AP - President Barack Obama issued a strong plea for action on his health care agenda Saturday, using his weekly radio and Internet address to focus on his top domestic priority even while traveling overseas.
One of the largest 802.16e mobile WiMAX networks in the Middle East leverages Motorola's global expertise in delivering and operating nationwide deployments. ... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 10:00 am
Shibuya246 sez, "A brand of Japanese men's underwear has been launched by a company called Login, which depicts the motif of the popular warlords from the Warring States period. There is a brand for Oda... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 9:57 am
Shibuya246 sez, "A brand of Japanese men's underwear has been launched by a company called Login, which depicts the motif of the popular warlords from the Warring States period. There is a brand for Oda Nobunaga as well as Tokugawa Ieyasu and others." And it's a mere $80 a pair!
The news of Professor Rajeev Motwani's untimely death on Friday afternoon spread quickly throughout the couple of hundred attendees of tonight's TechFellow event in San Francisco. The mood of the event... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 9:31 am
The news of Professor Rajeev Motwani’s untimely death on Friday afternoon spread quickly throughout the couple of hundred attendees of tonight’s TechFellow event in San Francisco. The mood of the event turned from cheerful cocktail sipping banter to stunned silence.
Most everyone who was there is his friend. And most everyone there had a story to tell about how Motwani had helped them at one time or another, asking nothing in return. I have a couple of those stories myself.
Ron Conway, a long time friend of Motwani, was visibly shaken. We asked Ron to make a few remarks to honor Motwani before the event started. His talk was not scripted or prepared. He was in a state of shock before, during and after his talk. And it clearly came directly from the heart. He talked about a man who loved entrepreneurs and who would meet with anyone to at least give them advice. Motwani influenced hundreds of entrepreneurs and students, Conway said, and never refused a meeting. We’ve included the video of Conway’s tribute to Motwani above.
It has been a long time since I have updated this blog. In fact, I have been doing some research for what I thought would be my next post.
Unfortunately, life does not always give you the luxury to plan what may be close to your heart next. It is with great sadness that I write about the passing of my teacher and good friend Professor Rajeev Motwani. But I would rather not dwell on the sorrow of his death and instead celebrate his life.
Officially, Rajeev was not my advisor, and yet he played just as big a role in my research, education, and professional development. In addition to being a brilliant computer scientist, Rajeev was a very kind and amicable person and his door was always open. No matter what was going on with my life or work, I could always stop by his office for an interesting conversation and a friendly smile.
When my interest turned to data mining, Rajeev helped to coordinate a regular meeting group on the subject. Even though I was just one of hundreds of graduate students in the department, he always made the time and effort to help. Later, when Larry and I began to work together on the research that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide us through challenges, both technical and organizational.
Eventually, as Google emerged from Stanford, Rajeev remained a friend and advisor as he has with many people and startups since. Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly. Yet his legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched. Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it.
Goodbye, Rajeev. You will be missed. What a sad, sad day.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Al writes "Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) have developed an OLED display that doubles as a camera. The idea is to use it in lightweight heads-up displays that track usersl eye movements, affording some form of gaze-control. The researchers will demonstrate a prototype at the Society for Information Display conference in San Antonio this week. The current version has a simple monochromatic display: it is 1.25 centimeters on each side, with a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels. The team at Fraunhofer IPMS has also partnered with Novaled, an OLED company that manufactures high-quality white diodes, and plans to make color prototypes using the technology."
Stanford's Joel Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called "schizotypal personality" have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities.
Stanford's Joel Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 8:20 am
Stanford's Joel Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 8:20 am
The Recording Academy has eliminated the Grammy award for best polka album. Damn. Grammys drop polka album award (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 8:10 am
The Recording Academy has eliminated the Grammy award for best polka album. Damn. Grammys drop polka album award (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 8:10 am
I love the illustrated blog of Japanese Second Life photographer Bark Aabye, and photos like this flying submarine suggest why. Last week, she was out golfing in surreal locations while wearing Katamari... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 7:41 am
Xylocopa's "The Complete Ukulele Guide to the Moustaches of the World" is a ukelele sporting diagrams showing the world's 25 major mustache groups.
The Ukulele Guide includes not only the standard moustache groups, but also exotic and endangered moustaches like the Shirley Temple and the LARP-stache. Recently cultivated strains of moustache such as the Octopus also feature prominently, and the headstock is graced with an inspiring moustache quote, sure to please any moustache fancier.
You may be asking yourself at this point you have survived without such a practical object, and what you can do to obtain one. If this is the case, please contact us.
Xylocopa's "The Complete Ukulele Guide to the Moustaches of the World" is a ukelele sporting diagrams showing the world's 25 major mustache groups. The Ukulele Guide includes not only the standard moustache... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 7:32 am
Miss Jess sez, "The Design Piracy Prohibition Act is very, very scary to all of us in the apparel industry. There are millions of jobs at stake if this legislation passes, and this act is simply being pushed by a handful of wealthy celebrity designers who continually pirate the 'little guys' designs anyway. Basically, this act will kill my business along with thousands upon THOUSANDS of other small, medium and large design and manufacturing businesses around the US and the world if it is passed. It's a big deal!
Under this legislation, however, designers will need to consult with a lawyer throughout
the design process to ensure that every new design created could not subjectively be
found at a later date to be "closely and substantially similar" to one protected in the
Copyright registry...
Further, young, up-and-coming designers would be susceptible to legal intimidation from
designing anything new at all, as they would likely not have the resources to fight a legal
challenge in court...
While the bill purports to keep all fashion designs that have existed in the past free and
open for all to use, the legislation would allow the ability to copyright non-original
design elements in the public domain if arranged in an original way.
Moreover, since there is no test for originality, the registry will begin to be populated
with designs that from the public domain. Thus, a designer who draws upon inspiration
from the public domain, can easily find himself/herself stuck in costly litigation.
TEHRAN, June 6 (Reuters) - These are some of the leading stories in Iranian newspapers on Saturday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 7:20 am
Theo sez, "Pedalpalooza is 2+ weeks of open-source bike rides in Portland, Oregon starting on June 11th and ending June 27th. Rides are created, posted to the calendar, and lead by anyone. One of my rides is the XKCD ride, for which I will be dressed as Cory Doctorow; thought readers might find that funny."
Other rides include: chocolate ride, noobs on unicycles, yoga for cyclists, naked bike ride, surprise bike wedding, homeless hotspots bike tour, tour de goats, old French bikes, pun-ishment ride, trek-tosterone ride, pretty panty ride, dead freeways ride, unimproved road ride, Sisyphean cruller crawl, pedal powered pajama party, etc etc etc.
MOSCOW, June 6 (Reuters) - Sberbank , part of a consortium to buy GM's European assets, will pay 65 million euros ($92.1 million) for GM's assembly plant in St Petersburg, RIA news agency quoted a Sberbank... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 7:05 am
There were no long lines or excited campers but a few early birds still rushed in to snag a Palm Pre as the much-anticipated device went on sale at select Sprint stores Friday night.
“It’s awesome, dude,” said Ken Fitzgerald, a mobile phone developer, proudly holding one of the first Pre phones sold at Sprint’s Palo Alto, California store. Fitzgerald broke his contract with Verizon to get the Pre. Sprint has an exclusive deal with Palm for the Pre at least till the end of the year.
“I have been reading everything on the internet about the Pre for the last few months and I knew it was going to be a revolutionary device,” said Fitzgerald.
About ten Sprint stores nationwide opened their doors, a day early, to offer the Pre to buyers. The $200 phone, after a $100 mail-in rebate, will be available at all Sprint, Best Buy and RadioShack stores starting June 6.
Despite a few visibly excited buyers, Sprint’s Palo Alto location lacked the long lines that the Apple store, just a few blocks away, had seen before the launch of the first generation iPhone or the iPhone 3G.
“What we have here is the pre-Pre launch,” said Steve Elfman, president of network and wholesale at Sprint. “We invited a select few customers to get the Pre. Tomorrow, when the stores open to all we expect to see some lines.”
One of the select few customers to get in early was Scott Hutton, an engineer for Cisco. Hutton said he’s not a Palm fanboy but other phones such as the T-Mobile HTC G1 or even the iPhone have left him unimpressed.
“The iPhone, um, is missing that little thing called the keyboard,” said Hutton who bought two Pres and a wireless Touchstone charger.
Drawbacks such as the device’s ostensibly poor battery life, the lack of apps and even the cramped keyboard pointed out in reviews of the Palm Pre did not faze him or Fitzgerald. Both say they have had Palm devices in the past and have been happy. After a brief fling with other devices, they are back into the Palm fold.
With the launch of the Pre, Palm is reeling its old loyalists in.
More photos from the Pre launch at the Sprint Palo Alto store
cconnell sends in a piece he wrote for Dr. Dobb's which "argues that software development will never be a fully formal, rigorous discipline, and the reason is that software engineering involves humans as central to the process." Quoting: "Software maintainability, for example, is the ability of people to understand, find, and repair defects in a software system. The maintainability of software may be influenced by some formal notions of computer science — perhaps the cyclomatic complexity of the software's control graph. But maintainability crucially involves humans, and their ability to grasp the meaning and intention of source code. The question of whether a particular software system is highly maintainable cannot be answered just by mechanically examining the software. The same is true for safety. Researchers have used some formal methods to learn about a software system's impact on people's health and property. But no discussion of software safety is complete without appeal to the human component of the system under examination."
We’d like to congratulate the twenty-two inaugural winners of tonight’s TechFellow awards, each of whom has made outstanding contributions in one of four different categories: Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation. Below is a listing of the winners, broken down by category.
Disruptive Innovation
This category is meant to highlight the visionaries, the starry-eyed fools who believe when no one else will. They are undaunted when told NO by stern parents, when told it WON’T WORK by a thousand dismissive VCs, when failure after failure would dash the hopes of lesser mortals. These are the men and women whose incredible ideas burst forth like Athena from their foreheads, and they know what it means to make Fire, the Wheel, and the Printing Press.
Engineering Leadership candidates are people who have demonstrated technical excellence, built amazing technology infrastructure and products, or led teams that together built complex and elegant solutions that changed our lives. They are the uber geeks who calculate 10-digit squares in their heads, and write a thousand bug-free lines of code on the fly without skipping a beat.
Product Design and Marketing candidates are people who have designed insanely great products, who have made technology beautiful, who have created the marketing campaign that blows you away and make you want to go out and buy ten of them for your whole family. These are the storytellers, the artists, the people who make our dreams come alive.
General Management candidates are people who have built the teams and organizations that create and deliver great technology and products to the world. They are company builders who provide foundations and processes for all the rest of the geeks and dreamers to make their dreams reality. They are the folks who wake up at 6am and open the doors, make the donuts, play reveille, and lead the charge to take the hill. They make it *happen*.
Although TechCrunch editor Michael Arringtonrecently posted an April Fool’s joke about hiring a matchmaker to find him a wife, matchmaking services are becoming an alternate (and pricier) way to find a mate (think Millionaire Matchmaker). For those guys who are looking to meet a lady but don’t have the time to devote to the due diligence, outsourcing the job is the obvious option. Trolling Match.com,eHarmony and other dating sites can be a time-consuming and frustrating task. Even setting up an appealing profile on these sites can be daunting. To help these dudes out, VirtualDatingAssistants.com has launched a service allow busy male professionals to fully outsource their online dating experience.
At a price of $480 per month, the company’s virtual dating assistants will use “advanced internet dating techniques and strategies to create online dating profiles, interact with women and set up dates with them.” The company says it will work approximately 40 hours per month for each customer and guarantees them a minimum of 2 dates per month (or their money back).
Co-founders Mark Anderson and Scott Valdez are overseeing a cherry-picked team of virtual assistants that are referred to as “007” Dating Assistants due the “suave and sophisticated nature of their undercover interactions.” Yes, they are actually called “007″ Dating Assistants. Anderson attests to the power of virtual assistants representing you on online dating sites because that’s how he found his wife. As a pharmaceutical sales exec, Anderson had his assistant manage his online dating accounts and schedule 79 dates with attractive women within a period of a year. One of these women happens to now be his wife.
Virtual assistants will help clients fill out their profiles and then search dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony to find women that fit each client’s tastes and preferences. Once the client informs the assistant of necessary information for a profile, the assistant will take over the process of finding, messaging, and setting up dates with women. According to the site, the “007″ assistant will begin “contacting and interacting with the candidates. Once an interesting candidate is qualified as a strong candidate, your 007 Dating Assistant works to stimulate interest, build comfort, and flip her attraction switches.” The client doesn’t have to participate in the process until an “pre-date evaluation” meeting before the actual date.
The service makes me a little uneasy. I get that people are busy but the idea that I’d be trading emails with a virtual assistant posing as the potential date seems disingenuous and gives me the creeps. Not to mention that $480 a month is a hefty price to pay for someone to just handle dating websites for you. There’s no doubt that online dating is a huge market, and there have been similar startups that have emerged to feed off this pool, such as ProfileHelper.com, which assists people in creating the perfect profile for online dating. But I think Virtualdatingassistants.com takes it a step to far; it almost seems like misrepresentation.
IRVINE, Calif., June 5 /PRNewswire/ -- VIZIO, America's #1 HDTV and Consumer Electronics Company, announced today that the U.S. District Court for the Central District of... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 5:21 am
AFP - Videogame makers at E3 this week shrugged off the dismal economy, debuting supercharged sequels to blockbuster titles and play that is increasingly social and active.
[He] looks like he might have Progeria, a terrible disease where your body is elderly even though you're only 8. Regardless of this disfiguring disease, he's a true gangster. He has the balls to go online and be like every other pre-teen boy on youtube, singing along to Papa Roach and generally being awesome. The fact that he does this, that it brings him some kind of happiness, and that he calls himself "chick3n little", is why the internet is amazing and why the world doesn't seem so shitty sometimes.
Looks like the content was previously uploaded to YouTube under another name, deleted, then re-uploaded them under this new account name.
Update: Ah, 4chan. Some BB commenters have stated that the current YouTube channel is not controlled by the person in the videos, but was reconstructed by channers. In other words, the videos may be real, but the YT channel, and the descriptions/titles therein, no longer. Various accounts name the person in the video as Justin Tsimbidis; the new account name sounds like a mean way some others have come up with to make fun of him. The videos are fascinating, but it sucks that anonymous jerks on the internet are being cruel to this person.
Tonight many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest have come together for the TechFellow Awards, a new startup investment program that we have created in partnership with Founders Fund. We’ll be annoucing the winners shortly, and are live streaming the event below, compliments of Ustream.
Here are more details about the program:
At least twelve fellows will be granted $25,000 each tonight to invest in an early stage startup of their choice. Founders Fund will invest an additional $25,000 alongside those investments and request an additional right to invest another $250,000 when the company raises its next round of financing. In all, Founders Fund expects to devote around $3.6 million to the program.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Tony Hawk's new game comes with an actual skateboard (minus the wheels). Ride is about as close as you're going to get to actual skating, and you won't break yourself! We asked the Bird Man why he thinks this is the ultimate skateboarding game.
GamePolitics reports that "Germany's 16 Interior Ministers have banded together to ask the Bundestag (Germany's equivalent of Parliament) to ban the production and distribution of violent video games. Moreover, the ministers hope to see this accomplished before Germany's new elections take place on September 27th." Violent games became a national issue in Germany earlier this year after Far Cry 2 was scapegoated for a shooting. Germany-based game developer Crytek could be forced to move or outsource if the ban goes through. Spiegel Online has the original story (Google translation).
Tragic news today for the Silicon Valley community. Rajeev Motwani, a prominent Silicon Valley angel investor and the Stanford professor perhaps best known for serving as the advisor for Larry Page and Sergey Brin during the formative years of Google, has passed away.
Rajeev was an ardent supporter of Silicon Valley startups, investing and mentoring many of them while continuing his research at Stanford University. With investments in companies that included PayPal and Google, he saw an overwhelming amount of success. And through it all he has continued to give back to the community though his mentorship, investments, and his time at Stanford, where he has continued to teach as recently as last semester.
We owe Rajeev a debt of gratitude here at TechCrunch, as he was kind enough to speak at a number of our events and was genuinely supportive of our efforts.
Om Malik has shared his thoughts on his old friend, writing that there wasn’t a startup that Rajeev didn’t love on his quest for the unknown.
Our deepest sympathies go out to Rajeev’s family. He will be sorely missed.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
alphadogg writes "Telesign, a provider of voice-based authentication software, challenged hackers to break into its StrongWebmail.com Web site late last week. The prize: $10,000. On Thursday, a group of security researchers claimed to have won the contest, which challenged hackers to break into the Web mail account of StrongWebmail CEO Darren Berkovitz and report back details from his June 26 calendar entry. The hackers, led by Secure Science Chief Scientist Lance James and security researchers Aviv Raff and Mike Bailey, provided details from Berkovitz's calendar to IDG News Service. In an interview, Berkovitz confirmed those details were from his account. However, Berkovitz could not confirm that the hackers had actually won the prize. He said he would need to check to confirm that the hackers had abided by the contest rules, adding, 'if someone did it, we'll kind of put our heads down.'"
Want to break Apple’s hegemony over your headphone choice when using the new iPod Shuffle? This $18 dongle adds all of Apple’s functionality into a little thing that sits on top of the Shuffle rather than inline on the headset, thereby freeing you from the shackles of fear that hold us all down and, in the end, will kill us. After all, even the birds are chained to the skyway.
Anyway, it’s a really simple little dongle. This thing had to appear sooner or later.
PC World - A Hampton, New Hampshire, man has pleaded guilty to fraud charges for his role in a scheme to empty brokerage accounts by installing malicious Trojan horse software on victims' computers. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 6 Jun 2009 | 1:10 am
The pico projection thing might be getting a little out of hand. Sure, the projectors themselves are cool, and it’s hard to say no to cute accessories like this thing, but with pico projectors planned for phones, media players, and now little camcorders, things are getting a bit… projectionable.
According to Digitimes, the DigiLife DDV-JF1 being shown at Computex has pretty much got it all:
Life Technologies, under its DigiLife brand, is showcasing a DV pico projector, the DDV-JF1. The DV features a 5-megapixel CMOS sensor, H.264 video compression, 30fps frame rate at a resolution of 1280×720 and a 2.5-inch LCD display. However, users can also project the image using the integrated pico projector. Projected images can be projected up to four meters away at a maximum size of 50-inches. The projector support Q720P(640×360) resolution and has a whiled LED backlight at an 8 lux brightness.
640×360 is a better resolution than the pico projectors we’ve got, and it’s also exactly half the 720p resolution, so it’ll be a clean downrez. The more I think of it, the more I’m convinced that it may actually be a good thing to have. With a good amount of storage, the thing could be a great all-purpose media device. No, no, what am I thinking of?! This is nauseatingly excessive! Isn’t it? I can’t decide.
You're a super-villain and you want to prepare a transparency (the kind that goes on an overhead projector) with the key points of your plan for world domination so you can present them to the hero/superagent before you attempt to kill him in some ridiculously novel way. You don't want this information to fall into the wrong hands before you're ready. Smart villain that you are, you know you can share the information across several slides so that if the enemy agents capture any 2 of your slides, they won't learn even the tiniest bit of information about your plan. How?
According to PayScale, a call center employee in India with 10-20 years experience makes about $6,400 a year. These folks might be able to afford one of the 1,000 tiny apartments being made by Tata, the company that makes the $2,200 car.
From Business Week:
Luxury flats in Mumbai can cost more than ones in Manhattan. But these apartments won’t be luxurious. The Tata apartments will be built on 67 acres in Boisar, an industrial area where many lower-wage commuters already rent. These apartments will be absolutely tiny. The carpeted area of the smallest units will be 218 square feet, too small even for most Manhattanites. The largest units would be about 373 square feet (Click here to see the floor plans). Can you imagine squeezing a family into one of these units? The community would have its own garden, post office, meeting hall, schools, and hospital.
Reuters - A surprise appearance by Apple Inc Chief Executive Steve Jobs at the company's annual developer conference could boost its stock on Monday, but his absence might trigger a bigger move in the other direction.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A surprise appearance by Apple Inc Chief Executive Steve Jobs at the company's annual developer conference could boost its stock on Monday, but his absence might... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 12:34 am
NEW YORK, June 5 (Reuters) - Movie studio The Weinstein Company has hired investment adviser Miller Buckfire & Co LLC to explore possible restructuring or refinancing, the Wall Street Journal said,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 12:23 am
This is a great idea: fit tiny photodiodes between the pixels of an OLED display. We know OLEDs can get very transparent, so these could be used in something like an head-mounted display that tracks the position of your eyes. There’s still a lot of engineering and imagineering to be done, but it does seem like a really great way to take advantage of the microscopic gaps in a display.
What else could you do with these bidirectional arrays? How about OLED displays that only turn on when someone comes near, or lights that turn on when you come into a room &mdsah; technologies that already exist, but could be integrated into the very display or light source now. Can you guys think of any more?
I swear, once the prices come down on OLED displays, these low-power, highly versatile displays are going to be everywhere. It might actually get kind of annoying.
RENO, Nev., June 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- GameTech International, Inc. ("GameTech" or the "Company") (Nasdaq: GMTC), a leading designer, developer and... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 6 Jun 2009 | 12:07 am
Apple may be known for its advertising prowess, but this little marketing coup is going to go down as one of the most hilarious ad placements in recent history. doubleTwist, the company co-founded by renowned software reverse engineer DVD Jon, has managed to place a banner for its product directly next to the main entrance to Apple’s flagship San Francisco store.
The ad invites passersby to try “The Cure for iPhone Envy”, which they can use to access their “iTunes Library on any device. In Seconds”. It’s clearly a message that Apple doesn’t want anything to do with. We’re hearing that Apple employees are currently scratching their heads as to how this appeared. So how did this wind up only a few feet from the store’s entrance, and directly beneath a giant Apple logo?
Apparently the window technically belongs to BART, the Bay Area’s commuter transit system. doubleTwist got in touch with an ad agency that BART deals with and leased the window, giving them the chance to plaster their ad just below the Apple logo in its full glory. This is apparently the first time the window has been used for this purpose (before it just sat bare). And because everything was done legally, Apple’s going to have a hard time getting rid of it.
While DVD Jon has a long history of reverse engineering digital media security, doubleTwist is a perfectly legitimate software application that makes it easy to manage media files for a variety of hardware devices. It’s sort of like iTunes, except it works for nearly any device — not just your iPod and iPhone (you can find an extensive overview here, and the app now supports both Windows and Mac). Given that one of the iPod’s biggest advantages over competitors is the seamless experience it offers to users, Apple probably isn’t a big fan.
Tonight’s the night that we’re announcing the winners of The TechFellow Awards, and you can watch the ceremony live right here on TechCrunch at 9 pm PST, care of a live video feed from Ustream.
The TechFellow Awards is a a new startup investment program that we created in partnership with Founders Fund. At least twelve fellows will be granted $25,000 each tonight to invest in an early stage startup of their choice. Founders Fund will invest an additional $25,000 alongside those investments and request an additional right to invest another $250,000 when the company raises its next round of financing. In all, Founders Fund expects to devote around $3.6 million to the program.
An amazing group of people have helped us select winners of the TechFellow Awards and will be attending the ceremony tonight at the beautiful and newly-renovated California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park:
stoolpigeon writes with this quote from the EFF: "'Terms of Service' policies on websites define how Internet businesses interact with you and use your personal information. But most web users don't read these policies — or understand that the terms are constantly changing. To track these ever-evolving documents, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is launching TOSBack: a 'terms of service' tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, and other major websites. ... The issue of terms-of-service changes — and how and why they are made — was highlighted earlier this year when Facebook modified its terms of use. Facebook users worried that the change gave the company the right to use members' content indefinitely. After a user revolt, Facebook announced that it would restore the former terms while it worked through the concerns users had raised."
A year ago MySpace and Fox Interactive Media were trumpeting an upcoming office move to Playa Vista in Los Angeles. Peter Levinsohn (former) President of the no longer existing Fox Interactive Media, justified the move to the 300,000 square foot space based on the “phenomenal success” of the business, and noted that he expected “even greater growth and achievements in the coming fiscal year.”
FIM has experienced phenomenal success in its three-year history, and we have plans for even greater growth and achievements in the coming fiscal year. Given our tremendous track record, it’s only fitting that we should enter into the single biggest real-estate transaction in Los Angeles in the last 25 years. When we move to our new facility between June of 2009 and January of 2010, not only will we enjoy the distinction of having one of the largest corporate headquarters in the LA area, but we will be housed in a state-of-the-art facility that reflects our corporate identity and culture.
Time to cut costs. And people cuts alone won’t do the trick. Levinsohn said “Given our tremendous track record, it’s only fitting that we should enter into the single biggest real-estate transaction in Los Angeles in the last 25 years.” Now new digital chief Jonathan Miller, who has probably noted that with all the layoffs MySpace doesn’t really need all that hip new square footage, is saying they’re backing out of that transaction. In an email to all MySpace employees, Miller said:
Everyone,
Since coming on board, it’s no secret that I have asked each of the executive teams within my organization to conduct a comprehensive strategic review of their businesses to ensure that we are operating as efficiently and effectively as possible. These reviews have included a very close look at our costs and a full examination of our resource allocation – an important exercise that will help us determine whether our resources are aligned properly with our business priorities. This process is still ongoing and we will be communicating the details of the reviews as the results become available.
One immediate result is that we have determined that we will not be moving to Playa Vista. After taking many different factors into account, we have decided that the best plan for our businesses is to remain in our current locations for the near future. We’re making great progress building strong standalone businesses at each of our LA locations, and the last thing we want to do is to interfere with that momentum. In addition, the realities of the current economy make the prospects of a move incredibly expensive, a fact that I believe makes this decision not only good for our working environments, but also for
our bottom line.
As I mentioned above, the strategic reviews are ongoing and I assure you that our executive teams are working as quickly as possible to determine what, if any, additional decisions will be made and we will communicate with all of you as frequently as possible in this regard.
Best,
Jon
It’s funny how MySpace PR fell all over themselves to get the word out on the new office space last year, but not a word on pulling out now. We hear the San Francisco office is next to go.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
A leaked memo has outed June 26 as the starting date when Best Buy (and possibly other places, if this is a Microsoft-blessed program) will guarantee a free copy of Windows 7 at its launch if you buy a Vista-based system immediately. The memo itself is actually a bit catty, saying that Windows 7 isn’t just a “Vista that works” — cold as ice, Best Buy. But the point of that little crack is more that Best Buy employees should really be pushing this as a major update, to allay the fears of people who might be afraid 7 is just an updated Vista. Still, ouch.
In addition to the guarantee program, Best Buy will also be selling upgrades to 7 Home premium for $50 and 7 Pro for $100. I swear, it’d be a lot simpler to sell this OS if there was just one version.
Last week, Facebook took a $200 million investment that valued the company at $10 billion. So if Facebook is worth $10 billion, how much is Twitter worth? After all, Twitter turned down $500 million from Facebook late last year, and founder Evan Williams might not even sell it for $1 billion. But how about for $1.7 billion?
That is the valuation we come up with when we run Twitter’s numbers through our new social network valuation model. The model takes into account the size of each social network’s audience in different countries and the average online spending per capita in those countries. Using Facebook’s $10 billion valuation as a baseline, Twitter would be the fourth most valuable social network after MySpace ($6.5 billion) and Bebo ($1.8 billion).
Of course, that $10 billion valuation was for preferred shares, so $1.7 billion might be a valuation a strategic investor or acquirer would be willing to place on Twitter. If you use the $4 billion to $6 billion range Facebook’s common stock is being valued at in private sales, then Twitter’s valuation would come down to $671 million to $1 billion. And if you use Bebo’s 2008 valuation of $850 million as a benchmark instead, Twitter would be worth $781 million.
So there is your range: roughly $700 million to $1.7 billion. And remember, Twitter may still have scaling issues, but it doesn’t have all the costs that Facebook has in terms of storage and other capital expenditures. For one thing,Twitter isn’t keeping everyone’s photos on its servers—that is what TwitPic and Yfrog are for. On the flip side, there is also the question of revenues, which remains an open question for Twitter (and for Facebook, for that matter). Is Twitter going to make money from real-time search, corporate accounts, or maybe even figuring out a way to sell followers? Given how engaged a large portion of Twitter’s users are already and how it is becoming a hot testbed for opt-in marketing, it is not inconceivable that Twitter’s users will be worth more to advertisers than Facebook’s. But before we can find out, Twitter needs to pick a business model.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
PC World - Anyone familiar with LCD HDTVs expects their prices to decrease, and for TVs from established companies to cost more than models from upstarts like Insignia and Vizio--but no one expects the top-shelf brands to come down in price faster than the value brands. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 5 Jun 2009 | 11:15 pm
There have been a few histories of underground comics as of late, but this is the first one to really focus on the artwork of underground comics, as opposed to their cultural significance, which most histories cover. That's not to say the book doesn't look at the era in which these comics were made -- it does, but it's first an foremost an art book.
Most of the pages are devoted to high quality scans of original art by all the usual suspects -- R. Crumb, Rand Holmes, Vaughn Bode, Robert Williams, William Stout, Art Spiegelman, Gilbert Shelton, Trina Robbins, Jay Kinney, and the rest.I love seeing the zip-a-tone, blue lines, and white-out that you don't get to see in the printed comics. I have a lot of the comics this art came from, and it's a treat to see it presented with such great attention to detail. Each illustration is accompanied by enlightening commentary.
The book is edited by Denis Kitchen and James Danky, co-curators of the exhibition of underground comics at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisonsin-Madison that this book is based on.
The book includes essays by Paul Buhle, Trina Robins, Jay Lynch, and Patrick Rosenkranz (who wrote a great history of underground comics called Rebel Visions).
(Also -- the Crumb illo on the cover is from Snarf #6 [1975]. The guy in the car would be very welcome at Maker Faire!)
Am I crazy, or did NEC and Alienware just unveil the same thing? Alienware’s original curved monitor, which we saw at CES last year, had some issues which have since been resolved, but was their hand forced by NEC’s announcement? At $8000 the NEC one isn’t going to be making into a lot of homes, but is this one any different? Well, it’s made by Ostendo and they’re launching via Dell, so it can’t be the exact same hardware, although they do share a size, resolution, brightness, and contrast. Verrry suspicious.
The differences are subtle: the Ostendo one is significantly narrower (32.5cm vs 50cm), which suggests a less-extreme curvature. Let’s hope there’s a less subtle difference in price. I’d love to get my hands on one of these, though — or maybe two.
This week proved a lousy one for 300 or so Intuit employees. The tax-preparation software maker on Thursday sacked 4 percent of its work force as part of its ongoing resource management efforts. “We manage our resources on an on-going basis; these changes support our long-term growth strategy,” an Intuit (INTU) spokesperson said in a statement. Said strategy, it should be noted, also includes the $170 million acquistion just two days ago of PayCyle, an online payroll services provider …
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In the Duluth, Minnesota case headed for a re-trial on June 15th, Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset, the RIAA has filed a motion seeking to bar the defendant, Jammie Thomas-Rasset (she got married recently), from making objections to the plaintiffs' copyright registration documents. To preempt those of you reacting with shock and anger at the American judicial system, let me assure you this motion has nothing to do with the American judicial system; the RIAA's motion has the chance of a snowball in Hell of being granted, as there is simply no legal basis for preventing a person from making valid legal objections in Trial #2, just because the lawyer she had in Trial #1 didn't make similar objections. I'm guessing that the RIAA lawyers realized they have some kind of problem with their paperwork, and thought this a clever way of short-circuiting it. Instead, of course, they have merely red-flagged it for Ms. Thomas-Rasset's new legal team. A few days earlier, the RIAA lawyers filed a similarly ludicrous motion trying to keep Ms. Thomas-Rasset's expert witness from testifying; that too is doomed."
We’ve taken a break from reviewing elevator pitches for awhile but we’re back with a good one: VocabSushi. The pitch is concise yet detailed and manages to pack in a good amount of content into a one-minute pitch. The founder, Jeff Novich (an SAT tutor), even managed to squeeze in the price points for the services.
VocabSushi is an online verbal test prep service that helps you prepare for standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, and GRE by teaching you vocab words with real-world, contextual examples found in the daily news. The site crawls the daily news from around the U.S. to find examples of vocab words to show users context of how a word is used while also seeing the definition of the word. VocabSushi has compiled lists of vocab words commonly tested on each standardized test and contains recorded MP3 pronunciations, definitions and sample sentences for every VocabSushi word.
The site’s tests simulate traditional verbal standardized tests, offering you sample definition multiple choice and sentence completion questions. VocabSushi’s tests are intuitive and tracks your progress overall and for every word. When you learn words, they’re automatically replaced with newer, more challenging ones. You can also download word quiz podcasts and print PDF version of tests.
Pricing is $10 for month, $25 for 3 months, and $50 for a year’s subscription to the service. Kaplan, Princeton Review and others offer online tutoring for the verbal sections of standardized tests but don’t have the intuitive testing and comprehensive audio pronunciation and real-world context features of VocabSushi. Prepme’sstandardized test help system also keeps track of what questions you get right and wrong, remembering what questions you miss and challenging you accordingly. Prepme’s plans are pricier, but the startup offers comprehensive tutoring for all subject matters of standardized tests. Learn10 is another interactive vocabulary learning site.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
I own a first-generation iPod Touch and a T-Mobile G1. While I love my G1 as a phone, I’m constantly amazed at the quality of applications and software that are available for the iPhone — games especially. While I seem to have sort of gotten my bases covered in the games department on the G1, I can’t help but wonder what it’d be like to walk around with games like Tiger Woods PGA Tour, Sim City, and The Sims 3 on my phone all day long.
Magic, I tell you. Magic!
That might be stretching it a little bit, but the fact remains: The Sims 3 represents yet another excellent and very-impressive iPhone game from EA. At $9.99, it’s a no-brainer for any fan of the Sims franchise.
The game is a slightly scaled-back version of the big-boy Sims games. In this adventure, you live in a small town surrounded by a handful of neighbors, a few employment opportunities, and a few shopping areas. If a full-blown PC version of The Sims equates to Sim City 3000 or Sim City 4, the iPhone version of The Sims 3 would dovetail with SimTown. Perhaps Sim Small Town, even.
You create your own character using a few different hairstyles, skin tones, and clothing and shoe options — nothing too advanced, there are perhaps 4-5 options for each category — and then decide on a basic personality type: Jack of All Trades, Nice Guy, Jerk, Sleaze, Power Seeker, and Maniac. After that, you assign yourself five main personality traits. I made myself a Jack of All Trades and chose good sense of humor, conversationalist, modest, friendly, and genius as my traits.
Then, in true Sims form, you set about making a little life for yourself. You’ll have to get a job to make money, you need to buy food items from the market, and you’ll have to keep an eye on your basic personal needs: hunger, energy, fun, social, hygiene, bladder, and the like. You can make extra money by completing tasks for various other Sims. Some are pretty weird; like this guy Bernie wants to pay me $30 (sorry, 30 simoleans — Sim currency) to annoy another Sim named Jack.
And one lady Sim offered me $90 to shove another lady Sim! Unfortunately (or fortunately) due to my personality type, my character doesn’t have it in him to annoy or shove people.
Since the iPhone’s got an accelerometer, we can’t escape mini-games based on shaking and tilting can we? No sir. If you want to cook yourself a meal, you’ll have to make sure to pick up and shake the pots on the stove or your food will burn. You can also go fishing, which consists of tilting the iPhone back and forth to get your line near a moving fish and then jerking the device upward to reel it in. Stuff like that. It’s sort of interesting the first time but it gets a little old after a while. Not a deal-breaker, though.
In order to stave off the monotony of everyday life, your Sim will develop long-term goals. Mine wants to hit the top of his career ladder eventually. He also wants a better TV, $1000 in the bank, and he wants to catch 15 fish — all things I can relate to in real life, except for the fish part. New goals will appear throughout the game and you can choose to add them to your long-term list. Otherwise, they’ll be goals for a while and then eventually fade away.
Again, you’ll get some weirdness here too. My Sim has had goals like “Annoy another Sim” or, worse yet, “Creep-out another Sim.” Hopefully my Sim doesn’t turn into a serial killer.
So there’s definitely enough going on to keep you engaged. Certain items unlock at various points in the game — new furniture, the ability to add on to your house, etc. — and there are just enough people to talk to and places to see to make it feel like a somewhat “big” game without making it unwieldy to play on the iPhone’s screen. The graphics, sound, and music are all done really well; just what you’d expect if you’ve purchased any of EA’s other recent games.
At $9.99, The Sims 3 already looks and feels more advanced than the first version of the game that came out for the PC back in 2000. If you’ve enjoyed playing subsequent Sims titles and you’re looking for a great way to pass some time, you can’t go wrong with this one.
I own a first-generation iPod Touch and a T-Mobile G1. While I love my G1 as a phone, I'm constantly amazed at the quality of applications and software that are available for the iPhone -- games especially. While I seem to have sort of gotten my bases covered in the games department on the G1, I can't help but wonder what it'd be like to walk around with games like Tiger Woods PGA Tour, Sim City, and The Sims 3 on my phone all day long.
Magic, I tell you. Magic!
That might be stretching it a little bit, but the fact remains: The Sims 3 represents yet another excellent and very-impressive iPhone game from EA. At $9.99, it's a no-brainer for any fan of the Sims franchise.
PC World - Saturday, the launch day for the Palm Pre smartphone, will be a big day all around for Palm, struggling carrier Sprint Nextel and anyone looking for another slick alternative to the Apple iPhone. But next Friday may have even more historic significance for all those parties, according to Avi Greengart. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 5 Jun 2009 | 10:10 pm
Space travelers likely to be bloated, bald
LONDON, June 5 (UPI) -- Future generations of humans living in space are likely to be fat, short, ugly, bloated and bald, researchers at London's University College said.
Traveling to earth's closest stars would require years, if not decades, in space, and such long-distance travel would take its toll on the human body, Dr. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 5 Jun 2009 | 10:02 pm
SlashDotDotDot writes "The New York Times reports that Intel will purchase Wind River, the embedded OS and software vendor, for $884 million. 'Wind River makes operating systems for platforms as diverse as autos and mobile phones, serving customers like Sony and Boeing. Intel, whose processors run about 80 percent of the world's personal computers, is expanding into new markets, including chips for televisions and mobile devices. Wind River's software and customer list will pave the way for Intel to win more chip contracts.'"
Another week, another iPhone App Roundup. The inaugural post last week highlighted three apps that probably didn’t deserve a second take. This week’s hunt was a lot more successful, turning up three games worthy of opening up your wallet.
App #1 - Brain Genius Deluxe: Wow, I feel smarter already, and my improved intellect tells me Brain Genius Deluxe by Glu is well worth the $2.99. The game is a compilation of 23 “brain exercises,” which encourage you to use your powers of observation, memory, calculation and reasoning. In Daily Exercises mode, you participate in a “mental workout” once a day, each made up of 4 games. Brain Genius tracks your score so you can see how you’re doing over time. Personally, 4 games in one day was not enough (they are short), and so I spent oodles of time in the Free Exercises mode, playing each of the games over and over trying to beat my last score. Even for a bonafide prodigy like myself, the game was challenging and enjoyable. All in all, Brain Genius is a great buy and brain/puzzle game enthusiasts will shriek with approval.
App #2 - Phaze: Another great game. A racing game with a futuristic feel, Phaze (developed by Pazzazz Games) offers awesome gameplay with solid graphics. There are tons of racing games on the iPhone, and it is becoming super clear that the device is all-but perfect for the genre. Phaze does a great job of turning the iPhone into an easy-to-use, but hard-to-master racing wheel. At just $4.99, the game still has a ways to go to match Need for Speed’s rich environments, customizable cars, and a legitimate career mode. Aside from these drawbacks, Phaze’s 16 tracks and 10 vehicles provide plenty of variability and excitement to provide a rich racing experience. I’d buy it, and play it again and again.
App #3 - Johnny Crash: Entertaining and interesting, but doesn’t have a ton of pack in its punch. In Johnny Crash, by Digital Chocolate, you are stuntman Johnny Crash and your goal is to “fly” through the air and hit as much stuff as possible. You start in a cannon and tap the screen to get launched into the clouds. From there, you fly through the air and try to hit the various UFO’s, hot-air balloons, kites, parachutists, and anything else you would expect to find on a normal day as a human cannonball. The only way to control yourself is by tilting back your iPhone, which causes Johnny to flap his arms so he can soar higher. Watch out, though, because if you flap too much you’ll run out of energy and plummet face-first to the ground. The game is fun at first, and honestly pretty challenging, as maneuvering through the air with only one control is certainly difficult. However, Johnny Crash is a one-trick pony, so the game doesn’t have that much depth. That said, with 24 levels at two locations (Texas and New York), there’s enough variety in this game to make it fun for a few hours. The novelty factor alone might make it worth the $2.99.
Are you a developer? Think you’ve got an app worth checking out? Shoot us an e-mail at tipsATmobilecrunchDOTcom (with the obvious substitutions in place, of course).
Crunch Network: TechCrunchobsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
An upcoming Quiznos campaign will tap user-submitted videos to promote its new Torpedo sandwiches, offering $10,000 for the best clip.
On Monday, the closely held Denver fast-food chain launches the contest on ToastyTorpedo.com, where visitors will be able to submit photos or videos over the next four weeks. Quiznos said it’s looking for demonstrations of customers eating one of the $4 subs “in an unusual place or while doing an unexpected activity.” The winner will also be determined by public votes and announced August 3.
“We believe social media and interacting with our consumers in this way is really important to our brand and is in many ways, the wave of the future,” said Trey Hall, Quiznos’s marketing chief. “And who doesn’t love a viral video?”
Seriously. I’ve seen this all over the internet. Mossberg reviews the Pre, makes one questionably-phrased mention of the upcoming iPhone, and suddenly it’s confirmed? Let’s look at the sentence:
I’d note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations.
Consider that the second sentence of Mossberg’s review is “A new, improved iPhone is expected to be announced on June 8.” That he didn’t include “expected” in the second mention means nothing — it’s just the way the sentence was written. Are we done here?
Of course, it is very likely that the new iPhone will come out next week, that’s not the issue. The issue is that everybody’s freaking out about one ambiguously phrased sentence, the rogue interpretation of which is contradicted within the article. I know us bloggers are wont to jump on every possibility like this, but everybody’s talking about it like it’s some established fact.
AP - Navigational device maker Garmin Ltd. will start selling its oft-delayed wireless phone in Asia within the next month, Chief Operating Officer Cliff Pemble told shareholders Friday. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 5 Jun 2009 | 9:58 pm
Score one for the good guys! The Federal Trade Commission has shut down the company that ran the Triple Fiber Network, a service that helped evildoers put verboten content online. Such content included viruses and child pornography.
The Triple Fiber Network, which was run out of Belize by a company called Pricewert LLC, provided servers and bandwidth to Internet criminals and troublemakers.
Apparently Triple Fiber Network was advertised in—and here come some square quotes—in the “darkest corners” of the Internet. I’m guessing that means IRC or Usenet or something. (Anything that’s not a Wordpress blog is scary, I would imagine.)
In any event, let us celebrate by making smores, which I’m about to do IRL.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes VS2010 Beta 1 for a test drive and finds the upgrade promising, particularly with regard to improved thread debugging and a revamped UI. But the biggest enhancements have to do with parallel programming, Heller writes. 'I'm not sure that I've completely grasped the power of the new .Net Framework and native C++ support for task and data parallelism in VS2010, but what I've seen so far is impressive.' Heller points to intriguing parallel programming samples posted to CodePlex and offers numerous screenshots of VS2010 Beta 1 functionality. He also notes that the beta still lacks support for ASP.Net MVC, smart devices, and the .Net Micro Framework."
National broadband plan must include policies that encourage innovation and investment
WASHINGTON, June 5 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jun 2009 | 9:08 pm
Someone got all the way to level 80 in World of Warcraftwithout dying. It’s quite the achievement (although not an actual Blizzard Achievement.)
The following is inspired by the exploits of Cautious, the now level 80 Warrior. I’ve taken creative license.
Setting: A rubbish apartment in New York.
Characters: Cautious, who also goes by Cautious in real life (IRL); and two roommates, and guild mates, named Bohn Jiggs and Batt Murns. They seated nearby each other in the apartment.
It’s a Tuesday night, and Cautious’ guild, The Bra Busters, is raiding one of those big dungeons or whatever. Cautious is one bar away from hitting level 80. The excitement is noticeable.
Cautious: Yes! Just one bar away from owning this. I’ll go down in WoW Insider history as the person who hit 80 without dying.
Batt: Yeah you will! A couple hundred people you’ve never met before will be jealous for like 2 seconds lol.
Cautious: Shut up jerk, we’ll see how well you do in this raid if I log off. No tank, no treasure.
Batt: Treasure? Don’t you mean loot?
Cautious: Does “loot” alliterate with “tank”? I thought not.
Bohn: Can you two nerds stfu and get geared already, I want to run this before my clothes go out of style.
Batt: Hey that’s my shirt you’re wearing! It’s not out of style, ass.
Bohn: It’s garbage, Batt, hot steamy garbage.
Cautious: Ok, geared. Ready. Come on, 80!
Forty-five seconds later
All: Wipe! WTF!
Thirty minutes later
Batt: Man, Cautious has been locked in the bathroom for a while now. I hope he’s not too upset that he didn’t ding 80 before dying.
Bohn: Nah, he’s probably cool.
Bohn and Batt smash the bathroom door open
Batt and Bohn: Gasp!
Cautious can be seen sitting on the bowl, eating and weeping.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., June 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Chris Burgio, president of the South Florida Technology Alliance (SFTA), and head of the Technology Practices Group for Seitlin Insurance and Advisory Services (www.seitlin.com), is being honored Thursday, June 18 as one of South Florida Business Journal's "40 Under 40."
The South Florida Business Journal is honoring the region's best and brightest professionals under forty years old for their professional success and community involvement. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:58 pm
Do you live your day status update by status update? Are the pads of your CrackBerry thumbs wearing away due to nonstop wall posts? Get ready for new stuff. When the clock strikes 6 p.m PST (not EST as some sites are reporting), Facebook will be pushing a minor update to their BlackBerry App.
Patch notes after the jump.
The new goods:
· Status updates and highlights on the home page – you can now view your friends’ most recent status updates right on the home page. Highlights like photo uploads and wall posts are just a click away and you can comment on a photo, poke a friend, etc. right from the home page.
· Wall access from within Facebook for BlackBerry – with one click on your friend’s profile picture from the home page, you can access their wall without having to go to the mobile site.
· Photo viewing in a simple, easy-to-use slideshow format – check out your friends’ latest photo albums with improved photo viewing, and view albums in a simple and easy-to-use slideshow format. Just scroll back and forth through the thumbnails along the bottom to display the larger picture in the center of the screen.
· Facebook for BlackBerry 1.6 will also support three new languages:
o Thai
o Indonesian
o European Portuguese
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Whether it uses carbon nanotubes to mimic geckos' feet or not, there's no doubt that the surface of the Palm Pre's inductive Touchstone charger is really, really impressive. It's doesn't feel gummy or tacky, either.
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory believe they've identified a simpler way to generate biofuels – a one-step process to convert cellulose found in plant material and other biomass into a chemical that can serve as a precursor to make fuels and plastics. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:41 pm
TORONTO, June 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Belzberg Technologies Inc. (TSX - BLZ), a provider of technology-based equity and options trading services, announced today that Sidney H. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:41 pm
FROM GAMERTELL - E2 2010 will take place June 15 through 17, 2010, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. According to the ESA press release, more than 41,000 attendees from 78 countries have attended E3 2009. MORE »
Bryant writes "Scientists with the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered what could bring yet another massive advance in memory and storage. The discovery, a magnetoresistence literally 'up to 1000 times more powerful' than the Giant Magnetoresistence Effect discovered roughly 20 years ago, which led to one of the major breakthroughs in memory, seems to be a result of high-pressure interactions between Manganites. Manganites aren't new to this game; MRAM uses Manganite layers to achieve the Magnetic Tunnel Effect needed to keep the state of memory stable. Applying significant amounts of pressure to known tech-useful materials isn't a new trick; you might recall the recent breakthrough with Europium superconductivity thanks to similar high-pressure antics."
Apple’s MagSafe connector is nifty. It’s held on by magnets so it’s a lot harder to ruin both the connector and notebook if the power cord gets jerked-out unexpectedly. We dug up a DIY guide on how to convert your PC’s non-MagSafe adaptor into an ugly, but still working, clone.
I would say that there is a good possiablity that you could wreck your notebook if you mess this up. The instructions are good and pics are aplenty, but still be careful. It might be wise to try this one someone else’s notebook before you attempt yours. That’s what I would do.
Scientists in China say they've reprogrammed skin cells from adult pigs to behave like stem cells from humans.
Engineering cells in pigs provides a way to access the potential of embryonic stem cells without the ethical problems associated with the use of human stem cells, researchers Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:25 pm
In this week’s edition of the Gadget Lab podcast, Danny Dumas and I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the Palm Pre, as well as the challenges that lie ahead (cough, the App Store). It’s a solid, beautiful smartphone indeed, but will developers wish to code for it?
Looking ahead, I lay out my analysis on what hardware announcements to expect at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2009 next week. Hint: No Apple tablet (yet), but plenty to say about the next-generation iPhone, which we’re betting will be announced at Monday’s keynote. Check Gadget Lab at 10 a.m. Monday for Wired.com’s live coverage of WWDC 2009. We’ll also be tweeting the keynote, so follow us now!
This week’s podcast features Danny Dumas and Brian Chen, with superb audio engineering by Michael Lennon.
A Swedish company is working on a project to convert skyscrapers into vertical greenhouses in areas where land is scarce."A tomato seed is planted on the ground floor on a rotating spiral and when it arrives at the top, 30 days later, you pick the fruit," Plantagon vice president Hans Hassle told the AFP news agency.Within just a few decades, some 80 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. This will necessitate the need to "grow fruits and vegetables in an urban environment due to the lack of land," he added.A vertical greenhouse would mean "we could have fresh organic produce every day and sell it directly to consumers in the city," Hassle explained."We would save 70 percent on the cost of fresh produce because right now 70 percent of the price is transport and storage costs," he said, adding that the project would mean produce would become more readily available to those with tight budgets.Although no vertical greenhouses exist today, "several cities in Scandinavia and in China have expressed an interest," Hassle added.Each installation would cost around $30 million dollars, far more than a conventional greenhouse. However, the investment would rapidly turn a profit, Hassle said."With ground space of 107,640 square feet, a vertical greenhouse represents the equivalent of 1,076,390 square feet of cultivated land" due to the rotating spiral that allows continuous planting."An inventor came up with the idea 20 years ago but none of the people he presented it to believed in it. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:20 pm
AP - No doubt bolstered by positive reviews, Sprint Nextel Corp. CEO Dan Hesse said Saturday's release of Palm Inc.'s Pre smart phone represents a "coming out party" for Sprint as it seeks to reverse subscriber losses. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:08 pm
Events to be Webcast Live on salesforce.com's Investor Relations Website
SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company today announced that Graham Smith, Chief Financial Officer at salesforce.com, will present at multiple upcoming investor events the week of June 8, 2009. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:05 pm
No matter how good a search engine is, it is sometimes necessary to change the search terms to get the information you need. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:00 pm
Sirius XM (SIRI) fans will see their subscription rates rise by nearly $2 this summer. According to an employee training document, the company plans to pass on to subscribers the cost of increased performance royalty rates for satellite radio instituted by the Copyright Royalty Board in 2007. Sources say the increase will amount to about $1.98 per month when it is implemented on July 29. Users with multiple radios will pay about half that. Sirius is billing the additional cost as a sort of tax, and insists it is not increasing its base subscription price. Sirius XM failed to respond to multiple requests for comment. The document in full, after the jump.
AP - When Apple Inc. launched an updated iPhone at its annual gathering of software developers last June, its biggest competitor was the iPhone that Apple had introduced the year before.
Amanda Callahan writes to tell us that Apple's upcoming WWDC could be quite a test for the Cupertino powerhouse. They will most likely be missing Steve Jobs for star-power and have extremely high expectations to meet in order to maintain their edge. Thankfully it looks like Jobs will be rejoining Apple later this month with a good prognosis after facing severe health issues. "The competition is now catching up. Palm, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, are all at varying stages of developing and introducing their own iPhone-like devices and software, along with easily accessible stores for the small programs known as applications, or apps, that run on those devices. In some cases, those companies are releasing a greater variety of phones, on more wireless carriers around the world, than Apple. To maintain its advantage, Apple must preserve the impression that it is far ahead of rivals when it comes to the capabilities and the 'cool' factor of its devices."
Boys born with a variation of the so-called Warrior Gene are more likely to use weapons and join gangs, a researcher at Florida State University said.
The study is the first confirm a link between violence in boys and the variation of the gene Monoamine oxidase A, said Kevin Beaver, a biosocial criminologist who led the research at the university's College of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
We found that variants of this gene could distinguish (male) gang members who were markedly more likely to behave violently and use weapons from members who were less likely to do either, Beaver said in a release from the university.
The gene affects levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin, which are related to mood and behavior, Beaver said, noting girls with the same variant of the gene seem resistant to its potentially violent effect.
Beaver and his colleagues examined DNA data and lifestyle information from more than 2,400 respondents to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 5 Jun 2009 | 7:44 pm
Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Letters on Friday, researchers noted that a system of selling credits to reduce carbon emissions in the Indonesian rainforest could provide a feasible method of conservation.Authors of the new report stated that paying to reduce rainforest carbon emissions could actually amount to more income than initiatives to use the deforested land for palm oil production.Lead researcher Oscar Venter, from the University of Queensland, focused his study on Kalimantan, a forested region in Indonesia where plans for deforestation for palm oil production have been under scrutiny."Our study clearly demonstrates that payments made to reduce carbon emissions from forests could also be an efficient and effective way to protect biodiversity," said Venter."We now need to see policy discussions catch up with science because at the moment the potential co-benefits of linking forest protection to biodiversity are not getting the attention they deserve."Palm oil is derived from the fruit and kernels of the oil palm. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 5 Jun 2009 | 7:40 pm
When the Garmin Nuvifone was first announced, it was truly interesting. A GPS-centric handset made by one of the world’s leading GPS manufacturers? Awesome! That was a year and a half ago.
Just when we were starting to get the inkling that this thing had gone the way of Duke Nukem Forever, Garmin has come out and given it a launch date - sort of. In a shareholder’s call today, Garmin COO Cliff Pemble said that we ought to see this things hit the open market in Asia sometime this month, and that a US carrier launch is “getting very close”.
It seemed risky at first - but now it just seems like the sun has set on this little venture. What was interesting a year and a half ago now seems dated and fairly silly. Is anybody out there still interested in this guy? Please do tell why in the comments.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron observes in a research note that the company continues to plan the spin-off of its crumbling handset business sometime next year. But he says checks suggest the company is in the middle of strategic planning process that could lead to other asset sales as well over the next 12 months.
In particular, he thinks the company is considering narrowing its focus to the government and enterprise markets, and gradually transitioning its carrier and cable businesses. He says the company is “in advanced discussions” with Huawei on a sale of all or parts of its wireless infrastructure business, and that it is also reviewing the possible sale of its set-top box business.
COLUMBIA, Md., June 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- MICROS Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: MCRS), a leading supplier of information systems to the hospitality and retail industries, today announced that its Executive Vice President of Investor Relations, Peter J. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jun 2009 | 7:30 pm
The German company, Ultrasone, isn’t too well known in the States, but they are running a pretty solid deal throughout June here in the United States. Basically, Ultrasone is the US distributor for Ultrasone AG (which is based in Germany), and they have five headphones, whose prices will be marked down by 40%.
The headphones include the HFI-680, HFI-2200, PRO 550, PRO 2500 and DJ1 PRO, and each will be shipped for free in the United States. Now, to find these discounted headphones, navigate to their homepage here, and then press Shop USA (or click this convenient link) and then press Promotional Items (here) to check out the five headphones. I decided to check out the prices on the headphones to see how cheap they were, but they are actually pretty expensive. Prices range from $249 all the way to $429, however, this is before 40% is taken off. The price difference will be reflected when you checkout. Since they are pretty expensive, I imagine them to be high quality headphones.
Either way, it’s a pretty nice deal to be running in the month of June. If you are looking for some new, quality headphones, take a look at Ultrasone and see what reviews you can dig up. The Press Release is below.
Ultrasone Inc. Offers 40% off MSRP on Select Headphones and Free U.S. Shipping During June
HFI-680, HFI-2200, PRO 550, PRO 2500 and DJ1 PRO offered at 40% off MSRP with free shipping during June at www.ultrasone.com
Wildomar, Calif. - (June 5, 2009) – Ultrasone Inc., distributor for German headphone manufacturer Ultrasone AG, announces its HFI-680, HFI-2200, PRO 550, PRO 2500 and DJ1 PRO headphones will be available for 40% off MSRP during June at www.ultrasone.com. In addition, free shipping will also be offered on the above products during this promotion for all U.S. orders.
To purchase these headphones at the promotional price, visit www.ultrasone.com and click on the “Shop USA” icon. Once inside the store, click on “Promotional Items” to view the five headphones that are being offered at 40% off MSRP. The discounted price will be reflected once the headphone has been added to the customer’s shopping cart.
About Ultrasone
Based near Munich, Germany, Ultrasone AG has been manufacturing headphones for the audio market for over 17 years, during which time the company has developed and applied for more than 60 patents for its innovative technology. The company’s unique, patented S-Logic™ technology creates natural surround sound without the use of additional electronic devices. Ultrasone headphones represent a safer listening experience by reducing sound pressure on the ear drum by up to 40% and also by offering shielding from EMF radiation up to 98% through the use of patented ULE (ultra low emission) technology. For more information about Ultrasone headphones, go to www.ultrasone.com.
AP - The New York Police Department is looking into adapting futuristic technology that would allow officers' guns to recognize one another in an effort to avoid the type of friendly fire incident that left a cop dead last week. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 5 Jun 2009 | 7:26 pm
Specs: A 4-spoke 256 RGB LED system with stabilized images and video from 8 to 25 mph (12 to 40 km/h). Zigbee wireless control. More on the system at MonkeyLectric.com.
Experts warned Congress on Thursday that a mysterious fungus attacking America's bats represents the most serious threat to wildlife in a century and could spread nationwide within years.The condition, known as white-nose syndrome, gets its name from the white fungus speckled amongst the bats, reports the Associated Press.Experts told two House subcommittees on Thursday about discovering caves where bats had been decimated by the disease.“One cave there was turned into a morgue, with bats freezing to death outside and so many carcasses littering the cave's floor the stench was too strong for researchers to enter,” said one state wildlife biologist from Vermont.Bat experts warned that the fungus could strike caves and mines with some of the largest and most endangered populations of hibernating bats in the United States if nothing more is done to stop its spread.So far the six species of bats that have been stricken by the fungus can eat up to their body weight in insects a night, reducing insects that destroy crops, forests and carry disease such as West Nile Virus.Thomas Kunz, director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University, said that between $10 million and $17 million is needed to launch a national research program into the fungus"We are witnessing one of the most precipitous declines of wildlife in North America," he said.White-nose syndrome is probably the most serious threat to wildlife in the past century, according to Merlin Tuttle, a world-renowned bat expert and president of Bat Conservation International in Austin, Texas. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 5 Jun 2009 | 7:10 pm
If I ever needed a reminder of my place on the totem pole, Palm was happy to provide one. I just got my Pre review unit in the mail today. If you recall, all the big sites reviews went up Wednesday.
It's a peculiar and humbling arrangement. On the one hand, it's nice to get a review unit. On the other hand, it leaves me with little to do or say that hasn't already been done or said.
So excuse me while I flail about a bit, trying to discover if there's anything I have to offer to the world of Pre. Until I discover what that might be, I'm failing over to the most braindead of enthusiast blogger tricks: pulling shit out of a box on video. Surprisingly, there doesn't actually seem to be an unboxing video of the Pre yet.
(Thank you to everyone on Twitter who are also offering up ideas. I like the idea of trying to use it in real life, especially while drunk. Which reminds me, Cruzan did send me a bottle of single-barrel rum to review, and it is Friday...)
Also, this video quality is horrible! I don't know why. I probably have the ISO bumped up way too high. This is the sort of professionalism that gets you review units a week after everyone else.
The atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider is to run year-round to make up for the year lost to a helium leak, researchers in Geneva said.
The collider was activated last Sept. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 5 Jun 2009 | 7:06 pm
Governor announced the latest Recipients of $250,000 Pre-Seed Commercialization Awards from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund
HOUSTON, June 5 /PRNewswire/ -- The Gulf Coast Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization (RCIC) and the Houston Technology Center (HTC), a business accelerator that assists Houston-based emerging technology companies, today hosted Texas Technology Leadership Day. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jun 2009 | 7:01 pm
I’m hearing mixed chatter about Q2, which is winding down now: Some folks are fans of the “green shoots” theory, also known as “things have stopped getting worse” theory; others think that this quarter will be the worst part of the slide, which means things will start getting better later this year. Still others tell me that the online ad orders are being placed so close to the time they actually run that there’s no way to predict anything more than a few days or weeks out. And others think any talk of a rebound is wishful thinking. Nothing wrong with wishing, though.
LONDON, June 5 /PRNewswire/ -- In association with travelguru.tv, the Treasure Beach Hotel and the Barbados Tourism Authority, Holiday Extras(R) is giving away a fantastic seven day holiday for two in Barbados.
Recognised the world over for its natural beauty, rich culture and the friendliness of its people, Barbados really does deliver the 'Caribbean Dream'. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 5 Jun 2009 | 6:53 pm
Advances in cell biology and computer models will end experiments on animals within a generation, a British scientist said.
Animal research, primarily on mice, is being replaced by computer research on virtual human beings and tests conducted on banks of living cells, Kelly Berube, a cell biologist from Cardiff University told The Times of London in a story published Friday.
These models have the ability to be far more accurate, Berube said. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 5 Jun 2009 | 6:47 pm
FROM GAMERTELL - Konami’s announced at E3 a new DDR game for all four consoles. PS3 and Xbox 360 versions can download 150 classic DDR songs and have an Octo-Move Mode with 8 arrows. The Wii version uses the dancepad, Wii Remote and Wii Balance Board. MORE »
A Chinese nature photographer is the first from his country to be named a Climate Hero by the United Nations Environment program.
Luo Hong, 42, was honored Thursday as a person who has undertaken exceptional personal feats, high-profile expeditions or other acts of environmental Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 5 Jun 2009 | 6:11 pm
Hey, politicians aren’t the only ones who get to do fancy polls!
Walt and I had a bunch of them about a variety of tech topics that we pulled out to ambush, ooops, pose to speakers at our seventh D: All Things Digital conference last week.
For the D7, we commissioned a study of digital trends from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB), a global market research and consulting company and a conference production partner.
PSB conducted 1,005 interviews within the general U.S. population–you know, real people who are not geeked out.
One showed–despite Silicon Valley hype–how Twitter was still in its infancy, in awareness, engagement and size, which we got Co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams to react to onstage. (They could care less.)
Another showed that the biggest problem that users of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone cited was the poor AT&T (T) network. (Sorry, Randall Stephenson!)
Another looked at the declines in usage of the MySpace social networking site, which we know its new CEO Owen Van Natta enjoyed reacting to in front of the crowd. (Okay, he did not enjoy it.)
Also, no one is paying for subscriptions to blogs, which the Huffington Post impresario Arianna Huffington said was okay, since consumers will only fork over money for “very weird porn.” (Yes, she said that!)
In any case, here is a selection of slides that were shown and discussed during various speaker sessions.
Click on any slide below to enlarge, then hit “next” or “previous” on either side of the slides to page through.
Hey, politicians aren’t the only ones who get to do fancy polls!
Walt and I had a bunch of them about a variety of tech topics that we pulled out to ambush, ooops, pose to speakers at our seventh D: All Things Digital conference last week.
For the D7, we commissioned a study of digital trends from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB), a global market research and consulting company and a conference production partner.
PSB conducted 1,005 interviews within the general U.S. population–you know, real people who are not geeked out.
One showed–despite Silicon Valley hype–how Twitter was still in its infancy, in awareness, engagement and size, which we got Co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams to react to onstage. (They could care less.)
Another showed that the biggest problem that users of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone cited was the poor AT&T (T) network. (Sorry, Randall Stephenson!)
Another looked at the declines in usage of the MySpace social networking site, which we know its new CEO Owen Van Natta enjoyed reacting to in front of the crowd. (Okay, he did not enjoy it.)
Also, no one is paying for subscriptions to blogs, which the Huffington Post impresario Arianna Huffington said was okay, since consumers will only fork over money for “very weird porn.” (Yes, she said that!)
In any case, here is a selection of slides that were shown and discussed during various speaker sessions.
Click on any slide below to enlarge, then hit “next” or “previous” on either side of the slides to page through.
Check back here 10 a.m. Monday for Wired.com’s live coverage of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2009. Yours truly will be liveblogging the keynote, accompanied by staff writer Priya Ganapati and photographer Jon Snyder.
Prefer your news through Twitter? Priya will be tweeting juicy bits of the keynote on the Gadget Lab Twitter account. What are you waiting for? Follow us now!
Meanwhile, keep up with all our WWDC-related news. We’re anticipating an exciting Monday, aren’t you?
FROM APPLETELL - More quality free apps you say? In the words of Li’l Jon, “Okay! I can do that.” Check out this week’s list. You might be surprised what you’ll find, as there were quite a few gems released. MORE »
With rumors of the new iPhone’s video recording and editing capability abound, it seems clear that Apple is focusing their attention on one of their mobile juggernaut’s weakest points. So much so, in fact, that rumors also peg the new iPhone as having a front-facing camera for honest-to-goodness video chat (as opposed to AT&T’s one-way Video Share streaming service). According to a screenshot leaked to TUAW from an unpublished AT&T support website, though, Apple is so enamored with their new focus on video that they may name the whole damned phone after it. That’s right - we may well be hearing news of the iPhone Video come WWDC in a few days.
At this point though, everything is still conjecture - after all, we saw a flood of fake ads and faux-phones right around this time last year. Looking at the screenshot itself, it would be easy to mock up in Photoshop based off of a few reference images, not to mention any number of Firefox web dev plugins that could replicate the same effect within the browser. After all, it supposedly comes from an unpublished version of AT&T’s support site - who would be able to verify it? If we assume that the leak is real, it would be hard to resist the temptation of giving Apple the award for Most Uninspired Product Name of 2009. Given Apple’s track record with unassuming product names, though, it seems like iPhone Video would be right up their alley.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
FROM GAMERTELL - The controller is smaller than a standard skate deck and “full of technology” including two internal accelerometers and four infrared sensors… MORE »
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said that Palm Pre exclusivity will be longer than “six months” according to a CNET interview.
“We are very different company than we were 12 months ago,” he said. “And the Pre is the coming-out party for the new Sprint that shows off our fantastic data network and rate plans.”
There is also talk of planned shortages AKA “constraints” until Sprint knows how many these things it can sell.
Crunch Network: TechCrunchobsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
Just when I thought I'd died and gone to heaven with the Nesoid NES Emulator for Android (see the review here), along comes a Genesis emulator from the same developer called Gensoid.If you have a T-Mobile G1 and you're even remotely interested in playing NES or Sega Genesis games on it, your total out of pocket cost will be just shy of five bucks. Nesoid costs $1.99 and Gensoid costs $2.99. Or simply buy one or the other. You can't really go wrong.
On the edge. As the world eagerly awaits the release/announcement of the worlds hottest new phones, we are all on edge. That curious desire to camp out at a phone store overnight suddenly seems realistic yet for a Palm? This is Palm for goodness sake!
This week sees the Wall Street Journal play bloggers like a flute, I predict we’ll say Hulu who? in 6 months; Robert gets gun-shy about the Pre, and Twitter realizes everything is spam.
We fell for Mossberg, again.
Did he, or didn’t he? I fall into the “he did” camp. Here is what he did “...though I’d note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations.”
Not “may”. Not “probably” Mr. Mossberg doesn’t use any of these qualifiers. He nonchalantly drops this like fact.
Speaking of facts: Walt lives inside Apple HQ. Fine, he doesn’t but he certainly is privy to what’s going on in there. This was a targeted, intended, marketing move by the experienced Apple team two days before launch day of the device that is the first to actually compare to the iPhone. And we bought it.
We can’t believe Mossberg broke an NDA and slipped up. Our own Appletell sees it as speculation, ending their piece with “With the WWDC keynote only a few days away it will be interesting to see if he is correct.” Of course he is correct, that’s like saying, “I wonder if the Apple commercial is correct.” Mossberg and Apple marketing just got married. The new iPhone is the bun in the oven.
Hulu who?
Pay for Hulu??? Sha, as in not. (and I am done with the Wayne’s World references for now). Seriously? Hulu became popular cause it is on the internet and free. Take away one of those and you’ve got what everyone else has. We call it cable. Lose the hipness, loose the coolness and pay to play turns us sour.
Here is what our Jodie Andrefski had to say: “According to statements he(Jonathon Miller, the newly appointed chief digital officer of News Corp) made at an Internet Week event sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter, he can see a future which includes at least some of the movies and TV shows on Hulu only being made available to subscribers. “In my opinion the answer could be yes. I don’t see why over time that shouldn’t happen. I don’t think it’s on the agenda for Monday”
Yeah, good thing it is not on the agenda for Monday cause it is a stupid idea. People will come to it as an alternative because it is convenient, but if we have to pay, we’ll stay on our couches. Jonny, listen to me: keep the momentum going. Keep bringing us to your site. Tie in advertising. Change how you handle product placement. But don’t throw up subscription fees. Torrents are just a click away.
Robert’s got Palm Pre possible pre-purchase paranoia
Standing next to Robert at the CES announcement back in January, I could tell he was excited then. Reading his piece on the early reviews, you can still feel that excitement in his writing. Robert wants to put the Pre into a box: >iPhone, >G1, G1Twitter is spam. Spam is Twitter. Our Sue Walsh reports on an increasing problem with Twitter: spam. The way Twitter sees it, spam is following people just to make yourself more popular so they can send out their spam.
Only, I say everything on Twitter is spam. I follow a bunch of people who send out their garbage. Some of it is self-promotion of their blog posts, some of it is daily boring happenings, some of it is late night drunk dialing. But all of it could and probably should be considered spam.
One funny aspect is for spam to work on Twitter, users have to opt-in, that is follow the spammer. Turning the spammer off is as easy as un-following. This is very different from email in that they’ll keep sending you stuff long after you say, “no, thank you.” Just un-follow or actually evaluate who you follow.
Seems like Twitter should focus on bigger things than fretting over things we can control; silly Twitter. You can follow my self-promotion, daily boring happenings and late-night drunk dialing here or you can follow Gadgetells 100% non-spam Twitter feed here.
Now, we aren’t typically the carrier that comes out and announces what we are going to be selling 12 months from now. Other carriers do that, and the media loves to speculate on what we are bringing to market. But what I will tell you is that over the next six months or so you will see devices like the Palm Pre and the Cousin on our network from Palm.
– Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam
When Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam claimed his company would be selling the Palm Pre six months from now, he was apparently as full of it as a dairy farm manure spreader. At a Palm Pre launch event in New York city (at the Palm Room in the Roosevelt Hotel, wink, get it?), Sprint CEO Dan Hesse dismissed McAdam’s claim as inaccurate. “They need to check their facts,” he said. “That just is not the case. Both Palm (PALM) and Sprint (S) have agreed not to discuss the length of our exclusivity deal — but I can tell you it’s not six months.”
It would seem then that we will not be seeing “devices like the Palm Pre and the Cousin” — whatever that is — on Verizon (VZ) before the end of the year, although we may well see them in 2010.
You’ve waited so long, and your time has almost come. If you’re anything like me, you’re refining your early morning line strategy, making calls to every Best Buy Mobile, Radio Shack, and Sprint store within a ten mile radius, and psyching yourself up to elbow a guy in the face if need be. In short: the Pre drops tomorrow, and you’re getting one no matter what the cost.
But what if you could order one now?
That’s the dilemma a certain Mr. Celltasticprices818 has introduced into the mix. You see, he apparently got his hands on 5 new-in-box CDMA Palm Pres, and he’s willing to sell one to you (yes, you!) for the scant price of $899.99. Sounds like a great deal… until you realize that in under 24 hours, you can (theoretically) get your hands on one for several hundred dollars less. Sure, there exists a distinct possibility that stock will run out, and you won’t be able to find one for the next few months. And look, they’re right there, just begging for you to take one of them home. It’s tempting, I know, but please: don’t cross the line from Pre fan to Pre-tard. Trust me, your wallet and your dignity will thank you.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Here’s another big media player trying — very cautiously — to get people to pay for online media: Disney’s ESPN (DIS) is going to put the Website for its “ESPN the Magazine” title behind a paywall this summer.
BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine, who broke the story, has most of the relevant details, but here’s an important one I didn’t see: ESPN reps tell me that the magazine accounts for less than 10% of the content available on ESPN.com. So most of the stuff that people are used to getting for free at ESPN.com will remain free at ESPN.com.
That fits nicely with the free/pay thesis I’ve been chewing on for some time now — in the future, a relatively small number of people who are wealthy and/or passionate about something will pay to access some Web content, and the rest of us will be happy to settle for free stuff, which will need a very big audience to survive.
But I’m not sure how that will pan out with ESPN’s magazine, which seems to fall in the middle ground. I just picked up a copy last week — when I travel, I like to treat myself to a couple print magazines — and it’s nice read. But it doesn’t have the specialized stuff that allows, say, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to charge for its Green Bay Packers “Insider” site, or even the data-heavy stuff that ESPN’s Insider sells to fantasy sports nuts and/or gamblers. Or, for that matter, the fantasy sports stuff that ad-happy Yahoo (YHOO) still sells.
And if memory serves, this is actually a reversal back to an old strategy — several years ago, as I recall, only print subscribers had access to the magazine’s online pages. Be interesting to see if anyone’s more willing to pay for it now.
UPDATE: A little more nuance, via some people knowledgeable with ESPN’s thinking. Internally, the company thinks of the move as a way to bolster its paid Insider product, since anyone who ponies up for Insider will get the magazine for free. And the company and will end up shifting some resources from the magazine to the Insider.
FROM APPLETELL - If you’ve saved up both money and vacation time just to be able to purchase the next generation iPhone, then you’ll be excited to hear the name given to the object of your blind affection: iPhone Video. MORE »
In her latest One More Go column for Offworld, Margaret Robertson murders Steven Spielberg. Three dozen times she murders him, for his appearance at E3 and his "increasingly asinine - and frankly pretty arrogant - repetition of the 'games won't be important until they can make you cry, which up until now they haven't been able to, but don't worry I've come to fix things' line", as she otherwise looks at the game she can't stop returning to, Intelligent Qube, which she proclaims is the 'Modern Times' of videogames.
Finally, Fez creators Polytron unveil their latest retro-future logo for Infinitron Polypharma, which can only mean that work steadily continues on Power Pill, their iPhone collaboration with Paper Moon creators Infinite Ammo.
Judging from the latest FCC listing to be revealed, it seems that the HTC Touch Pro2, which is also going by the codename of the “Fortress” is going to be available with AT&T sooner than later. And by saying sooner than later it really means that the release date has not been announced, but based on previous experience, the FCC listing usually means its getting closer.
Overall, it was nice to see this listing, but at the same time it was a little more on the boring side (as far as FCC reveals go) due to the Confidentiality Letter. It appears that a “short-term confidentiality request” was made on any internal and external images. Bummer. Of course, at the same time, this does give current AT&T users who are considering upgrading soon something to wait for.
The Lonely Planet guide is an iPhone travel guide done right. It takes everything from the original dead-tree guide and squeezes it into an iPhone (or iPod Touch) sized package. Better still, it does adds some things that are impossible to do in an old-fashioned paper edition.
Lonely Planet guides are, like any other travel guide, great if you want to be eating, sleeping and visiting in the same places as everyone else. You’ll find advice on restaurants, bars, gay and lesbian hangouts, shopping and everything else, and it’s all replicated here.
There are some advantages to having an electronic version. First, you won’t look quite so much like a tourist — staring at your iPhone will make you look like any other local. Toting a map and guidebook, on the other hand, marks you out as a target. And because the iPhone knows where you are, there’s no wandering around looking for street signs and then wading through indexes. Just like Google Maps on the iPhone, your location is pinpointed. All of the actual streetmaps are stored on the device, too, which means that you don’t need an internet connection — or even an iPhone: this works great on the Touch, too.
You can either browse maps or just hit the “Nearby” button and be given a list of everything in the surrounding streets. As you can see from the picture, it even works here in Barcelona, although everything is over 6000 kilometers away.
One quirk of this system is that you can’t access the restaurant and bar listings through the actual sections in the book, whether by kind of food or by neighborhood. Instead you have to use the map. It’s a shame. While a paper book can’t spare space to print everything twice, there is no such restriction in an application.
You can save favorites, too, which is the equivalent of folding the corners on pages, or you can browse through like a normal book, page by page, section by section, just by swiping your fingers. And a very handy extra is the search function. It will bring up anything listed in the book, but sadly you can’t search on addresses.
I’ll be trying it out in New York over the next week, and I’ll let you know how it goes. The Application cost me €13 ($16 in the US store). That’s cheaper than the paper book, and a lot more handy. You can also get guides for many other major and minor cities, and if you want to check things out first, the San Francisco guide is actually free during the WWDC. I guess those Californian hippies won’t pay for anything.
With E3 drawing to a close I finally have a little time to reflect on the highs and lows of the last few days. It’s been something of a whirlwind tour of the good and the great of video gaming. For me, Nintendo won E3 by a country mile with a raft of first party games and controls are that are all available next month.
Haven’t caught all of the Gadgetell news this week? Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles!
Facebook: Coming to an Xbox 360 near you ” 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…” MORE »
Top 5 essentials for netbook users “If you’ve decided to take the netbook plunge, you’re probably going to want to streamline the programs you use and get rid of any “crapware.” The real question is what applications do you really need for a netbook? Netbooks are meant to browse the web and take…” MORE »
The keyboard was supposed to save the Palm Pre, not doom it ” Back in January, the Palm Pre was seen as the bee’s knees for a couple of main reasons. Among them was a kickin’ OS and the other was a slide out keyboard. The iPhone and many touch screen only phones lack a physical keyboard and many…” MORE »
Cell2Get.com announces June 6 availability on unlocked Palm Pres “If you are still considering purchasing a Palm Pre on June 6 but really would like to avoid a long term commitment with Sprint then you may be in luck. According to a recent press release, Cell2Get.com will be offering you the chance to get the Pre…” MORE »
Amazon Kindle DX gets an official release date: June 10 ” 9 days to go and you’ll be able to receive your Amazon Kindle DX. The large screen ebook reader from Amazon was met with a curious response by the press. Why exactly would Amazon…” MORE »
Palm Pre: all fun and games? About those games… ” Having dinner with a couple of iPhone users on Saturday I ask, “so how many of your apps are game vs. utilities or other work/useful stuff?” I get laughed at. “It is all games and crap” says…” MORE »
Dell’s Mini 9 netbook closely approaching its end-of-life “Just recently the Dell Mini 9 product listing has been going on and off of the Dell website. This led many to wonder whether the site was being updated or if Dell had other plans. Initially, I had thought it a little strange, in part because the…” MORE »
Rumor: Sprint to sell the Palm Pre without a mail-in-rebate “According to the latest chatter surrounding the Palm Pre, it looks like potential customers may be able to make a purchase at a Sprint location and not have to deal with a mail-in-rebate. Initially we saw Sprint selling the Pre for $299 with a $100 mail-in-rebate bringing…” MORE »
Mobile phone bits: New Android phone and the Palm Pre on TV ” The T-Mobile G1 has been a pretty successful investment for T-Mobile, while it has not reached the popularity of the iPhone, it did surpass one million handsets sold. In addition, the software has continued to get better,…” MORE »
FROM APPLETELL - At $40, the Omniverse Universal Laptop Tote is a bit more expensive than most sleeves, but offers better protection and a bit more functionality. Better yet, you won’t need to worry about your laptop catching a cold. Your mom would be so proud. MORE »
Via's Amos 3000 is a fanless "palm size" computer, about half the dimensions of a Mac Mini, with a 500MHz CPU and VESA mounting tracks, meaning you can just screw it into the back of most monitors. Its Pico ITX motherboard has 1GB of RAM, UniChrome video, gigabit ethernet, and a single 44-pin IDE interface. Four USB ports, VGA, DVI and a serial port are out back, and those wanting more power can opt for a 1GHz CPU with a fan. It runs Windows XP, XP embedded or CE.
It's just the thing if you like low-power home servers, very small computers, or if you sell cash registers by the containerful.
What kind of friend causes your pulse to race every heart-pounding second you’re together? A best friend, that’s who.
Now you can have the thrill of driving real Southern Belles with turbo radio control. Hidden beneath Heather’s beautiful dress is a tornado of power.
These are the amazing features of the Turbo Heather, a remote controlled Southern Belle, and this ad is perhaps our favorite parody to date: it’s a pitch perfect, although the production values are perhaps a little too good for a real trashy infomercial. The faux-ad is by SCADshorts, alumni of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), and they have a whole YouTube channel to amuse you. We’re just sad that these Turbo Heather’s can’t be bought. I think I’d love the way they’d make me feel.
These are some very early prototypes Japan’s No. 1 telecommunications company NTT recently showcased during the JPCA Show 2009 in Tokyo, but they are pretty cool to look at and may show a glimpse of the near future. The basic idea is to one day be able to offer cell phones featuring an interface for attachable and replaceable hardware add-ons.
The company’s Institute for Advanced Technology is researching on how to transform a conventional cell phone into a “physical”, two-piece flute, for example. Users would then attach the upper part of a flute to their cell phone and press its keyboard buttons to make music. Songs can even be shared wirelessly with other users.
A bit less spectacular is the blood test unit users can plug into their cell phone in order to transfer data to their doctors. Straight out of Minority Report: An add-on that lets you read newspapers or magazines displayed on the cell phone screen via an integrated sheet of digital paper so that you don’t have to read stuff on those tiny screens anymore.
NTT is hoping to develop practical versions (not commonly available phones, mind you) in 2015.
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It’s a problem experienced by Gadget Lab’s own Daniel Dumas on an almost daily basis. How does one stare for hours on end into the mirror, admiring one’s beautiful hair, and at the same time control the romantic background music? For Danny, the thought of removing his eyes from the perfectly coiffured and outrageously handsome visage presented before him is a painful one.
Enter the MP3 mirror from Stocco, a mirror which hooks up to an iPod via the dock connector and controls it with buttons on the surface of the glass. This means that you don’t have to look down for a single moment. Mr.Dumas will also be pleased to learn that it incorporates a barometer and clock, taking the guesswork out of predicting outdoor weather conditions for the perfect early-morning hair-setup. The price is as yet unannounced, but obviously, for some people, worth it.
We see no reason why this Lego remote control shouldn’t become reality. In fact, quite the opposite. We don’t see why the world should be deprived of such a superlative setup.
Think about it. Not only can you, as designer fueledbycoffee intends, endlessly rearrange the switches to suit your tastes, much like icons on the iPhone screen, you can play around with this during more boring shows. Connecting the various components shouldn’t be too hard — the base could take care of power and actually beaming the info to the TV and the “buttons” simply contain switchable RFID tags.
Just don’t tell Sony. The company would probably bring out a licensed version missing the skip and fast-forward buttons to force you to watch ads.
The Ukulele Guide includes not only the standard moustache groups, but also exotic and endangered moustaches like the Shirley Temple and the LARP-stache. Recently cultivated strains of moustache such as the Octopus also feature prominently, and the headstock is graced with an inspiring moustache quote, sure to please any moustache fancier.
Tragic news today for the Silicon Valley community. 
The pico projection thing might be getting a little out of hand. Sure, the 
Tonight’s the night that we’re announcing the 
This week proved a lousy one for 300 or so Intuit employees. The tax-preparation software maker on Thursday sacked 4 percent of its work force as part of its ongoing resource management efforts. “We manage our resources on an on-going basis; these changes support our long-term growth strategy,” an Intuit (INTU) spokesperson said in a statement. Said strategy, it should be noted, also includes 
Sirius XM (SIRI) fans will see their subscription rates rise by nearly $2 this summer. According to an employee training document, the company plans to pass on to subscribers the cost of 
When 
You’ve waited so long, and your time has almost come. If you’re anything like me, you’re refining your early morning line strategy, making calls to every Best Buy Mobile, Radio Shack, and Sprint store within a ten mile radius, and psyching yourself up to elbow a guy in the face if need be. In short: the Pre drops tomorrow, and you’re getting one no matter what the cost.
The Lonely Planet guide is an iPhone travel guide done right. It takes everything from the original dead-tree guide and squeezes it into an iPhone (or iPod Touch) sized package. Better still, it does adds some things that are impossible to do in an old-fashioned paper edition.
We see no reason why this Lego remote control shouldn’t become reality. In fact, quite the opposite. We don’t see why the world should be deprived of such a superlative setup.