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Get video games instantly with Amazon.comFROM GAMERTELL - Amazon has gotten into the digital video game download business, and now is offering over 600 games for direct download. To get people started, Amazon is offering full versions of Build-a-Lot, Jewel Quest II and The Scruffs for free. MORE » Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 10 Feb 2009 | 6:21 pm SmartShopper Electronics rolls out improved grocery list gadgetSection: Gadgets / Other, Household
The grocery gadget, which can be affixed to a wall or refrigerator, allows users to speak grocery items and errands into the unit where its software organizes the information into specific categories. The shopper then prints the list and enjoys a more organized, efficient trip to the grocery store. Overview of the SmartShopper Deluxe Grocery AssistantIn days past, shoppers affixed a paper grocery list to a wall or refrigerator, or wrote their list on a piece of scrap paper. The result was a disorganized list that caused the shopper to spend wasted time going from aisle to aisle in the grocery store. SmartShopper Electronics’ SmartShopper Deluxe Grocery Assistant aims to change the disorganization associated with haphazard grocery lists by offering numerous features including:
The SmartShopper Deluxe Grocery List Assistant runs on four AA batteries and prints the grocery list on thermal paper, thus no need for ink replacements. Read: [Business Wire] Full Story » | Written by Daniel J. Gansle for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 10 Feb 2009 | 5:32 pm Obama orders review of cyber securityPresident Barack Obama on Monday ordered a 60-day review of the nation's cybersecurity to examine how federal agencies use technology to protect secrets and data. Obama said former Bush...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Feb 2009 | 1:47 pm FAA says Hackers broke into agency computersHackers broke into the Federal Aviation Administration's computer system last week, accessing the names and Social Security numbers of 45,000 employees and retirees. The agency said in aSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Feb 2009 | 1:45 pm Yet more WinMo 6.5 screenshots
Source: CrunchGear | 10 Feb 2009 | 1:42 pm Yet more WinMo 6.5 screenshots
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies Source: MobileCrunch | 10 Feb 2009 | 1:42 pm How To Shoot Close-Up With Any Lens
Did you know that almost every SLR lens you own is a macro lens? Sure, you might actually have a specialty, close-focusing objective, usually a zoom of some kind which will allow you to take shots a few inches from your subject. If so, great. Go snap some pics. If not, you can press pretty much any lens to the task. All you need to do is to unscrew it, flip it 180º and hold it in front of the camera's lens-hole. That's it. Of course, there are a few extras tips to make things easier, but the principle is simple -- mount the lens backwards and it will focus to within a few inches of the front end. Before we get onto the more substantial hacks, there are a few precautions you need to take. The biggest problem will be dust. With film cameras this wasn't a problem -- the "sensor" was renewed every time you wound the film to a new frame. With digicams dust can be a real problem so make sure you blow the front and back elements of the lens clean before each reversal, and avoid dusty and drafty places. Second, and only a problem for those who stay in program mode all the time, is the exposure. The easiest way is to take the exposure reading with the lens still mounted on the camera and enter those settings in manual mode. If you have a camera which can use the aperture ring for setting the aperture, enable this -- you'll then be able to actually make use of the light meter when the lens is de-coupled. Last is focus. Fancy, purpose made reversing rings may include a bellows for changing the distance between lens and camera to enable focusing. For us, with our ghetto hacks, the easiest way is to move the camera. Get in close and look through the viewfinder. Slowly move back and forth and you'll see parts of the image snap in and out of focus. At these distances, and with your lens wide open, the depth of field is tiny and accurate focusing is critical. It also makes for pretty dramatic shots. So, the hold-the-lens-in-front-of-the-camera method works great. But if you want something a little more stable, try this great little hack from the excellent DIY Photography. It uses a body cap (the plastic cover that came with your camera) and a filter ring (with the glass punched out):
Cut a hole in the body cap, glue the filter ring to the front and you're done. One side will mount on the camera, the other screws into the filter thread on the lens. This will keep out the dust and leave your hands free, but remember to be careful with the rear element of the lens, now out in the air. So, go ahead. Unless you're getting fancy, you can try this right now without even a strip of gaffer tape (although that would work, too). the picture at the top of the post was taken with a Nikon D700 with a 50mm, ƒ1.8 lens held in front. The slightly blurred picture below is of a bowl of seeds in the kitchen.
You can easily see the shallow depth of field here. In fact, I made this even worse by actually tilting the lens in front of the camera. It's hit or miss, but you can get passable tilt-shift effects when you're lucky. And one further tip -- set the camera to show the images on the LCD screen immediately and automatically. I didn't and I had to keep hitting the button with the tip of my nose. Post the results to the Gadget Lab Flickr group See Also: Source: Gizmodo | 10 Feb 2009 | 1:40 pm Qwest profit falls 49 pct in 4Q
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 Ars Technica | Google adds ActiveSync to accommodate iPhone, Win Mobile NetworkWorld.com - By John Fontana , Network World , 02/10/2009 Google Monday announced that it is adding support for Microsoft's ActiveSync to Google Sync, which will give iPhone and Windows Mobile offline access to their Google calendars and Gmail contacts from their ... Is Google Sync a shot at MobileMe? Google Sync Beta Uses ... |
 dBTechno | Study: Birds shifting north; global warming cited The Associated Press - WASHINGTON (AP) - When it comes to global warming, the canary in the coal mine isn't a canary at all. It's a purple finch. Global Warming Is Forcing Birds To Stay North In Winter Study: Warm Weather Has Birds Staying North |
AFP - India's largest software exporter Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and US networking giant Cisco Systems announced an alliance Tuesday to help their customers build next-generation data centres.
The Nikkei, Japan’s biggest business newspaper, is reporting today that Nintendo bought 40,000-sq.-meter of land in Kyoto to build new research and development facilities. Late last year, the company paid $140 million for the site, which used to be a golf driving range.
The new R&D center is located near Nintendo’s world headquarters in downtown Kyoto. A construction date hasn’t been set yet and Nintendo also didn’t say what exactly the new facilities will be used for.
For much of 2008, the big ad conglomerates seemed unaffected by the global slowdown. But that had to stop sometime: Omnicom Group (OMC) just announced that its fourth-quarter revenue and earnings dropped 7% and 13.7%, respectively.
From the barebones press release that Omnicom issued, it’s difficult to get a read on just how off the ad markets really are: The giant holding company hasn’t broken out it results by industry (advertising vs. pr, etc), and crucially, it hasn’t broken out its organic growth rate — ie, how the company would have performed without recent acquisitions. [UPDATE: Reuters says organic growth dropped 2.3%, though I can't see where they got that figure] Hoping to get more of that during the company’s 830 earnings call and will report back if there’s anything interesting.
Here's the way to get your ad shown free -- make it awesome. Here we see Tech Restore hawking its Modbook upgrade program, a $1150 service which adds a touch screen to your MacBook while simultaneously rendering it useless by removing the keyboard.
The twist is that the video shows the whole process in stop motion video. Initially, I was entranced. And then I started to see how similar this is to the rather easy keyboard replacement on a MacBook, or the hard drive swap-out in an iBook.
We're not sure just how much the 256-level, pressure sensitive touch screen costs, but we doubt its more than a couple hundred dollars. And given that the mod is available as a swift overnight service, that $1150 is starting to look pretty steep. In fact, you could buy a second MacBook for that, complete with a keyboard.
Product page [Tech Restore]
See Also:
 DailyTech | Kaspersky Customer Database Exposed by Hackers DailyTech - Although there are a lot of high-profile hacker intrusions these days, it normally doesn't happen to security companies... but it recently did to Kaspersky Security firm Kaspersky Security has been left embarrassed after a hacker informed them that a ... Kaspersky Web Site Hacked With SQL Injection Kaspersky: no personal information lifted during web hack |
Today, it is the turn of both Canon and Panasonic, tweaking the G10 and the G1 respectively (and simultaneously showing the fun ambiguities of camera model numbers).
The compact G10 gets a fix for a rather rare but quite drastic problem, only reproducible if you align the stars just so. If you are shooting RAW (and you should be) at the continuous setting, at ISO 1600, only the first frame of the burst will come out right. Subsequent pictures will have a heavy magenta cast. The Version 1.0.2.0 update fixes this, but check your serial number to see if you need it (instructions in the link, but if the fifth digit is either 1 or 0, you need the update).
Panasonic's update for the DMC-G1 is a little more mundane, fixing some white balance issues, a problem with flash reliability when shooting in cold places and the actually rather useful ability to write picture back to the memory card from a computer via USB cable (this last is Europe-only -- apparently it already worked everywhere else.
G1 Update [Panasonic]
G10 Update [Canon]
See Also:
 ITProPortal | Standing Out in the App Store Crowd TechNewsWorld - By Jim Offner iPhone users are crazy about all the slick new apps they can uncover at the App Store, but the size of the catalog means that most developers -- and their precious creations -- are languishing in the cobwebby corners. I’m sorry Dave: HAL 9000 finally comes to the iPhone Apple App Store developers look to next level |
Silicon Valley start-up Trackle.com is launching the public beta of its personalized Google Alerts to track pretty much everything in an internet user’s life. Trackle’s technology and interface is innovative and disarmingly comprehensive. It provides real-time personalized RSS feeds of the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, how much a user’s house value is down this week, updated job listings, sports scores and much more.
The breadth and specificity of Trackle’s information is what differentiates itself from other RSS tracking applications like Google Alerts, Yotify and Notify.me. Trackle doesn’t just search for keywords, it incorporates change into the keywords and provides up-to-date, highly customized information about ever-fluctuating internet content. For example, if a user is eyeing a camera on sale at Amazon.com but only wants to spend $200, Trackle will monitor the sale and provide you updates of when the camera price reaches $200. Trackle keeps all of this information on the user’s personalized site but the user can also choose to receive the real-time alerts via SMS and e-mail. Imagine if a user is bidding on an Ebay item; Trackle claims to give real-time price updates on an auctioned item. For free.
So who’s behind this nifty idea? Trackle was founded by Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Pavan Nigam and technology executive Naveen Saxea. Nigam was the founder of Healtheon (a health care start-up that merged with WebMD in 1999) and Cendura (a start-up that was acquired by Computer Associates in 2006). Trackle, who has received seed funding by NEA (New Enterprise Associates) and other angel investors, hopes to morph into “the PayPal of tracking systems” by having a “Trackle” button on websites, such as retail sites, to allow a user to track content instantaneously.
Trackle has already started thinking towards the future by incorporating elements of social networking into the interface. For example, a user can Tweet a Trackle update via Twitter to friends and users can also share their Trackle updates with accepted friends.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
LEDs are kind of like the integrated circuit of the flashlight world -- they are so tiny that they can be squeezed into just about anything -- you no longer need to worry about big incandescent bulbs or D-Cell batteries. The downside is that this kind of thinking leads us to all kinds of badly designed junk (I'm looking at you, USB thumb drives).
Fortunately, the folks at Sahalie are hawking a very useful LED lamp, a tiny glowing light built into a cord lock, the cord clamps found on jackets and bags of all kinds. The name you can probably guess. It's called the Cord Lock Light.
The little $10 widget hangs from your coat doing the exact same clothes-fastening job that a regular dumb clamp would do. But when you need to read a map, or find a keyhole, or dig your iPod from the bottom of your bag, it's there for you. It's even water resistant, for use in a bar.
The obvious next step for this tech is the Fly Zipper LED, for safely aiming streams whilst seeking relief in darkened alleyways on those long, long walks back from the pub.
Product page [Sahalie via Oh Gizmo!]
This Onion video, "Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work," may be the single most insightful critique of gadgets and gadget-marketing I've ever seen. This is the apotheosis of imaginary gadgets. (NSFW if your employer doesn't like cursing)
Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
One year before I dropped onto this earth, Sanyo was demonstrating this astonishing human washing machine at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan, in 1970 AD. The Ultrasonic Bath is a giant, six foot high contraption into which the victim must climb (yes, using a ladder).
Once settled into place, the lucky user will be bombarded by various cycles, much like a carwash -- pulsing water jets, a rain of plastic golf balls ("massage") and an ultrasonically stimulated mist of steam. After this, air-jets will dry your moistest parts and then the body is disinfected with infrared and ultraviolet rays.
Stunning. The entire cycle lasted 15 minutes and all the while voyeurs at the show could peek through the plexiglass plate on the side, something doubtless intended to be removed from a production model.
Alas, the production model never was. Perhaps it was because nobody could fit a tub the size of a mobile-suit robot into their bathroom (especially in cramped Tokyo) or perhaps it was the cost -- subsequent industrial versions for sprucing up oldsters in retirement homes went for $50,000.
Ultrasonic Bath: Human washing machine [Pink Tentacle via Neatorama]
 BBC News | Amazon Hopes to Kindle ... InternetNews.com - The e-reader gets a sleek overhaul and a handful of new features. But some observers say the moves won't help Kindle become a mainstream phenomenon. Amazon's Kindle 2: No iPod for Books Why did Amazon downplay the most important part of Kindle 2? |
I hate IResQ
(Thanks, Meredith!)
Clarion instills good work habits, good artistic sensibilities, and good professional attitudes in its graduates, and has served as a springboard for the careers of writers like Bruce Sterling, Octavia Butler, Tobias Buckell, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jeff Vendermeer, and many others.
I've been privileged to attend, teach and oversee Clarion. It's one of the best shortcuts I know for promising writers looking to turn their passion into a career.
The 2009 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' WorkshopThe 2009 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop
June 28 through August 8, 2009 at University of California, San Diego
2009 Writers in Residence:
Holly Black
Larissa Lai
Robert Crais
Kim Stanley Robinson
Elizabeth Hand
Paul Park
Clarion West (similar workshop, in Seattle)
(Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer as a Director of the nonprofit Clarion Foundation, which oversees the workshop)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Companies using Twitter for commercial purposes may soon start getting charged for that activity, according to an interview British trade magazine Marketing (part of BrandRepublic) held with co-founder Biz Stone.
This is what Stone reportedly said:
“We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”
No big surprises there, as this is often cited as one of the most obvious moves Twitter could make to start generating revenue, although many are expecting more from the startup who has become notorious for its lack of an apparent business model even after nearly 3 years of existence. Stone also said they will not start charging individual users, and that the move could “create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool.”
Stone did not give any details regarding pricing or the specific way Twitter would go about charging users and for what exactly. As a reminder: the startup has raised $20 million in venture capital to date and recently turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook.
One of the most recent examples of companies using Twitter for commercial purposes is Dell, who reportedly made $1 million in sales during the holidays via the micro-sharing utility, and recently started giving discounts exclusively to its followers.
We’ll see more of this type of behavior in the future beyond any shred of doubt, but I’m wondering what exactly is considered as ‘commercial usage’ by Twitter management: does it mean any way of promoting a product or service or only when there’s sales activity connected to the corporate accounts? And will companies be prepared to pay up for use of the service at all?
Marketing got in touch with Bob Pearson, VP of communities and conversations at Dell, with that exact question and got a telling response: “If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.”
Update: as Peter Kafka points out in comments, there was good article two days ago in New York Magazine which reveals a little more of where Twitter is headed.
(Picture from Profy, hat tip to Matt from Made by Many)
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
As a precautionary measure I rebooted each core just to make sure it wasn't anything silly. After the cores came back online they instantly went back to 100% fabric CPU usage and started shedding connections again. So slowly I started going through all the switch ports on the cores, trying to isolate where the traffic was originating. The problem was all the cabinet switches were showing 10 Gbit/sec of traffic, making it very hard to isolate. Through the process of elimination I was finally able to isolate the problem down to a pair of switches... After shutting the downlink ports to those switches off, the network recovered and everything came back. I fully believe the switches in that cabinet are still sitting there attempting to send 20Gbit/sec of traffic out trying to do something — I just don't know what yet.Slashdot.org Self-Slashdotted (via Hack the Planet)
Century KD25/35PRO HDD Duplicator
(via Red Ferret)
Heidi Kenney's caterpillar pancakes are utter perfection -- a cuteness of great and weighty proportion, beckoning from the breakfast tray. Seriously, I'm a sucker for any breakfast that smiles back at me (my folks used to make me smiling pancakes with faces made out of banana slices and raisins), and this is the zenith of the form.
foodies
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
Those of you waiting for Apple to fix Mobile Me, forget it -- Google has stepped up to fill the gap.
Apple's "cloud computing" service got off to a bad start last year and never really recovered. IPhone users who hoped the service would push contact, calendar and email updates to their device found that switching on Mobile Me did little more than drain their battery quickly.
Enter Google. The search giant has now released a beta contact and calendar sync service for the iPhone, the Blackberry, the Windows Mobile, the S60 and various flavors of Nokia and Sony Ericsson non-smart phones. This obviously beats out the Apple version which only works with the iPhone.
Google Mobile Sync will push and pull any changes to contacts or calendars over the air. On the iPhone these occupy the regular calendar and address book applications, meaning that things will work just as they normally do. It's all done via an Exchange server at Google's end, which means that things should actually function properly.
Add to this Google Calendar's recent move offline for Google Apps users and you start to see that this is actually a great alternative to the Apple version. And most important of all, those icons are way cute.
I'm in the middle of setting things up. If you hear nothing from me, assume that it went well. If things break, there will be a rant immediately following these words.
Product page [Google]
Online classifieds service Oodle is reporting decent growth in the first month of 2009 with over 10 million visits (both Quantcast and Compete reflect a significant traffic surge). Add to that the fact that social networking juggernaut Facebook has selected the company to power its classified listings application and you know they’re on to something over at the San Mateo, CA-based startup.
Its investors seem to agree, as they have just injected more capital in Oodle: Greylock Partners, JAFCO Ventures and Redpoint Ventures are adding another $5.6 million to the startup’s war chest, bringing the total amount invested in the company to $21.6 million.
Oodle is already powering the classified listings for MySpace, and the roll-out for the Facebook Platform is supposed to start this quarter, effectively replacing an in-house solution (Facebook Marketplace) in favor of a product developed by an outside company, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a recent interview with Michael Arrington.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Just after he got the job 10 days ago, BoomTown got the chance to chitty-chat a bit with Scott Moore (pictured here), the former Yahoo media chief, who is returning to Microsoft, where he will lead its online content efforts for the U.S for its MSN online service.
Apparently, you can go home again!
It’s a touché tale, because it feels like Moore was pretty much re-hired by MSN exec Greg Nelson (also in on the conversation with Moore) to give Yahoo a wallop where it really will hurt–its powerful content business, one of Yahoo’s few bright spots.
And to add another layer of irony, Moore replaced Jeff Dossett, who replaced Moore at Yahoo (YHOO), after Moore suddenly left the troubled online company late last year.
In our conversation, Nelson began talking first about the continued commitment of Microsoft (MSFT) to compete in the online media business, despite a lackluster record over the years.
“We are making a big bet with Scott, because he understands the key themes for us, which is that this is a scale business,” said Nelson (pictured here). “We all have a conviction that Microsoft has what it takes to compete in that arena.”
Moore agreed, noting that “very few companies have the scale that Microsoft has and you look at the size of the audience and the tools and great assets we can weave in and you realize the possibilities as the market is changing.”
But that scale has not helped Microsoft so far, although Moore argued that it still has a chance as the online content landscape changes.
By change, Moore posits that the Internet is now shifting from being a place to get news and information to becoming a primary entertainment medium.
“You can see that phenomena is somewhat in social media, the idea that it is not only about entertainment, but about making all kinds of choices through the Internet,” he said.
Because of Microsoft’s large audience, which still lags behind Yahoo and Time Warner (TWX) online service AOL, Moore thinks it has the opportunity to leverage the distribution strength with a variety of entertainment partners.
But he said he is not ruling out more original content from Microsoft.
“Most of it is still aggregated content, but MSN also has to think about having stuff no one else has,” Moore said. “You can make it, license it or partner.”
Both Moore and Nelson said it is important that the small amount of premium content is special, such as Microsoft’s deal with NBC during the Olympics.
“It’s a pyramid with the original and premium content on top,” said Nelson.
That does not mean going too far afield though. “I think we have to choose a spot where we already have a large audience and then program to keep them coming back,” said Moore. “It’s not doing something out whole cloth–that’s not the idea.”
That’s presumably the exact idea behind MSN’s launch of Wonderwall last week, a slick, standalone celebrity Web site (pictured here), designed to compete with AOL and Yahoo offerings.
Moore, who was involved with the creation of Yahoo’s top-ranked omg! pop culture site, was not part of the Wonderwall effort and he did try to tamp down the idea of going head-to-head with former colleagues at Yahoo.
“I have a lot of friends and a lot of great memories there, but it is also great to go back to my roots,” said Moore.
Nonetheless, he still managed to add he wanted to get MSN sites to top status as soon as possible. “When I got to Yahoo it was not #1,” he said.
Nelson said Microsoft was committed to content, even after a history of less-than-stellar results.
“Ideas are free, and so it is all about execution,” said Nelson. “What is our level of conviction? How committed is Microsoft? Very committed, because it’s the future of the company.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
By Ben Kuchera, Gaming Editor, Ars Technica
There are two types of people when it comes to the games-as-art debate: those who spend too much time and energy arguing one way or another, and those who ignore it altogether and simply create games that are art. Jenova Chen and thatgamecompany belong firmly in the second category, and after playing Flower to completion on the PS3, we can confirm that they have given us another game to talk about, puzzle over, and enjoy.
In Flower you control the wind, causing a trail of flower petals to fly around each level, gathering more petals to itself by touching flowers, which makes them blossom. Touch a group of flowers and a splash of color spreads out across the land. These transformations are oddly satisfying, as if you’re painting the landscape with a heavenly brush. The music also works with the graphics to create a soothing, evocative mood for the game. These aesthetic issues are only part of the story, however.
By James E. McWilliams, Fellow, Agrarian Studies Program, Yale
I’m sitting at my desk examining a $10.95 jar of South River Miso. The stuff is delicious, marked by a light, lemony tang. The packaging, by contrast, is a heavy-handed assurance of purity. The company is eager to tell me that the product I’ve purchased is certified organic, aged for three weeks in wood (sustainably harvested?), unpasteurized, made with “deep well water,” handcrafted, and—the designation that most piques my interest—GMO free.
GMO refers to “genetically modified organisms.” A genetically modified crop results from the laboratory insertion of a gene from one organism into the DNA sequence of another in order to confer an advantageous trait such as insect resistance, drought tolerance, or herbicide resistance. Today almost 90 percent of soy crops and 80 percent of corn crops in the United States sprout from genetically engineered seeds. Forty-five million acres of land worldwide contain genetically engineered crops. From the perspective of commercial agriculture, the technology has been seamlessly assimilated into traditional farming routines.
By P.W. Singer, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
More than just conventional wisdom, it has become almost a cliché to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved “how technology doesn’t have a big place in any doctrine of future war,” as one security analyst told me in 2007. The American military efforts in those countries (or so the thinking goes) have dispelled the understanding of technology-dominated warfare that was prevalent just a few years ago—the notion that modern armed conflict would be fundamentally changed in the age of computers and networks.
It is true that Afghanistan and Iraq have done much to puncture that understanding of war. The vaunted theory, so beloved in the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon, of a “network-centric” revolution in military affairs can now be seen more clearly as a byproduct of the 1990s dotcom boom. The Internet has certainly affected how people shop, communicate, and date. Amid this ecstatic hype, it is not surprising that many security studies experts, both in and out of the defense establishment, latched onto the notion that linking up all our systems via electronic networks would “lift the fog of war,” allow war to be done on the cheap, and even allow the United States to “lock out” competition from the marketplace of war, much as they saw Microsoft doing to Apple at the time.
By Alana Semuels, Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times
Updated 4:43 p.m.: @OHHDL is back on Twitter, but it’s now labeled as “the UNOFFICIAL Twitter page of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.”
Some members of Twitter, the micro-blogging service, received a surprise over the weekend when they were informed that the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, had joined the site. “Dalai Lama (OHHDL) is now following your updates on Twitter,” the message read.
They bragged about it to friends, talked about spirituality and cracked jokes (”Can enlightenment be reached 140 char at a time?”). Agence-France Presse even banged out a news story about the Dalai Lama joining Twitter. By Sunday night, he (or is it He?) had attracted 13,000 new followers, an impressive number even for a guy who spiritually represents the whole Tibetan people.
By Felix Salmon, Contributing Editor, Condé Nast Portfolio
I’m not sure why the micropayments-as-the-savior-of-journalism meme seems to have taken off of late, but I’m glad there are lots of people trying to squash it: I’d particularly recommend Gabe Sherman and Clay Shirky. But in the case of Steve Brill’s “secret memo” on the subject, it’s worth responding to some of his specifics; a few points are worth making beyond those of David Cay Johnston.
First, Brill frames the question in an utterly bizarre manner, through the parent of a journalism student:
As one parent put it to me last fall, “why are you luring my daughter into something that will never pay her loans when she could go to work for McKinsey?” I have been trying to construct an answer for her.
The answer is simple: “madam, if your daughter wants to go work for McKinsey, she’s more than welcome to”. You want to make lots of money? Don’t become a journalist. In fact, if you’re the kind of person who would make a great management consultant, don’t become a journalist: the skillsets are just too different.
“We will enter Asia with the iPhone in 2008… we will one day enter China, we’re not saying when.” Apple COO Time Cook said that back in March of 2008 and it’s a good thing he declined to offer a more specific timeline. Because here we are nearly a year later and Apple (AAPL) still hasn’t managed to ink an iPhone deal with China’s largest mobile carrier, China Mobile. The companies have so far gone through three rounds of negotiations in the last 18 months, each one ending without a deal being reached. Talks have variously collapsed over both Apple’s iPhone revenue sharing plan and its subsidized plan, as well as issues of hardware localization. Now Interfax China claims there’s a new point of contention that’s hamstrung discussions: Apple’s App Store. Seems China Mobile doesn’t much care for the idea of Apple selling applications directly to its customers. Company CEO Wang Jianzhou fears that to do so might undermine its dominance of China’s mobile Internet industry and, perhaps more importantly, muck up China Mobile’s plans for an application store of its own. Said an Interfax China source, “Wang said China Mobile should operate the application store itself in order to maintain its advantage.”
And so the two companies will presumably continue to go round and round for the forseeable future. Unless, of course, Apple wises up and finds a more amenable carrier partner in China Unicom or China Telecom.
Japan gets solar parking spot for electric bikes
Perhaps pizza vending machines are why America is so fat
First look at Star Trek animation studio
Jauntify your Kindle 2 with jaunty jackets
Official: The Amazon Kindle 2
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
First off, there's the #3 man at Justice, Thomas Perrelli, accurately described by CNET as "beloved by the RIAA". Not only has this guy been on the wrong side in the courtroom, he's fingered as instrumental in convincing the Copyright Board to strangle Web radio in its crib by imposing impossible fee structures.RIAA Takes Over DoJ (Corante Copyfight)Then there's Neil MacBride, who used to be the Business Software Alliance's general counsel. The BSA, to its credit, hasn't been suing teenagers. Generally their name is associated with large-scale raids on companies that are mass-producing illegal copies of software. Still, it's an industry flak group.
Then there's the #2 man, currently slated to be David Ogden. If that name only rings a faint bell it's because you have to cast your mind back to Eldred v Ashcroft, the argument on whether retroactive copyright term extensions were legal. Sitting over there on Ashcroft's side? That's Mr. Odgen. For extra-bonus ick points, Ogden also was involved in defending the heinous COPA legislation, fortunately now dead and buried (but not forgotten).
The capper on this line-up of suspicious characters is Donald Verrilli, now up for Associate Deputy Attorney General. This specimen of legal acumen is front and center in the Cartel's jihad, having appeared for Viacom when it sued YouTube, for the RIAA against Jammie Thomas, single mother. And if we peer back a little farther, we find Verrilli's dirty fingerprints on MGM v Grokster.
Section: Audio, Portable Audio, Video, Portable Video, Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Web, Google
Archos, a company mainly known for their PMPs, is planning to enter the smartphone market with their Internet Media Tablets (“IMT”) by employing Google’s Android OS.
If you are familiar with Archos’ IMT features, then you will be pleased to know that they would remain the same in an Android smartphone. To recap, here are some core features that would be present in this smartphone: 5-inch screen, Adobe Flash and Flash Video support, unrestricted access to TV, movies, music, games, photos, TV recording and HD playback, 500GB storage, 7 hour video playback battery life, and it runs on a 3.5G 7.2Mb/s HSUPA. Essentially, it is similar to the Archos 5g Internet Media Tablet with the main difference of voice support and the Android OS.
In addition, Archos plans to include the OMAP 3 platform from Texas Instruments. By using this sort of a platform, it allows for the processor to use less power, while not compromising performance. While not much more is known about the smartphone at this time, expect for it to be ready sometime in Q3 of this year.
Read [Archos Press Release]
Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
IBM will be unveiling a number of new cloud computing technologies at its CIO Leadership Exchange in Shanghai and its Pulse Conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday with networking giant and Cisco-rival Juniper Networks by its side. We reported last summer that Juniper is doing a good job of making inroads on Cisco's turf, and this partnership with IBM is a sign of Juniper's continued strength in the cloud computing sphere, an area where Cisco is also hoping to make its mark.
Sure, all these immersive 3-D worlds and photorealistic graphics in videogames today are mind-blowing, but it wasn't long ago that all we needed was some beeps and flashing lights to be entertained for hours.
We want to see the electronic games that stole your imagination without the aid of a gaming console or a computer. You might not want to go back and play them again, but they deserve a hero's sendoff into the sunset.
What's your favorite forgotten electronic game?
Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best forgotten electronic game (with photo if possible) and to vote for your favorite among the other submissions. If we like your submission, we'll include it in a gallery on Wired.com.
If you submit a photo, it must be your own or in Creative Commons, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, so that other readers know what they're looking at.
We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. Using an online photo service that requires that you log in will not work. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it again, and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).
Please bookmark this page, send it to your friends and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!
Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your forgotten electronic game.
(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)
Guilty. I feel guilty that I have a blog and haven't contributed to it for seven months. Guilty that all my pals on Facebook post cool pictures, while the last shots I uploaded were of Fourth of July fireworks—from 2007. Guilty that I haven't Dugg anything since, well, ever.
It's not that I don't like social networking—I adore it. I love the way it transforms my ragged circle of contacts and acquaintances into something approaching a community. Every site becomes a personalized small town where strangers don't stay that way for long. I'm fascinated by the quirks and preferences my "friends" reveal through comments, status reports, and alerts.
That's where my guilt comes in. Because of time constraints and just plain reticence, I worry that I'm snatching morsels from the information food bank without making any donations. Instead of healthy, reciprocal participation, I'm flirting with parasitic voyeurism.
So, driven by guilt, I try to pitch in. I post Facebook status reports, send iPhone snapshots to Flickr, link my Netflix queue with FriendFeed. But as my participation increases, I invariably suffer another psychic downside of social networking: remorse.
The more I upload the details of my existence, even in the form of random observations and casual location updates, the more I worry about giving away too much. It's one thing to share intimacies person-to-person. But with a community? Creepy.
NYU lecturer and Wired correspondent Clay Shirky notes in his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, that sharing personal information on social networks is not the same as broadcasting. It's more like dishing with close buddies in a mall food court.
The latest source of my dilemma is Twitter, which lets you spit out real-time reports about what you're thinking and doing. It's fun to track the digital ejaculations of selected Twitterati. But a couple thousand people signed up unsolicited to follow my tweets. And I feel guilty when not serving this hungry crowd—remorseful when I am.
Since I don't know many in this mob, I try not to be personally revealing. Still, no matter how innocuous your individual tweets, the aggregate ends up being the foundation of a scary-deep self-portrait. It's like a psychographic version of strip poker—I'm disrobing, 140 characters at a time.
Every so often, I get a glimpse of the effects of tossing all this personal confetti to the winds. In November, I attended an industry conference, and so many people congratulated me on the Phillies World Series win that I felt like Chase Utley. How did they know I'm a Phillies fan? Duh, they read my dispatches from Citizen's Bank Park during game four. And if they're still following, they also know about my son's college plans, my recent travel itinerary, and the fact that I filed this column late.
We hear a lot about privacy violations by Big Brother and Little Brother. But what if the fault lies not in our siblings but in ourselves? For a reality check, I called Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and an utter hawk when it comes to protecting personal data. He told me to relax. "One aspect of privacy is the ability to project yourself as you choose," he says. Services like Facebook and Twitter are strictly opt-in, so as long as the information isn't divvied out to marketers, Rotenberg is OK with it: "That is freedom."
So now I'm feeling guilty—for being remorseful. Maybe I should complain about it in my next tweet.
Want to add to Steven Levy's already heavy psychic burden? Follow his comment stream on Twitter at twitter.com/stevenjayl.
Email steven_levy@wired.com.
: Photo: Coors BrewingBeer and gadgets have gone hand in hand since Babylonian brewmeisters first used clay pots to ferment their mash. In the millennia since, technological innovations have often accompanied beermaking, and occasionally improved it. Some were quite important. The recycling breakthrough invention of the aluminum can comes to mind, as well as the double-barreled beer hat. We look at some of the most notable modern beer conveniences.
Left: A couple of weeks ago, drunks, er, beer connoisseurs celebrated the 50th anniversary of the seamless, recyclable aluminum beer can. Coors released it on Jan. 24, 1959, after two years in development. The 7-ounce can launched the recycling era, allowed beer to be packaged without pasteurization and reduced the metallic aftertaste of beer in cans.
Coors historians say the environmental-waste issue was a huge reason for William K. Coors' push for the can, but financial incentives played their part. A better-tasting, fresher product meant the company could restart the beer market on its terms, and it lowered shipping costs. Within a few years, every major beermaker used aluminum cans.
: Photo: MJLphoto.com/FlickrWe don't know who came up with the beer helmet, but invention was true genius and deserves the eternal gratitude of sports fans around the world. The design is simple: Place one beer can on a plastic or metal harness on opposite sides of a drinker's helmet and attach plastic tubes to each. The user then gets to sip happily, while others fake indifference to hide their raging jealousy.
: Photo courtesy AsahiThe rise of microbreweries in the last 20 years has opened up the global market and intensified the competition with the big legacy breweries. It has also forced breweries to come up with crazy new ideas to keep customers. Enter the chatty, R2D2-like robot from Japan called the Asahi Refrigerator Robot. The Asahi brewery developed 5,000 of them in 2006 for a promotion of its new malt beer, and customers played a public lottery to win one.
The robot is as cute as Wall-E, but instead of wandering around an abandoned planet making cubes of trash, it does something useful — it pours you a beer. Each robot refrigerator belly is packed with six cans of beer and two chilled mugs. When the owner presses a button, the robot puts out a can, opens it and pours the beer, usually without spilling too much. It's as slow and as talkative as any neighborhood bartender, and you have to manually place the mug on the robot's hand, because, well, what did you expect from a beer company giveaway?
: Two German research professors recently created the first beer coaster with embedded accelerometers, pressure sensors and a radio transmitter to determine when a glass of beer needs to be refilled. Hard to believe, but this might not be first time educators with long hours to fill and beer produce a crazy scheme.
Andreas Butz, from the University of Munich, and Michael Schmitz, from Saarland University, created a mat that measures the weight of the glass precisely and notifies the staff when it's ready for another round. The researchers say the mat costs $100, but they think it could improve service wait times significantly.
They'd like to see it be used for fun interactive bar games. For example, in a Jeopardy-style pub game, a contestant could "ring-in" the answer by shaking the coaster vigorously. Sounds embarrassing, but it could work. The only setback we can think of is that it's too probably too heavy to be flipped through the air like a Frisbee after a long night of revelry.
: In Tokyo bars, malls and heavily trafficked areas, these machines come packed with motion-activated ads, interactive touchscreens and plenty of beer options. Often, the bar establishment provides a clean glass that a customer places on the machine's slot, and the machine takes it from there with style. A hooking mechanism secures the glass with a giant claw and tilts it 45 degrees for the optimal amount of foam. Using motion sensors, the machine can tell when the glass is full, and releases it softly on the beer mat.
: John Cornwell graduated from Duke University only a couple of years ago, but his beer-launching refrigerator has sent him to the top of the beer brotherhood. The mechanism can grab a beer from the fridge and toss it to him.
Cornwell's machine features an automatic elevator that pushes a beer can through a hole at the top (using a remote control), and when it gets to the tilted enclosure base, it slides securely into a catapult. Once in its clutch, the recoiled arm sends the can flying through the air up to 20 feet with a single push of a button.
According to Cornwell, it took him 150 hours and $400 to turn his small vanity fridge to an inspired tool for lazy men with heavy drinking habits. During development, he managed to bust up the walls in his home with holes, and almost destroyed one of his TVs.
Why didn't he just move his refrigerator closer to his La-Z-Boy?
: Photo courtesy The Beer MachineThe brew-your-own Beer Machine was almost as big a hit in the infomercial big-hair, big-boob circuit of the late 1980s as the Veg-O-Matic and the Ginsu knife. I can see you're skeptical, but let me break it down for you.
Created by brewer Michael Lewis to give at-home buyers a simple way to make their own beer, the Beer Machine had simple features: a pressure-release valve with a carbonation rig maintains correct CO2 levels and a dubious selection of packaged Beer Mixes. While we've heard that the beer tasted a bit flat, the brewing process was pretty simple. You just added some water into the cask, added the Beer Mix and then waited 7 to 10 days. In the meantime, of course, you could have made 20 trips to the corner store.
The Beer Machine was a staple of late-night infomercial TV in the 1980s. It's still available, and a Valentine's Day special has it for only $140.
: Robert Smith of Dresden, Germany, invented the wood-pulp coaster (known to collectors as "beer mats" in 1892. The first coaster, derived from an earlier invention, a wooden wagon-style box that was pushed along the bar, was made out of wood pulp. Smith heated and pressed the pulp to make flat "crackers" of sawdust, which made them somewhat flimsy. According to coaster collectibles, the first coasters were also thick, twice the size of the "classic" 1-mm coasters of today.
Companies started printing ad labels on coasters. (Before Prohibition, coasters mostly carried the names of the company that made them.)
The materials, sizes and shapes of coasters have changed over the years. Versions of cork, plastic, paper and even leather have been used. Shortly after World War II, coasters measured 4 inches square, but by the 1980s, most were merely 3 inches square, and thinner.
: Photo: Bruce Tanner/Flickr A kegerator can be as simple as a refrigerator that's been stripped on the inside so it can accommodate a beer keg, with taps installed on the outside for easy dispensing. But that's like saying a car is basically a motorized vehicle with four wheels. In reality, this staple of fraternities and dorm rooms everywhere is a canvas for its owner's personality. Whether it's covered in bumper stickers, spray-painted with anarchist slogans or pimped out like a low-rider, nothing says "I'm a guy and I love beer" like a kegerator in the living room.
: Photo courtesy Cooper CoolerThe $80 Cooper Cooler doesn't use rocket science — it basically bathes your beer can or wine bottle in ice water — but it does so with speed and aplomb. Dump in two trays of ice cubes, two cups of water and a beer can, and turn it on. The cooler rapidly spins the can, chilling it to 43 degrees within a minute without agitating it. Now that's cool!
: The flat-top can style popularized by Krueger in 1935 had no easy-access openings. The flat metal top had to be opened with a rudimentary tool called "the church key," a big metal hook that was at first almost 5 1/2 inches long, and 3/4 inches wide. Not comfortably pocketable. The design stayed the same for 25 years, until Ohio engineer Ermal Fraze came up with the pull tab in 1959.
Fraze figured out how to notch an embedded opening that would stay on until it was pulled, wouldn't require much strength and wouldn't blow up from internal pressure. While he succeeded in those aspects (with 75 percent of all cans getting the pull-tab treatment by 1965), the tab had other flaws he didn't anticipate: Its sharp edges resulted in injuries to drinkers, including cut fingers and lips. The tabs were designed to be torn off, so it was easy to discard them on the street. The debris resulted in wildlife choking deaths and injured feet on beaches.
In response to the safety problems, Daniel F. Cudzik invented the Stay Tab can in 1975, and Louisville's Falls City Brewing Company was the first brewery to feature them. The stay tab worked by forcing the pull tab into a "scored" area in the lid that leveraged the pulling force of the user, but without completely separating the tab from the can. By the mid-1980s almost all cans had a stay tab.
: Photo courtesy Tempra TechnologyLast year, Tempra Technology announced the first beer-bottle apparatus that cools a liquid without external necessities like fridges, ice or the icy stare of the girl sitting on the corner stool.
The 16-ounce Instant Cool Can reduces a beer's temperature by 30 degrees Fahrenheit within three minutes by displacing its heat to an insulated heat-sink chamber at the bottom of the container. Tempera Technology boast that you just twist the bottom of the can, and then "the all natural desiccant contained within a vacuum draws the heat from the beverage through the evaporator into an insulated heat-sink container." It's science!
But there's a downside. Because the heat-sink apparatus takes up about a third of the volume inside the can, you only get 10.5 ounces of beer out of a pint-size can. That means you'll likely pay more for the benefit of using the tech. But hey, it sure beats drinking warm beer.
Foster Beers is in talks with Tempra to offer the self-chilled beer within the next year, Tempra says.
See Also:
Craft Brewers Reformulate Beer to Cope With Hop Shortage
This Green Beer's the Real Deal
1957: The foam ice chest is invented. By providing an alternative to the metal ice box, the new lighter material makes it easier to transport chilled soda and beer, and keep those 12-ounce curls moving.
Dow Chemical patented a foam substance known as Styrofoam in 1944. Trying to develop a wartime alternative to rubber, Dow research engineer Otis McIntire combined isobutylene and styrene — bringing to life a product used to produce or insulate everything from ice chests and basement walls to marine-buoyancy devices.
The styrofoam picnic cooler was a postwar brainchild. The first so-called "portable ice chest" received a U.S. patent in 1953. Coleman introduced its plastic-cased cooler in 1957, the same year Kellogg's produced what the cereal-maker called a "double milk-bottle cooler" to assist those with limited home refrigeration. Keeping milk fresh was the roadway to selling more cereal.
Milk, sure. Soda, sure. But really, it's the suds. Imagine picnics, fishing trips and bullfighting without coolers. They just wouldn't be cool.
So next time you're carrying one of those lightweight coolers to the beach, to a campsite, to a tailgate party or just to stash underneath your desk at work, lift a cold one to the one who made it cold: Otis McIntire. He's good enough for the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and he's good enough to toast.
Source: Various
: Photo: Coors BrewingBeer and gadgets have gone hand in hand since Babylonian brewmeisters first used clay pots to ferment their mash. In the millennia since, technological innovations have often accompanied beermaking, and occasionally improved it. Some were quite important. The recycling breakthrough invention of the aluminum can comes to mind, as well as the double-barreled beer hat. We look at some of the most notable modern beer conveniences.
Left: A couple of weeks ago, drunks, er, beer connoisseurs celebrated the 50th anniversary of the seamless, recyclable aluminum beer can. Coors released it on Jan. 24, 1959, after two years in development. The 7-ounce can launched the recycling era, allowed beer to be packaged without pasteurization and reduced the metallic aftertaste of beer in cans.
Coors historians say the environmental-waste issue was a huge reason for William K. Coors' push for the can, but financial incentives played their part. A better-tasting, fresher product meant the company could restart the beer market on its terms, and it lowered shipping costs. Within a few years, every major beermaker used aluminum cans.
: Photo: MJLphoto.com/FlickrWe don't know who came up with the beer helmet, but invention was true genius and deserves the eternal gratitude of sports fans around the world. The design is simple: Place one beer can on a plastic or metal harness on opposite sides of a drinker's helmet and attach plastic tubes to each. The user then gets to sip happily, while others fake indifference to hide their raging jealousy.
: Photo courtesy AsahiThe rise of microbreweries in the last 20 years has opened up the global market and intensified the competition with the big legacy breweries. It has also forced breweries to come up with crazy new ideas to keep customers. Enter the chatty, R2D2-like robot from Japan called the Asahi Refrigerator Robot. The Asahi brewery developed 5,000 of them in 2006 for a promotion of its new malt beer, and customers played a public lottery to win one.
The robot is as cute as Wall-E, but instead of wandering around an abandoned planet making cubes of trash, it does something useful — it pours you a beer. Each robot refrigerator belly is packed with six cans of beer and two chilled mugs. When the owner presses a button, the robot puts out a can, opens it and pours the beer, usually without spilling too much. It's as slow and as talkative as any neighborhood bartender, and you have to manually place the mug on the robot's hand, because, well, what did you expect from a beer company giveaway?
: Two German research professors recently created the first beer coaster with embedded accelerometers, pressure sensors and a radio transmitter to determine when a glass of beer needs to be refilled. Hard to believe, but this might not be first time educators with long hours to fill and beer produce a crazy scheme.
Andreas Butz, from the University of Munich, and Michael Schmitz, from Saarland University, created a mat that measures the weight of the glass precisely and notifies the staff when it's ready for another round. The researchers say the mat costs $100, but they think it could improve service wait times significantly.
They'd like to see it be used for fun interactive bar games. For example, in a Jeopardy-style pub game, a contestant could "ring-in" the answer by shaking the coaster vigorously. Sounds embarrassing, but it could work. The only setback we can think of is that it's too probably too heavy to be flipped through the air like a Frisbee after a long night of revelry.
: In Tokyo bars, malls and heavily trafficked areas, these machines come packed with motion-activated ads, interactive touchscreens and plenty of beer options. Often, the bar establishment provides a clean glass that a customer places on the machine's slot, and the machine takes it from there with style. A hooking mechanism secures the glass with a giant claw and tilts it 45 degrees for the optimal amount of foam. Using motion sensors, the machine can tell when the glass is full, and releases it softly on the beer mat.
: John Cornwell graduated from Duke University only a couple of years ago, but his beer-launching refrigerator has sent him to the top of the beer brotherhood. The mechanism can grab a beer from the fridge and toss it to him.
Cornwell's machine features an automatic elevator that pushes a beer can through a hole at the top (using a remote control), and when it gets to the tilted enclosure base, it slides securely into a catapult. Once in its clutch, the recoiled arm sends the can flying through the air up to 20 feet with a single push of a button.
According to Cornwell, it took him 150 hours and $400 to turn his small vanity fridge to an inspired tool for lazy men with heavy drinking habits. During development, he managed to bust up the walls in his home with holes, and almost destroyed one of his TVs.
Why didn't he just move his refrigerator closer to his La-Z-Boy?
: Photo courtesy The Beer MachineThe brew-your-own Beer Machine was almost as big a hit in the infomercial big-hair, big-boob circuit of the late 1980s as the Veg-O-Matic and the Ginsu knife. I can see you're skeptical, but let me break it down for you.
Created by brewer Michael Lewis to give at-home buyers a simple way to make their own beer, the Beer Machine had simple features: a pressure-release valve with a carbonation rig maintains correct CO2 levels and a dubious selection of packaged Beer Mixes. While we've heard that the beer tasted a bit flat, the brewing process was pretty simple. You just added some water into the cask, added the Beer Mix and then waited 7 to 10 days. In the meantime, of course, you could have made 20 trips to the corner store.
The Beer Machine was a staple of late-night infomercial TV in the 1980s. It's still available, and a Valentine's Day special has it for only $140.
: Robert Smith of Dresden, Germany, invented the wood-pulp coaster (known to collectors as "beer mats" in 1892. The first coaster, derived from an earlier invention, a wooden wagon-style box that was pushed along the bar, was made out of wood pulp. Smith heated and pressed the pulp to make flat "crackers" of sawdust, which made them somewhat flimsy. According to coaster collectibles, the first coasters were also thick, twice the size of the "classic" 1-mm coasters of today.
Companies started printing ad labels on coasters. (Before Prohibition, coasters mostly carried the names of the company that made them.)
The materials, sizes and shapes of coasters have changed over the years. Versions of cork, plastic, paper and even leather have been used. Shortly after World War II, coasters measured 4 inches square, but by the 1980s, most were merely 3 inches square, and thinner.
: Photo: Bruce Tanner/Flickr A kegerator can be as simple as a refrigerator that's been stripped on the inside so it can accommodate a beer keg, with taps installed on the outside for easy dispensing. But that's like saying a car is basically a motorized vehicle with four wheels. In reality, this staple of fraternities and dorm rooms everywhere is a canvas for its owner's personality. Whether it's covered in bumper stickers, spray-painted with anarchist slogans or pimped out like a low-rider, nothing says "I'm a guy and I love beer" like a kegerator in the living room.
: Photo courtesy Cooper CoolerThe $80 Cooper Cooler doesn't use rocket science — it basically bathes your beer can or wine bottle in ice water — but it does so with speed and aplomb. Dump in two trays of ice cubes, two cups of water and a beer can, and turn it on. The cooler rapidly spins the can, chilling it to 43 degrees within a minute without agitating it. Now that's cool!
: The flat-top can style popularized by Krueger in 1935 had no easy-access openings. The flat metal top had to be opened with a rudimentary tool called "the church key," a big metal hook that was at first almost 5 1/2 inches long, and 3/4 inches wide. Not comfortably pocketable. The design stayed the same for 25 years, until Ohio engineer Ermal Fraze came up with the pull tab in 1959.
Fraze figured out how to notch an embedded opening that would stay on until it was pulled, wouldn't require much strength and wouldn't blow up from internal pressure. While he succeeded in those aspects (with 75 percent of all cans getting the pull-tab treatment by 1965), the tab had other flaws he didn't anticipate: Its sharp edges resulted in injuries to drinkers, including cut fingers and lips. The tabs were designed to be torn off, so it was easy to discard them on the street. The debris resulted in wildlife choking deaths and injured feet on beaches.
In response to the safety problems, Daniel F. Cudzik invented the Stay Tab can in 1975, and Louisville's Falls City Brewing Company was the first brewery to feature them. The stay tab worked by forcing the pull tab into a "scored" area in the lid that leveraged the pulling force of the user, but without completely separating the tab from the can. By the mid-1980s almost all cans had a stay tab.
: Photo courtesy Tempra TechnologyLast year, Tempra Technology announced the first beer-bottle apparatus that cools a liquid without external necessities like fridges, ice or the icy stare of the girl sitting on the corner stool.
The 16-ounce Instant Cool Can reduces a beer's temperature by 30 degrees Fahrenheit within three minutes by displacing its heat to an insulated heat-sink chamber at the bottom of the container. Tempera Technology boast that you just twist the bottom of the can, and then "the all natural desiccant contained within a vacuum draws the heat from the beverage through the evaporator into an insulated heat-sink container." It's science!
But there's a downside. Because the heat-sink apparatus takes up about a third of the volume inside the can, you only get 10.5 ounces of beer out of a pint-size can. That means you'll likely pay more for the benefit of using the tech. But hey, it sure beats drinking warm beer.
Foster Beers is in talks with Tempra to offer the self-chilled beer within the next year, Tempra says.
See Also:
Craft Brewers Reformulate Beer to Cope With Hop Shortage
This Green Beer's the Real Deal
Goodrec, a recommendation site that was first introduced at TechCrunch50, has launched its online review hub to the public alongside a new iPhone application. The site differentiates itself from other similar sites by keeping reviews short and sweet - users can rate an item as either ‘Thumbs Up’, ‘Mixed Bag’, or ‘Thumbs Down’, and can include only 160 characters of text. The site also covers a very broad range of items, which include restaurants, music, nightlife hotspots, or anything else users submit. You can find the main site at Goodrec.com, and can grab the free iPhone application here.
At launch the site is pre-populated with venues and items relating to nightlife, books, music, and restaurants, but users will be able to add reviews to anything else (they’ll just have to add the product or location first). Users can also request that friends review a given item by sending invitations to through peers through Facebook or Email.
CEO Mihir Shah says that since TechCrunch50, the site has compiled over 100,000 recommendation from its beta testers, the majority of which were submitted through the site’s iPhone application. Shah says that because of the brevity of its reviews, Goodrec is better suited for mobile reviewing than competitors like Yelp, which doesn’t allow users to submit reviews from its iPhone app (likely because the site prefers longer reviews). Aside from the main standalone application, Goodrec is also offering free apps that focus on each category the site covers (the first will be called GoodFood and will offer restaurant recommendations, with more to follow). The site also has plans to quickly expand to other mobile platforms.
The site’s Thumbs Up or Down rating system is also taking a different approach, shying away from the typical 5-star system seen elsewhere. Shah notes that as most review sites compile dozens of reviews for a given item, the average usually approaches three stars, making it difficult to tell if the restaurant or attraction is worth checking out. Goodrec presents these thumbs in a counter form (Digg does something similar), allowing users to immediately tell how positive reviews are without having to read through them.
Goodrec’s biggest problem will clearly lie in getting users, as Sean Parker noted during the site’s presentation at TechCrunch50. With competitors that have compiled years worth of reviews, Goodrec will need to quickly build a catalog of content for it to stay competitive. That said, Shah says the site is off to a good start, averaging over 20,000 restaurant reviews a month in its beta stage.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Mobile
Still considering picking up a BlackBerry Storm? Well, Amazon seems to be offering a deal that will be hard to refuse. They are currently offering a BlackBerry Storm for just $99, and best of all that does not come with any rebates—it is just 99 bucks.
Of course, as you would expect, in order to get that price you will have to sign a two-year agreement. You even get two-day shipping for free with the purchase. Although it was not mentioned, this deal seems to be going up against the BOGO offer from Verizon, and for most people this will be the better offer, because after all, how many people really need two phones.
Product [Amazon] Via [GearDiary]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Pete Carr, whose photograph of a giant robot spider graced Boston.com over the weekend, has an entire gallery of it at his homepage. It's practically impossible to pick a favorite: each and every one captures something wonderful of this freakish creation.
This shot, however, takes it for me: by somehow concealing the public festivities surrounding the machine, it becomes less a work of art and more the menacing, Tripods-like alien monster it conjures! You can buy prints here.
La Machine [Pete Carr]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 Voice of America | Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live New York Times - By CARL SAFINA “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family. Scotland 'inspired' Darwin's work Darwin celebrated, despite controversy, on 200th birthday |
Reader Ken writes in with his design for an improved Kindle 2, featuring a sliding keyboard to keep the scale down, at the cost of extra depth.
When I first saw the new Kindle 2.0 images, I hated the big bezel too. However, I also hated the ever-present keyboard. I understand why Amazon wants it there, but does it need to stare me in the face all the time, even when I'm just reading a book?
Though I don't think the K2 is as ugly as some believe, Amazon's gotten it wrong in a particularly inspiring way. Thank you, Ken!
 EfluxMedia News | Ruckus: when "free music" can't compete with free music Ars Technica - The Ruckus music service shut down over the weekend, raising the question of whether universities are done offering sponsored legal download services to students. Chairman, professor say free music service not necessary Major label venture TotalMusic calls it a day |
Time to induldge your inner animator. Home animation site GoAnimate is officially announcing tomorrow that they have obtained the rights from CBS to allow you to create your own Star Trek animated stories. Sounds pretty cool to me.
From the press release:
Go!Animate is a free online animation tool that enables everyone -- no artistic ability required -- to create their own animated stories and share them with the world. And now, after signing a licensing deal with CBS Consumer Products, Go!Animate is giving users the ability to create their own STAR TREK animated adventures. This is the first ever officially-sanctioned use of STAR TREK material for the purpose of user-generated content within an online medium.Click through to see our own cartoon.
NSFW.
Facebook has just activated a new feature that allows users to leave “Like” labels on photos, notes, and other items across the network. The feature, which is nearly identical to one on FriendFeed, was first seen in a demo video last month but has not been available to the public.
According to Facebook’s blog post on the feature, users will be able to say that they “Like” something whenever they leave a comment. It appears that the feature is being gradually being rolled out, because I can’t seem to find it anywhere.
Facebook has stepped on FriendFeed’s toes with a few other features, including the ability to import activity items from third party sites into your News Feed and the fusion of microblogging with activity streams. We should note that it was Facebook that really popularized activity streams in the first place, and these improvements may well have come about eventually even without FriendFeed’s inspiration.
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Section: Computers, Mobile Computers, Laptops, Netbooks
The latest rumor surrounding Asus is calling for their notebook and netbook lineups to begin landing in Wal-Mart locations. This report comes as Asus is hoping to not only surpass the 650,000 notebooks (including netbooks) they sold in the US last year, but also break the one million mark. Of course, you can already grab an Eee PC from Target or Best Buy, however nothing really screams low-cost laptop like Wal-Mart.
As of now an exact time frame has not been announced, however they are estimating the availability as sometime in the second half of 2009. Additionally, no mention was made on whether Wal-Mart plans to have these units in-store or just online. If nothing else, let’s just hope these are running Windows XP, because I seem to remember a few other Linux-based low-cost computers not doing so well in Wal-mart’s past.
Read [DigiTimes]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I only did a couple of things today, but one of them was paw the Kindle 2. Unlike a lot of other skeptics and their quite reasonable criticisms, I'm actually a pretty big Kindle fan. (I have no problem viewing it purely as a paper book adjunct, a role at which it excels.) I took a crack at explaining why—and why the Kindle 2 is better than the first one—in this article at GOOD.
Reviewing the Kindle 2
Another day, another iPhone 3 (iPhone Video?) mockup. Clearly this is completely from some fellow’s imagination, but it’s fun to play make-believe anyway. The problem with this one is that the interface is cluttered, something Apple would avoid. Sending a location to someone you’re video chatting with is a complicated situation to begin with, but Apple would handle it with more finesse.
In this case, I’d guess that the video would minimize to a corner and your picture-in-picture would disappear. This frees up CPU cycles as well as minimizing screen garbage. But splitting the screen like this gets a big boo from me.
The form factor is debatable. A one-way wedge like that means the phone would be top-heavy — bad news if you’re holding it at the bottom. The PCB, touch, and display layers are likely unable to take that sort of miniaturization right now anyway, though that’s no guarantee they won’t in the future.
Apple also wouldn’t say “multi-way,” or imply in their copy that you are going to be conferencing to something, which makes no sense. I’m a grammatical pedant, can you tell?
See, I told you this would be fun.
[Thanks for the tip, Rodolphe]
I recently decided that I'm going to give things I made as gifts to family and friends, instead of giving them store-bought stuff. There are three types of gifts I'm planning to make: food (honey from my bees, dried figs, and pickles), whittled wood itmes (spoons and other utensils), and felt creatures.
The green 3-eyed monster on the left is from a class I took a couple of years ago with my daughter. I really enjoyed making it, and it only took about 40 minutes to complete. I made the blue squid on Saturday, using felt purchased from Michaels (29 cents a sheet) and embroidery floss pilfered from one of Jenny Hart's Sublime Stitching kits. Again, I spent about 40 minutes making it. I chatted with my family as I cut and stitched it together, filling it with uncooked (duh) rice. My daughters joined in on the fun, making their own creations. It was a pleasant way to spend time together.
While it may be easy enough to type “liquor” into Maps on your iPhone, this way may be even easier. And I’ve often found that when one is in desperate need of liquor, easier is better. Of course, this particular app (still in development) doesn’t just find liquor stores nearby — it’s put out by Proximo Spirits, and it only finds their liquor. Good if you like those brands, but somewhat limiting if you prefer, say, Monarch (shudder).
You can find an analogue here on their site — it’s just like any other store locator app, but it’s by brand. The same will apply to the iPhone app (which I’ve mocked up to the right, pretty nicely too). So if you need a fifth of Three Olives on your person at all times and no other will do, this is probably going to be your thing.
Somebody needs to make an iPhone app out there that allows you to choose from more than their own brands of liquors — companies would pay good money to have their names included on a default list.
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile
The latest BlackBerry, the Gemini 9300 seems to be what many have been hoping for—a 3G equipped Curve. So far, the details that have surfaced here are on the light side, not to mention they are still just in the rumor stage. However if they are accurate, then the 9300 will be a welcomed addition to the BlackBerry lineup.
What we have so far is that the 9300 will have a higher resolution display and faster processor as compared to the BlackBerry 8900, in other words they will be similar to the BlackBerry Bold. The 9300 is also expected to be available in silver and feature a 3.2-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, GPS as well as tri-band UMTS/HSDPA support. Additionally, the 9300 is expected to have a slightly more rounded keyboard as compared to the 8900.
Unfortunately, the release date is also unknown and estimated at possibly sometime during Q4 of 2009, but more likely as sometime in early 2010. I guess if nothing else, the slow release of the 9300 will be good news for the Bold.
Via [BGR]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Last week Meebo and Facebook teamed to launch the first integration of Facebook Connect + Chat, allowing Meebo users to chat with their Facebook friends from the popular web-based IM service. The feature has had a rocky history: Meebo used an unsanctioned method to integrate Facebook Chat in December, then temporarily disabled it at Facebook’s request. And while many were quick to point the finger at Facebook (which has had a history of bullying some third party services), as it turns out the site was eager to help Meebo, and is likely open to helping other third parties.
The announcement is the latest in a series of policy changes that indicate that instant messaging is finally starting to open up, representing a paradigm shift could potentially lead to a slew of innovations. That is, as soon as the largest remaining holdouts - Yahoo and Microsoft - follow suit.
Historically, IM has existed on closed and proprietary systems, with dedicated clients that can only connect to a single network. For many years users with accounts on multiple networks (say, AOL and MSN), would have to keep multiple programs open, which ate up system resources and cluttered desktops. By 2000 a handful of clients emerged that would allow users to manage multiple IM accounts from a single program. These stayed largely under the radar until 2002, when a client called Trillian hit 1 million downloads (and then jumped to 5 million six months later).
Prompted by the application’s growing popularity and incensed by the fact that users no longer had to use its official client, AOL attempted to block Trillian in early 2002, though the application’s developers would release patches very quickly to un-break the service. Yahoo and MSN attempted to enact similar measures against third party clients with limited success, as their restrictions were quickly cracked.
Eventually the battles between third party IM clients and the networks died down to a simmer - third-party programs would rely on open-sourced plugins to access the chat networks, and would be quickly updated if anything broke. The networks seemed to gradually accept the fact that these clients would persist, but wouldn’t do anything to help get their workarounds to function correctly (and oftentimes advanced features like file transfer didn’t).
Finally, in 2006 some chinks started to appear in IM’s armor. Google launched Gtalk, a chat client built on the open standard Jabber protocol. Meebo, a popular web-based multi protocol client, launched at around the same time, and along with other clients encouraged sites to begin opening their protocols to third parties.
Gradually AOL’s AIM network began to get in on the action, first with Open AIM 1.0 (which really wasn’t open at all, as it was primarily concerned with plugins and status updates) and later in 2008 with Open AIM 2.0. The second iteration of Open AIM offers third party web services like Meebo and native clients like Adium a sanctioned way to access the network.
More recently, the social networks have also begun to also grant access to Meebo and some other third parties, though most of them aren’t quite open (at least not yet). MySpace worked with meebo to launch support in December, and the aforementioned Facebook support was added last week.
It’s clear that progress is being made, but there are still two major holdouts: Microsoft’s Window Live Messenger (AKA MSN) and Yahoo Messenger. The two networks have teamed to let their users talk to each other, but everyone else is out of luck.
Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg says that he has reached out to both companies, but that neither of them are willing to offer a sanctioned way to access their networks. He notes that while Meebo’s integration with MSN and Yahoo are secure, he’d prefer to use the standards established by the networks themselves. A lack of ‘official’ third party access is also likely the reason why the networks have not been integrated into Gmail Chat (AIM has).
Sternberg points out the parallels between IM and SMS messaging, which has grown to become a massive market that now sees over 2 trillion messages sent per year. While SMS might seem ubiquitous now, for years major carriers didn’t support inter-network texting (you could only send messages to contacts using the same carrier). It wasn’t until these networks opened up that SMS became the norm, spurring incredible growth and widespread innovation (you can now use SMS to order pizza, look up stock prices, and get directions).
IM is also ripe for innovation, but developers have been hampered by a near-complete lack of cooperation from the major IM networks. Perhaps developers will take advantage of the growing number of networks that are open, adding new features that make them attractive to users still stuck on the old behemoths. Then Yahoo and Microsoft might be compelled to finally change - or perish.
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Leave it to Microsoft to make netbooks complicated.
It appears likely the tech giant will offer three different versions of Windows 7 for netbooks. HP officials told Computer World about its plans to offer three different configurations of Windows 7 for netbooks, which suggests Microsoft will roll out this structure for other companies' netbooks as well.
According to HP, the following three Windows 7 options will be available: Windows 7 Starter Edition, which will only be able to run three apps at a time; Windows 7 Home Premium for consumers; and Windows 7 Professional edition, aimed at business users. That could lead to three pricing options for Windows 7 netbooks, depending on the version you choose — in addition to pricing variations when netbooks ship with Linux instead.
HP says its netbooks will likely run three versions of Windows 7 [ComputerWorld]
Photo: Tailer Hikari/Flickr
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!
Time to indulge your inner animator. Home animation site GoAnimate is officially announcing tomorrow that they have obtained the rights from CBS to allow you to create your own Star Trek animated stories. Sounds pretty cool to me.
From the press release:
Go!Animate is a free online animation tool that enables everyone — no artistic ability required — to create their own animated stories and share them with the world.
And now, after signing a licensing deal with CBS Consumer Products, Go!Animate is giving users the ability to create their own STAR TREK animated adventures. This is the first ever officially-sanctioned use of STAR TREK material for the purpose of user-generated content within an online medium.
As a result, Go!Animate gives millions of dedicated Star Trek fans a tool to creatively express themselves and share with the global STAR TREK community.
So now, not only can you write your own Star Trek slashfic, you can actually animate them too!
How to create a Star Trek animation from GoAnimate on Vimeo.
GoAnimate Demo: Star Trek Launch from GoAnimate on Vimeo.
Picturesurf, a new Wordpress plugin that allows bloggers to quickly build photo galleries, has launched to the public. Instead of having to waste time cropping and resizing thumbnail photos (and then embedding them into annoying HTML tables), Picturesurf allows users to simply select and upload a number of photos from their desktop, which are then automatically resized and arranged in standard CSS. The plugin is available in the WordPress plugin directory, or you can grab it at the Picturesurf homepage, which also includes directions.
Founder Alan Rutledge says that while there are other galleries available for bloggers, Picturesurf is primarily targeting large blogs looking to “convert their images into cash”. Because the gallery can place ads alongside each image (as opposed to just seeing a blank page using embedded .png or .jpg files), bloggers can more effectively monetize their images while saving users from having to constantly hit the ‘back’ button.
The plugin is also optimized for SEO purposes, and will work with RSS feed readers (typically galleries using Flash or Javascript don’t work in RSS readers). And because these images link back to the blog itself, Rutledge says that it could help bloggers more effectively monetize their RSS feeds.
While this is the first time the plugin has been publicly announced, Picturesurf has been quietly available for some time and has been integrated into over 3,000 blogs. Rutledge reports that on average, bloggers are seeing ad impressions double using the plugin as opposed to their standard thumbnail galleries (users are also clicking more images because of the increased convenience).
We’ve been trying out the plugin on some of our image-heavy blogs (including CrunchGear), and have been pleased with how easy it is to create the galleries - it sure beats doing them by hand, as we used to.
We should note that Picturesurf isn’t Rutledge’s first startup venture - while a student at Berkeley he and three other students built a small mobile startup that was acquired by iLike.
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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mmm… bright candy colors. M-Edge is cashing in on the Kindle Kraze with their new Executive Jackets for Kindle 2. These sassy, multi-hued jackets have a built-in booklight and start at a mere $29.99.
Don’t have hands? Try the Platform Jacket that keeps your Kindle 2 upright while in its sexy protective case. It also starts at $29.99.
M-Edge Accessories Announces Product Line for Kindle 2
Reading Never Looked So Good
ODENTON, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–On the heels of the debut of Amazon Kindle 2, M-Edge Accessories (www.buymedge.com) – the leading provider of accessories for Kindle – has unveiled its newest collection of jackets designed specifically for the second generation of Amazon’s popular eReader. Amazon launched Kindle 2 today at a New York City press conference and unlike the first generation device, Kindle 2 will not include an Amazon-supplied stock jacket with purchase.
M-Edge Accessories’ CEO Patrick Mish expects the company’s Kindle-compatible products to be a big hit with consumers, and not just for their ability to protect the user’s eReader. “Our products allow Kindle users to express their unique style with vibrant and well-made jackets that capture their individuality in a jacket they can trust to protect their investment. Our customers have also grown to appreciate our high-quality jackets at a very reasonable price-point.”
M-Edge products that are compatible with Kindle 2 include the Executive Jacket and brand-new Platform Jacket (both available in genuine and synthetic leather). A revamped version of the e-Luminator booklight, an accessory to the Executive and Platform jackets that enables Kindle users to read in low-light environments, is expected to be available in March. All jackets are currently available for pre-order on www.buymedge.com as well as Amazon.com. Jackets are expected to begin shipping the last week in February.
M-Edge Accessories has supplied Kindle users with Kindle-compatible accessories since the release of the first-generation device in November 2007. The company has a proven track record of success with consumers and continues to lead the market in eReader-enhancing accessories.
Executive Jacket for Kindle 2 ($29.99-$44.99)
M-Edge offers the Executive Jacket in genuine and synthetic leather. The jacket offers full device protection, holds the Kindle securely in place with the Kindle-compatible mounting system and features a wraparound closure strap. Additionally, the jacket design accommodates M-Edge’s innovative booklight, the e-Luminator.
“The genuine-leather Executive Jacket is our most popular jacket among first-generation Kindle owners,” says Mish. “Our customers appreciate that it’s well-made and stylish and are confident it can protect their Kindles. Our Executive Jacket for Kindle 2 will do the same, while offering even more color options.”
Executive Jackets designed for Kindle 2 are available in such eye-catching shades as marbled red, jade green, sapphire blue, fuchsia, and purple as well as understated options like black, mocha, saddle, navy blue, cream and grey.
Platform Jacket for Kindle 2 ($29.99-$44.99)
A new addition to M-Edge’s product line, the Platform Jacket introduces a new bookstand design that allows users to read their Kindles upright and hands-free, while still offering full protection in a lushly-padded case. The Platform Jacket is offered in genuine and synthetic leather.
“Feedback from first-generation Kindle owners indicated there was a strong desire to incorporate an integrated bookstand into their protective jackets,” says Mish. “With the Platform Jacket, we’re providing an innovative solution that functions superbly while capturing the look and feel our customers have come to expect.”
M-Edge is excited for this new chapter and hopes all Kindle owners will have a great experience, cover to cover.
Vudu on Monday slashed the price of its TV set-top box in half.
The price cut brings the Vudu HD movie rental box down to $150 — about $80 less than its major rival, the Apple TV.
Vudu launched its set-top TV box for $400 in September 2007, and just four months later the price dropped to $300. The company's EVP of strategy Edward Lichty said the "reaping awards of success in the retail channel over the holidays, lower component prices and higher movie revenues" enabled Vudu to reduce the price.
However, Vudu declined to provide sales numbers to substantiate its success. And Wired.com finds the claim dubious, as we believe the price cut has more to do with competing with Apple than high sales. The price cut appears long overdue, as Apple TV dropped from $300 to $230 in January 2008.
When Vudu launched in 2008, Forrester analyst James McQuivey said he was skeptical that the start-up could compete with Apple. He noted that Apple was at an advantage because it already has an established customer base in the iTunes Store.
However, Vudu argued that it was well positioned to compete with Apple, citing a larger collection of titles. The Vudu offers about 5,000 movies for rental. Apple TV's library only holds about 1,500 movies. (Despite our skepticism in Vudu's success, Wired.com has given the set-top box positive reviews.)
Pricing of Vudu's content remains the same. For example, standard definition rentals range from $1 to $4; high-definition rentals cost between $4 and $6.
Product Page [Vudu] (Thanks, Erika!)
See Also:
Photo: Tom Schierlitz
The PCMOS system, designed by Rice University researchers, promises a speed increase of 700% at a thirtieth of the power demands. How, you ask? Well, transistors today are very tiny and use a lot of power to make sure that the intentional signal overpowers the random noise at that near-molecular scale. This is getting harder and harder, as transistor counts multiply and voltage per transistor increases as well, processors are getting hotter and more power hungry by the generation.
The creators of PCMOS think that by using “probabilistic logic” and accounting for noise in a different way, they can do a huge amount more work with a given amount of silicon. The system for such logic (an alternative to Boolean) is proprietary, of course, but the basics of it suggest that it may be suitable for tasks which do not require absolute precision or exact calculation. Decoding or showing a video stream, for instance, is something that, pixel by pixel, could be “estimated” and misplaced pixels would be quickly eclipsed by the next frame or ignored by our natural tolerance for such things.
The system is obviously not for everything, and it won’t be showing up as a desktop processor. But for things that need to have something low-power and aren’t doing anything terribly important (decoding the digital signal for a cell phone, for instance), they could increase both performance and battery life.
It’s all pie in the sky, however, until they get a product on the market (years); likely you won’t hear about it when it happens, or it will have a snazzy brand name. But it’s got DARPA and Intel behind it, so you know it’ll end up somewhere.
Not to be overshadowed by AlertThingy’s announcement earlier today, Seesmic founder — Twhirl owner — Loic Le Meur let us know that his desktop notifications client is also getting a substantial upgrade today.
Twhirl doesn’t support as many services as AlertThingy but Le Meur points out that it’s much more popular. It’s also the only desktop client in its class that supports his video messaging system Seesmic, which is no surprise since Seesmic aquired Twhirl last April.
Until today, users could only play video clips through Twhirl from the people they follow on Seesmic. But now with version 0.9, Seesmic users can record and post video clips from within Twhirl as well, bringing the construction of a Seesmic desktop client to completion.
Le Meur says that creating the right API to record and post video comments from within Twhirl took a lot of work, and naturally he’d like to see the other desktop notification tools pick up Seesmic support as well. So all of the recording functionality is now part of the APIs that Seesmic has already provided publicly. No desktop clients have used it to retrieve or post clips yet, but the web services Ping.fm and DailyMile have both added Seesmic video recording as features already.
There’s a variety of other improvements in this release, which you can read about in Le Meur’s official post on the announcement. Among them is new support for Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Ping.fm.
Le Meur says that Twhirl has about 150,000 active users, about three times the number of those who use Seesmic regularly. The client has been downloaded about 700,000 times and about 10,000 people sign into Seesmic each day.
Disclaimer: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic, although I am not.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Gadgets / Other, Green, Lifestyle
We’ve played with the Kindle 2. What’s the verdict? It’s a step in the right direction but still needs more features.
The Kindle 2 is what the original Kindle should have been. The screen is very crisp and reading off it seemed easy. Unfortunately, I have not had an extended amount of time to test it, yet.
Jeff Bezos said he wanted the Kindle to disappear when you read. No longer are you confronted with the unappealing form factor with an odd keyboard when you want to read a book. Good luck not noticing the original Kindle.
This new version has a sleek, clean design. It is comfortable to hold and the redesigned page keys are a vast improvement. The keyboard will take a little time to get used to, but it’s decent. The travel of the keys is short, but it is easy to tell that you have pressed a key. You will notice that there is space on the left and right of the keyboard. That’s a good thing considering you are going to want to hold the device more than typing on it.
There is no touchscreen but there’s a 5 way toggle switch to navigate. An Amazon representative said that one of the reasons they didn’t go with a touchscreen is the current crop of touchscreens are too reflective and they didn’t want that getting in the way of reading.
There is no expansion port for SD cards, but there is 1.4GB of user-accessible space. To the people who want a Kindle with a backlight, that’s still not included. Personally, I don’t mind the lack of backlight.
The feature set is still something that needs improvement depending on where you stand. If you are an avid reader who wants a device that can take the place of shelves of books, then the Kindle is fine.
If you are like me, you may have a hard time justifying that $360 price tag. You could grab a netbook at that price. Reading your own material is still clunky since it requires a conversion process via e-mail.
One of the big problems is that the Kindle does not play well with others. The Kindle could be the iPod of book readers. One of the things that made the iPod successful is the fact it could play the de facto standard in digital music, MP3s. Just imagine where the iPod would be without that feature.
The Kindle does not read PDFs and docs without some work. You should simply be able to upload your material to the Kindle. With the 1.4GB of space, hopefully this feature will come in a firmware upgrade.
Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
This is pretty much the craziest thing I’ve seen all day (except for Stephen King - homeboy looks weird). This is a ring that you place over your penis that allows you to move your wang in four directions to control the on-screen Atari 2600 action. Strokes shoot your missiles on screen and gameplay continues until issue.
The makers at the SF Media Labs note that there is really a philosophy behind this process of build-up and release.
Our impetus to win can be seen as a drive towards transcendence. A transcendence that is both over death and, in a sense, a metaphorical death. Winning a video game is much like what Martin Heidegger referred to as becoming a “being towards death.” That is a self-realized individual who has overcome uncertainty in life, reconciled their place in the universe and has acknowledged death within their life.
This simultaneity of both transcendence in life and the acknowledgment of death is also encountered during what the French like to call “la petite morte” or in English, “the little death.” This is the refractory period following sexual climax in which a person can achieve no further orgasm and is filled both with pleasure and melancholy.
It would be reasonable to assert that the tension that builds during gameplay and the release achieved through victory are similar to the events leading up and through a sexual orgasm.
Got that? Good. Now all they have to do is connect this to World of Warcraft - say linking the orgasm to a level up - and a generation of men will never have sex, even unto death. Full instructions are available at the SF Media Labs website.
Just think: what if you could connect this to Twitter?
via Giz
Miniaturization of circuits and displays could lead to televisions shrunk into contact lenses and being powered by body heat, according to British futurologist Ian Pearson.
Channels could be changed using voice commands or gestures, Pearson told The Daily Mail. "You will just pop it into your eye in the morning and take it out at the end of the day," he said.
Pearson's predictions are in contrast to how consumer electronics companies have been pushing bigger TVs. In the last few years, advances in plasma and LCD panel technologies along with falling prices have made it easy to buy TVs with up to 100-inches in screen size.
But Pearson believes that trend will change and contact lenses that double up as personal TV sets could be reality within the next ten years.
Already scientists have taken the first steps towards making contact lenses more powerful and versatile, says LiveScience. Digital contact lenses that can zoom in on objects and display related information have been tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes. Digital and programmable contact lenses will be the next big step, say futurists like Pearson.
Another possibility to advance your pleasure while watching Temptation Island or Flavor of Love? digital tattoos that could let users feel the emotions of the actors on the show by provoking similar impulses in their bodies.
Photo: (fxp/Flickr)
Dear Owen Thomas,
You owe me. I had to get off my sickbed today to call David Karp, the CEO of Tumblr, and ask him if he really was in talks to sell his company to Yahoo (YHOO), as you reported today on Gawker/Valleywag. For the record, David says your report is “categorically untrue.”
I’d spend more time discussing it, but, as I said, I’m feeling under the weather. And your story is not true. So here’s what Karp has to say via his Tumblr account.
And here’s what Marco Arment, who helped start Tumblr with Karp a couple of years ago, says:
And here’s what venture capitalist Bijan Sabet, whose Spark Capital helped raise a $4.5 million round for Tumblr last year, says via his Twitter account:
Now I’m going to return to my convalescing. Please give me a break for another day or so.
[Image Credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]
AP - Amazon.com Inc. is releasing a slimmer version of its Kindle electronic reading device, but it still costs $359 making it unclear how mainstream even an improved Kindle can be during a brutal recession.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Websites, Google
Robert Scoble asked the question this morning, “is the real-time web a threat to Google”. Many followers of Scoble on Twitter and Friendfeed (he unabashedly loves both) have admitted to searching their social network for answers/opinions before going to Google. This segmentation of the search market is something new and something to note.
I see the difference being trusted info (at least to a degree) from your social network and untrusted (at least anonymous) info from Google and other search engines. At the moment, Google doesn’t easily index tweets or conversations on Friendfeed where networks move at the pace of real-time.
As a recent convert to Twitter, I am finding I spend less time out there searching for new posts on some of my favorite websites like Gadgetell. Sure I could get the info via a RSS feed, but having TwitterGadget right in my Gmail brings the news to me with commentary and other tweets so I don’t have to move. I really like that and it makes me more efficient not having to go out and regularly check for updates as I am prone to do…
So how does Twitter make money on this? Honestly, I see the endgame as an outright purchase by a bigger fish, like Google.
What do you think? Does real time info make it more valuable? Does Google have a handle on “trusted info”? Will Google find a way just to steal Twitters thunder or at least info? Let’s battle it out in the comments.
Read [Scobleizer]
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
I may bitch and moan about having to travel every couple weeks for some press conference or event, but my job is probably better than most and I get to play with gadgets all day. Life is rough, I know. But when you’re crammed like a sardine into an airplane for at least six hours it starts to wear on you. I’m not one to sleep with my head hanging forward. As a kid I always fell asleep on my seat belt in the car, so that’s what I’m accustomed to and still do it today even though there are only lap belts on planes. And I always wake up with a cramp in my neck.
To heck with those neck pillows, I want something that will replicate that car seat belt wherever I go. Enter TravelRest. It touts itself as the ultimate travel pillow and I’ve been taking it across the world with me for the last couple months to see if that holds true. Hit the jump to find out if your hard-earned $27 is worth it.
The TravelRest pillow is pretty low-tech and kind of chintzy looking, but it works as advertised. I won’t go into telling you what I think it looks like, but I’m sure you can think of a few things. Setup is easy and quick. A small nipple like the ones you’ll find on anything that you can inflate is located at the skinny end near the snap-flap. You can attach the snap-flap to your lap belt to keep it from moving about as you rest.
A cord is located on the bulbous end so you can attach to a headrest or around chairs themselves for support. If you don’t have either of those you can actually sling it around yourself like a messenger bag and free ball it.
The fabric is faux velvet and I’m not fond of it but that’s just personal preference. I was skeptical of the seal thinking it would irritate some part of my body, but that was never the case. It’s pretty low-tech, but works surprisingly well. The reason I’d take this over a neck pillow is that there’s more surface area where your head can rest on.
For $27 (discounts if you purchase more than one) the TravelRest pillow is disposable if it’s not your cup of tea, but its versatility won me over. A handful of times I was stuck in an airport because of weather delays and I’m a big fan of naps. Sure, I looked like a goof, but I was the only one waking up from my naps without a cramped neck.
By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily
Barclays Capital analyst Vishal Shah this morning picked up coverage of a half-dozen China-based solar stocks. His general view is that the stocks will be hampered in the near term by falling Street estimates and excess channel inventory, but that some stocks could outperform as polysilicon supply improves. Here’s a rundown on his new coverage:
Yingli Green Energy (YGE): Overweight rating, $12 target. “Yingli has [the] industry leading nonsilicon cost structure and among the highest exposure to declining spot silicon prices.”
Solarfun Power (SOLF): Underweight rating, $3.50 target. “Lack of sufficient cash balance, relatively low brand differentiation and downside risk to estimates could lead to share price underperformance.”
FROM APPLETELL - Twitterrific from the Iconfactory gives access to most of the popular Twitter features in a simple, easy-to-understand interface for your iPhone and iPod touch. MORE »
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We’ve known about the Android RC33 update’s flagship features, such as Latitude and voice search, for some time now. But what about all of the less obvious enhancements, API changes, and bug fixes that managed to sneak their way in?
A few of these incremental improvements have been discovered the good old fashion way, but Google has gone ahead and published the full bug fix/features lists for Firmware 1.1 alongside the updated SDK.
Check after the jump to see what’s gone down.
Resolved Issues
* AlarmClock alert now plays audio/vibe directly, rather than through AlarmManager. AlarmClock alert starts playing audio/vibe in its IntentReceiver, rather than on activity start. These changes should prevent alarms from being blocked by modal dialogs.
* Fixes to device sleep.
* Single tap no longer opens the in-call dialpad; users now need to touch and drag it.
* Fixes a bug causing approximately 1 in 25 outbound messages to freeze up the IMAP connection (to a Gmail based server) when transferred to the Sent folder.
* Removes automatic account setup entries that were broken or not testable. Adds minor fixes to a few of the remaining entries. Makes improvements to warning dialogs used for a few special cases.
* Changes default mail checking interval to every 15 minutes (instead of defaulting to “never”).
* Fixes password-quoting bugs in IMAP, so that users can include special characters in passwords (e.g. spaces).
* Fixes various errors in auto and manual account setup
* Improves reporting for various connection errors, making it easier for the user to diagnose failed account setups.
* Fixes new-mail notifications for POP3 accounts.
* Ensures proper auto-checking of accounts marked as “never check”.
* Now displays date and time using user preference (e.g. 24 hr vs. AM/PM).
* Now shows cc: in message view.
* Improves recovery from POP3 connection failures.
* POP3 parser rules loosened, so the application can work with non-compliant email servers.
* Removes green CALL button as a shortcut for “add a new call”.New Features
* Maps: Adds details and reviews when a user does a search on Maps and clicks on a business to view it’s details.
* Dialer: In-call screen timeout default is now longer when using the speakerphone.
* Dialer: Adds a “Show dialpad” / “Hide dialpad” item to the in-call menu, to make it easier to discover the DTMF dialpad.
* Adds support for saving attachments from MMS
* Adds support for marquee in layouts.API Changes
Overview* Adds annotations for test systems, no actual (non-test) API changes.
* Adds a method to allow a process to easily determine its UID.
* Adds support for marquee in layouts.
* Adds new methods for determining padding in views. Useful if you are writing your own subclasses of View.
* Adds new permissions that allow an application to broadcast an SMS or WAP Push message.
* API cleanup: removes protected constructor from SDK-bound system images.
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Apple recently rejected an iPhone game featuring caricatures of President Barack Obama and other political figures bouncing on a trampoline.
Swamiware, developer of Obama Trampoline, could not disclose why Apple gave the app the red light. However, it's likely Apple felt the app violated a clause in the iPhone developer's terms of service agreement, which states apps may not ridicule public figures.
"It's really kind of bizarre," said Patrick Alphonso, president of Swamiware, in a phone interview. "We were really expecting it to be in the store. It's a cartoonish look on them, but it's not out there to ridicule them."
Alphonso added that the app clearly was not trying to make a political statement, as it includes political figures from both the Democratic and Republican parties, including Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton.
Some developers have accused Apple of being arbitrary with its App Store rejections. Obama Trampoline's rejection is questionable, as it's lighthearted compared to another app rejected last week, which involved throwing virtual shoes at former president George W. Bush.
[Via Buzzfeed]
See Also:
If you don’t have the money to hire a financial adviser for investment advice, you may turn to the internet to find information on stocks. Wikinvest hopes that their site will be the one that you use.
Wikinvest works in the same way as Wikipedia: anonymous users provide information in order to share with web visitors. The site will provide stock charts with notes in order to help the average person understand them. Additionally, opinions will be given on whether to buy or sell particular stocks and give information about each traded company.
The drawback of the Wikinvest website? Who knows if the information is valid? It would prove very easy for an anonymous user to give bad advice in order to move stocks in a way that would be advantageous for them. As a way to prevent this from happening, Wikinvest will require that writers cite supporting evidence to their claims. If a contributor does make false claims about a company, that person could be subject to prosecution. However, the saying, “a fool and his money are soon parted” was created for a reason.
The biggest issue Wikinvest has to face is trust. Financial advisors do well because they are trusted by their clients. Wikinvest users may not want to trust the information provided there on the simple grounds that no one is taking credit for it. There is little incentive to put good info there and far too much incentive for info with nefarious purposes.
Read: [NY Times]
Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Archos, best known for its line of hard drive-based portable media players, has announced plans to “extend its product line with a new ultra-thin Internet Media Tablet combined with a mobile phone, by merging Google’s Android telephony stack and the ARCHOS’ multimedia framework,” according to IT News Online.
This new hybrid device (something of a joint effort between Archos and Texas Instruments) aims to merge the functionality of a “premium” smartphone with the rich multimedia capabilities found throughout the rest of Archos’ lineup.
Archos first introduced its Internet Media Tablets last summer. This newly announced model will be the first with voice support, along with being the first to be Android-based. Hopefully this new breed will offer greater expandability (theoretically the Android Market App should help with this), something that has been notoriously lacking in previous Archos devices.
Look for the ArcDroidTab to land sometime in Q3 2009.
[via ArchosFans]
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Take the 8-megapixel shooter and slider form factor from the Sony Ericsson C905, up the screen from 2.4″ to 2.6″, throw in stereo speakers, dedicated music keys and an oh-so-necessary 3.5mm headphone jack, and stamp on the Walkman logo. What do you get? The Hikaru.
According to the SEMCBlog, we’ll see this high-end camera phone/music phone hybrid get announced at Sony Ericsson’s MWC press conference on February 15th, with a launch window sometime before the end of Q2. We can’t really say what we think about this one until we get a chance to touch it, but we can say that we really want to touch it.
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Sorry NuevaSync. It (syncing Google contacts and calendars unofficially through your wonderful free service, that is) was fun while it lasted.
Google has finally fleshed out its Google Sync to work beyond just BlackBerry handsets - enabling (most) smartphone (and iPod touch) users the ability to perform bi-directional syncing of Google contacts and calendars. Today’s update adds support for iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, and any phone with SyncML support.
Google provides specific usage instructions for the following platforms: iPhone (including iPod touch), BlackBerry, Nokia S60, Nokia standard, Sony Ericsson, and Windows Mobile. That’s pretty much all there is to it. An official app. Contact syncing. Calendar syncing.
For more, check the video after the break.
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
Only $23, but you could probably make your own with an old Polaroid snapshot, some tape and a pocket mirror.
Polaroid Mirror [Designboom]
If you’ve been keeping a tab on the Sprint Treo Pro lately, past hearsay might have you expecting it to hit the shelves (for real this time) on February 15th. Unfortunately, that’s just not going to happen - not anymore, at least.
According to an internal news memo that found its way to BGR, the Pro’s launch has shifted from 2/15 to “TBD”, with dealers being told to “put aside” any promotional items they’ve received. No reason is given, but for Pro hopefuls: don’t worry, it doesn’t appear that they’ve canned the Pro entirely.
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Samsung's latest accessory is the Lapfit, a secondary monitor the exact height of your laptop's display, and seems primarily aimed at the skin-peelingly obsessive compulsive, the sort of people who can only eat apples of a specific grammage and see the entire world overlaid with an invisible matrix of millimetric synchronicity which need must be obeyed. It comes in sizes of 19-inches and 22-inches, and while this is not the first product to be marketed specifically to the geo-spatially autistic, it is the first product to be marketed to them when two perfectly valid solutions for lining up your secondary monitor with your first — the laptop stand and your OS' own display settings — already do the job.
Samsung Lapfit Monitors [Samsung]
It looks like Expansys is making a habit out of stealing people’s thunder, this being the second product page to go up prior to official announcement in the past week. This time it’s the Nokia E75 which, admittedly, wasn’t much of a secret at this point anyway.
We’re a bit surprised this thing is actually making it to market, being that the timing and its chubby-bunny form factor are likely to leave it shrouded in the shadow of the N97. Plus, the pricetag of roughly $580 bucks doesn’t help. If you’re still itchin’ for one regardless, Expansys is saying that we can expect to see them sometime around March 13th.
Full specs after the jump.
[Via BGR]
• Battery:
- Capacity: 1000 mAh
• Display:
- 320 x 240 pixels
• Network:
- GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 (Quad-Band)
- WCDMA: 900/2100 (Dual-Band)
- HSDPA (3.6Mbps)
• Camera:
- 3.2 mega-pixels (auto-focus)
- Digital Zoom
- LED Flash
• Video:
- Hi-Resolution VGA Video Recording
- 30fps Video Recording (QVGA)
- Supported formats: MP4, 3GP, H.264, Flash, H.263 & Real Player
- Video Streaming
• Music:
- Supported formats: MP3, AAC, eAAC+ & WMA
- FM Stereo Radio
- Nokia Music Store
- Nokia Podcast Support
- Nokia Music Manager Support
- Windows Media Player Sync
• Ringtones:
- Monophonic
- Polyphonic (64)
- MP3
- AAC
- Talking Ringtones
- Video Ringtones
• Messaging:
- SMS- MMS (with video) - E-mail (POP3, SMTP, IMAP4, MS Exchange)
- Instant Messaging (MSN)
- Text-To-Speech Reader
• Memory:
- Phone Book (unlimited)
- Dialled Calls (30)
- Missed Calls (30)
- Received Calls (30)
- microSDHC (external)
• Call Features:
- Hands Free
- Caller ID
- Voice Dialling
- VoIP Support
• Connectivity:
- microUSB
- Nokia 3.5mm AV connector
- Bluetooth (2.0)
- Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11g)
- GPRS Class 32
• Navigation:
- AGPS
- Nokia Maps
• Security:
- Device Lock
- Remote Lock
- Device and memory card encryption
- Mobile VPN support
• Features:
- Dual Home Screens (Work/Personal)
- Office Document Viewer (Word, Excel & PowerPoint)
- PDF Document Viewer
- ZIP File Manager
- Nokia Web Browser
- Dual Keypad Design
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Okay, seriously. Its gotta be intentional at this point. Samsung is a more than a dozen pre-MWC leaks deep, with everything from the lowest of lows to their higher-end stuff out on the table. Two more Samsung phones purported to be getting their announcements next week have now leaked. Neither are anything groundbreaking, but we’ll cover’em for the sake of completion.
From left to right, with what we know:
Samsung J700:
Samsung S7220
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With good ol Sammie Samsung’s pipes being all kinds of leaky this year, it’s not too surprising that Samsung is going ahead and announcing somethings right before Mobile World Congress. Might as well make sure word gets out properly, right?
This morning, Samsung announced that they have revamped the TouchWiz UI that graces a number of its handsets, and will be demoing it in Barcelona next week. Our translate-o-bot is chorking on the Korean press release a bit, but here’s what we gather:
They also casually mention that over 1,000,000 TouchWiz devices have been sold, though we’re not sure whether that includes hybrid (TouchWiz layered on top of Windows Mobile) TouchWiz devices like the Omnia, or if its only those that are TouchWiz to the bone.
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In a staggering announcement that jellied the brain meats of all who were present through the sheer concussive force of stupefaction, Amazon announced the Kindle 2 today, which looks exactly like the soothsayer mockups of one psychic Photoshopper that leaked to the Internet the other day.
As rumored, it costs $359. The battery has been improved by 25%, giving 4 days of straight reading with EVDO on, and 20 days without. Internal storage has also been improved, up to 2GBs. Amazon's bizarre conversion process remains for most of the common ebook formats. It has text-to-speech built in, which will finally make an ebook reader accessible to the visually impaired, and an improved screen. It is also staggeringly thin... little thicker than a magazine.
Essentially, it's a prettier, thinner Kindle with an improved screen and better button placement and a few other cool new features that will largely go unused. From this side of the press conference (the non-attending side), it seems to be an incremental revision that doesn't muck too much with the formula of its predecessor, besides some slight tweaking of both aesthetics and power. But Joel's slurping down comped booze and playing with a Kindle 2 as we speak, so we'll have his report in a bit.
Kindle 2 [Amazon]
Photo: Christian Weber
Unintended Fusion [Dezeen]
Nikon's cheap DSLRs don't have autofocus motors, instead relying on expensive lenses to bring it. You get one with the basic retail kit, but it's a one-size-fits-all compromise. The AS-F DX Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 offers shallow depth of field, good low-light shooting, and speed. From Wired:
It's clear what Nikon is doing here. The 50mm lens has been hugely popular amongst the new wave of DSLR photography enthusiasts. It is cheap, it offers a fast maximum aperture and it is small. On a DX camera, though, it ends up acting like a 75mm lens -- perfect for flattering portraits but a little long for everyday use.
Best of all, it's just $200.
AF-S DX NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8G [Nikon via Wired: Gadget Lab]
Pitchfork has a leaked tracklist. I noticed a turntable in a hard case in the United lost luggage office at JFK last night that had three Prefuse 73 stickers on it. Guillermo Scott Herren, if you've lost a turntable, it's there.
Now this is the Curve I would have loved for T-Mobile to have launched this year, but I’m perfectly content with my 8900. The BGR is reporting that the 9300, codename Gemini, is more or less a 3G Curve. Details are scant at this point and BG pontificates that we shouldn’t expect this until Q4 ’09 (if we’re lucky) but mostly likely Q1 ’10. Hit the jump to see what we might expect from Gemini.
* The screen will be larger than the BlackBerry 8900, and that will also include a higher resolution
* The CPU will also be beefed up. We’re not sure if this means it will include something more powerful than the Bold’s 624MHz processor or not, but we’d like to think so.
* The device is said to be silver (think BlackBerry 8830)
* The keyboard is a little more rounded than the BlackBerry 8900
* The Send/End keys are rounded instead of being flat on the sides
* Styling is not drastically different — it keeps with the 8900/Storm styling
* It of course rocks quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, and tri-band UMTS/HSDPA
* Wi-Fi and GPS was not confirmed, but we’d say there’s about a 99.99% chance
* Camera specs were not confirmed as well, but you can bet you’re looking at 3.2 megapixels or better
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
⌦ External HDD – LaCie 1TB USB 2.0 external hard drive for $100, shipped, about $30 off the street price. [Slickdeals]
⌦ Portable GPS – Sanyo Easy Street GPS for $109, shipped, at least $20 off the normal street price. [Dealoco]
⌦ Netbook – MSI Wind U120 netbook for $330, shipped. This is the new model with a 6-cell battery, 160GB HDD, and Windows XP. [Dealnews]
⌦ Camcorder – The lowest-end Flip Video Ultra, a VGA-quality model with a 30 minute capacity, is $60 shipped. [Dealnews]
⌦ Soundbar – Altec Lansing PT7031 5.1-channel soundbar speaker system for $165, shipped. A good solution for rooms in which you don't want to run surround speakers but still want decent surround. I can't find a review for these specific ones, though. [Dealnews]
⌦ Digital Picture Frame – Today's Woot is a Kodak 7” Digital Picture Frame with Quick Touch Border for $45, shipped.
Photo: The Joy of the Mundane
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Cleveland-based SmartShopper Electronics has introduced several key improvements to its SmartShopper Deluxe Grocery List Assistant product. Changes include size reduction with a more attractive look, category management, improved voice recognition, two simultaneous grocery lists, a kitchen timer, greater memory, longer battery life, and an easier procedure for adding custom items and errands. 
