts, so it might be idle hope. We’ve contacted AppLoop and will update this post accordingly as soon as we get some insight on what’s happening. Update: after an e-mail from co-founder Eric Kerr, we’re putting the company in the deadpool as they effectively had to shut the service down ‘for a variety of financial and legal based reasons’. Kerr claims users have been sent an e-mail several weeks ago and that some might not have received it. I’m not so sure, but I definitely think it’s bad form not to put a message on your website or blog about the demise of your company. (Hat tip to Philip Roy for the heads up) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. Source: TechCrunch | 4 Jan 2009 | 3:22 pm Facebook Quietly Pulls Polls (Update)
Update: Facebook has acknowledged putting Facebook Polls on hold following a technical migration last October which raised some questions internally about the priority for the product. They advise users to switch to one of the many polling applications available on the service.
When Facebook Polls launched back in June 2007, we called it a dream product for brand marketers and market researchers. Users could create a poll and target users based gender, age, location or profile keyword. Facebook charged a variable fee based on how quickly you wanted results, and based on how many results you wanted and how much you were wiling to pay per result. Prices ranged from $.10 to $1.00 per data point, plus an initial $5 insertion fee, and the polls appeared in Facebook users’ news feed so more people could become aware of the service.
Back then, Facebook had only 20+ million users on the social network - it has more than six times that amount today - and Polls seemed like a great way to monetize the appeal and engagement of Facebook’s user based on demographics. On the other hand, there was some criticism regarding the pricing and the fact that Facebook Polls delivered statistically insignificant results. Anyone care to take a wild guess why they decided to pull the service? (I have contacted Facebook PR and will update this post if and when I get word back.) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 Source: TechCrunch | 4 Jan 2009 | 11:34 am SkyGrid To Offer Free Version Of Real Time News Service. Future Of News Aggregation?
The paid Skygrid service lets users personalize and filter the real time news stream from blogs and traditional new sites, and it also tries to detect “sentiment” via an algorithm that guesses what the tone of the article is. That’s a big plus for traders trying to make quick decisions on which way the market is going. Publications and authors are also ranked by authority. But now, we’ve learned, the company is preparing to offer a free version of the service that anyone can use. The paid version is really only attractive to private equity funds and individual traders that need a jump on the news to get better returns on stock trades. Few others are going to pay $500/month for a premium news service. The free version, though, may be the future of news aggregation. Our understanding is that there is little attempt to cluster news items as Google News and TechMeme do to try and rank stories. Rather, it presents a personalized, filtered stream based on company, sector, topic and industry settings you make. In the future you may go to sites like Google News and TechMeme to see what the important stories of the day are. But you’ll go to sites like SkyGrid to monitor all the important news around topics you care deeply about. As a blogger, I really look forward to the new service. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Source: TechCrunch | 4 Jan 2009 | 10:53 am
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Some last minute grist for the Macworld rumor mill: 
At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this - previous lists: 
So you finally got the HDTV you wanted for the holidays, but now the sound seems a bit wimpy. Sure, you could always use the speakers on the TV itself, but that’s boring, and could definitely sound a lot better. The upgrade to Blu-ray might be a pain as well, you need to buy the expensive player, then start a new collection. What about your old DVDs? They also deserve a place in your home theater.
If you’re a regular IM user with an iPhone, chances are you’ve heard of 
When 
We got a tip that Facebook Polls, the social networking service’s business tool that enabled anyone to create a paid poll targetting a pre-defined group of users, is no longer available. The 
New York/Silicon Valley based 
