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Apptagious’s Toss! falls short of expectations Football, cornhole, leap frog and horse shoes. Sound like a Sunday in the Midwest? No – it’s Toss! for the iPhone, a recently-released suite of games by Apptagious. This all-in-one app consists of four games with the same basic premise - you use the iPhone’s accelerometer to mimic “toss”ing, and your goal in all of the games is to throw something to hit a target. Apptagious has definitely demonstrated the iPhone’s capabilities in this game, much like WiiSports demonstrated what the WiiMote could do. However, the game’s charm is ephemeral, and the app doesn’t offer very much depth.
Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jun 2009 | 2:02 pm E3 2009: Microsoft wants to make you the controller with Project NatalFROM GAMERTELL - Dropping wires and even the need for an object to hold, Microsoft’s Project Natal utilizes what appears to be a special video camera bar with microphone that works in cooperation with motion sensing and video technology… Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 4 Jun 2009 | 2:01 pm White House uses Web during speech to Muslims (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 Jun 2009 | 2:00 pm NEC announces 43-inch curved LCD for the low, low price of $8,000
Some people like big cars, some like big guns, and some like big monitors. If you’re a big monitor person, this 43-inch curved LCD with a 32:10 aspect ratio from NEC is right up your alley. It’s wildly expensive at $8,000 but that just means you’ll see it in trendy shops, web design firms, and hedge funds all over the place. Actual specs include an 2880 x 900 resolution (double WXGA), 200 cd/m2 brightness, 10,000:1 contrast ratio, “wide color gamut with 100% coverage of sRGB and 99.3% coverage of Adobe RGB,” DVI/HDMI inputs, and built-in USB hub. To put that in perspective, two $99 19-inch LCDs next to each other would give you the same resolution. But you don’t get the curve or the giant screen. That costs an extra $7,800 and “eliminates bezel and screen gap issues for increased productivity and decreased frustration.” The NEC CRV43 will be available in July. Full press release:
[via Akihabara]
Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jun 2009 | 2:00 pm Grooveshark Launches Facebook App and WordPress IntegrationIn 2008 Blender magazine named Gainesville Florida the Best Place to Start a Band. With this morning's launch of Grooveshark's new Facebook Share Song application, WordPress plugin and release of their...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Jun 2009 | 2:00 pm Left 4 Dead 2: zombie game is scarier than the original, which is plenty scaryLeft 4 Dead -- a first-person, team-play zombie game -- is one of the most compelling, nightmarish, cinematic games I've ever seen. Part of it is the excellent play mechanics, part of it is the music (which has its own AI subsystem to ensure that it follows your play and makes appropriate, dramatic swellings at all the right times), part of it is the superb writing -- but it's mostly the fact that computer generated zombies are supposed to inhabit the uncanny valley, so these undead critters seem incredibly lifelike. And now there's a sequel in the works, and holy crap, it looks even scarier. Watch this trailer and tell me that this thing won't give you bad dreams and twitches for months. Left 4 Dead 2 PC GamesTrailer - E3 2009: Keep Fighting Trailer (via Wonderland)
Previously:
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:44 pm Pre is Not the Homerun Palm Needed - PC World
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:42 pm An algorithm to simulate the sound of waterCornell University's Changxi Zheng and Doug L. James have developed an algorithm that accurately simulates the sound of water. Fluid sounds, such as splashing and pouring, are ubiquitous and familiar but we lack physically based algorithms to synthesize them in computer animation or interactive virtual environments. We propose a practical method for automatic procedural synthesis of synchronized harmonic bubble-based sounds from 3D fluid animations. To avoid audio-rate time-stepping of compressible fluids, we acoustically augment existing incompressible fluid solvers with particle-based models for bubble creation, vibration, advection, and radiation. Sound radiation from harmonic fluid vibrations is modeled using a time-varying linear superposition of bubble oscillators. We weight each oscillator by its bubble-to-ear acoustic transfer function, which is modeled as a discrete Green's function of the Helmholtz equation. To solve potentially millions of 3D Helmholtz problems, we propose a fast dual-domain multipole boundary-integral solver, with cost linear in the complexity of the fluid domain's boundary. Enhancements are proposed for robust evaluation, noise elimination, acceleration, and parallelization. Examples of harmonic fluid sounds are provided for water drops, pouring, babbling, and splashing phenomena, often with thousands of acoustic bubbles, and hundreds of thousands of transfer function solves. You can download the paper at the website, and watch high-res video: Harmonic Fluids [Harmonic Fluids Project via /.] Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:41 pm Rural, City Birds Do Not Speak The Same LanguageAlthough the great tit bird is loud enough to be heard in noisy, city areas, for their country relations they might as well be speaking Greek.Scientists at Aberystwyth University discovered that the male great tit warbled at a pitch high enough to be heard above the city’s noise.However, the rural birds were perplexed by the city bird’s singing while city birds "didn't understand the lower rural pitch."The male great tit chirps to guard his region and find a mate.Research student Emily Mockford traveled to 20 towns and cities in the UK to record the bird’s singing.The singing was played to rural male tits in the mating season when they are their most antagonistic, but there was a "slower and weaker" reaction than the ones they gave to the fellow countryside birds.Project leader Dr.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:40 pm Twinkling LED placemat
$25 for a pack of two. LED Placemat - Black [Sylvania via Oh Gizmo and Chip Chick]
Source: Gizmodo | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:40 pm FSP Group Brings iON Battery Pack for iPhone to U.S.By Shane McGlaun Yeah the battery life on my first gen iPhone sucks. Every time we stop somewhere, my kids want to play games on my phone and if I get bored while my wife drones on about whatever it is...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:39 pm Note to the AP: Do not do gadget reviewsAfter all the lip service paid by the Associated Press against wholesale IP theft, I wonder if this is their ultimate solution: to produce content so lifeless and undesirable that no one will want to steal it. I’d chalk this up to dude having a bad day but, thanks to AP’s byline policies, we don’t even know who this poor guy is.
Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:38 pm Ciena reports fiscal 2Q loss on impairment chargeCiena Corp., the telecommunications and network equipment company, said Thursday it lost $503.2 million in its fiscal second quarter, due to a hefty goodwill impairment charge and a steep...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:37 pm Pelosi Wants Probe Of Accidental Disclosure Of Nuclear Data - AHN
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:34 pm iFixit helps others void warranties with Gear Teardown
Kyle at the great site iFixIt.com has just opened a new service dedicated to the collection and curation of user-generated content called Gear Teardown. The service, sort of like a how-to site for crazy people, allows folks to document each step in the process of tearing down, and hopefully putting back together, their gadgets. For example, this teardown of the Moto Krave shows six steps, some more esoteric than others, and essentially allows anyone to figure out which chips are used in each phone. Obviously this level of gadget porn isn’t for everyone, but it’s a fascinating study and will be much cooler as the site is fleshed out with more hardware and more teardowns. Until then, it’s a cool way to get folks excited about buying Torx drivers.
Source: CrunchGear | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:33 pm AccelerateSource: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:31 pm SouthernLINC Wireless Supports CTIA's National Wireless Safety WeekATLANTA, June 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- href="http://www.southernlinc.com/">SouthernLINC Wireless , a Southern Company (NYSE: SO), today announced it will observeSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:30 pm Research Finds Needle Biopsies Safe in 'Eloquent' Areas of BrainAfter a review of 284 cases, specialists at the Brain Tumor Center at the University of Cincinnati (UC) Neuroscience Institute have concluded that performing a stereotactic needle biopsy in an area of the brain associated with language or other important functions carries no greater risk than a similar biopsy in a less critical area of the brain.The retrospective study, led by Christopher McPherson, MD, director of the division of surgical neuro-oncology at UC and a Mayfield Clinic neurosurgeon, was published online in May in the Journal of Neurosurgery.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:29 pm Google Labs Offers Table-Based Search Resultsblackbearnh writes "Google just released Google Squared into the Google Labs playground. Google Squared lets you get results back in row and column format, and then add more columns to the result set. There's a brief tour of the features over on O'Reilly Radar, where the judgement is that there's lots of rough edges, but a huge amount of potential, especially for quick and dirty table generation for reports."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:26 pm Yahoo Suing NFL Over Fantasy Football RightsYahoo Inc.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:25 pm Spectrum Control to Release Second Quarter Results and Host Conference Call on June 25, 2009FAIRVIEW, Pa., June 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Spectrum Control, Inc.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:24 pm Spectrum Control to Release Second Quarter Results and Host Conference Call on June 25, 2009FAIRVIEW, Pa., June 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Spectrum Control, Inc. (Nasdaq: SPEC), a leading designer and manufacturer of custom electronic products and systems, announced...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:24 pm Intel to buy Wind River Systems for $884M
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 Reuters | Sony Ericsson Debuts Green Handsets eWeek The company says its two handsets, the C901 and the Naite, have a 15 percent-reduced overall CO² footprint over the full life of the handset thanks to recycled plastics and smart chargers. Sony Ericsson Goes Greener With Two New Phones Sony Ericsson Goes Green With Two New Phones |
The 2880x900 pixel resolution of NEC's CRV43 curved display is perfect for gaming, but at $8,000, it's not everyman territory. It has a 10,000:1 contrast ratio, 0.02ms response time, and is claimed to cover 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut. It hooks up with DVI-D and HDMI, and includes a USB 2 hub.
I saw this in person at CES a couple of times while it was in development: what you don't see in this product shot is that it's actually an oldschool rear-projection unit, with a nine inch rear.
After the jump, a gallery!
Designed by Ty Pennington, Howard Miller's $1,500 Ithaca Pub Table seats for and conceals a snack and beverage drawer for each, as well as a central hollow column fitted with shelves to hold games, curios and guns. [via Born Rich]
Stripping the essence of duckness down to its first principle, the Robot Duck Kit waddles on giant yellow feet. It does not, however, appear to quack. The price is $17 at Amazon. [via Red Ferret]
My Little Zombie Pony (via Street Anatomy)
If it is the Pre that will decide Palm’s (PALM) fate in the smartphone market, if it is truly the bet-the-company device that it’s described as, then Palm has made a good bet and the company’s going to be around for some time to come. The early reviews of the Pre are in and they are, to a one, glowing — with some caveats about a poor battery life, a small selection of apps and some hardware flaws. The gadgeterati’s verdict on the device below:
It’s a beautiful, innovative and versatile hand-held computer that’s fully in the iPhone’s class. … All in all, I believe the Pre is a smart, sophisticated product that will have particular appeal for those who want a physical keyboard. It is thoughtfully designed, works well and could give the iPhone and BlackBerry strong competition — but only if it fixes its app store and can attract third-party developers.
– Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal
Think of it like this. The software is agile, smart and capable. The hardware, on the other hand, is a liability. If Palm can get someone else to design and build their hardware—someone who has hands and can feel what a phone is like when physically used, that phone might just be one of the best phones on the market.
– Jason Chen, Gizmodo
To put it simply, the Pre is a great phone, and we don’t feel any hesitation saying that. Is it a perfect phone? Hell no. Does its OS need work? Definitely. But are any of the detracting factors here big enough to not recommend it? Absolutely not.
– Joshua Topolsky, Engadget
So do the Pre’s perks (beautiful hardware and software, compact size, keyboard, swappable battery, flash, multitasking, calendar consolidation) outweigh its weak spots (battery life, occasional sluggishness, ringer volume)? Oh, yes indeedy. Especially when you consider that Verizon Wireless has announced that it will carry the Pre “in the next six months or so.” Can you imagine how great that will be? One of the world’s best phones on the nation’s best cell network?
– David Pogue, The New York Times
WIRED Great look and superb feel. Well-conceived OS with multitasking and instant notification. Physical keyboard. Utilizes iTunes to load and refresh content.
TIRED Multitasking puts a big suck on the battery. Sprint exclusivity will be annoying to Palm-philes on a contract with AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. Keyboard is puny. If Apple blocks the handset’s access to iTunes, Pre users are hosed.
The Pre offers a lot, but has some glaring omissions. If you’re willing to give up features such as video capture and don’t mind being limited to 8GB of storage, the Pre will offer you excellent personal information and messaging management along with a user interface that outperforms many others in return.
– Eric Zeman, PhoneScoop
The first Palm Pre will certainly give the iPhone and other rivals a run for their money. To be sure, there are areas where it could improve: Bring on the apps. But Palm has delivered a device that will keep it in the game and give it a chance to star in it.
– Ed Baig, USA Today
Move over, iPhone. You’ve had two years on top of the smart phone world. Now there’s a touch-screen phone with better software: the Palm Pre. In a remarkable achievement, Palm, a company that was something of a has-been, has come up with a phone operating system that is more powerful, elegant and user-friendly.
While the Pre isn’t perfect, it definitely does not disappoint: I found the WebOS interface clean, engaging, and intuitive. My main issues were with the hardware itself. …Hardware flaws aside, the Palm Pre made a solid impression on me. Its eye-catching design and smooth operation make this smartphone the most exciting device I’ve seen in a while.
– Ginny Mies, PC World
The long-awaited Pre has nice new touches, but Palm Inc has a lot of work to do if the device is to be a serious competitor to the iPhone. The device seemed to live up to some expectations but fall short on others.
– Sinead Carew, Reuters
 Ghacks Technology News | Gallery: Dress rehearsal for Opera 10 beta ZDNet Opera 10 beta is the latest incarnation of a browser that currently lags in sixth place in terms of market share, according to Net Applications. mocoNews - Opera's Mobile Browser Takes Slim Lead Over iPhone Does Opera outperform iPhone's Safari browser? |
Photo: Landmark Entertainment Group.
In November 1996, Apple announced it would open a chain of cafés. Videoconferencing and on-demand movies and music were among the touted attractions, but its the retro design vibe that seems strangest now. The plans ground to a halt by December, 1997.
The Apple Store that never was [GUIFX via Cult of Mac]
Servershield (via Red Ferret)Four small ventilator/filter units provide a clean ventilating airflow keeping the machine temperature stable and importantly clean and dry.
The cover simply drops over the machine and forms a semi airlock/seal as it rests on the floor around the machine. The machine requires no modifications whatsoever and continues to work as originally designed taking air through the body of the machine and exhausting around the top rim .
A small independently powered digital temperature readout is fixed to the cover showing machine working temperature within the cover.
Openings in the cover are provided to allow quick and easy access to the machine without removing the cover.
Wonder if any of these Kung-Fu dudes ever thought they would be staring in a commercial, let alone for the Palm Pre? Probably not.
If you take more than a few snaps a month, you’ll eventually end up buying a memory card reader. There are many advantages. First, even a junky dime store card reader will be make quicker transfers than hooking the camera up via a cable. Second, all the time your camera is talking to your computer it is switched on, and this drains batteries fast. Way faster than shooting actual pictures, in fact. Third, it’s a lot easier to just plug the card into a reader.
If you have a netbook and a camera that shoots SD cards, it’s even easier — you just slide the card into the slot in the side of the computer. But for anyone else, or people using DSLRs with Compact Flash cards, a reader is the way to go. But are they all equal?
The short answer? No way. I have a cheap, no-brand unit I bought for less than €10 ($15). I also have a swanky Lexar “professional” reader that I paid over €50 ($70) for (although in the US you can get one for just $45). And guess which one is already broken?
The long answer:
I tested both readers with 500MB of RAW photos on the same SanDisk Ultra III SD card (4GB). I would have tried with CF, too, but one of the pins inside the cheap card has already broken. Both cards are USB 2.0 and were connected by a cable directly to the USB port on a MacBook. Transfer was drag and drop via the Finder to test transfer time without the image-processing overhead of Lightroom or Aperture. Here are the numbers.
I was surprised that they’re so close. Scale this up, though, to the full four gigs, and you’re looking over a half minute difference. Small, but significant for some professionals. Of course, those same pros would probably be using an even faster FireWire reader (assuming they have a computer with a FireWire port. Are you listening, Apple?) Remember too that if you are using SDHC cards, or UDMA Compact Flash, the cheap reader can’t handle them.
So, read and write speeds aren’t that much different. Is there really a reason to spend five times the price of the commodity reader? For me, yes. First, as I mentioned, the cheap-o unit is already broken. It lasted a few weeks before a pin bent. Thankfully it didn’t damage the CF card (itself pretty expensive). The Lexar, on the other hand, is solid, closes down into its own case to protect the slots from dust and, most importantly, has proper guide-rails for locating a CF card, making it almost impossible to jam it in at an angle. It also comes with a two-year warranty.
The bottom line is that, while the performance differences are small, the build quality differs hugely. I expect to be using the Lexar reader for many years. If I stuck with the cheap, non-name readers, I’d be dropping $10 a month to replace them. Which of those sounds cheaper to you?
Product page [Lexar]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Great news for VUDU owners this morning. Well, great news if they happen to have kids. VUDU just announced that Disney has released 60 library films for purchase and future titles will be up on the same day that the Blu-ray/DVD titles are released.
This is the first time VUDU says that Disney has allowed a downloadable service to sell their titles. Previously the films were only available on a rental basis. It’s always good news to see large additions to the VUDU catalog, but how about dropping the price a bit on the device itself? $150 is still kind of expensive even if Pandora is now available on the set-top box.
VUDU announced today that Disney is the first major studio to broadly license their HD catalog for purchase to any online service. Until now, HD movies have been available for rental only or offered for purchase in a one off basis. Disney is licensing 60 of the library films and all new HD releases for purchase day and date with the DVD/BluRay release of the film. Disney is offering this through VUDU in large part because of the quality of HD that VUDU offers, showing that Disney is a leader among the major studios who are making steady progress toward embracing the digital lifestyle of today’s consumers.
 Straits Times | Google Squared launches to lukewarm response VNUNet.com Google has launched a new analytics tool called Google Squared that presents search results in a spreadsheet. The launch comes nearly a month after the search firm unveiled the idea for the product. New Search Tool Google Squared Goes Live Mountain View gets boxed in with Google Squared |
You’re soon going to be able to live out your Dick Tracy fantasy when LG ships out its video-calling watch phone this July.
Folks in Europe will get the first crack at the GD910 on Orange, but soon after Asia, the Middle East, Australia, and Latin America will all get a turn - pretty much everyone but us here in the States. It’s all good though, we didn’t wanna have fun video calling our peeps anyway.
You’re soon going to be able to live out your Dick Tracy fantasy when LG ships out its video-calling watch phone this July.
Folks in Europe will get the first crack at the GD910 on Orange, but soon after Asia, the Middle East, Australia, and Latin America will all get a turn - pretty much everyone but us here in the States. It’s all good though, we didn’t wanna have fun video calling our peeps anyway.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile, Features
The excitement for the Palm Pre seems to building each day as we draw closer to the June 6 launch date. Having been a long time Palm user and Palm supporter I am not so patiently waiting to hear more about how the Palm actually works as opposed to what the features say it can do. Given that I was pleasantly surprised to wake up this morning to find not one, but numerous hands-on reviews of the Palm Pre. Of course, at the same time, it leaves me wondering what happened to my review unit, maybe it was lost in the mail. But all joking aside, the reviews, while positive have not convinced me that the Palm Pre will be a good enough replacement to either my current iPhone 3G or my T-Mobile G1.
Overall, the reviews that I read seem to have been positive, but at the same time it was interesting to see how many people were forgiving of Palm. Most of the reviews had some sort of reference to how the Palm Pre was not perfect but it was good as a “1.0 product” or how it was a “a first-generation platform on first-generation hardware.”
Of course there were plenty of comparisons between some other phones such as the iPhone and G1, which is only natural, but perhaps Gizmodo summed it up the best in saying how they were ready for something different because they were bored of the iPhone. Makes sense, perhaps that is why I have been using my G1 a little more often these days.
Now lets get on and check out some of the verdicts from the early reviews…
So what’s our verdict on the Palm Pre? Simple: The Palm Pre is a stellar 1.0 product. Given Palm’s fractured and foible-filled history, the fact that they were able to pull all this off is nothing short of amazing.
Palm has hit a home run with the Pre. Probably not a grand slam, but a definite home run.
I’m bored of the iPhone. The core functionality and design have remained the same for the last two years, and since 3.0 is just more of the same, and—barring some kind of June surprise—that’s another year of the same old icons and swiping and pinching. It’s time for something different. The Pre may have hardware that’s worse than the G1/G2, but the whole package—the software and the hardware—isn’t bad. It’s good. It’s different. That’s something we can get behind. I can’t wait to see what Palm gets dealt in their next hand.
Still, these are shortcomings in a first-generation platform on first-generation hardware, and we’re happy giving Palm the benefit of the doubt.
Thankfully they’ve delivered a smartphone not only capable but honestly impressive and distinctive. Improvements to webOS will only make it better, but even in this fledgling state we’d readily recommend the Palm Pre.
To put it simply, the Pre is a great phone, and we don’t feel any hesitation saying that. Is it a perfect phone? Hell no. Does its OS need work? Definitely. But are any of the detracting factors here big enough to not recommend it? Absolutely not. There’s no doubt that there’s room for improvement in webOS and its devices, but there’s also an astounding amount of things that Palm nails out of the gate.
Product [Palm Pre]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
There are phones with GPS and then there are GPS phones. The Pharos Traveler 137 is in the latter camp, a device designed to be a GPS unit and a phone in one. Pharos has been making mapping software and devices for years, mostly for a less commercial market, and their specific knowledge in what makes a good GPS device is quite important when looking at the 137.
The 137 is a G.S.M. 3G phone with a special interface overlaid onto Windows Mobile 6.1 and includes a MicroSD card. It will be available today on Amazon and will cost $599.95 or $350 after T-Mobile rebate. It’s an unlocked quad-band phone with touchscreen, stylus, and little scroll wheel.
I’ll dig through this puppy this week and report back. The full specs follow.
Pharos Delivers First Windows Phone to Provide 3G Speeds on Both Major GSM Networks
Available for the first time today, the Pharos Traveler 137 offers unrivaled 3G connectivity and best-in-class navigation on a sleek new phone
TORRANCE, Calif. — June 4, 2009 — Pharos Science & Applications, Inc., a leading provider of location-based information and services, today announced the immediate availability of the Traveler 137, a striking Windows phone that is the first to give users access to 3G data speeds on both the T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless networks. The Traveler 137 features hybrid navigation software, giving it the unique ability to provide voice-prompted navigation even without a connection to a carrier’s network. The Traveler 137 is sold unlocked, enabling users to use local GSM SIM cards worldwide and avoid international roaming charges. The Traveler 137 is available today from Amazon.com, Dell.com, eXpansys.com, and Newegg.com for the suggested retail price of $599.95. Users can obtain a $250 discount on the phone if signing up for a new T-Mobile two-year contract through Pharos.
“When it comes to phones, we believe consumers deserve the full spectrum of choice,” said Stephanie Ferguson, general manager, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Corporation. “The Traveler 137 is a great example of a Windows phone that gives consumers the choice of 3G networks, the choice of personalization and the choice to use a single, powerful phone for both work and life.”
“The Traveler 137’s ultra-sensitive aGPS gives users the ability to navigate quickly; its high speed 3G capability brings a world of information to users’ fingertips; its touch-and-sweep interface on a crisp WVGA screen makes using the powerful Windows phone fun and easy,” said James Oyang, PhD, President, Pharos.
Traveler 137 Specifications
* Operating System: Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, updateable to Windows Mobile® 6.5
* Processor: Qualcomm MSM 7201A 528MHz
* Memory: 256MB DDR SDRAM, 512MB Flash ROM
* Phone: unlocked GSM quad band 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, EDGE / GPRS,Tri-band 3G, 1700/1900/2100 MHz, UMTS 384Kb/s, HSDPA 7.2Mb/s, HSUPA 2Mb/s
* Talk time: up to 7 hours on GSM, 5 hours on 3G and 200 hours standby
* Display: 3.5″ TFT LCD with touch panel, 480 x 800 Wide-VGA with 65K colors
* Wireless: GPS aGPS compatible, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth™ v2.1 + EDR , FM tuner
* Camera: 3 megapixel for picture or video, 0.3 megapixel on the front for video conference
* Expansion: USB 2.0, micro SD slot support SDHC, stereo audio jack
* Battery: 1380 mAh Li-Ion, rechargeable/replaceable
* Size: 4.60in (L) x 2.40in (W) x 0.51in (H)
* Weight: 4.9 ounces
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
There are phones with GPS and then there are GPS phones. The Pharos Traveler 137 is in the latter camp, a device designed to be a GPS unit and a phone in one. Pharos has been making mapping software and devices for years, mostly for a less commercial market, and their specific knowledge in what makes a good GPS device is quite important when looking at the 137.
The 137 is a G.S.M. 3G phone with a special interface overlaid onto Windows Mobile 6.1 and includes a MicroSD card. It will be available today on Amazon and will cost $599.95 or $350 after T-Mobile rebate. It’s an unlocked quad-band phone with touchscreen, stylus, and little scroll wheel.
I’ll dig through this puppy this week and report back. The full specs follow.
Pharos Delivers First Windows Phone to Provide 3G Speeds on Both Major GSM Networks
Available for the first time today, the Pharos Traveler 137 offers unrivaled 3G connectivity and best-in-class navigation on a sleek new phone
TORRANCE, Calif. — June 4, 2009 — Pharos Science & Applications, Inc., a leading provider of location-based information and services, today announced the immediate availability of the Traveler 137, a striking Windows phone that is the first to give users access to 3G data speeds on both the T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless networks. The Traveler 137 features hybrid navigation software, giving it the unique ability to provide voice-prompted navigation even without a connection to a carrier’s network. The Traveler 137 is sold unlocked, enabling users to use local GSM SIM cards worldwide and avoid international roaming charges. The Traveler 137 is available today from Amazon.com, Dell.com, eXpansys.com, and Newegg.com for the suggested retail price of $599.95. Users can obtain a $250 discount on the phone if signing up for a new T-Mobile two-year contract through Pharos.
“When it comes to phones, we believe consumers deserve the full spectrum of choice,” said Stephanie Ferguson, general manager, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Corporation. “The Traveler 137 is a great example of a Windows phone that gives consumers the choice of 3G networks, the choice of personalization and the choice to use a single, powerful phone for both work and life.”
“The Traveler 137’s ultra-sensitive aGPS gives users the ability to navigate quickly; its high speed 3G capability brings a world of information to users’ fingertips; its touch-and-sweep interface on a crisp WVGA screen makes using the powerful Windows phone fun and easy,” said James Oyang, PhD, President, Pharos.
Traveler 137 Specifications
* Operating System: Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, updateable to Windows Mobile® 6.5
* Processor: Qualcomm MSM 7201A 528MHz
* Memory: 256MB DDR SDRAM, 512MB Flash ROM
* Phone: unlocked GSM quad band 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, EDGE / GPRS,Tri-band 3G, 1700/1900/2100 MHz, UMTS 384Kb/s, HSDPA 7.2Mb/s, HSUPA 2Mb/s
* Talk time: up to 7 hours on GSM, 5 hours on 3G and 200 hours standby
* Display: 3.5″ TFT LCD with touch panel, 480 x 800 Wide-VGA with 65K colors
* Wireless: GPS aGPS compatible, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth™ v2.1 + EDR , FM tuner
* Camera: 3 megapixel for picture or video, 0.3 megapixel on the front for video conference
* Expansion: USB 2.0, micro SD slot support SDHC, stereo audio jack
* Battery: 1380 mAh Li-Ion, rechargeable/replaceable
* Size: 4.60in (L) x 2.40in (W) x 0.51in (H)
* Weight: 4.9 ounces
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In theory, getting users to ditch one Internet search engine for another should be an easy sell. But doing so is likely to cost Microsoft (MSFT) every penny of the roughly $100 million it plans to spend on an advertising campaign that starts Wednesday for its new Bing search engine.
In economist speak, there are virtually no “switching costs” for a consumer that wants to change from one search engine to another, other than the burden of typing Bing.com into a Web browser instead of Google.com (GOOG). That’s nothing compared to the switching costs of a company changing a complex piece of enterprise software, which may require employee retraining, or a consumer who switches to a new operating system, requiring the purchase of new application programs.
In reality, of course, habit and inertia make it very challenging for a company like Microsoft to improve its 8 percent share of the search market against rivals like Google and Yahoo (YHOO). There’s also the problem that most people say they’re happy with their experience on Internet search engines today, though some of their online behavior–for example, the large amount of time they spend on typical searches–suggests otherwise, according to Microsoft’s research.
I may be wrong, but in-car cup holders seem to be a mostly US-only phenomenon. It might be that Europeans simply don’t live in their cars like Statesiders, or that our coffee tends to be smaller — espresso sized rather than delivered in buckets, the weak, watery brew sucked through a plastic teat while sitting safely inside the protective steel and rubber womb.
Which is a shame, as this little cup-holder mounted gizmo looks genuinely useful. The $30 Coffee Cup Power Inverter plugs into the 12v cigarette lighter socket and up-converts the power to 120v AC. There’s even a USB socket on there for charging iPods and the like. The unit can supply a continuous 200 watts, so unless you’re hooking up hair dryers and soldering irons, you should be good for anything. Actually, I’ve just thought of another reason this wouldn’t work here in Europe (aside from us needing 220v to power our gear): We tend to use our car cigarette lighters for lighting our cigarettes.
Product page [ThinkGeek via BoingBoingBeschizza]
This is the second of three interviews with members of the Google team responsible for overseeing search algorithms at the company. The introduction and Part I, an interview with Scott Huffman, appeared yesterday. In today’s installment Google software engineer Matt Cutts talks about search quality and spam. In Part III tomorrow, Google Fellow Amit Singhal will wrap up the series.
John Paczkowski: How do you maintain quality in search?
Matt Cutts: Well, broadly, we improve our algorithms and hopefully, every so often, develop some punctuated equilibrium where we create totally new ways to improve our relevance. My contribution… is ensuring that people who try to cheat the system don’t show up higher than they deserve to in our results. We want sites ranking high based on merit, not based on shortcuts.
JP: OK, so how do you do that?
MC: Essentially we look at a wide variety of input. We look at user complaints, for example. We also have a variety of internal metrics we use to track current trends. They help show us what people are using to spam right now. What’s getting past our defenses. And when we detect those things, we write some new algorithms or develop some tool that helps us detect and, hopefully, counteract them. So a large part of what we do is simply spotting trends in spam.
JP: Is there a human evaluation element here as well?
MC: Each team is responsible for general search-quality evaluations, but it’s not like they’re changing rankings or anything like that. That said, there are some policy violations that are pretty egregious. So, for example, if you type in your name and instead of getting All Things Digital, you got a porn site, you would get pretty angry about that. And you might complain to Google. And it would be frustrating if our reply was, “Yeah, well, we think we might have an algorithm that might fix that problem in five or six months, so we’re just going to leave that porn site as the top result for All Things D until we get an algorithm up to help you out.” Obviously, that’s a deeply dissatisfying answer.
So in spam, we are sometimes willing to take manual action on those sorts of policy violations. But Google’s philosophy is that wherever you can use machines and algorithms, it is much better, more robust, more scalable. And so, to the extent that we can, we always want to rely on the computers as our first line of defense.
JP: But you’re willing to remove spam manually until you can find an algorithm to counteract it. Do you think that will always be the case? Will we some day reach a point where human intervention of the sort you just described won’t be necessary or are we headed toward increasing human intervention?
MC: That’s a really fascinating question, but I don’t know the answer. What’s interesting to think about is that page rank, the raw page rank algorithm, actually improves as it ranks more pages. So the more pages you add to it, the easier it is to determine how reputable a particular page is without human intervention.
But as the Web grows in size we also encounter new and different policy violations–hidden text, cloaking. Those are the sorts of things that humans are very good at spotting. You can certainly identify some of them with a computer algorithm, but not all. And so our intent is always to try to make sure that we handle things efficiently with machines and algorithms. But I don’t know that we will ever get there completely.
CONTINUED TOMORROW …
NEC today announced that their renewed Earth Simulator System, Japan’s most famous supercomputer, now achieves a peak performance of 131 TFLOPS (131 trillion calculations per second. This is up from the 35 TFLOPS that made the same system the world’s fastet computer back in 2002.
The Earth Simulator System is currently being used by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, mainly for predicting developments in global warming and similar meteorological calculations. It achieves sustained performance of 122.4 TFLOPS and boasts a computing efficiency of 93.38% on the LINPACK Benchmark, the highest in the world.
But although the system is based on the world’s fastest CPU (102.4 GFLOPS), the title of fastest supercomputer in the world belongs to IBM’s Roadrunner, which features 1 petaflop performance (1 quadrillion calculations per second). The NEC supercomputer was ranked 73, but this was back in November 2008, when the last “hit list” of supercomputers was released.
Section: Audio, Portable Audio, Video, HDTV, Portable Video, Web, Websites
Amazon has a tendency to write up listings of announced, but unavailable products. Sometimes they let a few features slip, which always pleases the public but probably drives the company crazy. Today, it was noticed on Amazon’s listing about possible game and app support. Take a look at the description underneath “Surf the Web on Your Zune”:
Enjoy your favorite websites anywhere you have a Wi-Fi connection with Zune HDs’ nifty, full-featured web browser. The browser has tap-to-zoom technology, which lets you enlarge the parts of the site you want to see. It makes things like reading articles, search results, or maps a lot easier on the small screen. The device also has a built-in accelerometer, so it senses when it is moving. This lets you play games and use apps that are controlled by moving the device. The touchscreen QWERTY keyboard makes it easy to enter information.
Never mind the acceleormeter part of the description, because that could just be used to enhance the apps. The exciting part could be game and app support for the Zune HD. We’re not talking the crap Microsoft will preload onto the device, we’re talking actual games and apps that will definitely make the Zune HD a clear competitor of the iPod Touch, assuming high quality games and apps. Who knows, maybe the Zune HD will be even able to handle some Xbox games, which definitely could be an interesting addition.
The availability of the price is still set for Fall 2009. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft releases any statements on the game and app support for the Zune HD.
Read [Amazon] Via [ZuneSpring]
Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Give the Twitter guys credit for honesty: Asked to explain how their big-hype, zero-revenue company will make money, as we did at last week’s All Things Digital conference. and they’ll cheerfully admit that they’re not sure.
If you’re a perspective buyer, whether that’s Microsoft (MSFT) or Google (GOOG), that has to be unsettling.Then again, the Twitter guys insist they’re not selling the company in the next five years. And their investors, who have plowed more than $50 million into the company, seem to be equally sanguine.
Or at least one is. Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet says the company isn’t in a rush to start generating money — in large part because it’s raised so much money.
Here’s an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Sabet Thursday night, at a party his Boston-based company threw in conjunction with Internet Week in New York (note to Spark partner/cruise director Mo Koyfman: More women, please):
Originally we were thinking that in the first half of 2009 we were going to start testing things out… and so… we decided not to do that that soon, because we raised a lot of money just a few months ago. And they still had a lot of money that Fred [Wilson, principal at twitter investor Union Square Ventures] and I put in from the last round. So we’re just now, instead of rushing and trying to launch new monetization products and get it out the door, we have a little time to do it right and to think it through and refine it, and hopefully do a good job.”
When I asked Sabet when that might be, he demurred, but my dogged interrogation eventually got him to cough up a very broad timeline. Twitter should be generating revenue, or at least understanding how that will happen, by 2011, he said.
There’s (a little) more there, in this brief Q&A.
 BBC News | Hardware, Get Yer Windows 7 Compatible Hardware Digitaltrends.com Now we know when Windows 7 will go on sale, it's already time for Microsoft to begin touting hardware compatible with the OS. There's always got to be a gimmick to sell something, and Microsoft has come up with the trendiest of them all - peripherals ... Microsoft 'extends' Windows: What does that mean? Microsoft Slates Windows 7 Delivery for October |
A lot of entertainers have been using the Web increasingly to promote upcoming material, so it comes as no surprise that the Jonas Brothers have turned there aggressively to do a countdown for their latest music release.
The new album, which is inexplicably called “Lines, Vines and Trying Times,” is set to debut next week on June 16.
Thus, the pop trio have been doing a lot of online promotions, such a live Facebook Webcast on their fan page today at 5 pm PDT.
And they are also posting a lot of original online videos, especially at their YouTube channel.
Unfortunately, the digital hawking includes the one below, which is due to some fan request that has landed Joe Jonas in spike heels and a leotard, doing a bizarre dance interpretation of Beyoncé’s infectious and very viral music video, “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It).”
After that video soared last fall, a lot of fans did their own versions, including a very funny spoof by Justin Timberlake, essentially doing the same gig as Jonas (except funny).
But, you be the judge.
Here are all three: Beyoncé in the original, TImberlake in the spoof (a bad version–sorry) and Joe Jonas in, well, it is hard to describe:
What is it with people using the term PDA for cellphone? First, it happened on the usually super-accurate (and excellent) TV show Criminal Minds. Twice. And now it’s on the pitch-page of some trashy accessory maker. “Securely Holds ANY Cell Phone (Flip, Slide, PDA)” says Universal Cell Wrap.
Along with such nonsensical nomenclature, the product itself doesn’t look much better. A Velcro and clear-plastic sleeve wraps around your cell (or PDA) and clips to your seatbelt, holding the handset somewhere between shoulder and nipple. This, according to the blurb, lets you “drive hands-free without bluetooth, wires or earpieces.”
If you are anything like my ex-flatmate (not the yoga-hippy, but a different, even louder one), this might just work. In fact, this chap shouts so loud into the phone that you wonder if he needs one at all to be heard across town. A cellphone far from the mouth would therefore be perfect for him, and coupled with loudspeaker mode would possibly be the most annoying thing ever. For normal people, though, I imagine constant stooping to put the mouth nearer the handset, and some fumbling around to make and take calls — imagine trying to navigate the contacts list when the phone is on your shoulder.
The Universal Cell Wrap might comply with the letter of car-phone laws, but the spirit is quite clearly violated. $30.
Product page [Universal Cell Wrap]
AP - Cher has sued Universal Music Group, claiming the company owes her and Sonny Bono's heirs more than $5 million.
AP - This year's Electronic Entertainment Expo has been quite the moving experience.
 VatorNews | Twitter isn't a two-way thing TG Daily By Andrew Thomas Harvard (MA) - Twitter is a simple one-way, one-to-many publishing service rather than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network, say researchers. Twitter Trends: Why Do Men Follow Men? How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live |
FROM GAMERTELL - Making it a three-way battle for wireless, motion-controlled gaming, Sony threw its prototype in the ring at its E3 2009 press conference. Click through to find out more…
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Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
This is the latest visualization of the CrunchPad, and it’s hot. The touch-tablet is the attempt of internet hype-master Michael Arrington and his TechCrunch team to make a cheap Linux cloud-computer. The machine boots straight into a Webkit browser and is navigated much like you’d navigate the iPhone.
This latest iteration is apparently final, and Arrington says he’ll have a working prototype in a couple of weeks. The case thickness has been shaved down to just 18mm, and it is now made of aluminum for stiffness. I’ve been skeptical all along that Arrington could pull this off, and the previously in-house-only video now on YouTube shows that the software is still rather ugly and clunky looking. But it looks like they might do it, and if the price stays around the promised $200, this could be a genuine winner for customers and Arrington alike, and also proof that in these days of commodity OEM factories, anyone can design and build high-tech hardware, provided they have a good dose of arrogance.
CrunchPad: The Launch Prototype [TechCrunch]
See Also:
The nice thing is that the Android OS is based on free/open Linux, and hackers have extracted the security information necessary to load your own OS on your phone. With an open, hackable OS and an open bootloader, the tethering problem is simple to solve: just install your own OS that includes all the same code as a factory-fresh G1, with the anti-tethering stuff deleted. You can even bridge the 3G to the WiFi in your phone, turning your G1 into a self-contained all-wireless WiFi access point (bring along a USB cable anyway, since you need to keep the damned thing charging or your battery will croak in ten seconds flat).
Danny O'Brien describes the moment that drove him to cracking open his G1, and recommends a HOWTO for getting the job done. I know what I'll be doing when I get home!
So it was being stuck without wifi in the Library of Congress the other week that finally made me decide to overwrite the T-Mobile firmware on my Android G1 with something with root access. I was talking with the US Copyright and Patent offices about how to improve access to copyrighted material for the reading disabled (in the hopes, partially, to encourage them to support the Treaty for the Visually Impaired at WIPO the following week).How To: Root Your G1 And Install Android 1.5 Cupcake (via Oblomovka)In the end, I chose to install JesusFreke's distribution of the Android OS, which now has a great little utility to manage who gets root on your phone (each application's request is intercepted, and you, as user, get to allow or deny it). This tethering application is incredibly easy-to-use, and lets you share your 3G connection via wifi or bluetooth (I haven't tried the bluetooth). You can WEP encrypt the wifi connection, or allow access to only selected users.
Of course, next time I go to the LoC, I'll be sure to keep the wifi node open. I wouldn't want the MPAA guys doing without!
Remember Scott Amron? He brought us the water fountain toothbrush and the magnet-powered, clip-free Endo fridge-magnet. Now he’s lopped the bottoms off a stack of spring-water bottles and will sell you one to juice your oranges.
Scott is asking $6.50 for these punts, aka the stiffening dimple in the bottom of a large plastic bottle. This is ripe (sorry) for a DIY version, although it looks like Scott’s brand of choice, Poland Spring, has a particularly handsome punt. I will be making one of these.
Product page [Amron via Lifehacker]
See Also:
Some YouTube partners are being hit with e-mails seemingly coming from Google / YouTube teams attempting to trick them into replying with their login credentials and other personal information. One partner contacted us with screenshots of the phishing messages, the first received at the end of May and the second on June 3rd, coming from and delivered to different accounts.
While the first e-mail was quite amateuristic of nature and came filled with stuff that should raise quite some warning flags (typos, clumsy phrasing, Youtube instead of YouTube, etc.), the second appeared more genuine and had a body text edited rather professionally (see screenshot below).
In both cases, the YouTube partner was told that there was some kind of problem with his or her account, either with videos that purportedly contained copyrighted material, hate speech/bullying, or other issues that violate the service’s ToS. The first e-mail urged partners to respond with their username, password, e-mail address and D.O.B, while the second asked only for the password.
It’s unclear whether this phishing scam was aimed at our tipster specifically or if this is a more widespread problem (any YouTube partners wanna chip in?), but in any case YouTube has been alerted by the user and myself, although we have yet to receive a response.
YouTube partners, be aware and spread the word!
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
J-j-j-jiterbug! You put the boom-boom into my heart / You send my soul sky high when your lovin’ starts.
So wrote the great literary poet George Michael, in his magnum opus “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go”, penned and performed in 1984. At the time, Michael was unaware that, a mere quarter century later, there would be a telephone celebrating his genius and at the same time easy to use for his 45-year-old fingers. It’s name? The Jitterbug J, the stuttering initial of the original song moved to the end of the name to better suit the mouths of ageing denture-wearers.
The Jitterbug J is a an upgrade to the super-simple Jitterbug phone, a cellphone which does almost nothing but make calls. Despite some problems with the original (a software bug meant that 911 calls wouldn’t work — oops) the Jitterbug was apparently popular enough to inspire a sequel. However, even the Jitterbug has suffered from mission creep, with new features being added to a handset sold on having almost none.
What’s new? You can now customize ringtones and change the color of the screen, you can choose from a library of pre-written text messages (sample message: “Get off my lawn you damn kids!”) ,use a calendar, and access the Live Nurse, a real nurse waiting for your call.
There are some hardware differences, too. Bigger buttons, speakerphone switches on the front face of the phone and a better battery. Contract-free plans start at $15 per month and go up, although if grandma is burning through 1500 minutes a month, you might want to consider buying her an iPhone.
Product page [J-j-j-jitterbug]
Well people, it’s time. It’s time we celebrated the tech scene in Europe with an awards event which we can really call our own. So TechCrunch Europe will, on July 9, hold the first Europe-wide awards ceremony for technology innovation in London. “The Europas” - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 - will honor the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from across the continent of Europe. The first tranche of tickets are now on sale.
These awards will recognize and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year (Summer 08 - Summer 09), with the tech community invited to have a say in which finalists should be win. Leading lights of the the tech community will be invited to give away the awards to the winners, so you’ll have the opportunity to meet your tech heroes and heroines. The initial filtering will be done by referencing our database on European companies on CrunchBase (so make sure you are in it), then by public vote online, with the final Award winners to be determined based both on the popular votes received through website voting and by The Europas Judging Committee.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
In September 2007 we launched TechCrunch UK & Ireland. But within three months we realised the tech story that needed to be written was across Europe. So we went on tour to find contacts and companies. This year we’ve re-launched as TechCrunch Europe and begun running events across the continent to bring the European tech scene together, along with our first ever day-long conference. Today we’re opening up TechCrunch Europe to new contributors from across Europe so that we can really tell the European tech story the way it is.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AP - Get lost in the woods and a cell phone in your pocket can help camping buddies find you. Drive into a ditch and GPS in your car lets emergency crews pinpoint the crash site. But when a transcontinental flight is above the middle of the ocean, no one on the ground can see exactly where it is in the air, or worse, in the water.
There is a famous story about a meeting between Yahoo and Microsoft which took place when Yahoo was still a small start-up. Yahoo was growing at neck-breaking speed and David Filo and Jerry Yang were invited to Redmond to talk about working together.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Two police officers pin a man to the ground and try to handcuff him. The man wriggles and prays to Yahweh. Eventually, one of the officers shoots him with a Tazer, which instead of subduing the man, gives him the strength to break free and run away. The officers pursue the man half-heartedly, but quickly give up.
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Jun 2009 | 7:04 am
On June 6, Palm (PALM) will release the Pre, a smartphone many hope will fuel a resurgence of a company long since fallen from grace. But numerous miscalculations and missteps endanger this hoped-for turnaround.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Even the most hidebound male chauvinists have been forced to admit that girls are as good at math as boys, on average. Boys no longer start outperforming girls at age 12 or 13, as they did as late as the 1970s; in the U.S., high school girls now take calculus at the same rate as boys; tests mandated by No Child Left Behind show that girls have reached parity with boys in math achievement through high school; and tests of complex problem-solving (which NCLB doesn’t measure) find that girls have now pulled even with boys through 12th grade on this skill, too.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Last week we promoted what we called “eat like an ancestor day” via twitter. In short, to eat like an ancestor is to not consume foods that contain any additives, preservatives or freaky chemicals of any kind - i.e., eatNAKED.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
While it’s true that Apple has significantly grown its share of the desktop operating system market since the release of Windows Vista in November of 2006, the company’s market share remains below 10 percent, and it actually dropped in the first quarter of 2009, according to Gartner’s Worldwide PC Shipment report.
To most observers, it’s fairly clear that Vista’s failings gave people a reason to take a fresh look at the Mac.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Neuton battery-powered lawn mowers actually seem affordable
German geeks build electric bike, now want to sell it internationally
Twitter Tracker: Conan pokes fun, hilarity ensues
It begins: Pogue+Pre=love
Button-less multitouch trackpad coming from Synaptics
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Heavy hitting angel investor Ron Conway, who’s been called the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” by Gary Rivlin, is now focusing most of his investment attention on “real-time data,” according to an email he sent out to friends and contacts earlier this week. Conway was one of the earliest investors in Google, and has invested in more than 500 startups, he’s said in the past.
Conway has also distanced himself somewhat from Baseline Ventures, a fund run by Steve Anderson. Since 2006 Baseline has taken the lead in managing Conway’s deal flow. Now, Conway says, he’s reverting back to doing all of his investments directly.
Conway is also accelerating his investing, he says in the email, and has a goal to invest in 40-50 companies in the next 18 months. His focus will be companies exploiting “real-time data,” which he calls “the next billion dollar market opportunity.” Conway is already an investor in Twitter and Facebook, two companies solidly in the real-time space. He’s recently invested in other very young startups like Scoopler and Twitvid. Both are Y Combinator startups. He’s also an advisor to Topsy, a new real-time search engine that launched recently.
David Lee and Brian Pokorny from Baseline now work with Conway directly. Anderson is re-staffing Baseline and will continue to invest $10 million -$12 million per year in young startups.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Last year Sarah Lacy’s (now a TechCrunch editor) book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good came out in hardcover. Here’s an interview we did with Lacy about the book in May 2008.
The paperback version of the book was just released (buy it here). The book includes a new chapter titled “The Fail Whale” that’s all about Twitter.
The chapter begins with a discussion of the infamous Fail Whale, the image that Twitter put up when the service was down. CEO Evan Williams told Sarah “I hate that fucking whale”:
Twitter’s unreliability had stretched nearly a year by that summer, getting worse by the month. The site could be down for hours a day, for days at a time. Twitter users were getting impatient. People had started to rely on the system as a sort of personal news feed, a way of connecting with friends, and a tool for tracking events. When it went down, people flew into a rage. It only made them angrier that Twitter’s staff wasn’t saying much of anything about why the outages were occurring or when they would end. The Twitter team wasn’t trying to be obtuse; they just didn’t know what to say. They were just as stumped.
The Fail Whale was cute at first. In fact, undeniably so. But when you saw him every time you tried to message a friend or Tweet a new blog post, his oblivious grinning expression became maddening.
As furious as users were, they stopped short of tearing Twitter down or abandoning the site altogether. There was something about Twitter that Silicon Valley rooted for; a remarkable sense of goodwill for a company that was continually letting its users down for months. Friendster certainly hadn’t been cut that kind of slack.
Even the whale itself developed fans. The problem went on long enough that a weird Stockholm Syndrome developed. A Fail Whale fan club emerged. One guy got a Fail Whale tattoo. The woman who’d designed the art started to produce T-shirts and mugs. She sent a box of Fail Whale T-shirts to Twitter’s offices late in the summer, but the joke was wearing thin on a staff battling the problem day and night.
Sure, some staffers found it funny. After a point you just have to laugh, right? But ask CEO Jack Dorsey about wearing a Fail Whale shirt and you’ll get this answer: “l won’t wear any shirt with a whale on it, ever. It has put me off the whole species.” Twitter’s cofounder Evan Williams agrees: “I hate that fucking whale.”
The chapter also goes into a lot of detail on the beginning of Twitter. Creator Jack Dorsey tells Sarah that the original idea goes back to when he was just fifteen years old:
That’s because Twitter didn’t really start in 2006. It started in Jack’s head back when he was fifteen years old. He was iust a geeky kid living in St. Louis in the 1990s who had an unnatural obsession with the dispatch industry. Particularly the armies of couriers who physically took something, put it in their messenger bags, and dropped the packages off somewhere else. He thought about it the way other fifteen-year-olds think about half-naked girls or Star Wars—with sheer awe that never seemed to end.
And when he thought of dispatchers, he would picture a huge map of New York city with blinking lights of couriers all acting like a flock of birds navigating the city individually, but also as one. A symphony of bikers fanning out in different corners of the city, crossing paths seamlessly, each on their own route, then coming back to the same place at the close of business. All controlled by one conductor; one master plan. “I wanted to write software to do it,” Jack says, “I just had to.”
On Dorsey’s firing:
The question of replacing Jack first came up for the board duriing the summer of 2008, while Twitter was raising another round of money. Taking the money meant that the company likely wasn’t selling, and the board asked whether Jack had the chops to take the company to the next level. Nothing was decided then, but it kept coming back up for two reasons: Things weren’t getting better between Evan and Jack and, increasingly, Evan was discovering that he did actually want to be the CEO of Twitter. Both Jack and Evan complained to the board, and the board decreed that one way or another, it couldn’t go on. So Fred Wilson asked Evan, “Do you want this? Do you want to be CEO?”
…
Twitter’s investor Fred Wilson and Spark’s Bijan Sabet were in town for a board meeting and the three of them decided the investors should deliver the news, not Evan. It would be easier for Jack that way. And really, the news wasn’t all bad. Jack would be awarded the second largest individual stake of Twitter stock and would be named chairman of the board. It was generous by any standards. Later that night, Jack went out with a few now-former coworkers. “Come on! This is a celebration,” one of them said. Jack smiled, but he couldn’t feel very celebratory on the inside. The next day it was announced with the ubiquitous face-saving line, “Jack Dorsey has decided to step down.”
On Twitter’s business model:
Indeed, that’s how Evan is thinking about Twitter’s business model too. The plan is to let corporate Twitter users use the service the way they want to - and charge them for it. There’s been a lot of debate over whether Twitter would have some sort of partial subscription business model or an ad-based one. Evan says neither. He’s planning something more creative that’s every bit an extension of the product as any free feature. “There are lame ways we could make money now. We have enough of a user base and enough traffic,” he says. “But it needs to be part of the system.”
Evan uses the word “system” a lot. He thinks of Twitter as a living, breathing organism - not unlike a flock of birds - that he needs to keep moving together, now that he’s taken over the lead position in the formation. Revenue is as much a part of that “system” as company culture, features, the user interface, and the behavior that happens on the site. “The revenue piece is pure product design,” he says, getting excited. “What are people trying to do and how much are we going to help them do it? Is this something only companies want? Then how much can we charge? And where’s the credit card field?”
These are just small excerpts from the chapter. If you haven’t read the book, you should. Buy the paperback version here. Kindle version is here.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
paw-shoes. my new project./лапотуфли .
• The verdicts are in: we rounded up 15 of the best Palm Pre reviews.
• Could the Palm Pre masquerade as an iPhone to circumvent Apple's iTunes locks?
• Enter to win an awesome, arty laptop case -- by submitting photos of your tricked out, custom laptop.
• An interview with the guy who keeps the World Food Programs phones turned on.
• By 2011, iRex says we'll have our mits on the ultimate, "magazine qualtiy" color e-reader.
• Microsoft would prefer to call a netbook a "low cost small notebook PC." (not kidding)
• The first-gen Peek is now available for $20 (that is not a typo).
• The latest digital picture frame from SilverPac reminded us that everything is turning into a PC.
• A USB vacuum cleaner for tidying up your workspace (USB maid not included).
• We tested a $400 tide watch and tideApp, a free desktop/Android/iPhone app; find out which one we recommend.
• Deal Alert: Dell is phasing out its Mini 9 netbook.
• Video footage of a programmer riding a Kuka robot as if it were a surfboard.
• The Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA of the camera world is the Sigma DP2. Discuss...
• A $95,000 machine that converts printed documents to toilet paper.
• A look at the Soma AirBag, an inflatable surfboard carrier.
• Answering iPhone calls in the car? Consider the new Belkin Tunebase.
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Jun 2009 | 5:27 am
Mix an Exploding Drink
(via Neatorama)
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Jun 2009 | 5:27 am
The (very) last time I flew Ryanair, they locked us all in a no-toilets departure area for an hour and a half before the flight, then threatened to have me arrested for using the toilet when I boarded, rather than waiting until we were in the air and levelled off (which turned out to be an hour later).
Ryanair's Michael O'Leary defends pay-per-pee fee (via Consumerist)
The chief executive of Europe's largest budget carrier said the airline would also generate extra revenues by removing two out of the three toilets on its Boeing 737-800 jets and filling the space with up to six seats...Asked if he would be interested in charging £5 a toilet visit in order to eliminate the need for the loo altogether, he said: "If someone wanted to pay £5 to go to the toilet I would carry them myself. I would wipe their bums for a fiver."
(Image: Ryanair seats, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Matt From London's Flickr stream)
CARDIAC: (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation) (Thanks, Mark!)
David Pogue, leaked by the Financial Chronicle, at The New York Times:
So do the Pre's perks (beautiful hardware and software, compact size, keyboard, swappable battery, flash, multitasking, calendar consolidation) outweigh its weak spots (battery life, slow program opening, ringer volume, Sprint network)? Oh, yes indeedy. Especially when you consider that last weak spot might be going away. Verizon Wireless has announced that it will carry the Pre ''in the next six months or so.''
Steven Levy, at Wired:
It's a huge win ... The Pre emphatically shows that Palm has not reached the stage of suffixes. And multitasking rules!
Walt Mossberg, at the Wall Street Journal:
The Pre is a smart, sophisticated product that will have particular appeal for those who want a physical keyboard. It is thoughtfully designed, works well and could give the iPhone and BlackBerry strong competition -- but only if it fixes its app store and can attract third-party developers.
Joshua Topolsky, at Engadget:
To put it simply, the Pre is a great phone, and we don't feel any hesitation saying that. Is it a perfect phone? Hell no. Does its OS need work? Definitely. But are any of the detracting factors here big enough to not recommend it? Absolutely not. There's no doubt that there's room for improvement in webOS and its devices, but there's also an astounding amount of things that Palm nails out of the gate.
Jason Chen, at Gizmodo:
The software is agile, smart and capable. The hardware, on the other hand, is a liability. If Palm can get someone else to design and build their hardware--someone who has hands and can feel what a phone is like when physically used, that phone might just be one of the best phones on the market.
Mark Spoonauer, at Laptop Mag:
We've seen many smart phones come and go since the original iPhone, and the $199 Palm Pre is the first device we've tested whose user interface not only matches up well to Apple's offering, but also beats it in some areas. ... Palm and Sprint have a hit on their hands with the Pre, and the webOS is a smart phone platform to be reckoned with.
The OS is great. There's no ifs ands or buts; it's really refreshing to see something that's brand new with a UI unlike anything else out there. The only problem with this is, Palm's never been a hardware company that anyone's really cared about. ... Couple that with the nation's underdog carrier at a $299 price-point (before rebate), and we're not sure how many people are going to be lined up overnight, yet we're pretty confident once people are able to play a real unit themselves, there will be more than a lot of happy Palm Pre customers.
Bonnie Cha, at CNET:
Despite some missing features and performance issues that make it less than ideal for on-the-go professionals, the Palm Pre offers gadget lovers and consumers well-integrated features and unparalled multitasking capabilities. The hardware could be better, but more importantly, Palm has developed a solid OS that not only rivals the competition but also sets a new standard in the way smartphones handle tasks and manage information.
Ginny Miles, at PC World:
The long-awaited Palm Pre lives up to the hype with a responsive touchscreen and an engaging interface, but a few hardware design flaws keep it from being the perfect smartphone.
Stephen Wildstrom, at at BusinessWeek:
If the Palm Pre had appeared a year ago, it might have turned the smartphone market upside down. It would have beaten out Apple's iPhone 3G and the iTunes App Store, Google's Android, the BlackBerry Bold and Storm as well as BlackBerry App World, and possibly taken the spoils. But the field has grown so crowded with clever entries in the past 12 months that the Pre, ingenious as it is, seems evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Sinead Carew, at Reuters:
The long-awaited Pre has nice new touches, but Palm Inc has a lot of work to do if the device is to be a serious competitor to the iPhone.
...it is a pretty good-looking device, but it feels a little plasticky and is lower in build quality than a BlackBerry. It is squat, has a nice screen, and is easy to grip. It is round in the right places. However, the slide-out keyboard seems flimsy and cluttered.
Peter Svensson, at the Associated Press:
Move over, iPhone. You've had two years on top of the smart phone world. Now there's a touch-screen phone with better software: the Palm Pre. In a remarkable achievement, Palm Inc., a company that was something of a has-been, has come up with a phone operating system that is more powerful, elegant and user-friendly.
Ed Baig, at USA Today:
The first Palm Pre will certainly give the iPhone and other rivals a run for their money. To be sure, there are areas where it could improve: Bring on the apps. But Palm has delivered a device that will keep it in the game and give it a chance to star in it.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Even without Steve Jobs emceeing, this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference sold out in record time. Hopes are running high for products that the secretive corporation will unveil at the conference next week. Rumors about new iPhones, upgraded MacBooks and a highly anticipated touchscreen tablet abound, and there’s even gossip about a possible partnership with Verizon.
But as wonderful as all those items sound, they remain unconfirmed by Apple. And frankly, some of the rumors sound too good to be true.
What should we realistically expect? The following is a list of everything Wired.com has heard about WWDC, accompanied by our analysis on which rumored announcements will or will not become a reality.
New iPhones
There’s a pile of evidence in the blogosphere suggesting Apple will release a lackluster upgrade for its popular iPhone. Likely features include a digital compass, processor and memory upgrades, an improved digital camera with auto-focus and video-recording capabilities, and other minor improvements.
These hardware enhancements don’t add up to much. Instead, Apple seems to be training most of its focus on the previously-announced iPhone 3.0 — a major upgrade to the operating system that will add in-app commerce, tethering, live streaming, the ability to integrate apps with external accessories and push notification, along with a variety of other features such as cut-and-paste.
We’re confident that Apple will introduce an iPhone upgrade at WWDC — it would be a perfectly logical move because Apple announced the current iPhone 3G at WWDC 2008. Also, it would be ideal for Apple to unveil the iPhone at the event so it can hold WWDC sessions on any new hardware APIs (the rumored digital compass, for example).
The latest iPhone-related rumor involves Apple adding a 4-GB model to the line. We’re skeptical about this, because Apple already killed the 4-GB model introduced with the original iPhone just two months after its release in June 2007. Would many people buy one, even if it only costs $100?
It’s more likely that Apple will add a 32-GB model to the iPhone family, because that’d be the next step up from the current 8-GB and 16-GB models.
(See which specific features we predict will appear in the next iPhone in our earlier story “Rumor Round-Up: Everything We’ve Heard About the Next iPhone.”)
No Verizon Deal
BusinessWeek in April reported hearing from two sources “familiar with the matter” that Apple was working with Verizon on two new iPhones, which could be available as soon as this summer. This would be great news for Verizon customers unwilling to switch to AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier for the iPhone.
Our thoughts? Not happening — not anytime soon, at least. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg told the Wall Street Journal he expects Apple to consider sharing the iPhone with Verizon in 2010 — when Verizon begins deploying its fourth-generation network. If Apple is indeed interested in working with Verizon, there is no incentive to make this announcement in mid-2009 — especially when Apple can stretch out the negotiations to shake more money out of its carrier partners. Also, historically Apple does not enjoy making announcements about products until they are finalized.
Also, Apple said in late April it has no plans to change its exclusive relationship with AT&T. Flip-flopping on that statement about six weeks later would make that a blatant lie, wouldn’t it? If any deal happens between Verizon and Apple, we expect it to happen no sooner than 2010.
No Touchscreen Tablet
As much as you might want one now, we don’t see this launching at WWDC. We agree with analyst Gene Munster’s arguments for why an Apple tablet is likely to appear no sooner than 2010. The strongest point raised is that Apple purchased chip company PA Semi in 2008, and Steve Jobs said the purpose of the acquisition was to develop iPhone and iPod chips. Also, Apple has recently been hiring chip designers.
It’s reasonable to infer Apple would wait to introduce its newly developed mobile processor with the release of a highly anticipated touchscreen tablet. There’s no indication this is happening anytime soon.
Incremental Upgrades for MacBook Family
9 to 5 Mac reported a rumor that Apple will roll out incremental upgrades to its unibody MacBooks. We buy that. Apple typically refreshes its notebooks every seven months, and the last upgrades were released in October. WWDC would be an opportune event to announce new MacBooks.
More Details on iPhone 3.0, Mac OS X Snow Leopard Operating Systems
We saved the most obvious for last. Apple said in a press release that it plans to preview new features and APIs for its next-generation operating systems iPhone 3.0 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard. For iPhone, expect Apple to lay out the final roadmap for the iPhone 3.0 software developer kit, speaking more extensively on the features we previously wrote about. For Snow Leopard, Apple will likely nerd out about the OS’ optimization for supporting multi-core processors (i.e., Grand Central).
Agree, disagree or have anything to add? Comment with your WWDC predictions below.
See Also:
Photos: Adam Jackson/Flickr, Jon Snyder/Wired.com, Incendiary Mind/Flickr, blakie/Flickr, vernhart/Flickr, macnerd93/Flickr
The average movie fan has been quick to embrace the convenience of streaming films from Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon.com. But for discerning cineasts, those libraries are too mainstream, the video quality is shabby, and the director's commentary (a crucial feature on DVDs) is notably absent. Enter TheAuteurs.com, a new Silicon Valley-based site that delivers video-on-demand for film buffs—from obscure international releases to up-and-coming flicks found only on the festival circuit—at $5 a pop. Through an exclusive partnership, Auteurs also provides access to the Criterion Collection's legendary archive of director's cuts and DVD extras.
The site's tech is as groundbreaking as the content it features. Unlike Apple, which requires iTunes, and Netflix, which relies on a third-party app, Auteurs sends compressed files to your browser's Flash plug-in for instant streams. What's more: Engineers work behind the scenes to boost the viewing experience, painstakingly tweaking the compression settings for each film with a tool chain that includes mplayer, x264, ffmpeg, and mp4box. They also add lush 5.1 Dolby surround sound. "Our office is a combination of film geeks and AV nerds," says Efe Cakarel, the company's founder. "Even if a film is available elsewhere, it's not going to be the same because of the expertise we've brought to encoding." For further quality control, a selection judge from the Venice Film Festival curates the library.
Auteurs currently offers 84 titles from 30 different countries and plans to expand its catalog to 1,000 films by the end of 2009. So while the celebrities are descending upon Cannes, film connoisseurs can kick back and wait for the art house to come to their living rooms.
In the Middle Ages, while Christians were busy warring, plundering, and burning heretics at the stake, Muslim scholars were inventing the most advanced devices of the day. They refined the scientific method, developed effective cardiac drugs, and built celestial observatories—yet over time their contributions were largely forgotten.
Historian Fuat Sezgin spent 60 years tracking down ancient manuscripts and commissioning craftspeople to reproduce hundreds of instruments, from clocks to syringes. His replicas on display at the Islamic Science and Technology History Museum in Istanbul remind us that the culture now often associated with an antiscience ideology was once a catalyst for innovation. "Modern Muslims do not know this great history," Sezgin says, "so they sometimes have a complex toward modern science." His work exposes a geeky heritage to be proud of. Here are a few of those bright ideas from the so-called Dark Ages.
Universal Astrolabe (11th century), pictured above
What it is: An instrument for reading the stars
Why it matters: Starting around AD 622, Muhammad's followers spread throughout the Middle East and into Central Asia and North Africa. Astrolabes, which may date back to the Greeks, enabled travelers to determine time and direction from the constellations. But early users had to tote around a set of customized plates for each latitude. This all-in-one model, created by an astronomer known as Azarchel, lightened adventurers' loads. With it, globe-trotting Muslims could pray daily at the correct hours, facing Mecca, whether they were in Ibiza or Kazakhstan. Astrolabes ultimately led to the development of astronomical clocks.
Alembic
(8th century)
What it is: An apparatus for distilling liquids
Why it matters: Islamic culture forbids the drinking of alcohol, but early Muslim scientists made great advances in distillation, a process they refined to create medicines, perfumes, and essential oils. The alembic was the first device that could fully separate substances with different volatilities. A liquid mixture was heated until the component with the lowest boiling point vaporized and rose to meet cool air at the neck. There it condensed back into liquid form, and the purified fluid dripped into a collection container. This was the precursor of the pot still, without which—perish the thought—whiskey would not exist.
Torpedo
(13th century)
What it is: The first self-propelled projectile for sea warfare.
Why it matters: The Chinese invented gunpowder, but Hassan al-Rammah got the idea of stuffing it into a metal case and shooting it across water to shock and awe an enemy ship. In The Book of Fighting on Horseback and With War Engines (1280), al-Rammah dubbed it a "self-moving and combustible egg." This spiny missile would be filled with saltpeter, flammable liquid, and metal filings. Once ignited, combustion would propel the torpedo to its target, where it might explode.
Be.Ez makes simple, svelte laptop cases in a variety of gorgeous designs, cut to fit all sorts of laptops, netbooks and other form factors. They've got one to give away, and all you have to do is post a picture of your customized laptop to the comments, or to our Flickr Pool. Bonus marks go to extraordinary artistry or tastelessness!
The Boing Boing Gadgets Cabal will review entries after a safe interval and pick a winner.
Startup Bridgevine has raised $3.5 million in Series C funding from Safeguard Scientifics and Constellation Ventures to launch Offerwire, a consumer focused site that aggregates home services deals. This round brings Bridgevine’s total funding raised to $16.6 million. Bridgevine previously provided an online e-commerce engine for consumers and small businesses to find and compare deals specifically on connection and entertainment services, such as high speed internet, voice and cable TV offerings.
Bridgevine’s new consumer site, Offerwire, is an aggregation site of deals and offers not only for connection and cable services, but also for music, dvd rental, magazines, credit cards, security and more. It’s like Kayak for home and entertainment services. Users can comparison shop for deals, bundle services together, and as an added bonus, receive cash back for certain deals. Offerwire has a host of big-name vendors on board including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Verizon, Netflix, and LifeLock.
The cashback incentive makes the site particularly appealing. For example, Offerwire says that if you get cable through Time Warner, you could get as much as $100 cash back. Bridgevine’s CEO, Vinny Olmstead, says that the site offers a deal where if you bundle cable, phone and internet services together (the “triple play”), you could receive as much as $300 back from Comcast. Of course, with every referral, Bridgevine takes a cut, which ranges depending on the service bought.
Competitors to Offerwire include Digital Landing and WhiteFence.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Donavon West's Home Servidor, featured in the Baltimore Sun and Born Rich, is a cigar humidor as well as a home server. From the article:
Beneath the glass hinged door, more than a dozen cigars can be stored on a removable shelf. The shelf sits on an insulated lining, and its bottom has a glass panel, which prevents humidity and moisture from seeping into the electronic components in the compartment below the cigars, West said.
It's a great idea, but the Sun isn't correct to say that West is its originator. In fact, Art Deco casemaker Jeffrey Stephenson's been building similar machines for years, exhibited at CES as long ago as 2003. Here's the classic, from Home of the Humidor PC:
West plans to commercialize the concept. Stephenson suggests that it'll be more interesting to connoisseurs of computers than cigars.
The rule is 70/70. Seventy degrees and seventy percent humidity. The humidity is actually controlled by the moisture content of the wood it is made out of: that is why Spanish cedar is used, because it keeps its moisture content stable for long periods of time ... assuming you don't insert a heat source.
I must admit, my cigars do not reside inside my server. This state of affairs is not likely to change.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
WIRED senior writer Steven Levy has spent the last few days with the Palm Pre and he is impressed with it. Despite a battery that sucks down as fast as the iPhone 3G and a keypad that forces you to type with your fingernails, the device is fantastic. Especially noteworthy is the WebOS platform that not only provides multitasking goodness for multiple apps, but works incredibly well with the 3.1-inch touchscreen. From Levy’s review:
Shaped like a small bar of shower soap, the dense, ebony Pre matches many (if not all) of the features of its chief competitor, the iPhone. But in one key aspect, the Pre does the iPhone one better. While a lot of the Pre’s features — a bright 3.1-inch touchscreen manipulated by taps, swipes and pinches; apps sold by third parties in an open online bazaar; integration of e-mail, contacts and calendar — are now standard in 3G smartphones, Palm also lets users keep multiple applications running simultaneously.
It’s a huge win. The Palm gets around the inherent difficulty of multitasking with a concept dubbed “cards” which work like windows on a regular computer. When browsing open apps or web pages, you swipe through the cards as if viewing photos. Tap on a card to use the app. The other apps are still active; your inbox still collects mail, web pages still update. Just as with your computer, you can stay constantly connected to Facebook, Twitter, IM and other online activities. Best of all, when you’re using an app and need something from another app, you don’t have to go through a tortuous process of closing, launching and reloading. When you’re navigating with Google Maps you can slide over to check a contact’s address, choose a podcast or answer an e-mail, and then return to Maps without losing a beat.
$200 (with a two year contract), palm.com
There’s a lot more to the review. For a deeper download you can read the rest of the write-up right here.
Photo by Jim Merithew for Wired.com
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There are the companies you love to hate: Apple. Microsoft. Google. Their size, arrogance and aggressiveness have made them all targets of ire despite the amazing inventions they’ve brought to the world.
And then there’s Palm. Here’s a company which has remained a Silicon Valley success story, a much-loved underdog, even as its early brilliance faded and it began relying too heavily on a succession of ever-staler retreads.
Nobody hates Palm because, for all its success, Palm never managed to really piss anyone off.
Instead, its growth problems were all directed inward, into a bewildering and soap opera-worthy series of mergers and spin-offs and re-mergers, and a tragic, fruitless quest to build a new operating system. Even the triple-threat genius of founders Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan — three of the smartest people in Silicon Valley — and the infusion of lifeblood from the geektastic BeOS didn’t help. All of it added up to nothing more than a long, slow decline. In the meantime, Palm’s competitors leapfrogged far beyond it.
Maybe that’s why so many people have invested so much hope and expectation in the upcoming Palm Pre. We know it won’t knock Nokia, RIM and Apple off their smug little perches at the top of the smartphone world — at least not right away. But like Eddie the Eagle or the Jamaican bobsled team, who could root against Palm?
Before the hoopla starts, let’s pause a minute to remember some of the Palms that have gone before. From the brilliant to the not-so-brilliant, they’ve all had a place in our hearts.
(Note: The morgue that follows is necessarily incomplete, drawn as it is from the bottom drawers of Wired staffers’ desks. What highlights of Palm’s history are we missing? Please let us know in the comments!)
Above: Before there was a Palm, there was the Pilot. U.S. Robotics, a maker of modems (remember those?) owned Palm Inc. at the time of the Pilot’s debut in March 1996. There were two models: The Pilot 1000 had 128KB of memory and the Pilot 500 had 512KB.
The Pilot overcame the problems that plagued earlier handheld computers — notably Apple’s Newton — by being smaller and lighter, and by doing less. Most notably, it forced you to learn Graffiti, a special form of handwriting, rather than trying to read your chicken scratches, and the result was surprisingly effective pen input.
Soon after the launch, Palm soon changed the name of its products to “PalmPilot” and, later, to just “Palm.”
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
In the past month, we’ve seen some new search engine launches. Two in particular were able to generate a hype cycle of early positive reviews and excitement: Bing and Wolfram Alpha. One was launched by Microsoft, and the other by a startup. It is inherently not a fair comparison because Microsoft has so much more money to spend on marketing ($80 to $100 million is earmarked for Bing)> But most of the buzz so far has been generated by the respective launches with all of the blog and news coverage that entails.
So even though it is not fair, let’s compare the two, because it is instructive. There is little data on actual traffic or search volume for either site at this point. Instead, I looked at another proxy of interest: Google searches for both sites as measured by Google Trends. As you can see by the chart above, searches for “Wolfram Alpha” began to build up the weekend that it soft launched on May 15, peaking the following Monday, and then trailing off after that. It had a strong showing, and then interest waned.
Interest in Bing, on the other hand, started out just as strong with its unveiling last week. Then when it actually launched, interest shot up even higher. The positive experience many people had with their first search certainly helped.
Now, the question is: Can Bing keep up the momentum, or will interest in the latest search experiment fade away as fast as it did for Wolfram Alpha? That is where Microsoft’s big check book and that advertising campaign come in. You are going to be hearing a lot more about Bing overt the next few months: on TV, on the Web, and, yes, even on Google. Microsoft cannot afford to let Bing disappear from view.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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FROM GAMERTELL - While we wait for photos to come in from the E3 floor, here are all the specs and other list-y goodness provided by Sony concerning the PSPgo…
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An Indian website has published a draft of the New York Times‘ Palm Pre review, three days before the Pre’s scheduled June 6 release date.
UPDATE 7pm Pacific: Most major media outlets have now published their official reviews of the Palm Pre. Wired’s Steven Levy found it to be a good-looking, intuitive, capable, powerful phone. Battery life is dreadfully short, but he reports that multitasking rules: Wired.com Product Reviews: Multitasking Pre Brims With Power, Potential
Times tech writer David Pogue confirmed to Wired.com that the review, published on the Hyderabad-based Financial Chronicle website, is his.
Although it’s an early draft, it’s clear that Pogue likes the phone. He calls it “an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone that seems intended to be ‘iPhone, remixed.’” With the screen turned off, its hardware reminds him of a “stunning, featureless talisman.” On, the webOS operating system is “gorgeous, fluid and exciting.” He likes its removable battery. And his conclusion makes it clear he’s all over it:
So do the Pre’s perks (beautiful hardware and software, compact size, keyboard, swappable battery, flash, multitasking, calendar consolidation) outweigh its weak spots (battery life, slow program opening, ringer volume, Sprint network)? Oh, yes indeedy. Especially when you consider that last weak spot might be going away. Verizon Wireless has announced that it will carry the Pre ‘‘in the next six months or so.’’ Can you imagine how great that will be? One of the world’s best phones on the best U.S. cell network? If the story of Palm’s rise from the ashes really is like a movie plot, then that twist will give it one heck of a happy ending.
It’s not clear how this review wound up being published so early, but readers on Twitter are already all over the story.
Late last year we wrote about an experimental advertising product that Digg was developing:
One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback.
So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.
Compare that to the blog post from Digg a few minutes ago announcing a new advertising product:
Today, we’re announcing our plans to roll out a new advertising platform — Digg Ads. Digg Ads will give you more control over which advertisements are displayed on Digg. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system.
The platform will launch as a pilot in a few months, and it will be an ongoing work in progress as we learn more from the Digg community and adjust the system. We’re still in very early stages of working with advertisers and building the system, but we wanted you to be the first to hear about our plans.
Digg Ads will appear alongside stories in the river. The sponsored content will look and feel similar to regular Digg content, but will be clearly marked as sponsored. It may link to stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – many of the same types of content you see on Digg every day. The goal here is to give advertisers a way to present content related to their brands and get immediate input on whether it’s relevant to the Digg audience, or not.
New Digg ads will appear directly in the news stream and will be clearly marked as sponsored. The more people click on the ads, the lower the price the advertiser will pay. Ads that are buried too often will be priced “out of the system.”
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
I haven’t been much of a cleantech bull in the past, at least when it comes to venture capital investing. I think it’s a huge market, and there’s clearly a pressing social need. I just don’t quite think the science, government cooperation and economics are there yet for it to be a great opportunity for classic venture investing.
Sure there’s low-hanging fruit, and the outliers like Elon Musk who had the cojones to invest $70 million of his own money into building an electric car company. But a huge boom producing several multi-billion winners? Not yet, IMHO.
But Vinod Khosla greatly disagrees with me, and, frankly, you should listen to him, because he’s a lot smarter. That came across last week during a rare-sit down with Khosla, the famed venture investor and Sun Microsystems co-founder. It was for my Yahoo show, TechTicker, and I’d lobbied—nay, harassed—Khosla and his poor assistant for about eight months to get the meeting.
I’d initially intended to talk a lot about investing in India, since I’m going there in November, and it’s a cause close to Khosla’s heart. But we spent most the time talking about cleantech. Khosla Ventures arguably has the largest cleantech portfolio in the business. I counted more than 30 companies from the Web site alone. And, in many cases these are ambitious, science-heavy, swing-for-the-fences type plays. He is one of the only VCs I know who likes to do “science projects” – usually that’s a derogatory term in the industry, even for biotech VCs.
Here’s a link to our segment where Khosla explains why he believes ethanol—not hybrids and plug ins—are the answer to getting us off oil for good and here’s a link to the broader segment we did where he rebuts all my arguments about why cleantech won’t be the next big driver of Valley returns. He says that “clearly” ten Googles will be created from this opportunity, because it’s not really about solar, wind or biofuels, it’s about totally re-architecting the infrastructure of society.
Sounds ambitious, huh? I’m still not sure about cleantech as the next big Valley wave, but that ambition was what I liked about Khosla. Because I just don’t hear enough ambitious investment ideas these days in the Valley. Facebook apps, Twitter apps and iPhone apps are all great for consumers and for developers who want nice thriving businesses. And certainly, they’re great for Facebook, Twitter and Apple. But with the possible exceptions of Slide, Zynga and one or two others, they’re not the next companies that are going to drive the economy of Silicon Valley, mint millionaires, generate fees to support all those attorneys and accountants, and of course generate enough returns so that institutions want to keep investing in this asset class.
The fact that Facebook is considered risky scares me a little for the future of the Valley. This is a company that’s not necessarily doing something new; social networks have been around a while. It’s a company that mostly always been run at break-even. It’s a company that’s generating upwards of $500 million in revenue a year without really “figuring out” its business model. It’s a company that has no problem still raising money at nosebleed valuations. And most importantly, it’s still growing in almost every user metric that matters. That is not a particularly risky start-up.
Guess what? Twitter isn’t either. If you can’t look at the growth and usage patterns on Twitter and come up with several ideas to monetize it, you’re not very creative. Google built a great monetization engine because it knew intent—in other words, what you were searching for. Twitter knows way more about what’s going on at your head at any given moment, and that’s ripe for advertising and premium research/customer service products for companies. Is it a slam-dunk? Of course not. The crew still needs to execute, and the Twitter natives are getting restless to see some new features. But it’s all execution risk at this point, I’d argue.
Compare that to a company that’s making liquid biofuels out of bark or switchgrass. Khosla spoke right to this fact in the third segment of our interview, which I’ve embedded below. I started out by asking him if he’d turned his back on IT, which is after all where he made his fame and fortune. He gave a few examples of investments he’d snapped up in seemingly “over-invested areas.” One strong one was Aliph, the company who makes the Jawbone. It did $500k in 2006 to $140 million in 2008, and it’s still growing amid the downturn. (He says this at the 2:15 mark below.)
At minute 3:55, he talks about the venture capital business, and its troubling new aversion to risk. As he puts it the business is more about “capital” these days and less about “venture.” “There are too many people trying to avoid risk; too many people trying to deploy capital as opposed to invest in risk and invest in breakthroughs,” he said. You tell ‘em, Khosla.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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FROM APPLETELL - With the 2009 Worldwide Developers Conference less than a week away, there’s plenty of speculation of what new products Apple will announce. Here’s a roundup of the latest speculation, along with the liklihood of it happening.
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We’ve been working hard behind the scenes on the CrunchPad since our last update in April, and have just about nailed down the final design for the device. We’re showing the conceptual drawings here today. In another few weeks we’ll have the first working prototypes in our office.
This launch prototype is another significant step forward from the last prototype. The screen is now flush with the case and we’ve decreased the overall thickness to about 18 mm. The case will be aluminum, which is more expensive than plastic but is sturdier and lets us shave a little more off the overall thickness of the device.
I believe the device now actually looks better than the original concept design we published last summer. Compare the images below to the first prototype and you can see how far we’ve come. If you’re interested, here’s Prototype B. Pictures of Prototype C, which is the device we’re actually demo’ing to people now, are here.
A lot has happened behind the scenes, too. Our partner Fusion Garage continues to drive the software forward, and we are in deep discussions with key partners to bring the device to market. If you’d like to see the previous CrunchPad in action, we have a previously-private video available on YouTube that shows our vision for the user interface and the last version of the software stack. This is a Linux based operating system and a Webkit based browser. The device boots directly into the browser.
The next time we talk about the CrunchPad publicly will be at a special press and user event in July in Silicon Valley. If you’d like to be emailed when new news comes out, send an email to crunchpad@techcrunch.com and we’ll put you on the list.
Here is the near-final industrial design for the CrunchPad:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
According to the researching firm Nielsen Online, the United States has experienced an 83 percent leap in the number of time spent on social networking websites. No big surprise that Facebook experienced one of the biggest leaps, with over 700 percent growth in just a year. Figures should that users spent close to 14 billion combined minutes on the social networking site.
Twitter also experienced huge leaps this year with users spending approximately 300 million minutes on the site compared to the previous year’s figure of 7 million. On the other hand, MySpace dropped in favor, with losing about a third of its usage time. Almost 5 billion minutes were spent on the MySpace website, a significant drop from the 7.2 million minutes reported last April.
Other social networking sites that experienced significant growth include Tagged.com, LiveJournal and MyYearbook. Besides MySpace, Gaia Online also showed a decline in usage minutes. The full report is available through the Nielsen Online website.
Site: [Nielsen Online]
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FROM GAMERTELL - Sony has confirmed the PSP Go as the next step in the handhelds life. It will be released on October 1, 2009, for $249.
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FROM APPLETELL - Looking for a fair analysis of what smart phone is right for you? Compare nine similar features of the iPhone, Palm Pre, Android G2 and Blackberry Storm, even if the obvious choice is still the…
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Section: Computers, Networking, Software / Applications, Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle, Gaming, Miscellaneous, Web, Web 2.0, Websites
Microsoft has certainly been the charmer at E3 this year. People went gaga over their new Project Natal (as well they should!), they announced a way to deliver movies in 1080p format…no disks and no waiting for download. And also, they worked with the uber-social networking site of the time, Facebook, to have it work fluidly right with your Xbox.
With this new technology, Facebook users will be able to hop on through the Microsoft Xbox Live service, and bring Facebook right to their television screen. You will be able to do all kinds of Facebook actions, like update your status, check out your news feed, listen to music and browse photos.
The gamers that use FB will probably like the newest perk…the ability to take advantage of Facebook Connect to show off their gaming prowess and ability. Gamers can publish screenshots and other things right to their Facebook account. You can also take your Friends list on Xbox Live and, if you’ve linked your accounts, send out friend requests for those people on Facebook.
Microsoft clearly want to make it one-stop shopping on the TV. In addition to adding Facebook, they have also added the Internet radio service Last.fm, Twitter, and XBox Live Party. John Schappert, corporate VP for interactive live, software and studios at Microsoft says:
“We are always asking ourselves how to make TV more social. By bringing Facebook, Last.fm, and Xbox Live Party for movies and TV shows to Xbox Live, we’re not only extending the walls of your living room beyond your home to your friends in different corners of the world, we’re creating the definitive social network.”
With the Xbox, you may never have to leave your living room anymore. Has this really become our life?? I’m not convinced that is saying a lot.
via: informationweek
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Got a hankering for a new Sony Ericsson phone, but don’t want to wait for September for the CS8 to come stateside? Well, you’re in luck, because their Sony Style retail site has just started taking preorders for the W995a, a 8-megapixel sharp shooter due to ship next month.
You may know it better as the Hikaru, but never mind the moniker change. After all, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and with a feature this rich, you can bet “sweet” is one word we can use for the newly-christened W995. We’re looking at quad-band GSM and triband HSPA, stereo Bluetooth, FM radio, Wi-Fi, the aforementioned 8-megapixel camera, and a solid 2.6 inch screen, all crammed inside a reasonably slim sliding form factor. Oh, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, which I’m sure a certain Mr. Kumparak would approve of.
The only downside? It’ll run you $599.99, which isn’t entirely unreasonable considering the feature list and its unlocked status, but with a slew of new phones hitting this summer, you’ve got to decide who deserves your hard-earned dollars. You’ve got plenty of time to think, though - these sliders won’t ship until July 6, so choose wisely.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
It was first shown to the general public back in February, and now LG gave us some more concrete info about their LG-GD900, which is - according to LG - the world’s first cell phone featuring a transparent keypad. The aptly (code-)named Crystal is due out in as much as 40 different countries starting next month already.
We had a hands-on video of the device last month (the video can be found again below), saying it’s damn pretty. It still is, and the specs aren’t too bad either. The LG-GD900 comes with a 3-inch WVGA touchscreen, an 8MP camera, Wifi, Bluetooth, TV Out, HSDPA and 1.5GB of internal memory (expandable to 32GB).
The cell phone will be available in countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America (but no word on pricing or a release in the US yet) from July 1.
Via Tech Gadgets
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