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Time Warner Shutting Off Austin Accounts For Heavy Usagemariushm writes "After deciding to shelve metered broadband plans, it looks like Time Warner is cutting off, with no warning, the accounts of customers whom they deem to have used too much bandwidth. 'Austin Stop The Cap reader reader Ryan Howard reports that his Road Runner service was cut off yesterday without warning. Acording to Ryan, it took four calls to technical support, two visits to the cable store to try two new cable modems (all to no avail), before someone at Time Warner finally told him to call the company's "Security and Abuse" center. "I called the number and had to leave a voice mail, and about an hour later a Time Warner technician called me back and lectured me for using 44 gigabytes in one week," Howard wrote. Howard was then "educated" about his usage. "According to her, that is more than most people use in a year," Howard said.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 25 Apr 2009 | 2:21 pm Ignite NYC: Learn how a samurai katana is made in 5 minutesIgnite is a series of quick “speed presentations” recorded around the world. And it’s not your normal long, boring slide presentation (who hasn’t experienced death by powerpoint?) because there are a few rules. 1. your total presentation can only be 5 minutes. So Jon Kahan did a really quick presentation on the katana. It’s well worth your 5 minutes to watch, you might even learn something. [via Make] Source: Gizmodo | 25 Apr 2009 | 2:00 pm Windows 7 To Include "Windows XP Mode"Z80xxc! writes "Paul Thurrott's WinSuperSite reports that Windows 7 will include a built-in virtual machine with a fully licensed copy of Windows XP Professional SP3. The VM runs in a modified version of Virtual PC, and applications running in the VM can interact directly with the host operating system as if they were running on the Windows 7 installation itself. While details are scarce for now, it looks as if this feature will only be available as a (free) addon for Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7. Also, a processor supporting hardware virtualization will be required, indicating that this is perhaps aimed more at power users and corporate users, rather than consumers. Microsoft confirmed the feature last night."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 25 Apr 2009 | 1:19 pm Hydrogen Protects Nuclear Fuel In Final StorageWhen Sweden's spent nuclear fuel is to be permanently stored, it will be protected by three different barriers.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 Apr 2009 | 1:12 pm Attention torrent shoppers: Windows 7 RC1 is now availableSection: Computers, Web, Downloads, Web Browsers, Websites  Well if you are the pirating sort, maybe you can make use of the handy dandy new The Pirate Google Bay site, since you can now nab Windows 7 RC1 (Build 7100) on your favorite torrent site. Many were watching and waiting for this release, and it’s now been leaked, with an undisputed authenticity. Although, as with any time you are on torrent sites, you do want to watch out for fakes. Apparently not too much is wildly new and different since the public beta, but if you are looking to get a feel for the performance, you’ll want to check this build out. I hear that the full build string is “7100.0.090421-1700″ and you’ll want to check the file hash of the x86 (32-bit) ISO file with HashTab against the following to make sure you don’t have a fake. Not saying you should go find it on a torrent site or anything though. *ahem* CRC32: E8A1C394 However, all is not totally nice and rosy in Windows 7 land. Two researchers at the Hack in the Box security conference, which is going on now, have announced an “unfixable hack” to Windows 7. It seems they have come up with a way to get in and control a W7 computer during boot up, by using a small 3KB program called VBootkit 2.0. This is a follow-up to a Vista hack a lot like it. It sticks itself on the system memory and skips the hard drive totally, which makes it next to impossible to detect. Once there, the hacker could pretty much do whatever they want. Get in any files, change passwords, whatever. And then, poof! Disappear like they were never there. The drawback for the hacker, and the good thing for the rest of us, is that this one can’t be done remotely. Better hope your hubby or wife isn’t mad at you and very tech savvy. via: crunchgear Full Story » | Written by Jodie Andrefski for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 Apr 2009 | 1:08 pm A Small Victory For Endangered Gray WhalesConservation groups advocating the protection of critically endangered gray whales say they have cause to celebrate.After extended talks with Russian gas and oil companies, the groups say they have managed to win agreements from several firms to end seismic drilling work in order to give the struggling whales a chance to breed undisturbed.The energy companies’ agreement to suspend work comes on the heels of recent research studies that demonstrated how their methods of extracting fossil fuels had affected the breeding behavior and lifecycles of the rare marine mammals.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 Apr 2009 | 1:05 pm Weekly Wrapup: State of the Smartphone, Google Me, Oprah on Twitter, And More...In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the state of the smartphone industry, study new stats showing Facebook's international market penetration,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 1:00 pm Kenyan Preserve Spots First Albino BuffaloOfficials at Kenya’s majestic Hell’s Gate National Park announced on Friday that park rangers had recently sighted an albino buffalo calf, the first of its kind ever found in the country.“This is the first time that an albino buffalo has been found in our parks and it’s a great daySource: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 Apr 2009 | 12:45 pm Hot Air Balloon Ads - Miss Sixty Gets Lifted for Spring/Summer '09 Campaign (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) The new Spring/Summer 2009 ad campaign for Miss Sixty creatively uses a hot air balloon as the backdrop of their ads. But rather than have model Anne Vyalitsyna ride in the basket...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 12:40 pm UPDATE 4-Japan banks Shinsei, Aozora in merger talks-sources* Talks may fall apart if top shareholders oppose - NikkeiSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 12:20 pm UPDATE 4-Japan banks Shinsei, Aozora in merger talks-sources* Talks may fall apart if top shareholders oppose - NikkeiSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 12:20 pm Hanging Heart Bouquets - 'Heavier Than' Anatomical Sculpture from Jamie Gaul (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) This beautiful hanging anatomical heart bouquet is called 'Heavier Than' and is the creation of artist Jamie Gaul. What's particularly remarkable about this piece is that Gaul was driven...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 12:20 pm What Did You Do First With Linux?ruphus13 writes "OStatic has an interesting article on remembering the first time you used Linux. Quoting: 'I'm not sure if the admission that I remember my first Linux installation much more clearly than any date with my first boyfriend or my first date with my husband is a really wise thing to put in writing. I will freely admit it wasn't quite as anxiety-inducing as a date, and the long-term relationship that sprang from it taught me quite a bit about myself, how I learn, and how to passionately load kernel modules at boot. So, what was your first Linux experience?'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 25 Apr 2009 | 12:18 pm Glamorous Hollywood Portraits - Beyonce by Tom Munro in Vogue Italia (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) Beyonce is the embodiment of successful and glamorous Hollywood. From her new movie Obsessed and her new world tour to her fashion lines, everything this diva touches turns to gold...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 11:40 am U.S. Republican senator pushes biotech fundingWASHINGTON, April 25 (Reuters) - A Senate Republican who could prove a swing vote in the U.S. healthcare debate said on Saturday he wanted a new agency to help struggling biotech companies as part of a...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 11:30 am X-Ray Lights - Wonsuk Cho's Lightbox Mimics Radiology Results (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) Wonsuk Cho's 'X-Ray Light' mimics the lightbox used to view radiology results and brings hospital-inspired decor into the home. Cho took X-rays of different light bulbs and mounted...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 11:20 am We would act differently if God stood in front of us - The Newark Advocate
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 25 Apr 2009 | 11:06 am Help File: iphone Speaker Interference; Not-Really-Missing Photo Files - Washington Post
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 25 Apr 2009 | 11:06 am Face-Recognizing Faucets - iHouse SmartFaucet Automatically Adjusts Color & Temperature (VIDEO)(TrendHunter.com) The iHouse SmartFaucet is an incredibly intelligent bathroom faucet that lets you stay connected no matter where you are or what time it is. An integrated camera with face recognition...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 11:00 am Cash-Based Wedding Registries - Zankyou Transfers Value of Gifts to Your Bank Account (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) Its a fairly mainstream practice for couples to register gifts for their wedding, but not every couple wants tangible goods; Zankyou is a website that allows couples to instead receive...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 10:40 am Extreme Scooters - The Standbike Lets You Whip Around at Up to 87 MPH (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) The Standbike is an unusual extreme scooter design that axes the seats so that the rider must stand up, brace and balance on his or her own. According to OhGizmo, a 250 ccm Aprilia...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 10:20 am Skyscraper Cities - Joanna Borek-Clements Sky-Terra Towers Mimic Neuron Cells (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) The Sky-Terra towers designed by Joanna Borek-Clement are meant to augment the cities of the future. These green skyscrapers add an upper layer to the existing cityscape, with public...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 10:00 am Social Commentary Illustrations - Britney Spears Fashion Art by Andrea Marshall(TrendHunter.com) This Britney Spears illustration by acclaimed artist Andrea Marshall fuses art, pop culture and fashion all together into one piece. The striking illustration features Britney Spears...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 9:40 am Researchers Critique Today's Cloud ComputingRed Leader. writes "MAYA Design just released an excerpt from one of their forthcoming books as a white paper. The paper offers a different perspective on cloud computing. Their view is that cloud computing, as currently described, is not that far off from the sort of thinking that drove the economic downturn. In effect, both situations allowed radical experiments to be performed by gigantic, non-redundant entities (PDF). This is dangerous, and the paper argues that we should insist on decentralized, massively-parallel venues until we understand a domain very, very well. In the information economy, this means net equality, information liquidity, and radically distributed services (and that's pretty much the opposite of 'cloud computing' as described today). While there is still hope for computing in the cloud, it's hard not to wonder if short-term profits, a lack of architectural thinking about security and resilience, and long-term myopia aren't leading us in the wrong direction."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 25 Apr 2009 | 9:15 am Recession changes our definition of 'necessity' - Tampabay.com
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 25 Apr 2009 | 8:42 am UPDATE 3-SMFG in lead to buy Citigroup Japan assets-sources* SMFG wins exclusive negotiation rights for Citi Japan assetsSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 8:23 am UPDATE 3-SMFG in lead to buy Citigroup Japan assets-sources* SMFG wins exclusive negotiation rights for Citi Japan assetsSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 8:23 am Bahrain pounces on trade in wild animalsBahraini authorities are seeking to tame a roaring trade in wild animals, which are being smuggled in to meet fierce demand for exotic creatures in the tiny Gulf archipelago. "Our teams...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 7:21 am London cop's Facebook: "Can't wait to bash" G20 protestorsOne of the policemen who participated in the assaults on the London G20 protesters had earlier posted to his facebook that he couldn't "wait to bash some long haired hippys."The police officer's profile page on social networking site Facebook contained a message apparently written by Pc Ward at 2017 BST on 1 April.Pc 'eager to hit G20 protesters'
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 25 Apr 2009 | 7:08 am YOUAND.ME - Free Dating Site Makes 500 BabiesCOPENHAGEN, Denmark, April 25 /PRNewswire/ -- The YOUAND.ME href="http://www.youand.me/">free dating site has just given birth to a new feature, YOUAND.ME MAKE BABIES, andSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 7:01 am Daily Crunch: Lines of Communication Edition
Contest: Win The Ultimate iPhone Application Package Source: CrunchGear | 25 Apr 2009 | 7:00 am Charities see potential, risk with social networks (AP)AP - Meredith Bowen was getting tired of requests from Facebook friends to exchange make-believe pansies, daffodils and tiny cartoon characters for her "(Lil) Green Patch," a virtual garden that sprouted on her social-networking page about a year ago.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Apr 2009 | 6:48 am Yahoo Hires Adobe Vet Lamkin to Run Communications and Communities Unit, as Dietzen Moves to Strategy Post [BoomTown]More musical chairs at Yahoo, which BoomTown predicted recently, as top execs at the company move in and out of jobs, and new ones from the outside move in. Perhaps the most important change to occur is the replacement this week of SVP Scott Dietzen–who been in charge of all communications and communities products at Yahoo (YHOO)–with former Adobe Systems (ADBE) exec Bryan Lamkin, several sources said.
According to his profile on LinkedIn, Lamkin (pictured here) was most recently SVP of Creative Solutions, Adobe’s largest business unit, where the software exec “led product strategy, marketing and product development for Adobe’s flagship software applications, including Photoshop, the Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Flash and Illustrator.” Lamkin, who was at Adobe for 14 years, has more recently been an executive-in-residence at two venture firms, New Enterprise Associates and Sutter Hill Ventures. He will take over for Dietzen, who came to Yahoo in 2007, after its $350 million Zimbra open-source email acquisition Dietzen–who sources said is more entrepreneurial than managerial and did not want to lead such a big organization at the Internet giant–will become VP of strategy in the move. Many said they expect he will eventually leave Yahoo to try his hand at another start-up. His colleague, Zimbra Founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj, left Yahoo earlier this year to join Redpoint Ventures as a VC. In his job since , Dietzen has been busy fixing Yahoo’s mail and calendar offerings. (See my video interview with him below from last fall.) But that’s not all. Also afoot is a restructuring of Yahoo’s North American sales unit, with an unexpected promotion of Mitch Spolan, who was a regional sales exec, who will be in charge of all North American field sales. The paidContent Web site reported the sales changes first, which have been rumored around Yahoo recently. He jumped over two more senior execs, sources said, who run sales operations for the East and West coasts. One of those execs, Beth Lawrence, will now run Yahoo’s relations with agencies. Both report to U.S. sales SVP Joanne Bradford. Over the last 18 months, Yahoo has seen a bleeding of its advertising staff to a wide range of Silicon Valley Web companies, including, most recently, Yahoo’s VP of Sales Operations Dan Foehner to social networking site Facebook. Lastly, one of Yahoo’s most senior communications execs, Brad Williams, was let go as part of its recent round of layoffs. He had been running PR–admirably and with good cheer, I might add, despite all the bad news–since its head Jill Nash departed earlier this year. Williams departure was first reported by The Wall Street Journal tonight. He came to Yahoo in early 2008 from eBay (EBAY). Under new marketing head Elisa Steele, who was hired by CEO Carol Bartz, had recently hired a headhunting firm to find a new head of PR, sources said, and Williams was not considered as a candidate for the job. Here is Dietzen in my video interview:
Source: All Things Digital | 25 Apr 2009 | 6:43 am Thanko sells flexible “lightoscope” (microscope and light combined)
The Thanko madness goes on and on. The Japan-based gadget maker is now selling a “lightoscope” [JP], a term coined by the company itself. Apparently, a lightoscope is a combination of a microscope and a light. And yes, it has a USB interface, otherwise this wouldn’t be a Thanko product. The lightoscope is 24mm at its thickest part and solves a totally common problem: By using it, you can now a) see in the dark, b) reach narrow areas (for example in a car engine as shown in the picture), c) magnify those areas with the built-in microscope (40x) and d) store everything you see on a PC via USB. The thing can even be shaped like an “S” because it’s flexible. Yes, Thanko did it once again.
Source: CrunchGear | 25 Apr 2009 | 6:36 am A Vision For a World Free of CAPTCHAsAn anonymous reader writes "Slate argues that we're going about verifying humans on the Web all wrong: 'As Alan Turing laid out in the 1950 paper that postulated his test, the goal is to determine whether a computer can behave like a human, not perform tasks that a human can. The reason CAPTCHAs have a term limit is that they measure ability, not behavior. ... the random, circuitous way that people interact with Web pages — the scrolling and highlighting and typing and retyping — would be very difficult for a bot to mimic. A system that could capture the way humans interact with forms algorithmically could eventually relieve humans of the need to prove anything altogether.' Seems smart, if an algorithm could actually do that."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 25 Apr 2009 | 6:12 am Lawyer podcast on "Everyone Hates DRM"The Intellectual Property Colloquium, a podcast for lawyers, has a one-hour show up about the reasons that DRM is the most reviled consumer technology in the market today. It includes interviews with Ed Felten and Randy Picker, testimony from the FTC's DRM hearings, and is hosted by UCLA Law's Doug Lichtman. Fascinating listening that makes a good stab at unpicking the tech and the law of DRM.
(via EFF Deep Links)
Source: Boing Boing | 25 Apr 2009 | 5:32 am Handmade, effect-heavy feature filmMary sez, "The Diamonds of Metro Valley is a DIY feature film, made almost entirely on green screen, with full scale people and small-scale, hand-made models, sets costumes, props etc. We completed special effects in After Effects shot-by-shot. The plot of DMV is inspired by diamond heist films of the 1970's, but with an added tinge of the retro-futuristic. Some exciting sequences include a twelve inch robot growing to the height of a three story building, numerous gun-battles and explosions, and a thirteen minute car chase created with model cars on a green screen conveyor belt, composited with live action. It's taken us almost 4 years from start to finish, as each scene in DMV has multiple design and digital effects elements, but we think this effectively contributes to the unique look of the project. We expect to be done in a couple months. The site has our trailer, a synopsis and some info on the main characters. "
The Diamonds of Metro Valley
(Thanks, Mary!) Twitter a global sensation: Hitwise (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Apr 2009 | 5:09 am Sanyo rolls out hybrid bike with 85km driving range
Sanyo says it achieved this impressive driving range by developing a battery that automatically recharges (at least to some extent) when the driver brakes or drives downhill. Other modifications include a front basket that can carry up to 10kg (3 times more than the baskets in other Sanyo hybrids) and tires that are 20% wider than previous eneloop bikes. Sanyo says it aims at selling the bike to cost-conscious commuters, courier companies and maintenance firms but doesn’t expect to sell more than 300 units for the time being. The bike, which weighs a massive 32kg, costs $1,300 in Nippon. But when can we expect them appear in stores outside this country? Source: CrunchGear | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:58 am How Sun Could Fit With Oracle's Strategy - InformationWeek
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:33 am It’s official: Windows 7 Release candidate available for download May 5th
So get your FTP clients ready for May 5th, I’m sure we’ll overload the servers again in our eager rush to see the latest beast shuffling it’s way out of Redmond. Source: CrunchGear | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:29 am Shinsei Bank, Aozora Bank in merger talks -sourcesTOKYO, April 25 (Reuters) - Shinsei Bank and Aozora Bank are in talks to merge in a deal that would create Japan's sixth-largest bank by assets, two people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:12 am Shinsei Bank, Aozora Bank in merger talks -sourcesTOKYO, April 25 (Reuters) - Shinsei Bank and Aozora Bank are in talks to merge in a deal that would create Japan's sixth-largest bank by assets, two people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:12 am Improving the Abilities of Bionic Arm PatientsAl writes "Tech Review has an article about the progress being made on prosthetic arms that can be controlled using nerves that once connected to the missing limb via muscles in the chest. Todd Kuiken, director of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago's Center for Bionic Medicine has pioneered the technique, which has so far given more than 30 patients the ability to control a mechanical prosthetic simply by thinking about moving their old arm. Those who have had the procedure report using their arm to slice hot peppers, open a bag of flour, put on a belt, operate a tape measure, or remove a new tennis ball from a container. The next step is to add sensing capabilities to the arms so that this information can be fed back to the reconnected nerves."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Gizmodo | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:01 am Secret Codons: NYT Crossword Editor Hatches Interactive Game
Will Shortz is the crossword editor of The New York Times and puzzle master for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday. He has written or edited more than 400 books of brainteasers.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:00 am Spies Like Us: Gear for the Budding BondFancy snooping around a Monte Carlo casino at 10 o'clock in the morning, wearing a tuxedo? Here's a bulletproof dress shirt to go with it -- and a bunch of other cool spy stuff, too.Source: Wired: Gadgets | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:00 am How to Push a Coin Through a TableEvery wizard wants a sequined assistant and a crosscut saw. But all you really need to dazzle your drinking pals is the quarter in your pocket.Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:00 am American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-ApocalypseThe strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it's hard not to think immediately of England's Stonehenge or possibly the ominous monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built in 1980, these pale gray rocks are quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it. Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the "guides" themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology. Some are vaguely eugenic (guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity); others prescribe standard-issue hippie mysticism (prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite). What's most widely agreed upon—based on the evidence available—is that the Guidestones are meant to instruct the dazed survivors of some impending apocalypse as they attempt to reconstitute civilization. Not everyone is comfortable with this notion. A few days before I visited, the stones had been splattered with polyurethane and spray-painted with graffiti, including slogans like "Death to the new world order." This defacement was the first serious act of vandalism in the Guidestones' history, but it was hardly the first objection to their existence. In fact, for more than three decades this uncanny structure in the heart of the Bible Belt has been generating responses that range from enchantment to horror. Supporters (notable among them Yoko Ono) have praised the messages as a stirring call to rational thinking, akin to Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Opponents have attacked them as the Ten Commandments of the Antichrist. Whoever the anonymous architects of the Guidestones were, they knew what they were doing: The monument is a highly engineered structure that flawlessly tracks the sun. It also manages to engender endless fascination, thanks to a carefully orchestrated aura of mystery. And the stones have attracted plenty of devotees to defend against folks who would like them destroyed. Clearly, whoever had the monument placed here understood one thing very well: People prize what they don't understand at least as much as what they do. The story of the Georgia Guidestones began on a Friday afternoon in June 1979, when an elegant gray-haired gentleman showed up in Elbert County, made his way to the offices of Elberton Granite Finishing, and introduced himself as Robert C. Christian. He claimed to represent "a small group of loyal Americans" who had been planning the installation of an unusually large and complex stone monument. Christian had come to Elberton—the county seat and the granite capital of the world—because he believed its quarries produced the finest stone on the planet. Joe Fendley, Elberton Granite's president, nodded absently, distracted by the rush to complete his weekly payroll. But when Christian began to describe the monument he had in mind, Fendley stopped what he was doing. Not only was the man asking for stones larger than any that had been quarried in the county, he also wanted them cut, finished, and assembled into some kind of enormous astronomical instrument. What in the world would it be for? Fendley asked. Christian explained that the structure he had in mind would serve as a compass, calendar, and clock. It would also need to be engraved with a set of guides written in eight of the world's major languages. And it had to be capable of withstanding the most catastrophic events, so that the shattered remnants of humanity would be able to use those guides to reestablish a better civilization than the one that was about to destroy itself. 
Monumental Precision
Text: Erik Malinowski; illustration: Steve Sanford Fendley is now deceased, but shortly after the Guidestones went up, an Atlanta television reporter asked what he was thinking when he first heard Christian's plan. "I was thinking, 'I got a nut in here now. How am I going get him out?'" Fendley said. He attempted to discourage the man by quoting him a price several times higher than for any project commissioned there before. The job would require special tools, heavy equipment, and paid consultants, Fendley explained. But Christian merely nodded and asked how long it would take. Fendley didn't rightly know—six months, at least. He wouldn't be able to even consider such an undertaking, he added, until he knew it could be paid for. When Christian asked whether there was a banker in town he considered trustworthy, Fendley saw his chance to unload the strange man and sent him to look for Wyatt Martin, president of the Granite City Bank. The tall and courtly Martin—the only man in Elberton besides Fendley known to have met R. C. Christian face-to-face—is now 78. "Fendley called me and said, 'A kook over here wants some kind of crazy monument,'" Martin says. "But when this fella showed up he was wearing a very nice, expensive suit, which made me take him a little more seriously. And he was well-spoken, obviously an educated person." Martin was naturally taken aback when the man told him straight out that R. C. Christian was a pseudonym. He added that his group had been planning this secretly for 20 years and wanted to remain anonymous forever. "And when he told me what it was he and this group wanted to do, I just about fell over," Martin says. "I told him, 'I believe you'd be just as well off to take the money and throw it out in the street into the gutters.' He just sort of looked at me and shook his head, like he felt kinda sorry for me, and said, 'You don't understand.'" Martin led Christian down the street to the town square, where the city had commissioned a towering Bicentennial Memorial Fountain, which included a ring of 13 granite panels, each roughly 2 by 3 feet, signifying the original colonies. "I told him that was about the biggest project ever undertaken around here, and it was nothing compared to what he was talking about," Martin says. "That didn't seem to bother him at all." Promising to return on Monday, the man went off to charter a plane and spend the weekend scouting locations from the air. "By then I half believed him," Martin says. When Christian came back to the bank Monday, Martin explained that he could not proceed unless he could verify the man's true identity and "get some assurance you can pay for this thing." Eventually, the two negotiated an agreement: Christian would reveal his real name on the condition that Martin promise to serve as his sole intermediary, sign a confidentiality agreement pledging never to disclose the information to another living soul, and agree to destroy all documents and records related to the project when it was finished. "He said he was going to send the money from different banks across the country," Martin says, "because he wanted to make sure it couldn't be traced. He made it clear that he was very serious about secrecy." Before leaving town, Christian met again with Fendley and presented the contractor with a shoe box containing a wooden model of the monument he wanted, plus 10 or so pages of detailed specifications. Fendley accepted the model and instructions but remained skeptical until Martin phoned the following Friday to say he had just received a $10,000 deposit. After that, Fendley stopped questioning and started working. "My daddy loved a challenge," says Fendley's daughter, Melissa Fendley Caruso, "and he said this was the most challenging project in the history of Elbert County." Construction of the Guidestones got under way later that summer. Fendley's company lovingly documented the progress of the work in hundreds of photographs. Jackhammers were used to gouge 114 feet into the rock at Pyramid Quarry, searching for hunks of granite big enough to yield the final stones. Fendley and his crew held their breath when the first 28-ton slab was lifted to the surface, wondering if their derricks would buckle under the weight. A special burner (essentially a narrowly focused rocket motor used to cut and finish large blocks of granite) was trucked to Elberton to clean and size the stones, and a pair of master stonecutters was hired to smooth them. Fendley and Martin helped Christian find a suitable site for the Guidestones in Elbert County: a flat-topped hill rising above the pastures of the Double 7 Farms, with vistas in all directions. For $5,000, owner Wayne Mullinex signed over a 5-acre plot. In addition to the payment, Christian granted lifetime cattle-grazing rights to Mullinex and his children, and Mullinex's construction company got to lay the foundation for the Guidestones. With the purchase of the land, the Guidestones' future was set. Christian said good-bye to Fendley at the granite company office, adding, "You'll never see me again." Christian then turned and walked out the door—without so much as a handshake. From then on, Christian communicated solely through Martin, writing a few weeks later to ask that ownership of the land and monument be transferred to Elbert County, which still holds it. Christian reasoned that civic pride would protect it over time. "All of Mr. Christian's correspondence came from different cities around the country," Martin says. "He never sent anything from the same place twice." 
Daybreak: A carefully cut slot in the Guidestones' center column frames the sunrise on solstices and equinoxes.
Photo: Dan Winters The astrological specifications for the Guidestones were so complex that Fendley had to retain the services of an astronomer from the University of Georgia to help implement the design. The four outer stones were to be oriented based on the limits of the sun's yearly migration. The center column needed two precisely calibrated features: a hole through which the North Star would be visible at all times, and a slot that was to align with the position of the rising sun during the solstices and equinoxes. The principal component of the capstone was a 7\8-inch aperture through which a beam of sunlight would pass at noon each day, shining on the center stone to indicate the day of the year. The main feature of the monument, though, would be the 10 dictates carved into both faces of the outer stones, in eight languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili. A mission statement of sorts (let these be guidestones to an age of reason) was also to be engraved on the sides of the capstone in Egyptian hieroglyphics, classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Babylonian cuneiform. The United Nations provided some of the translations (including those for the dead languages), which were stenciled onto the stones and etched with a sandblaster. By early 1980, a bulldozer was scraping the Double 7 hilltop to bedrock, where five granite slabs serving as a foundation were laid out in a paddle-wheel design. A 100-foot-tall crane was used to lift the stones into place. Each of the outer rocks was 16 feet 4 inches high, 6 feet 6 inches wide, and 1 foot 7 inches thick. The center column was the same (except only half the width), and the capstone measured 9 feet 8 inches long, 6 feet 6 inches wide, and 1 foot 7 inches thick. Including the foundation stones, the monument's total weight was almost 240,000 pounds. Covered with sheets of black plastic in preparation for an unveiling on the vernal equinox, the Guidestones towered over the cattle that continued to graze beneath it at the approach of winter's end. The monument ignited controversy before it was even finished. The first rumor began among members of the Elberton Granite Association, jealous of the attention being showered on one of their own: Fendley was behind the whole thing, they said, aided by his friend Martin, the banker. The gossip became so poisonous that the two men agreed to take a lie detector test at the Elberton Civic Center. The scandal withered when The Elberton Star reported that they had both passed convincingly, but the publicity brought a new wave of complaints. As word of what was being inscribed spread, Martin recalls, even people he considered friends asked him why he was doing the devil's work. A local minister, James Travenstead, predicted that "occult groups" would flock to the Guidestones, warning that "someday a sacrifice will take place here." Those inclined to agree were hardly discouraged by Charlie Clamp, the sandblaster charged with carving each of the 4,000-plus characters on the stones: During the hundreds of hours he spent etching the guides, Clamp said, he had been constantly distracted by "strange music and disjointed voices." 
The team that built the Guidestones didn't know who was financing the project—just that it was the biggest monument in county history. Local banker Wyatt Martin inspects the English lettering with sandblaster Charlie Clamp before the 1980 unveiling.
Photo: Courtesy of Fendley Enterprises Inc. The unveiling on March 22, 1980, was a community celebration. Congressmember Doug Barnard, whose district contained Elberton, addressed a crowd of 400 that flowed down the hillside and included television news crews from Atlanta. Soon Joe Fendley was the most famous Elbertonian since Daniel Tucker, the 18th-century minister memorialized in the folk song "Old Dan Tucker." Bounded by the Savannah and Broad rivers but miles from the nearest interstate—"as rural as rural can be," in the words of current Star publisher Gary Jones—Elberton was suddenly a tourist destination, with visitors from all over the world showing up to see the Guidestones. "We'd have people from Japan and China and India and everywhere wanting to go up and see the monument," Martin says. And Fendley's boast that he had "put Elberton on the map" was affirmed literally in spring 2005, when National Geographic Traveler listed the Guidestones as a feature in its Geotourism MapGuide to Appalachia. But many who read what was written on the stones were unsettled. Guide number one was, of course, the real stopper: maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. There were already 4.5 billion people on the planet, meaning eight out of nine had to go (today it would be closer to 12 out of 13). This instruction was echoed and expanded by tenet number two: guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity. It didn't take a great deal of imagination to draw an analogy to the practices of, among others, the Nazis. Guide number three instructed readers to unite humanity with a living new language. This sent a shiver up the spine of local ministers who knew that the Book of Revelations warned of a common tongue and a one-world government as the accomplishments of the Antichrist. Guide number four—rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason—was similarly threatening to Christians committed to the primacy of faith over all. The last six guides were homiletic by comparison. protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts. let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court. avoid petty laws and useless officials. balance personal rights with social duties. prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite. be not a cancer on the earth—leave room for nature—leave room for nature. Even as locals debated the relative merits of these commandments, the dire predictions of Travenstead seemed to be coming true. Within a few months, a coven of witches from Atlanta adopted the Guidestones as their home away from home, making weekend pilgrimages to Elberton to stage various pagan rites ("dancing and chanting and all that kind of thing," Martin says) and at least one warlock-witch marriage ceremony. No humans were sacrificed on the altar of the stones, but there are rumors that several chickens were beheaded. A 1981 article in the monthly magazine UFO Report cited Naunie Batchelder (identified in the story as "a noted Atlanta psychic") as predicting that the true purpose of the guides would be revealed "within the next 30 years." Viewed from directly overhead, the Guidestones formed an X, the piece in UFO Report observed, making for a perfect landing site. Visitors kept coming, but after several failed investigations into the identity of R. C. Christian, the media lost interest. Curiosity flared again briefly in 1993, when Yoko Ono contributed a track called "Georgia Stone" to a tribute album for avant-garde composer John Cage, with Ono chanting the 10th and final guide nearly verbatim: "Be not a cancer on Earth—leave room for nature—leave room for nature." A decade later, however, when comedienne Roseanne Barr tried to work a bit on the Guidestones into her comeback tour, nobody seemed to care. Christian kept in touch with Martin, writing the banker so regularly that they became pen pals. Occasionally, Christian would call from a pay phone at the Atlanta airport to say he was in the area, and the two would rendezvous for dinner in the college town of Athens, a 40-mile drive west of Elberton. By this time, Martin no longer questioned Christian's secrecy. The older man had successfully deflected Martin's curiosity when the two first met, by quoting Henry James' observations of Stonehenge: "You may put a hundred questions to these rough-hewn giants as they bend in grim contemplation of their fallen companions, but your curiosity falls dead in the vast sunny stillness that enshrouds them." Christian "never would tell me a thing about this group he belonged to," Martin says. The banker received his last letter from Christian right around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and assumes the man—who would have been in his mid-eighties—has since passed away. 
Joe Fendley of Elberton Granite Finishing posing with his masterpiece.
Photo: Courtesy of Fendley Enterprises Inc. The mysterious story of R. C. Christian and the absence of information about the true meaning of the Guidestones was bound to become an irresistible draw for conspiracy theorists and "investigators" of all kinds. Not surprisingly, three decades later there is no shortage of observers rushing to fill the void with all sorts of explanations. Among them is an activist named Mark Dice, author of a book called The Resistance Manifesto. In 2005, Dice (who was using a pseudonym of his own—"John Conner"—appropriated from the Terminator franchise's main character) began to demand that the Guidestones be "smashed into a million pieces." He claims that the monument has "a deep Satanic origin," a stance that has earned him plenty of coverage, both in print and on the Web. According to Dice, Christian was a high-ranking member of "a Luciferian secret society" at the forefront of the New World Order. "The elite are planning to develop successful life-extension technology in the next few decades that will nearly stop the aging process," Dice says, "and they fear that with the current population of Earth so high, the masses will be using resources that the elite want for themselves. The Guidestones are the New World Order's Ten Commandments. They're also a way for the elite to get a laugh at the expense of the uninformed masses, as their agenda stands as clear as day and the zombies don't even notice it." Ironically, Dice's message has mainly produced greater publicity for the Guidestones. This, in turn, has brought fresh visitors to the monument and made Elbert County officials even less inclined to remove the area's only major tourist attraction. Phyllis Brooks, who runs the Elbert County Chamber of Commerce, pronounced herself aghast last November when the Guidestones were attacked by vandals for the first time ever. While Dice denies any involvement in the assault, he seems to have inspired it: Spray-painted on the stones were messages like "Jesus will beat u satanist" and "No one world government." Other defacements asserted that the Council on Foreign Relations is "ran by the devil," that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, and that President Obama is a Muslim. The vandals also splashed the Guidestones with polyurethane, which is much more difficult to remove than paint. Despite the graffiti's alignment with his views, Dice says he disapproves of the acts. "A lot of people were glad such a thing happened and saw it as standing up against the New World Order," Dice says, "while others who are unhappy with the stones saw the actions as counterproductive and inappropriate." Martin winces every time he hears Dice's "Luciferian secret society" take on the Guidestones. But while he disagrees, he also admits that he doesn't know for sure. "All I can tell you is that Mr. Christian always seemed a very decent and sincere fella to me." 
A worker uses a special burner to finish a slab of Pyramid Blue granite.
Photo: Courtesy of Fendley Enterprises Inc. Dice, of course, is far from the only person with a theory about the Guidestones. Jay Weidner, a former Seattle radio commentator turned erudite conspiracy hunter, has heavily invested time and energy into one of the most popular hypotheses. He argues that Christian and his associates were Rosicrucians, followers of the Order of the Rosy Cross, a secret society of mystics that originated in late medieval Germany and claim understanding of esoteric truths about nature, the universe, and the spiritual realm that have been concealed from ordinary people. Weidner considers the name R. C. Christian an homage to the legendary 14th-century founder of the Rosicrucians, a man first identified as Frater C.R.C. and later as Christian Rosenkreuz. Secrecy, Weidner notes, has been a hallmark of the Rosicrucians, a group that announced itself to the world in the early 17th century with a pair of anonymous manifestos that created a huge stir across Europe, despite the fact that no one was ever able to identify a single member. While the guides on the Georgia stones fly in the face of orthodox Christian eschatology, they conform quite well to the tenets of Rosicrucianism, which stress reason and endorse a harmonic relationship with nature. Weidner also has a theory about the purpose of the Guidestones. An authority on the hermetic and alchemical traditions that spawned the Rosicrucians, he believes that for generations the group has been passing down knowledge of a solar cycle that climaxes every 13,000 years. During this culmination, outsize coronal mass ejections are supposed to devastate Earth. Meanwhile, the shadowy organization behind the Guidestones is now orchestrating a "planetary chaos," Weidner believes, that began with the recent collapse of the US financial system and will result eventually in major disruptions of oil and food supplies, mass riots, and ethnic wars worldwide, all leading up to the Big Event on December 21, 2012. "They want to get the population down," Weidner says, "and this is what they think will do it. The Guidestones are there to instruct the survivors." On hearing Weidner's ideas, Martin shakes his head and says it's "the sort of thing that makes me want to tell people everything I know." Martin has long since retired from banking and no longer lives in Elberton, yet he's still the Guidestones' official—and only—secret-keeper. "But I can't tell," the old man quickly adds. "I made a promise." Martin also made a promise to destroy all the records of his dealings with Christian, though he hasn't kept that one—at least not yet. In the back of his garage is a large plastic bin (actually, the hard-sided case of an IBM computer he bought back in 1983) stuffed with every document connected to the Guidestones that ever came into his possession, including the letters from Christian. For years Martin thought he might write a book, but now he knows he probably won't. What he also won't do is allow me to look through the papers. When I ask whether he's prepared to take what he knows to his grave, Martin replies that Christian would want him to do just that: "All along, he said that who he was and where he came from had to be kept a secret. He said mysteries work that way. If you want to keep people interested, you can let them know only so much." The rest is enshrouded in the vast sunny stillness. Randall Sullivan (randysul@aol.com) wrote about the electric-vehicle company ZAP in issue 16.04. Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:00 am Spies Like Us: Gear for the Budding BondFancy snooping around a Monte Carlo casino at 10 o'clock in the morning, wearing a tuxedo? Here's a bulletproof dress shirt to go with it -- and a bunch of other cool spy stuff, too.Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:00 am DJ Deadmau5 Is a Gear HeadDJ and producer, Deadmau5 (pronounced Dead Mouse), talks shop with Wired.com. His secret weapon? The Monome.Source: Wired Top Stories | 25 Apr 2009 | 4:00 am iPod dock + HDD media player kit = Movie Cowboy Box
Japan-based Digital Cowboy today announced the Movie CowBoy DC-MC35ULI [JP], a device serving as an iPod dock and an HDD media player that’s compatible with 3.5-inch SATA HDDs (sold separately). Users wanting to watch movies from their hard disc can directly connect the box-like Movie CowBoy with their TV via HDMI. The device neither supports the iPhone nor the iPod touch but any other iPod. It can play MPEG2 HD/DivX HD/XviD HD/MPEG-1/2/DivX/ and XviD video files. Videos can be watched in full HD (1080i). Audio formats supported include MP3/WMA/AAC/OGG/WAV/AC3, and DTS. The device comes with a USB port and Ethernet so you can easily access YouTube, MS Live and Google’s picture service Picasa without switching on your PC. It’s sized at 225×59×200mm (weight: 850g). As the Movie CowBoy is Japan-only, I suggest contacting the Japan Trend Shop, Gizmine, Geek Stuff 4 U or Rinkya if you are interested in buying it. It costs $250 in Japan (on sale early May). Source: Gizmodo | 25 Apr 2009 | 2:30 am Apple's Big Profits Donât Protect Staff from Recession (PC World)PC World - Early this year, while millions of American businesses were struggling to hold on to their employees, Apple Computer was cutting staff. Why? So that the best non-holiday quarter in the company's history could be just a teensy bit better. So that the $29 billion that Apple has on hand would remain totally secure.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 Apr 2009 | 2:18 am Gamefly Complains of Poor Treatment From USPSGamefly, the popular video game rental service that operates through the mail, has filed a complaint with the Postal Regulatory Commission about the high number of games that are lost or stolen in the mail. The complaint (PDF) asserts that the postal service's automated sorting machines have a tendency to break a small percentage of discs, and that preferential treatment is given to DVD rental services like Netflix and Blockbuster. "According to Gamefly's numbers, it mails out 590,000 games and receives 510,000 games back from subscribers a month. The company sees, depending on the mailer, between one and two percent of its games broken in transit. ... Even if you assume the number is one percent, and a game costs $50 to replace, that's an astounding $295,000 a month in lost merchandise. ... That's not the only issue — games are also stolen in transit, which has lead to the arrest of 19 Postal Service employees."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Gizmodo | 25 Apr 2009 | 2:00 am Everday life can break marriage bondA U.S.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 Apr 2009 | 1:58 am Googler Defects To Twitter, He Tweets
“It’s kind of shocking we couldn’t keep him,” another Googler tells us, calling Diaz “one of the best frontend developers around.” But of course, Twitter is the hot new company, just like Facebook was months back when it was stealing employees left and right from larger companies — like Google. As he famously blogged about, Bowman took exception to some of the mentality surrounding design at Google, and cited it as a reason for leaving. As a frontend engineer, it’s certainly possible Diaz felt similar. He did, after all, author a book called “Pro JavaScript Design Patterns.” Or, as I said, maybe he just wanted to go work for the hot company. Update: Diaz was nice enough to tweet us a picture to use representing his move.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. Source: Gizmodo | 25 Apr 2009 | 1:30 am Dropbox: Now Effortlessly Syncing Files For 1 Million Members
Dropbox, the Y Combinator and Sequoia-funded file synchronization startup that makes it easy to share files across multiple computers at once, just hit a major milestone: it now has over 1 million members. And as the graph below shows, much of that growth has come in the last few months, with over 900,000 signups since the product’s public debut at TechCrunch50 last September. We don’t hear about Dropbox too often (it seems that they’re a bit too secretive for their own good at times), but their product rocks, and is gaining fans quickly. We’ve been using it around the TechCrunch office for over a year now to collaborate on group projects and keep key files handy regardless of which computer we’re using. And we’re not alone - I often hear about other startups that are using Dropbox for their own projects, including Facebook’s Dave Morin. Dropbox is going to be introducing a few key features soon, too. One of them is Peer to Peer sharing, which will allow users on the same network to share their files directly through their routers, without having to first upload them to Dropbox’s servers. The service’s web interface also just got a UI refresh, though many people simply use the folders that the Dropbox application integrates directly into your desktop. CEO Drew Houston wouldn’t talk about how many of Dropbox’s users are paid (the service offers a free version with a limited amount of storage), but he says that the site’s referral program has been driving signups, with the service seeing around 22-25% growth month over month since launch.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors Source: TechCrunch | 25 Apr 2009 | 1:21 am Oddball Tech: Geocities is toast, watch the dead via the web, and sentient trains in JapanSection: Video, Content, Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle, Transportation  Geocities to become a ghost townYahoo announced on Thursday, April 23, 2009 that Geocities is going ka-put this year. I know what you’re thinking - Who the hell cares? Yep. The Internet is littered with old, old Geocities pages from long ago. Let me take you on a trip back to the 90s. Back then, we didn’t have Facebook pages or blogs. Then, we had something known as “webpages.” You would edit HTML and make navigation via static HTML pages. That’s where Geocities came in. You would be able to create your website and have it hosted for free at Geocities. Then Yahoo bought them in a fit of acquisitions that led to nowhere. Will anyone miss Geocities? Maybe a few people. Yahoo will still be offering paid hosting plans if you really have your heart set on having your info on a Yahoo server somewhere in the world. [Source]
Watch the deadI guess people will watch anything on the Internet these days. Over in that boot-shaped country, Italy, there’s a town that will offer webcams in their graveyard so you can not only see the deceased, but you can also pan over to see the scenery. Apparently, lots of people want their bodies to decompose in Pollica, Italy and want their relatives to see. For those of you wondering, the cameras will be above ground because cameras inside a casket is just silly. [Source]
They’re comingYou know how we all fear that we will no longer be the dominant beings on earth because robots will take over? Well, looks like that’s happening right now. Japanese trains are alive. A train that had no passengers nor a conductor decided to go for a 5 mile trip. The official story is that the train did not have its brake correctly applied. However, I think we all know what happened. Even stranger, this is the second train in recent history to do take a roll. A similar incident happened in 2006 when another train gained sentience (the official story is that the conductor didn’t put the wheel chocks in place). Good luck to you all. Remember that trains fear small children. Why else did you think that so many people carry babies on their backs or in slings? [Source] Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 25 Apr 2009 | 1:16 am Windows 7 RC Adds New Remote Media Streaming, Virtual Windows XP Mode
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 PC World | At MPAA request, judge kicks public out of RealDVD court ZDNet In an unusual development, Judge Marilyn Patel kicked out the public from the RealDVD injunction hearing, saying that details of DVD encryption were trade secrets that need to be protected. Hollywood attacks RealDVD in court Judge in RealNetworks Case Seals Court |
FROM APPLETELL - Congratulations to Apple for now serving over one billion app downloads on the App Store. It’s quite an accomplishment, and we haven’t even been able to celebrate the first anniversary of the App Store’s opening.
MORE »
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If you’ve traveled enough, there’s a good chance you’ve lost your luggage before. Sure, it’s annoying as hell, but most people get it back within a few days. However, some people, for whatever reason, never claim their lost luggage, and the airlines then auction it off for charity. That’s where isthisyourluggage.com comes in.
The site, run by some anonymous person, collects this auctioned off luggage, and takes pictures of it to put on the site. Yes, this person opens the lugguage, takes out all of the items, and photographs them. Yes, this is creepy.
But it’s also a great web oddity. The main page of the site features pictures of each suitcase, you can click on any of them and get taken to a page that shows the pictures of each item inside. If you click on this picture, it zooms in, giving you a closer view of the items. I haven’t noticed anything too out of the ordinary, though one bag has a sort of strange nurse’s outfit, which may or may not double as a stripper outfit.
At least the creator of the site is honest. As they write on the about page, “I GO TO THESE AUCTIONS AND BUY THE CASES SO I CAN PHOTOGRAPH THEM FOR MY WEIRD VOYEURISTIC PASSION.”
[via twitter/mbaratz]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Last week, we held an absolutely massive iPhone App Giveaway spree. Over a span of about 12 hours, we gave away hundreds and hundreds of promo codes across 50+ different iPhone applications. It was a blast, but all good things must come to an end - but it’s not over just yet.
Throughout the competition, we hung on to one promo code for each app. We’ve taken all of these promo codes and put them together, forming one ridiculously huge omega-prize. One lucky person is going to take home a copy of every application we gave away that day - plus more. That’s dozens upon dozens of applications, worth hundreds of dollars in all.
Last week, we held an absolutely massive iPhone App Giveaway spree. Over a span of about 12 hours, we gave away hundreds and hundreds of promo codes across 50+ different iPhone applications. It was a blast, but all good things must come to an end - but it’s not over just yet.
Throughout the competition, we hung on to one promo code for each app. We’ve taken all of these promo codes and put them together, forming one ridiculously huge omega-prize. One lucky person is going to take home a copy of every application we gave away that day - plus more. That’s dozens upon dozens of applications, worth hundreds of dollars in all.
Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Time Warner Cable might be backing away from its tiered pricing proposition, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to do it gracefully. An Austin TWC customer with a Road Runner unlimited data plan got his connection unceremoniously severed, and after investigating, found out it was because he’d used a shocking 44GB in one week.
When he attempted to bargain with TWC, they would only grant less than half of that — let’s say 20GB. If we extrapolate, that’s less than 100GB per month at the absolute maximum. Not that they’ve actually stated that. They’re just imposing the rules they wanted to impose, without actually making their policies reflect that. That didn’t work out so well for Comcast, whose mysterious bandwidth limit was eventually outed as a comparatively generous 250GB.
It’s a crybaby tactic and it won’t last long. Unfortunately TWC is the only option in some areas and if their official position is that 2 gigs a day is as much as anyone in the world would ever need, then that’s that. I know it’s hard, Time Warner, but fighting it like this is just going to make it worse.
[via TechDirt]
Mushroom Magick (Amazon)For centuries hallucinogenic mushrooms have participated in a sublime relationship with humankind, thanks to their psychoactive chemicals that shift and modify the human mind. Arik Roper's exquisite painted portraits of magic mushrooms illustrate more than 90 of the known hallucinogenic species from around the world. He captures their powerful auras, adding to a tradition of Mushroom art that stretches back more than 400 years.
Last week, we held an absolutely massive iPhone App Giveaway spree. Over a span of about 12 hours, we gave away hundreds and hundreds of promo codes across 50+ different iPhone applications. It was a blast, but all good things must come to an end - but it’s not over just yet.
Throughout the competition, we hung on to one promo code for each app. We’ve taken all of these promo codes and put them together, forming one ridiculously huge omega-prize. One lucky person is going to take home a copy of every application we gave away that day - plus more. That’s dozens upon dozens of applications, worth hundreds of dollars in all.
Rules/How to win:
Heres what you’ll win: (Click any icon to go to that app’s iTunes page)
 Tap Tap Coldplay - $4.99
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 PhotoList - $1.99
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 Glyder - $0.99
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Remember, you have till Tuesday. Good luck!
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Residents of a community were shown how their energy use measured up against the communal average. If they consumed more than the average, most reduced energy in the months ahead. If households saw that they consumed less energy than their peers, however, their energy use actually rose, except when the frugal households were given the merest of rewards: a smiley face on their bill.Can we trick ourselves into saving ourselves?
Last month, the social network hi5 cut a large percentage of its staff following a new round of funding that didn’t materialized. Now, the self-dubbed “world’s leading social entertainment web site” is getting a new leader at the top. Bill Gossman, formerly the CEO of the online advertising service Audience Science, is taking over as CEO of Hi5. Grossman was brought in by Hi5’s largest shareholder Mohr Davidow Ventures, where Grossman was a former partner and is a current executive in residence.
In the release (below) you can read between the lines to see where Hi5 is looking to head as it continues on at a smaller size. The site, is now focusing on forms of entertainment like casual gaming and micro-payments. Hi5 also recently partnered with Paymo to power mobile payments for virtual goods. Gossman, who obviously has experience in monetization, will now try to monetize hi5. The company’s former CEO, founder Ramu Yalamanchi, will stay on and take the roll of Chief Product Officer.
With nearly 60 million active users, the service has a good sized audience, but it’s long been far behind the big boys in the social networking space, MySpace and Facebook. Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide with 294.7 million unique visitors, with MySpace is coming in second with 125.7 million unique visitors. hi5 gets about 63 million monthly unique visits worldwide but only 3.7 million of those are from the U.S., according to ComScore’s March stats. And the problem with its audience is that a good chunk of it is in countries where it will be hard to attract advertisers, as VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon notes.
Below, find the press release:
San Francisco, CA; April 24, 2009 — hi5, the world’s leading social entertainment web site, today announced the appointment of Bill Gossman as CEO to lead the company through its next phase of growth. Ramu Yalamanchi, founder and CEO since the company’s inception in 2003, will assume the role of Chief Product Officer to lead the company’s product strategy in the social entertainment space.
This change augments the hi5 executive team with seasoned leadership, particularly around monetization of the company’s huge global audience of over 60 million monthly uniques. As the former CEO of Audience Science, Bill brings considerable expertise in online advertising, behavioral targeting, and other forms of audience monetization. He has also built and led several companies through similar stages of their organizational growth.
“The founding team at hi5 has built a tremendous asset in one of the world’s largest online communities, and a truly global distribution and monetization platform for games and other social entertainment content,” said Gossman. “I’m excited to be joining the organization to help leverage that asset by focusing on our continued leadership in the social entertainment space and building a scalable, highly profitable business.”
As Chief Product Officer, Ramu will focus his operational responsibilities on leading the product and engineering organizations to deliver innovative, world-class features that differentiate hi5 in the social entertainment space – particularly extending hi5’s successful micro-payments infrastructure and maximizing that revenue stream for the business.
“It is great to have Bill joining hi5 at this exciting stage of our business,” said Yalamanchi. “We have been incredibly successful in building a huge global audience and pioneering the social entertainment space. Bill brings highly applicable, stage-relevant leadership experience, particularly in monetizing online traffic and building scalable sales organizations, that will help take our company to the next level.”
With over 25 years experience leading high-growth organizations in the digital media space, Bill helped pioneer the behavioral targeting category at Audience Science and is an expert in monetizing online audiences. His previous positions include CEO of Sabrix and founder and COO/CFO of @mobile, a wireless Internet software company sold to Software.com for $400 million. Bill is a former partner and current executive in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, the lead investor in hi5.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 ABC News | Motocross racing and turn-based strategy: iPhone apps of the week CNET News by Jason Parker This week, Apple surpassed an amazing milestone at the iTunes app store: one billion downloads. Apple had been running a contest called the Billion App Countdown promotion with prizes including a chance to win a $10000 iTunes Gift Card, ... Meet Bump, the App Store's Billionth Download Apple's Billion-Download Baby |
Mazetier was driving down South Proctor Street Wednesday night when he spotted a car on the curb and two guys standing nearby. He thought they needed help, so he stopped..."Don't you mess with grandpa, sonny" (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)
"When I opened the door, he started toward me and I kicked him in the balls," he said.
When the other man charged, Mazetier put his feet up and kicked him in the belly.
"He kind of bent a little and went down. And I went around the guy and I'm in the street, and I'm waving for cars to stop and, you know, help."
The two men fled, not having gotten whatever they were looking for.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Online Music/Video
On Monday (April 20, 2009), Open Box unveiled its solution for online video. The simple fact is that if you use or create online video, you know that multiple formats are a necessary evil. If you want to watch something on your BlackBerry or an iPhone or your computer, you need the right plugin or format. Open Box’s Sesame Vault aims to change all of that.
Alright, so you’re a person who watches video. Why should you care? Here’s why—you don’t have to install anything. Everything is done on the server side so whatever device you have, you should be able to watch video. Some devices - ahem iPhone ahem - can’t play back flash video. Wouldn’t it be nice if you went to a page and it would just give you a video that you could play? Yep, Sesame Vault solves that.
Also, if you’re a podcaster or an aspiring video producer, you may want to check out their free single user account. Let someone else take care of the heavy lifting for conversion, compression, and compatibility.
If you are interested in distance learning, like getting a degree online, Sesame Vault could be a great solution. Just imagine if you could watch your lectures online on any device during a break at work. You might want to let your online school’s IT department know about the service. Gonzaga already uses the service, so you know it is a viable solution.
Right now, online video is growing. Deploying information through video is one of the most complete ways of conveying data. The last thing you want is for a format incompatibility to cause a delay in communication.
Sesame Vault allows the user to take a video and put it online without a lot of the hassles of converting the original file to lots of other formats. Sesame Vault will make 11 different formats of the file and supports lots of devices. Additionally, when a user connects to a site using Sesame Vault, Sesame Vault will determine which format to present.
Open Box has their own infrastructure and is claiming an uptime of 99.99%. Their plans start at a free single user account, with the first paid option being $49/month all the way up to $349/month. Prices vary with the amount of GB transferred in a month.
Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
This Express TV stick thing could be pretty handy. Of course, there are other TV tuner solutions out there, but are any this portable and sport 4GB of storage? Great for catching up on network TV, and you can record right to your hard drive as well. It’s a bit bulky for a thumbdrive (try this one if you want small), but if you only want to carry one of the things around, why not make it a TV too?
Of course, I don’t like the idea of a widget or screen popping up every time I plug the thing in. USB drives with autolaunching programs creep me out. I’m looking at you, Cruzer. U3 launch system indeed.
Hmm, the picture on the right makes it look gigantic, actually. That’s just a picture on the box, if you can’t tell. The real thing is sort of regular-thumb-drive-sized.
[via HotHardware]
When it was first unveiled in March, Wolfram Alpha, a new type of search engine created by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, got a lot of buzz. Naturally, some people threw out the “Google killer” title — but it seems to be a different beast, as it’s all about knowledge search. That is to say, you ask a question, and you get an answer — with Google, you ask a question and you get a link to a bunch of documents. That may sound a bit bland, and simplistic, but the select few who have seen it, seem to think it works really well and could be a game changer.
The rest of us won’t know for sure until May, when it’s scheduled to launch. But if you want to catch a glimpse of how it will work, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard is hosting a webcast on Tuesday of an event with Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard. The sold-out event will be streamed live on the web at 3PM EST this coming Tuesday on this page.
And Harvard is calling for web users to participate in the preview by submitting questions, by @replying or direct messaging BerkmanCenter on Twitter during the event, or joining their IRC chat.
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Starting late last year, movie studios began peddling premium-priced DVDs that come with the right to download a digital copy of the movie onto a computer.
Now a federal judge will weigh in on whether the studios are the only ones who can legally make those copies, or if other companies can jump on the bandwagon.
Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Friday will open a hearing to evaluate whether RealNetworks (RNWK) can sell a computer program called RealDVD that allows consumers to copy DVDs onto computers.
Last fall, the studios won a temporary ban on the sale of RealDVD. If Judge Patel rules the program can go back on the market, it could hamper Hollywood’s efforts to cash in on consumer demand for digital copies of the DVDs they buy.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
AFP - Today's mobile workforce is putting precious business secrets at risk, with lost or stolen laptop computers costing companies dearly, according to the Ponemon Institute.
Remember Rob Spence? You know, the Canadian filmmaker dude with a camera prosthetic eye AKA Eyeborg? We just sat down with him for a few minutes and he talked to us about his Eyeborg project and what the heck he’s doing south of the border. Hit the jump for our exclusive pics and video.
Update: Images are now included.
 Canada.com | Happy birthday, Hubble msnbc.com There's plenty to celebrate today as the Hubble Space Telescope turns 19 years old: The billion-dollar orbiting observatory is still in business, even though some people thought it should have failed by now. NASA: No shuttle damage from dropped socket April 24, 1990: Hubble Becomes Big Eye Above Sky |
Oh, cats. Will you ever cease being entertaining? Your feline antics are irresistible. Here we have a common house cat that seems perplexed and/or horrified by the noises its owner’s printer is making. I’ve never liked that little eet-eet noise either, but at least it doesn’t make me convulse. That would have been embarrassing in middle school.
Can you imagine what this cat would look like if it were present at a performance of “old computers singing Bohemian Rhapsody”?
[via Geekologie]
From Rock Cookie Bottom.
(Via Andrew Sullivan)
AOL has a new content site in open beta called Love.com - it’s been live since early this month but hasn’t attracted any press attention to date. AOL hasn’t announced it, and it isn’t linked to from any other AOL properties. But it’s already a vast site covering 350,000 topics that attracts 100,000 unique visitors a week through search engine links and word of mouth on Twitter, Facebook and other sites.
The site has a home directory at love.com, and topic sites are organized under subdomains. Current content on literally anything you can think of (or at least that I could think of) is there: dogs, The Beatles, sex, money, rock and roll. Hamsters. Barack Obama. You get the picture. Search engines love this stuff.
The site is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. The content is all automated, with main articles pulled from third party sources via Relegence, videos from YouTube, Twitter messages linking back to individual pages, and links to major news sites. All of this is automated and requires very little human involvement.
Right now AOL isn’t saying much about Love.com, other than they plan to roll it out officially sometime later this year, and that the goal is “to create sites with content on any topic that people love.” Love.com is described on the MediaGlow site as “The Love.com Network covers all the topics you love, all under one big roof, with hundreds of thousands of topic blogs to suit fans of all things.” Eventually, we hear, users will be able to create a customizable home page which brings in content from specific topics they want to track.
Love.com originally launched in 2003 as a personals site. it was later changed to simply redirect to Match.com, which has a long term partnership with AOL.
More on AOL employee Frank Gruber’s blog.
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There is a seldom told story that Morrissey's tour bus broke down in small town Ohio in the autumn of 1994. A full day was necessary for the repairs to be completed and Morrissey and his band delighted local teenaged fans by stopping by a house party to drink beer and smoke marijuana. "It was the time of my life," remarks Tamara Marshall, who was hosting the party. "My parents were out of town and I was told not to have a party, but once Morrissey showed up I knew I wasn't going to be a secret for long." When asked what she remembered most about Morrissey's visit, Tamara answered, "He didn't like Rolling Rock beer".Fortunate Teens Party With Morrissey, 1994 (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)
OPTi wins $19 million from Apple in patent lawsuit Apple Insider By Aidan Malley In a rare public legal defeat, Apple this week was found to have infringed on a patent for computing technology and has been asked to pay $19 million dollars in damages. Apple found guilty of willful patent infringement Apple Loses Patent Lawsuit from Opti Inc. on "Predictive Snooping" |
Just how big a task does MySpace’s freshly appointed CEO Owen Van Natta have in front of him? Let’s take a quick peek at the latest global traffic stats from comScore which just came out today. On a global basis, Facebook attracted more than twice as many visitors in the month of March as arch-rival MySpace.
Facebook had an estimated 294.7 million unique visitors in March, 2009 on a worldwide basis, compared to 125.7 million for MySpace. While Facebook gained 19 million visitors during the month, MySpace gained only 2 million. In terms of pageviews, MySpace has seen a drop of 20 percent since January (to 37.9 billion), whereas Facebook has seen growth of 22 percent in the exact opposite direction (to 87.3 billion). And while MySpace is still bigger in the U.S., Facebook is closing that gap fast.
Owen Van Natta must figure out some way to reinvigorate MySpace and keep it from languishing its way towards mediocrity. Maybe the answer is to turn MySpace Music into the new engine of growth for the entire social network or focus on some other niche where MySpace can win. But if Van Natta’s ambition is to retake the top spot in social networking, well, good luck with that.
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Last night I lost something very dear to me. While I was making my bed, my comforter bumped over a glass containing a tiny amount of water, which seeped right into my iPhone's weak spot — the dock connector. The screen turned white followed by a series of fluorescent colors, as if my iPhone were seeing its life flash before its eyes. Then it shut off and wouldn't turn on again. Just a year and a half old, my iPhone was dead.
I began treading through the five stages of loss and grief. First, I was in Denial that the damn thing was borked. I quickly immersed the phone in a container of dry rice — a moisture-pulling method many nerds preach about when it comes to reviving soaked electronics — and in the morning I checked to see if my poor iPhone would show any signs of life. No dice.
Then I succumbed to Anger. I cursed at the handset, shaking it accusingly as if it had purposely swallowed the deadly H2O to commit suicide. "Work, dammit, work!" I shouted.
After that failed, I slipped into Bargaining. "If only I owned a longer night stand so the water wouldn't have reached the phone," I thought. "Or if only it were wearing protection."
I quickly sank into Depression and self-pity. "What lousy timing," I complained to Wired.com science editor Betsy Mason. "I'm flying to New York next week for business, and right now would be an incredibly stupid time to buy a new iPhone since the third-gen is probably coming out in two months. My life is a greek tragedy."
"Stop whining," she replied. "It's just a phone."
"It's not just a phone!" I cried. "It's an iPod, a phone and an internet mobile communicator. It was my life in my pocket!"
"Oh, shut up."
Hours later, I circled around to Acceptance and started thinking of ways to move on. I reached out to my Twitter followers asking if anyone had a spare iPhone lying around. Fortunately Jason Snell, my former editor in chief at Macworld, was able to loan me an iPhone for a few days until I find a permanent solution.
And now that I'm done mourning, I'm reaching out to Wired.com readers so we can all learn something from my loss. What would you do with a drowned iPhone? I'm thinking selling it through the e-junk trader Gazelle is an option, though it won't earn me much. E-mail your suggestions to bchen [at] Wired [dot] com. (Our comment system is temporarily disabled due to a system upgrade.)
Or, if you're feeling super optimistic, feel free to send in any kooky methods you used to revive your soaked iPhones, and I might consider trying them and documenting my experience. I'll leave mine buried in rice for a few more days, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Photo: Brian X. Chen/Wired.com
"Check out what happens when Mr. Overstuffed decides to give a "full interview" to a hot colonial number named Tawny!"
I thought "chair porn" was obscenely-priced fare from Herman Miller. I was wrong. It's also photos of suggestively-positioned furniture.* FurniturePorn's design is wonderfully atrocious, as are the quality and clarify of the photos. My biggest gripe: not nearly enough content and zero video (hint hint).
The captions tell you all you have to know...
"It's a beautiful day... for hot gay teen lawn chair slut humpin'!"
Yes, it is. Yes, he/she did. And, yes, he/she sure does!
*Yes, I realize Mark posted this 9 years ago. It's worth revisiting.
Update: NSFW
(thanks Inverse Square!)
Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.
My friends' 3-year-old son, Will, asks, "Do cockroaches have a penis?" This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
First off, most basic sources will just try to give you some fluffy answer about how to tell a boy cockroach from a girl cockroach, which doesn't have anything to do with penises (or lack thereof) at all. In fact, apparently, the easiest way to sex your cockroach is to count the number of of segments on the underside of its abdomen, according to roach expert Joseph Kunkel, a biology professor at the University of Mass., Amherst. Girls have more segments. Boys have fewer
Second, there appears to have been a lot more research done on female cockroach reproductive anatomy. And for good reason: It is more noticeably freaky. Female cockroaches carry their fertilized eggs around in these pod-like sacks called ootheca. Some cockroaches will tote the ootheca around attached to their bodies until the babies hatch. Other species, however, simply drop the ootheca off in some hidden corner, where the babies can incubate safely while you beat their mothers to death with a shoe. Stumble upon enough ootheca in the basement, and its liable to be the first thing you take to the lab.
But, while useful, this information does not answer the young man's question. For that, I had to turn to Cockroaches, a 2007 book by William J. Bell, Louis Marcus Roth, Christine A. Nalepa, and (yes) Edward O. Wilson. Their description of the male cockroach junk helpfully explained why I'd been getting so much confusing (and conflicting) information from other sources. To wit:
A number of intromittent structures in the male cockroach have been called a penis ... Although these structures may be associated with the ejaculatory duct ... penis-like organs function in some capacity other than to convey sperm directly
So there you have it. Cockroaches: They have no penis. But they do have a lot of things that are frequently called a "penis". Many of these bits and pieces seem to actually be used for cockblocking, so to speak. Let me explain. Instead of the familiar-to-us method of copulation, male cockroaches produce a hard, little packet full of sperm, called a spermatophore, which they transfer into their favorite gal. But, unless it's her first time around the block, there's a decent chance that somebody else's spermatophore is already in there. A male cockroach has a better chance of passing on his genes if he can get rid of the competing sperm. Whether hooked, whip-like, barbed or spiny, those not!penis structures are likely used by male cockroaches to clear out rival spermatophores, according to the august authors of Cockroaches, the book.
Beach-bunny cockroaches provided by kthypryn.
Rumors that OQO canceled pre-orders for its Model 2+ ultramobile PC are untrue, according to the company. Instead, online vendor Build Your UMPC did so after OQO could not commit to a shipping date.
"While we haven't canceled the orders, it is unlikely that we will be able to produce additional model 2+ units," said OQO senior vice president Bob Rosin. "So it did not seem worth trying to police that story, as it is accurate in a long-term sense."
A highlight at January's Consumer Electronics Show in January, the updated model was planned for summer release. Upgrades included an ultra-bright OLED display, Intel's popular Atom CPU, and up to 2GB of memory -- and a cheaper price tag. At $1,000 and up, however, the pocket-size portable faces a weak market dominated by ultra-cheap netbooks.
The original OQO was announced in 2000, but did not appear until 2004. It was followed by the award-winning Model 02, introduced by Bill Gates at the 2007 CES in Las Vegas.
Rosin indicated that support services were presently unavailable, but would resume: "It is saddening that we are not able to provide repair and support services however there will be a solution to that available soon."
Section: Audio, Headphones, Reviews
The Monster Turbine in-ear speakers (otherwise known to regular mortals as in-ear headphones) designed by Monster’s head honcho, Noel Lee.
There are lot of included ear tips with different sizes and shapes. If you’ve got two different sized ears (and you probably do), this lets you get a good snug fit to get good audio. The headphones also come with a case so you don’t end up damaging these things in your bag.
The sound quality is very nice. The bass is good and clear. These headphones are sound isolating, so you don’t have to listen at very high volumes. When compared to my old Sony Fontopia headphones, I only had to have the Monster Turbine headphones at about 1/2 to 3/4 the volume to get the same loudness.
It’s possible that these headphones will open up new seating opportunities to you on the train like it did for me. Those four loud people aren’t so loud when you can’t hear them thanks to the Monster Turbine.
The packaging is a bit on the large side. While the materials are recyclable, the headphones would have sounded exactly the same in a package about half the size.
I was initially concerned about the weight distribution of the actual earbud. While the buds look cool, they have a lot of weight to them. I thought that they would fall out of my ears if I had to move around. Running around Grand Central Terminal, I found out that they stay put.
The price is pretty steep at $179.95, although you can get a better deal if you shop around online. I think these may be better priced at $99.
The Monster Turbine has good sound coming out of a stylish set of earbuds. Their term of “In-ear speakers” isn’t just a marketing term. It sounds pretty darn good. If price is no object, then I’d say go for it.
Product Page: [Monster Turbine]
Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
It was only a matter of time. Naked Pizza, a uniquely healthy pizza joint in New Orleans, has replaced its “call for delivery” billboard in favor of something a bit more unorthodox: its Twitter handle. The restaurant now features a large Twitter bird above its storefront, inviting passersby to follow ‘NAKEDpizza‘ for special deals.
Aside from being among the first brick and mortar businesses to so prominently feature its Twitter handle, Naked Pizza is notable for a few other reasons. Its menu was created to offer the “world’s healthiest pizza”, with each slice only weighing in at a fraction of the calories and fat of standard pizza, while still tasting delicious, according to Yelp reviewers . Oh, and Mark Cuban just partnered with the company to turn it into a national franchise.
To be honest I was skeptical of the sign at first (it’s fairly easy to Photoshop the Twitter logo onto a billboard), but I’ve confirmed with the New Orleans sign company that installed it that it’s real. And while it’s still a pretty strange sight to behold, it makes perfect sense. With the growing ubiquity of smart phones, free 411 services, and Google Local on the computer, looking up a restaurant’s phone number is trivial. And phone numbers only form a very fleeting bond with the business, anyway.
But if a business can get a customer to add their Twitter handle, it gets a free channel to constantly remind them that they exist. By tweeting out promotions a few times a week, Naked Pizza will maintain a presence in the customer’s consciousness, and the customer gets a chance to score some cheap pizza.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has been featured on a billboard. Just last week, Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter handle was displayed on thousands of digital billboards across the country in support of his quest for 1 million Twitter followers.
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FROM APPLETELL - Forrester released a computer manufacturer customer satisfaction survey in which, “Apple not only topped the list, it blew away the competition.” And whereas I’m not at all surprised Apple rated so highly, I am surprised by who brought up the rear: Dell.
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A smaller percentage of Americans see their TV sets, dishwashers, clothes dryers and other “old” household technology as necessities, while a growing number describe broadband and iPods that way, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center.
About 1,000 U.S. adults were interviewed by land-line phone and cellphone earlier this month and asked whether they considered 12 common products necessity or luxury items. Researchers at Pew’s Social & Demographic Trends Project compared the responses to a similar survey conducted in 2006, shortly before the recession started.
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FROM GAMERTELL - The fine funny fellows at Penny Arcade have announced that their annual gaming extravaganza will be returning for its sixth year with more than 60 exhibitors…
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If you love sex but can't find the perfect furniture to do it on, get the Tantra Chair. The web site has a very graphic, NSFW guide on different positions you can try on it. It's $1199, but the things you'll experience on it are priceless.
You work long hours. You're getting old. Your shoulders are stiff, your back is sore from sitting all day or walking all day or exercising at the gym, or maybe just from sleeping. What you really need is a massage--like, ten times a day, at home where nobody can hear you snore or fart. So what do you do? Well, if you have the money, it's worth investing in a home massage chair--they range from a couple hundred bucks to several thousand--but the question is, how much should you spend? And is a $7000 chair really that much better than a $1000 one?
To find out, I tested out three massage chairs--Human Touch's iJoy 2580 Robotic Massage Chair ($999.99), Panasonic's RealPro Ultra EP30007KX ($5,999.95), and Inada's Sogno DreamWave Plus ($6,499). I'm the type of person who will sit go to a department store just to sit in massage chairs all day, or spend an hour and $80 getting a petite but extremely strong woman to push the kinks out of my back. My body is important to me, and I am willing to spend money and time to keep it intact.
The iJoy-2580, which hit retailers this April following the success of its predecessor iJoy-100, is a solid, basic massage chair. It has four major functions--kneading, rolling, compression, and percussion. The chair reclines and the rollers can be adjusted to move up and down along your back. What's really nice about it is that it's lined in lovely faux leather and suede without any weird robotic extensions, so it fits in nicely with the living room furniture. The controls and a cup holder are on the armrests, so you don't have to fumble for a remote, and there's an outlet for plugging in a laptop in case you can't relax without geeking out at the same time. I did find myself wishing on occasion that my arms and legs were getting some love, but overall, it's a great chair to fall asleep in.
Panasonic's EP30007 is huge (it weighs 181 lbs!), and it talks a lot. After 3D scanning my back to create a virtual map of my spine, it started working on my body from all different directions--pressure on my shoulders, air bags squeezing my calves and arms, rollers smoothing out my lower back... it felt like four dexterous robots were working my body. A woman's voice talked to me the entire time--she explained the features of the chair, what the chair bots were going to do to my body next, and how many minutes I had left. It was a slight buzz kill, but my body felt great. When I tumbled off the chair 15 minutes later, my back felt slightly less knotted up, which was awesome.
The DreamWave Plus is like the king of massage chairs. Inada sold the first home massager in 1962, and has been one-upping its competitors ever since with things like voice-activated controls, optical shiatsu point finders, and added functions that help lazy people stretch their back and hips without moving a muscle. But consumers pay the price--this bad boy costs nearly $7K after taxes. As James, the lively Chinese man who owns the little showroom that I tested it out in--pointed out, this one doesn't feel like robot hands, it feels like human hands. I felt like I was being cradled by a very strong but gentle man who wanted to massage me all day. "Ah, this is nice," I said out loud as it kneaded my sore butt.
Were the $6-7K Panasonic and Inada massages significantly more relaxing than the iJoy?*
Yes.
Do I have an extra $5000 to spare?
No.
In conclusion, I would say: definitely spend as much as you can on a massage chair. The iJoy is well worth the grand it costs you, but if you have the extra cash, go for the high-end models because they'll save you trips to the chiropractor. Don't have much money at all? The cheapest massager I've ever tried is the Conair $20 neck rest on Amazon, but honestly, with that one, you get what you pay for.
*HumanTouch, the company that makes the iJoy, also has a high-end $3K range massage chair. I just didn't try it out.
This demo reel of the I-Movix SprintCam v3 is neat enough here, but you should really check it out in HD.
Thanks again to Justin, who gives the impression that I know what I'm doing in these videos.
Tonight's meeting will orient mostly around planning upcoming projects: on deck are a bio-diesel-powered go-kart (although electric is also on the table), an evening of building your own theremins, and a lesson on distilling spirits.
It will also orient around drinking beer. I may also break out that new smoker and smoke some dank meats, yo.
Question of the day: Did Apple somehow lay off 10 percent of its retail staff in the last quarter without anyone noticing until today? Answer: No.
My bloggy brethren are hopped up about Apple’s disclosure, via its most recent quarterly filing with the SEC, that its retail group had “approximately 14,000 full-time equivalent employees” at the end of March. Three months earlier, that number had been 15,600.
But let’s be clear: Those aren’t 14,000, or 15,600, employees. Those are 14,000, or 15,600 full-time equivalents–basically, an accounting term that measures the number of man-hours Apple (AAPL) is paying for, not the number of men (or women) it employs. So the very strong likelihood here is that Apple cut a lot of workers’ hours, but not workers themselves.
I asked Apple officials for a definitive statement on this, but they referred me back to their 10-Q.
Still, there’s no denying that sales have slowed at Apple’s 252 retail stores. Just ask CFO Peter Oppenheimer, who said this week that average revenue per store in the last quarter was $5.9 million, down from $7.1 million a year earlier, and that margins for the retail unit had shrunk accordingly. From the company’s earnings call, via Seeking Alpha:
“We believe that the year-over-year decline in average store sales and segment margin is a reflection of the continued weakness in the spending environment, coupled with third party channel expansions relative to the year-ago quarter.”
So the cutbacks make sense, as did the fact that the company only opened one store in the last quarter. It says it still intends to open 25 this year. That’s down from 50 a year ago, though that disparity may be a bit deceiving since Apple opened 17 stores in September–the last month of its 2008 fiscal quarter. Had a few of those opened a week later, the numbers would have evened out a bit.
[Image credit: Victoria Peckam]
Whoa! A pink phone! We haven’t written about a pink phone in months. It seemed like every company on the planet was re-releasing all of their popular handsets in pink for a few months there - then nothing. Looks like LG wants to kickstart the trend back up.
Because nothing makes old things new again like a fancy paint job, LG is re-releasing the six month old Renoir KC910 in head-to-toe pink. Same specs as before, including the 8 megapixel camera. Unfortunately for pink fans around the globe, this one’s a UK-only deal for now, with availability on Orange, O2, and T-Mobile.
[Omio via UnwiredView]
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
Boston police have used Craigslist in order to find more potential victims of accused killer Philip Markoff. Markoff was arrested early this week as evidence mounted against him that led police to believe that the medical student used Craigslist to prey on women. Markoff was charged with killing a masseuse on April 14 and robbing another erotic masseuse, both of which he met through the erotic services section of Craigslist.
Although Markoff is not mentioned by name in the ad placed under the erotic services section, it is apparent that it’s in regards to his case: “Were you attacked or robbed at a Boston-area hotel after placing an ad on Craigslist? If so, you may have information that could aid the investigation into the April 10 armed robbery of a woman at the Westin Copley Place Hotel and the April 14 murder of a woman at the Marriott Copley Place Hotel. Both victims were attacked by a prospective client who had contacted them through ads placed on Craigslist.” The police hope that the ad will attract leads from other victims or witnesses that may not feel comfortable using traditional methods.
In related news, a Facebook group has formed in support of Markoff called “Phil Markoff is Innocent Until Proven Guilty.” The group already has over 200 members and is steadily growing.
Read: [WSYR News]
Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Nathan Hodge has a short piece on Defense Tech talking about cell phones in prisons, and the technology that's used to jam or detect them.
Still anxiously awaiting a release of the Android v1.5 “Cupcake” build sometime this month? It looks like it’s time to uncross your fingers and take a breath. We’re running out of days in April, so we were already a bit skeptical - but T-Mobile Germany has gone ahead and confirmed a May roll out.
While T-Mobile US has been slightly reluctant to talk about it, T-Mobile Germany went ahead and put the information right on the G1’s product page. With the Cupcake-ified HTC Magic launching on the 5th of next month, we’ve got high hopes that everyone can get in on the Cupcake party within that first week. We’ll update you if we hear more.
[Via TalkAndroid]
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FROM APPLETELL - This week, the App Store served the 1 billionth app download, and here’s this week’s list of free apps and games to keep you a little less bored this weekend. Cheers!
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Travis Schmidt built an R/C Nerf tank that has a camera on board for remote viewing—and even onboard speakers for "psychological warfare". He's got an Instructable up to show you how he did it—and a video showing how much his girlfriend is willing to put up with.
After Apple announced that roughly 98% of applications that came there way were being approved within 7 days, there was a lull in the barrage of App Store submission horror stories bombarding our inbox. We thought that perhaps Apple had figured things out on their end, and that everyone was just happy; alas, it seems like everyone was just waiting for something like Baby Shaker before they came out of the woodworks. Our inboxes are once again overflowing with tales of App Store tribulation.
For most of the denials we hear about, the reasoning behind the red light is blatantly obvious. Be it bodily fluids, naked ladies, or whatever else, there are just a few things that Apple won’t ever be cool with. These stories aren’t worth retelling. But today, one came in that gave us a laugh: after being denied twice for “objectionable content”, these app developers simply prettied things up a bit - and got approved.
A few weeks back, Alkali Media submitted CrudeBox. Now, as you could probably assume from the name, CrudeBox was intended for the maturest of audiences. It was a simple soundboard: one screen, 16 raunchy sound effects, and a volume slider. It’s not going to win any awards for its complexity, but it’s no worse than any of the countless other sound effect apps that litter the App Store.
Six days later, Apple lets them know it was a no-go:
We’ve reviewed CrudeBox and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains objectionable content and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:
“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”
What exactly Apple considered obscene about the app was left unmentioned - just that there was something they weren’t going to let fly. So Alkali took it upon themselves to gauge what was offensive and hope for the best. They decided that one of the sounds, the sound of a moaning female, was the cause - so they nixed it. In its stead, they added the classic “Boing!” of a spring - we’ll let you figure out for yourself how that one fits in amongst the other nasty noises. They submitted it again.
A week later, they got the same e-mail again. Denied.
So they changed course. If changing the sounds wouldn’t do it, what if they simply made it look less offensive? There was nothing within the app that wouldn’t make the cut on Saturday Morning TV - but if they went over the top with the new look, would it outweigh whatever Apple was deeming offensive? And thus, PrudeBox was born.
Same application, same sounds. Instead of the buttons being slimy green blobs, they became golden sunflowers. The black background was replaced with a sunset, and a bunny was added to the volume slider. The “Wet Fart” button became “Big Toot”, “Sneeze” became “Ah-choo”, and “Vomit” became “Sicky”. The core of the application, the sound effects themselves, stayed the same. It was submitted again.
The application was approved.
Now lets get this straight: the sound of a “Big Toot” isn’t offensive - but the identical sound identified as “Wet Fart” is? Or are the words they used originally what made it offensive? Immature? Sure. Offensive? Only to prudes.
With a simple change of facade, this application went from twice being labeled obscene to being on sale. This is the App Store equivalent of blurring out a middle finger or changing a swear word in a movie to something that makes absolutely no sense. You’re not changing the underlying content, and you’re not fooling anyone. You’re just making yourself look silly.
What do you think? Was the application offensive in the first place? Is the new one any less offensive?
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Run the extension cord with its outlets up the trunk of your tree, then connect each of Harlan's "Trim-It-Quick" light strands to the outlet for easy Christmas tree trimming that won't get tangled up. That's their big pitch anyway. I guess since each of the cords are fairly short, there's not as many chances for snags.
I'll let you figure it out, with kits starting at $60 (and going up to $190), while trimming my holiday tree the traditional way: by spitting rum nog at a dry pine while making it smolder with a green laser. (The laser represents the angel Gabriel's lightsaber.)
Sofas, park benches, and loungers are pretty standard-looking these days, but what will we be sitting on in the future? From meditation pods modeled after anime to a slightly phallic motorized rocking chair, here are eight designs that hint at the possibilities.
1. Novague, a design studio in Prague, imagines a sleek white motorized chair that uses the rocking motion to generate electricity that powers an adjacent LED reading lamp hanging above the head.
2. Jeff Lawber created this concept using Rhino v4. He imagines it as a hybrid between a bean bag and a park bench; I would like to have one in my living room so I could teach my dogs to jump through hoops.
3. These beautiful, assymerical flower petals by Alex Cozma are designed for big open spaces, like parks and museums. Pretty.
4. Tokujin Yoshioka famously made this design-y chair out of natural crystals by submerging a nucleation-inducing fiber structure into giant water tanks. When I saw the installation in Tokyo last fall, it had grown quite a lot bigger than this, but still didn't look comfortable to sit in.
6. This real 80% recycled aluminum bench designed by architect Frank Gehry really exists and will be auctioned to the public in May.
7. Nimbus is great for those who want to meditate, simulate sitting on a cloud, or pretend they're Dragon Ball Z characters. Inspired by the Japanese anime, the chair-- imagined by Bobby Lowe--uses Maglev technology to create the sensation of levitating. It also slowly rotates for those who want to check out the view.
8. Do you wish you could lie on the grass all day without ever leaving your house? Designer Sebastian Pulgar Arata's astroturf-like lounger makes that possible.
[Sources: 1, 6-Dezeen; 2, 5, 3, 7, and 8-Yanko Design]
Section: Audio, Video, Communications, Computers, Features, Originals, Columns, Who's On Crack
It has come to my attention that more and more stuff ought to be free. Many of the things on the ‘net and in our gadgets are free, but many more are still not. Why? Today, I’ll take a look at stuff that ought to be economically feasible to give away and perhaps cause a ripple in current business models and help usher in a free utopia where I want to live.
Instead of the going after everyone for pirating music, what if the RIAA stopped paying lawyers and started subsidizing the cost of music players. If we didn’t shell out $100/$200/$300 on a portable media device, many more of us might be open to consuming much more music. Imagine, “claim your free iPod” adverts would be all over the place (and it wouldn’t be some scam). Apple gets paid, we get encouraged to pay for artists’ labors, win all around.
I’ve heard it time and time again, “Why shell out $359 for an eBook reader that I immediately have to go and buy books to fill it with?” Just yesterday on NPR I heard, “Spending $359 is just dumb, I’ll wait until they come down.” What if Amazon gave away these things aiming to make it up on the back end with content sales. Would you grab a reader and begin downloading? Of course you would. So would bunches and bunches of others. The pitch ought to be about content, not the gadget.
Yes, I am totally going there. Would you accept a phone that had a home screen spouting adverts for local businesses in exchange for free phone service? What if you got one text per day with an advert from local businesses? I am still in. You see, make the trade off clear and we’ll jump at it. Bury the fees and charges in a 13 page legal doc and we’ll flock elsewhere. Advertising needs an outlet, let them in but only if you are clear on the trade off.
Same drill, what if we load you up with a homepage, background, and theme from advertisers you agree not to change. [looking at you hackers] Would companies pay to put stuff in front of you while you waited the excruciatingly long boot up periods? How about a new special everyday from vendors you select on your wallpaper/screen saver? How about something special, just for computer owners on your browsers home page?
Any of this stuff actually going to happen? Doubtful. As advertisers seek new ways to get in front of us as the old way (30 second TV spots) die off, perhaps another look will be given to these ideas. Until then, we keep shelling out good dollar after bad for stuff they should give us in hopes to consume content or at least access to content.
There is free stuff you don’t have to be on crack to get though, you only have to be on Gadgetell. Check out our free giveaway—the Hava Gold.
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Legendary MTV Networks exec and co-founder John Sykes (pictured here in an interview on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” show) will replace Owen Van Natta as CEO of the controversial music-sharing site, Project Playlist.
He is a high-profile choice to take over for Van Natta, who was officially named CEO of MySpace this morning by News Corp. (NWS).
Van Natta, who also worked at Facebook, will remain an adviser to Playlist, which is based in Silicon Valley. It is not clear where Sykes will be located.
Sykes–who is on the Playlist board–was one of the original executives who launched the iconic music-focused cable channel 25 years ago, before leaving last year. He was also a key exec at both VH1 and Infinity Broadcasting.
He is well regarded in the music industry, an important criterion since Playlist has been dealing with legal attacks from some music labels. Settling with them will be key to the start-up’s survival.
Former AOL and MTV exec Bob Pittman, who is an investor in Playlist, worked closely with Sykes at the Viacom (VIA) unit.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Playlist Names Board Member and Veteran Media Executive
John Sykes as CEOMTV Co-founder and Former VH-1 President Replaces Owen Van Natta
Palo Alto, Calif., April 24, 2009–Playlist, the leading social media network where over 43 million music fans discover, create and share playlists, announced today that Board Member and industry veteran John Sykes has joined the company as Chief Executive Officer. As a Co-founder of MTV, President of VH1, and CEO of Infinity Broadcasting, Sykes brings extensive operating experience and industry relationships to the company as it partners with the music industry to provide advertising, subscription and e-commerce services to music consumers.
Owen Van Natta will serve as an Advisor to Playlist.
“John was a pioneer of the MTV revolution that forever changed the music industry landscape by giving fans a whole new way to discover and enjoy music,” said Bob Zangrillo, Chairman of Playlist. “Playlist looks forward to leveraging John’s tremendous track record operating media businesses and deep relationships in the music industry as it builds out the world’s premier social media service.”
“Creating and sharing playlists has become a phenomenon in our culture. With over 43 million registered users, Playlist is the number one site where fans go to discover, share and enjoy their favorite music,” said John Sykes, CEO of Playlist. “Leveraging our newly forged partnerships with the music community, we can now offer consumers deep access to their music and provide the industry with powerful new revenue streams.”
Playlist, one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet, continues to establish partnerships with the entertainment industry in an effort to offer a comprehensive collection of content that can be discovered, shared and monetized at www.playlist.com.
Amazon.com (AMZN) is absolutely on fire. The company posted Q1 results that blew away estimates, with EPS of 41 cents a dime ahead of the Street, as both gross margins and operating margin expanded in the face of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Not only are consumers continuing to migrate shopping to online from offline, but Amazon continues to gobble up share: Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker notes that Amazon’s U.S. business has grown at least 18 percentage points faster than overall e-commerce for eight consecutive quarters. Throw in better-than-expected demand for the Kindle–annoyingly, the company won’t give any specific data on sales of the device–and you have a recipe for an investor lovefest.
And when I say the stock is on fire, I don’t just mean today. AMZN is up about 67 percent year to date, and a whopping 145 percent since the stock’s November low.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta has finally been officially named as CEO of MySpace, as BoomTown reported yesterday, according to a press release from News Corp.
He will replace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, who stepped down from the job earlier this week. DeWolfe will remain a strategic adviser at MySpace.
Van Natta, 39, will take over immediately and be based in Los Angeles, where MySpace has its HQ. But, with strong ties to Silicon Valley, he is likely to give the site more of a high-tech infusion.
Van Natta has most recently been running Project Playlist, a controversial music-sharing start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif. Previous to that, he worked at Amazon (AMZN).
He will be replaced there, in turn, by well-known former MTV Networks exec and co-founder John Sykes.
No other new top execs at the huge social-networking site have been named yet, as some had reported.
Instead, it will be up to Van Natta, who will work closely with and report to new News Corp. digital head Jon Miller, to energize the current staff and recruit new talent to MySpace.
The social-networking giant has seen its buzz and momentum wane in the face of the juggernaut growth of Facebook.
Van Natta played a key role in Facebook’s formation, striking key investment and advertising deals with Microsoft (MSFT), for example. He left after it was clear he was not going to become CEO, a job held by founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Nonetheless, MySpace is still the largest social network in the U.S., although Facebook is close to surpassing its size.
All Things Digital broke the news earlier this week that Van Natta was the top choice of News Corp. (NWS), which owns MySpace.
(News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)
In his new job, Van Natta has a lot of challenges, including: reinvigorating the MySpace brand, upgrading its technology, adding more innovation to its feature set, continuing to grow its nascent advertising business and dealing with the expected end to its lucrative search-advertising deal with Google (GOOG).
He also must play deft diplomat at MySpace, where many remain loyal to DeWolfe and to co-founder Tom Anderson. Anderson is in talks to step down as president for an unspecified new role in the company. He currently remains president.
Here’s the full press release on Van Natta:
News Corporation Names Owen Van Natta Chief Executive Officer of MySpace
______________________Los Angeles, CA, April 24, 2009–News Corporation today announced the appointment of Owen Van Natta to the role of MySpace Chief Executive Officer effective immediately. Mr. Van Natta will be based in Los Angeles and report directly to Jonathan Miller, News Corporation’s CEO of Digital Media and Chief Digital Officer.
A highly-regarded digital executive, Mr. Van Natta, 39, previously served as Chief Revenue Officer and Vice President of Operations for Facebook, where he helped negotiate Facebook’s $240 million investment from Microsoft. Earlier, he served as Vice President of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development for Amazon.com. Most recently, he was the CEO of Playlist, Inc., an online music company.
“Owen combines a deep understanding of social networking, a keen business sense and the operational experience to guide MySpace through its next phase of growth. I’m confident his leadership will be an invaluable asset,” said Mr. Miller. “I plan to work closely with Owen to shape our long-term vision around this vibrant community that already attracts more than 130 million users worldwide.”
“I’m thrilled to have the privilege to pilot MySpace in what is sure to be an incredibly exciting and rewarding next chapter for the business,” said Mr. Van Natta. “I feel honored to build upon the immeasurable achievements of the MySpace founders and look forward to working with Jon and the MySpace team to meet the challenges and make the most of the opportunities before us.”
While serving as Vice President of Operations and Chief Revenue Officer for Facebook, Van Natta focused on revenue operations, business development, strategic partnerships and technical operations. As Vice President of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development at Amazon.com, he managed global marketing programs and strategic partnerships. He was also part of the founding team of A9.com, the Amazon.com search company, and was responsible for site operations and sponsored-link advertising. Owen earned a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Broadcast TV’s “upfront” season–the odd tradition whereby the networks try to get advertisers to buy much of their inventory in advance for the coming year–doesn’t start till next month. But once it does, it’s likely to be grim.
That’s the prediction from Barclays Capital’s Anthony DiClemente, who says that a combination of factors–first and foremost, a lousy economy–will force the networks to sell less advertising, at lower prices, than they have for quite some time. Translation: DiClemente sees a 15 percent drop in upfront sales this year–the first double-digit drop for the networks since 2002.
CBS (CBS) will be in the least vulnerable position since it has the strongest ratings, DiClemente says, and will see revenue drop 10 percent. But GE’s (GE) NBC, the ratings laggard, will see dollars drop by nearly 20 percent; the fact that it’s stripping out five hours of network programming and replacing it with Jay Leno (who will presumably be OK after his hospitalization) doesn’t help. Here’s his network-by-network breakdown (click table to enlarge):
One impact for Web video sites like Hulu, the joint venture between NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, and very soon, Disney’s (DIS) ABC: DiClemente figures that the networks will start throwing in Web ads as sweeteners for broadcast buys, which should push down ad rates for Web video in general.
The “buy”-a-“real”-ad-get-a-Web-ad-for-free sales pitch is one that media conglomerates have been moving away from in recent years, but all bets are off right now. Big Media will sacrifice Web pricing in order to shore up offline sales, which are still much more important.
The good news: The upfronts are increasingly less important to the networks’ health and even less so for their corporate parents (click table to enlarge):
And if you’re a very optimistic network executive, you can hold out hope that the economy rebounds later on this year and the ads you didn’t sell this spring become much more valuable in the fall. Could happen, right?
The presidential CrackBerry is undergoing final testing before being handed back. The NSA is hammering on the SecurVoice software which has been loaded onto the Obama-phone and is in the last stages of testing just how secure it might be.
The BlackBerry is an 8830, the standard business handset, but the added software encrypts both calls and messages. Cellphone calls are encrypted anyway, but there are some back doors if you know where to find them (and of course, the NSA knows exactly where they are).
The company behind the SecurVoice software is Genesis Key, which is handily based in Washington DC. Be careful not to confuse this with spam-alike secure-voice.com, whose site reads, rather unconvincingly, thus: “The development of the Secure Voice lasts from 2001 and we have now a wide range of devices as well as Landline version of the solution.”
Since winning the election, President Obama has been limping along with two devices — a standard BlackBerry and a secured handset called the Sectera Edge, an unwieldy device that not only offers encrypted communications but is also so ugly that nobody would ever want to steal it. Both machines need to be tethered to each other to work, making every presidential e-mail look something like a game of Wii Boxing.
If the NSA tests come up clean, he could have his customised BlackBerry in his hands soon, which in governmental terms means a couple of months. And of course, secure communications aren’t much good if the person you are talking to is an open and easy target. To this end, Mrs. O should be getting one, too.
The odd fact is that the NSA usually likes everybody else to be locked out but itself. Giving the SecurVoice such a big endorsement will either mean that the encryption is indeed unbreakable (and therefore fit for the president) or that it wants everybody to think that it is unbreakable, therefore giving the NSA back-door access to every single SecurVoice customer. Paranoid conspiracy theory? Hell yes. Accurate speculation? Maybe.
Inside the Ring: Obama’s BlackBerry [Washington Post]
Photo: BohPhoto/Flickr
See Also:
What does that actually mean? It means that you can buy one of the burgeoning range of modern m4/3 digicams and slip on a lens from Leica, Voigtländer or Carl Zeiss. Essentially this means you can use some of the best lenses ever made on some pretty cheap and full featured bodies (the Panasonic G1, for instance).
There are some limits. The adapter is mechanical only, which means that there will be no communication between the camera and lens. This could mess with some advanced metering features, and also leave gaps in your photo’s metadata, but for older, non-chipped lenses this won’t matter anyway.
This product alone actually makes the Micro Four Thirds system much more enticing, and until Leica comes out with a proper digital M-series camera, why not save some money and use this instead? ¥19,800 or around $200.
Product page [Cosina via DP Review]
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We now have it straight from the horses mouth: the Windows 7 Release Candidate will be available for 
Last month, Douglas Bowman, the design lead at Google, left to become the creative director at Twitter. Today, a former co-worker joins him. Dustin Diaz, who was an engineer working on Gmail, resigned from Google and announced he was taking a job at Twitter, 
