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SAP to Make Online Software Push [Voices]Software maker SAP is about to make its second foray into the world of online software. In September 2007, SAP unveiled an online version of its management software aimed at small businesses. The product languished, with the company’s co-CEOs last year saying that they wouldn’t sell it because it didn’t make any money. SAP plans to unveil a new online software strategy later this week. This time the target audience is the large businesses that make up SAP’s core customers, says John Wookey, the SAP exec in charge of the project. Wookey has spent the last six months crafting the company’s online-software strategy. SAP’s software, which businesses use for tasks like balancing the general ledger and tracking inventory, is installed on servers that businesses buy and operate themselves. Businesses pay a hefty upfront fee for it and ongoing payments for product support. Online software is accessed over the Internet through a Web browser. It’s run on servers operated by the vendor, and customers typically pay a monthly subscription fee. Online software is commonly viewed as a threat to companies that sell traditional software because it tends to be less expensive for customers and less profitable for sellers. Source: All Things Digital | 10 Jun 2009 | 12:00 pm Virgin Mobile USA offers Broadband2Go service with no contract Using Sprint’s EVDO Rev. A network, Virgin Mobile USA announced today the launch of their wireless broadband service, Broadband2Go.
When the service goes live later this month you’ll be able to purchase a Novatel Ovation MC760 USB dongle for $150 sans contract. Pay-as-you-go VM Top-Up cards can be purchased in the following increments: 100MB, 250MB, 500MB and 1GB. Here’s where it gets a little confusing; 100MB will cost you $10, but you have to use that within 10 days. For $20 you get 250MB, 500MB for $40 and 1GB for $60, which have to be used within 30 days.
Source: CrunchGear | 10 Jun 2009 | 11:43 am DailyPerfect: Latest News Aggregator to Attempt PersonalizationIt's been nearly 4 years since news aggregation site Techmeme (or tech.memeorandum, as it was called back then) launched to the world. Since then it's grown to be the leading aggregator of tech news in...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jun 2009 | 11:36 am If You’re Not Worried About Bing, Why Are You Talking About it So Much? [Digital Daily]
Not so difficult, apparently. As I noted yesterday, early data from from market researcher ComScore shows Bing boosting Microsoft’s share of the search market to 11.1 percent from 9.1 percent since May 26. Anyway … Schmidt’s remarks recall a CNN interview he did earlier this month in the aftermath of Bing’s debut. Then, as now, the Google CEO went to great lengths to tar Microsoft and its search products. “Micrososft has announced a Google killer search product about once a year for the past six years,” Schmidt said at the time. “And they need to offer a better product than the one they did last Year. I think it’s too early to say with Bing how well it will do. They have some advantages because of the Windows monopoly where they can encourage people — in our view unfairly — to use Bing, but let’s see what the end users choose. We always start from the premise ‘what do the end users want’ and we continue to find in our studies that what Google offers is what they want.” Yeah, until someone comes along and offers them something better. Source: All Things Digital | 10 Jun 2009 | 11:34 am Water stress, ocean levels to unleash 'climate exodus'Tens of millions of people will be displaced by climate change in coming years, posing social, political and security problems of an unprecedented dimension, a new study said on Wednesday.Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Jun 2009 | 11:33 am eLearners.com Launches National 'Career Stimulus Package' to Tackle Crisis of Undereducated, Underemployed Adult Americans40 City Empowerment Tour, Featuring Career Coaches; $4 Million in Full-Tuition Scholarships; Job Shadowing; and Fundraising to Educate, Empower and Employ DENVER,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Jun 2009 | 11:30 am NanoMarkets Releases New Report on Conductive Coatings in Electronics Markets; Sees Opportunities in Nanomaterials, Conductive Polymers and PhotovoltaicsGLEN ALLEN, Va., June 10 /PRNewswire/ -- A new report from NanoMarkets, a leading industry analyst firm based here, predicts that new opportunities are rapidly emerging in the...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Jun 2009 | 11:30 am FLO TV Goes National - Expands Live Mobile TV Service as DTV Transition Frees Broadband Spectrum- FLO TV Set to Reach More Than 200 Million Potential Consumers, Ushering in a New Era of Television Viewing on the Go - SAN DIEGO, June 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Jun 2009 | 11:30 am Travelport GDS Introduces Merchandising First for Air Canada: Launches Ability for Galileo-Connected Travel Agents to Sell Air Canada's Full Range of Product OfferingsIndustry-first Web application changes the travel distribution landscape for Air Canada, travel agencies and travelers looking for the best of all worlds - in one locationSource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 10 Jun 2009 | 11:30 am Picasso's grandson says stolen drawings will be found
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 Jakarta Post | Apple finalizes powerpc divorce with OS upgrade CNET News by Stephen Shankland Apple, a company that's rarely namby-pamby about making technological changes, has put its foot down once again with its Snow Leopard upgrade to Mac OS X due in September. WWDC Conference Showcases Growing Rift Between Apple, AT&T Four Reasons Why iPhone Owners Hate AT&T |
Hey, here’s some “process journalism” for you: Anyone know what happened at the Hulu board meeting in New York on Monday? Besides News Corp. (NWS) digital boss Jon Miller taking his seat on the board? Inquiring minds want to know!
Meantime, check out this excellent Daily Show clip (via Hulu) from Monday, where Jon Stewart skewers mainstream media’s clumsy attempts — ok, Time Warner’s CNN (TWX), specifically — to augment their product with some of that newfangled social media we’ve heard about. Facebook? Check. Twitter? Of course! Wisdom of crowds? Hard to discern, sometimes.
A new report from Juniper Research forecasts that by 2014, annual sales of low-budget mobile devices will rise to north of 700 million units, up 22% from this year. The report goes into the various schemes that have been implemented to help ‘connect the unconnected’, or the estimated 3 billion people on the planet that do not own mobile phones.
That number include people who live in areas where wireless networks offer coverage, something that is not always the case because operators tend to shy away from underdeveloped markets because of limited chances of financial return on investments. Apparently, the key to be able to tap into this vast pool of potential customers in these so-called ‘emerging markets’ lies in drastically reducing the cost of handsets that can be used by low-income users.
Mobile handset juggernaut Nokia is a big believer in this, as we’ve talked about in the past when the company released a series of devices and services specifically targeting these emerging markets and the debut of its Mail on Ovi service on some 35 different Series 40 handsets.
According to Juniper’s report, of which you’ll find a summary in this free whitepaper, entry-level devices (Nokia’s definition for phones that sell for less than $60) accounted for 45% of total global shipments in 2008, which translates to 535 million units. However, Juniper also says ULC devices (ultra low-cost or devices selling for $5 on average) were only a fraction of those but growing in importance quickly. By 2014, Juniper forecasts low-cost devices to account for over 50% of all devices sold worldwide each year. Of the 700 million low-cost handsets expected to be sold in 2014, Juniper Research believes around 24% will be sold in Africa and the Middle East.
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The financial crisis has made a lasting impact on small businesses around the world and here at home in the United States. With the credit crunch creating a virtual standstill of lending, small businesses in the U.S. are facing an uphill battle to find funds, especially if their financial history isn’t stellar. Kiva.org, one of the web’s most interesting innovators in the micro-lending space, is hoping to come to the aid of U.S. entrepreneurs and small businesses by launching a pilot expansion that would allow individuals anywhere to make small loans to low-income U.S. entrepreneurs through Kiva’s platform.
Kiva is a peer-to-peer lending site that facilitates micropayment loans between citizen lenders and extremely low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries. Through Kiva’s platform, anyone can loan $25 or more to support an entrepreneur and the specific progress of the loan can be tracked from initial funding to repayment. Upon receiving repayment, lenders can withdraw their funds from Kiva or lend again to another entrepreneur, thereby continuing the lending cycle.
In April alone, Kiva members loaned $4.5 million to entrepreneurs, a 56 percent year-over-year increase and a record month for Kiva. Since the microfinance platform’s birth in 2005, over $75 million has been loaned through Kiva.org to support more than 180,000 individuals from 44 developing countries. Kiva’s president, Premal Shah, says this new initiative to include U.S. businesses increasingly made sense as the financial markets deteriorated and traditional lending began to dry up even in the U.S.
According to Kiva, small businesses represent more than 87 percent of all businesses in the United States, and, on average, these micro-enterprises are responsible for 900,000 new jobs created per year according to the Association for Enterprise Opportunity. This number seems small to me but the impact of small businesses on job creation is clear. To make matters worse, Kiva says more than 10 million business owners faced difficulty obtaining capital—even before the credit crisis and economic slowdown.
Kiva will launch today with the ability to for anyone to make loans to 45 small businesses and entrepreneurs seeking funding from the areas of New York, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta and Miami. The businesses range in purpose and services, from salons to landscaping to day care facilities. For example, a Queens, NY-based entrepreneur delivers baked goods to bodegas in New York. He is looking to raise $6000 to fund insulation technology for his trucks.
Shah tells us that the idea was first introduced by California’s first lady and journalist, Maria Shriver, when she visited Kiva’s office last year. She asked if Kiva’s model could be replicated domestically to support low-income entrepreneurs in the United States. Shah said that initially he wasn’t sure if lending within the U.S. fit into Kiva’s model of international development. But following the recession, the organization realized the opportunity and need to provide community driven, low-cost capital for the everyday small business owner in the U.S.
Traditionally, Kiva uses partner microfinance programs, called a “Field Partners,” to evaluate whether businesses and entrepreneurs are eligible for Kiva’s platform. Field partners looks at a variety of factors in businesses, including past loan history, village or group reputation, and feasibility of business idea and then facilitates the loan transactions between Kiva and the microenterprise. In the US, Kiva will be partnering with ACCION USA, microfinance institution that lends to 48 states across the U.S., and Opportunity Fund, a community development financial institution based in San Jose, CA.
But P2P lending to U.S. businesses has proven to be controversial in the past. Prosper, a US peer-to-peer lender stopped all new lending on its site because of scrutiny by the SEC. Prosper, which is currently back online, agreed to register under the Securities Act, a process which took months. Since Prosper is a seller of investment, the organization had to be registered with the SEC, according to securities laws in the U.S. Loanio and Lending Club also faced similar problems in P2P lending initiatives.
Shah says that Kiva differs from P2P lending sites like with Kiva, you can’t earn a rate of return. The best you can do is get your money back at 0% interest - like lending to a friend. Shah maintains that a key factor for the SEC to determine is whether the organization is offering a ’security’ — where there is an opportunity to earn a rate of return. Since Kiva’s loans to the working poor at 0% interest are clearly charitable in nature, Shah says that registration with the SEC is not required.
One of the compelling parts of the new program is the ability for lenders in other countries to lend entrepreneurs in the U.S., making Kiva the enabler of economic development throughout in both developed and underdeveloped countries. Kiva has also signed up celebs to take part in the new initiative. Apparently, actor Tom Hanks will be lending to a U.S micro business and investor Warren Buffet has been asked to contribute to the new project as well.
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TechCrunch Europe is holding an afternoon of presentations, panels and pitches exploring the German tech scene today, from 3pm (Berlin time) onwards. Here you’ll find the live video stream provided by Sevenload and we’re holding it at the office of Zanox. Thanks also to Gründerszene, Dwight Cribb Personalberatung and Seedcamp for their support. See below for our schedule. Update: Due to the popularity of the event (which sold out a week ago) we’ve now arranged an after-party from 9pm at the offices of Soundcloud. Details are here. In addition, I will be hanging at Caras Gourmet Coffee at Neue Schönhauser Str. 9 on Thursday afternoon. Feel to get in touch.
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Only a handful of blogs picked up on Google’s fresh Translator Toolkit, which the company launched yesterday by means of a blog post, but this new service really deserves a second look, if only because Wikimedia apparently sees the tool as something that could “change the way Wikipedia grows in other languages”.
You can read an extensive review of the product over at Google Blogoscoped, but here’s the gist:
Google Translator Kit enables anyone to upload documents for a variety of formats (HTML, Microsoft Word, Rich Text, OpenDocument Text and Plain Text), enter the URL for a file on the web or input a direct link to a Wikipedia article or Knol entry. After submission, the text that requires translation is automatically translated in the back-end and subsequently featured in a so-called ‘Workbench’, neatly placing the resulting text in the target language next to the original.
Google will search their translation memory for previous, human translations of the uploaded segment and show the translations in the Search Results tab. Color-coded segments will depict ‘exact’ matches and ‘partial’ matches, so you can edit the text based on the memory as well as previous, human translations. In addition, you can use the computer-generated translation in the Computer Translation tab to jump-start the translation of your current segment. When available, the toolkit will also search Google’s multilingual glossaries to help you translate specific terminology for your language, or you could use the Dictionary tab to do custom searches on Google’s multilingual dictionaries.
Besides the self-learning ability of the toolkit, the service also makes it incredibly easy for people to collaborate on translations, bringing a human, crowd-sourced touch to the automated process of Google’s Translate service.
(Thanks for the heads up, ArabCrunch)
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Over the last two and a half days - the short window of time within which the GeeksOnAPlane group has been staying in Tokyo - I’ve attended two industry events (Tokyo 2.0 and Startonomics Japan) and talked with those who live or do business here about how web technology in Japan differs from that in the US. And while this is enough time to gain only a superficial amount of insight into the Japanese tech scene, I’ve gotten the impression that things aren’t fundamentally that different from the way things are back home; there are just idiosyncrasies (albeit important ones) within the Japanese tech landscape.
Take mobile, for example. Before coming here, I had the impression that Japan was light years ahead of the US when it came to mobile technology. I’ve found that this reputation, while supported by indisputable advantages, belies a more complicated reality. Mobile devices certainly play a far greater role in everyday life here, with something like 90% of the Japanese owning 3G-capable handsets and 85% of all phone subscribers accessing online services while on the go regularly. The Japanese also use their phones for purposes simply not available to Americans such as watching live TV, scanning QR codes, and paying for goods with the proximity readers that are located in stores and subway stations.
However, we’ve also seen demos of several Japanese mobile applications, and the technological sophistication and design of these apps are surprisingly primitive. The general quality appears more in line with the WAP apps from yesteryear than the powerful iPhone and Android apps that have come upon the scene over the past year or so. And from what I’ve been told, they operate in a very closed environment akin to Compuserve that gets reinforced by strong carrier lock-ins and family plans.
Speaking of the iPhone, the reaction to it appears to be mixed here. While the iPhone is (generally speaking) more advanced than any other handset on the Japanese market, it poses a number of problems for Japanese consumers. Namely, it doesn’t play nicely with the closed suite of online services that Japanese have become accustomed to using on their phones. It doesn’t do TV streaming without a $100 hardware add-on. The touch keyboard isn’t great for entering Japanese characters. It has a hard time enticing people away from the strong contract lockins they have with other mobile providers. It doesn’t contain a proximity chip for mobile payments. And the iPhone service contract is expensive, despite the fact that carriers have begun giving the device itself out for free in exchange for contracts.
Social networking is another area in which familiar trends can be spotted alongside peculiarities. Whereas we in the US track the ongoing struggle between Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, the Japanese witness a mindshare grab between the social networks Mixi, Gree and DeNA. These networks are very Japan-specific, despite attempts among them to branch out to surrounding geographical areas such as China. Mixi, for example, requires a Japanese phone number and an invitation to join. While Japan doesn’t appear to breed the same sort of clones that we see come out of China, Japanese firms don’t hesitate to borrow ideas from Western companies. Mixi has forged an open strategy modeled after Facebook with platforms that are designed, and even named, quite similarly (e.g. “Mixi Connect”).
Two differences between Japanese and American social networking are particularly conspicuous. The Japanese are much less inclined to put their real identities online, preferring instead to use usernames and avatars that obfuscate their individuality. This is perhaps one reason why Facebook hasn’t taken greater hold here, although I’ve heard from several people that its translations have been rather poor (Twitter, on the other hand, has experienced a modest level of success already). Not surprisingly, Japanese social networkers also tend to spend a lot more time on their mobile devices compared to their American counterparts, with mobile pageviews greatly exceeding desktop pageviews on the predominate social networks.
Entrepreneurialism in Japan is inauspicious despite how good the infrastructure is here. In addition to enjoying an extraordinarily high level of mobile connectivity, many Japanese have access to very cheap and fast broadband in their homes. But for a country that also has a large enough population (~127 million) to form a self-contained market for internet services, Japan isn’t home to a large entrepreneurial community. Much of this results from the culture, which discourages people to undertake risky ventures. The government could also be friendlier to small businesses, as it tends to defend incumbent corporations against the encroachments of young upstarts (although luckily web ventures don’t butt heads with them as much as others). The country’s business laws were also not designed to foster new companies until changes were made recently in 2006. As a consequence, the entrepreneurial community is small enough for people to notice when even individual members leave.
Tonight we’re off to Beijing in China to see how things operate in the world’s most populous country. Follow our travels - and the media we produce - on Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare, Twitter and our blog.
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Apple has hired David Fincher, director of movies such as Fight Club, Zodiac or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, to direct a TV commercial for the iPhone 3G S. The 30-second spot is supposed to push the phone's video recording feature. Fight Club cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth took over the camera work for the commercial, which was released today.
Commercial after the jump.
Apple has hired David Fincher, director of movies such as Fight Club, Zodiac or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, to direct a TV commercial for the iPhone 3G S. The 30-second spot is supposed to push the phone’s video recording feature. Fight Club cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth took over the camera work for the commercial, which was released today.
The ad is called “Break In” and shows a man breaking into a Apple R&D facility to get the new iPhone. But little does he know about said new feature and gets caught “on tape”.
It’s not a bad commercial, but was it really necessary to hire a David Fincher to direct it, Apple? And does the speaker in the ad really say video recording is an “amazing” feature?
Via Slash Film
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Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we paid special homage to our best doggie friends by doing a series of posts about dogs and technology. Among them:
* An illustrated guide to the history of the artificial dog;
* Photo galleries taken by minpins Ruby and Malcolm using Uncle Milton's Pet's Eye View camera;
* How to carry a laptop and a lapdog at the same time;
*A retro-robotics robo-dog;
*A developmental study on robotic pets and children;
*An x-rated clip-on speaker a la Up;
*A $3K doggie treadmill;
* A review of the Zoombak GPS locator;
* A review of the SpotBot Pet dog stain cleaner;
* A review of an ice cake maker for dogs, and
* Geeky dog toys for geeky dogs.
For those of you who aren't interested in dogs, we had some other fun stuff today too, like the self-proclaimed world's most technologically advanced roller coaster, bluetooth motorcycle gear, and a video on making living movie posters.
Source: Boing Boing | 10 Jun 2009 | 7:36 am
I didn’t go to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday expecting a revolutionary new iPhone. That’s a good thing, because I didn’t see one.
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 ABC News | Information tech firms urge China to reconsider filter Reuters By Lucy Hornby BEIJING, June 10 (Reuters) - A Washington-based group representing information technology companies called on China on Wednesday to reconsider its requirement that Internet filtering software be bundled with new computers. China's porn-blocking mandate leaves PC makers with big tasks Chinese Developer Surprised by Backlash to Porn Filter |
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has been talking a lot over the past two weeks about Yahoo and how it competes against Google and Microsoft. Each time she does, I feel like she’s digging the hole even deeper for Yahoo’s prospects in search.
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If you ask Apple or AT&T how much the iPhone 3G S costs, they’ll emphasize two prices: $199 for the 16GB version and $299 for the 32GB one, as Apple does here. It’s only in the fine print and disclaimers that they’ll explain that only new customers and those who aren’t on a contract (or nearing the end of one, at least) qualify for those deals.
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Two years ago, Asustek wowed the world with the hottest selling computing product to arrive in recent memory: the Eee PC netbook. But even that blockbuster device has failed to do much to boost the company’s brand in the United States, a situation the Taiwanese computer maker intends to correct.
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In a sparsely decorated office suite two floors above a neighborhood of strip malls and car dealerships, former oncologist Douglas Jackson is struggling to resuscitate a dying dream.
Jackson, 51, is the maverick founder of E-Gold, the first-of-its-kind digital currency that was once used by millions of people in more than a hundred countries. Today the currency is barely alive.
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Beach Cocoon: A little bit of WTF after lunch
Exclusive: MoGo Talk Bluetooth headset for iPhone folds down to 5mm thin — we’re giving 50 away, plus a 30% discount
Japan finishes its enormous Gundam statue
Heinz eyes USB-powered microwave for desk drones
Bringing Pleo back
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Southern discomfort: new screenshots of Valve's Left 4 Dead 2
According to the Xinhua news agency, the man, along with three others, assaulted another man in the cafe, forcing him to give up various virtual goods and 100,000 yuan ($14,700) worth of the virtual currency known as QQ coins. The coins are the currency utilized by the major Chinese web portal, Tencent. It is used for the purchase of online goods and premium services for supported titles...(via Raph)Despite the clear financial value, no law exists in China to protect virtual goods or currency. This case changed set a new precedent: The court ruled that the victim should be protected because he spent money on the extorted items. Under the ruling, the three men who assisted in the crime were fined. The primary defendant was sentenced to three years in prison.
Not long after this cheeky -- but paid-for -- ad went up, BART tore it down, citing the lame excuse that the ad was "too dark." So doubleTwist submitted the same ad with a white background, and BART rejected it for "having a solid white background." Now they're doing it on a transparent background -- what excuse do you suppose BART will come up with this time?
We then submitted the following revised ad with a white background. A white ad would have let even more light through (notice how bright the bottle is in the original ad above). However, it was rejected for having a solid white background (!).The Cure for iPhone Envy: The story behind the doubleTwist ad (Thanks, Jon!)At the ad agency's request, we then made the background completely transparent. It's a lot harder to read text on a transparent background... After complying with all their requests to change the ad, we still haven't been given a firm date on when the ad will be back up.
Apple is a major BART advertiser (in the past they've plastered entire BART stations with iPod ads). Apple's WWDC conference ends on Friday. It's pretty obvious what's going on here... I'm sure our ad will conveniently be back up after WWDC ends.
The Hope Chest: Bad news from the past
(via Beyond the Beyond)
Source: Boing Boing | 10 Jun 2009 | 5:34 am
These days, Popovich is fielding assignments as fast as he can handle them. "We've got a lot of business right now," he says. "We recently recovered planes from Okun and Nadel." Popovich is referring to Edward Okun and Arthur G. Nadel, two Bernie Madoff-manqués that have been accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from unsuspecting clients who thought they were safely investing their money ($300 million in Nadel's case, the largest alleged hedge fund fraud in Florida history). Among the booty that Popovich was hired to return were two Gulfstream IIs and a Learjet...The Learjet repo manUsing his European scouts, Popovich tracked one plane in Milan; the other was sitting on the tarmac near Terminal One at Charles DeGaulle Airport. The MD-81 was covered in official-looking documentation written in French, so Popovich just ripped everything off and hopped in. Big mistake. The airport cops stopped him as he was taxiing and threw him in a cell overnight. The next day, a French magistrate had handcuffs slapped on Popovich and ordered him returned to Chicago. "I was more determined than ever to grab those damn planes," he says. "You push me, I push back harder."
A few weeks later he snuck back into the country, convinced a captain with an Air Afrique fuel bus to fill up Arpel's Boeing and flew it out. But the Milan plane was trickier. The engine was behaving erratically, and no sane person should fly a bird with a hinky engine. Popovich had a replacement engine in Munich (engine-swapping is a common occurrence in the business) and the only way to get it would be to make the 50 minute flight and pray.
Hallmark's delightful miniature "The Menagerie" is advertised as a way to "relive moments from Star Trek's beloved two-part episode featuring the radiation-scarred Captain Christopher Pike." This would be a great Thanksgiving centerpiece, or topper for your toilet-paper cozy.
 MCV | Yet another PS3 price cut rumor Neoseeker Madden 09 has been out for a while. This would be Madden 10. Hurray for fact checking and general knowledge. the console's hardware is still an expensive manufacturing feat, which would explain why Sony has been reluctant to adjust its prices. Sony Doesn't Believe PSP Go is Overpriced Sony: Who Needs a PlayStation 3 Price Drop? |
It’s been a tumultous few months for Seeqpod, the powerful music search engine that skimmed the web for music files hosted on other servers. In March the site finally cracked under the weight of multiple lawsuits brought on by the major record companies and filed for bankruptcy protection. Then came word that it may-or-may-not have been acquired by Microsoft, though the deal still has yet to be confirmed.
Today we’re hearing that Seeqpod has started looking to sell off its seeqpod.com domain name, pending an acquisition deal that is about to close. We got in touch with CEO Kasian Franks, who refused to confirm the rumors, saying that a deal has “not officially closed” and that a decision to unload the domain is still “up in the air”. It may not be official yet, but given that the company has apparently begun prodding for buyers for the domain, it sounds like it’s nearly finalized.
Franks was willing to talk vaguely about the pending deal, saying that multiple major suitors are involved. He also noted that any acquisition would be about the company’s technology, and not necessarily the Seeqpod brand. While Franks still won’t name the companies involved, he says that they have no issues with acquiring more traffic, which is why the company may wind up selling Seeqpod.com.
Update: As commentor Spencer Schoeben points out below, visiting Seeqpod.com and clicking the site’s logo will take you to Microsoft’s new Bing search engine. So, yeah — it’ll be very surprising if Microsoft isn’t ultimately named as one of the companies involved with the acquisition.
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Using Sprint’s EVDO Rev. A network, Virgin Mobile USA announced today the launch of their wireless broadband service, Broadband2Go.
When the service goes live later this month you’ll be able to purchase a Novatel Ovation MC760 USB dongle for $150 sans contract. Pay-as-you-go VM Top-Up cards can be purchased in the following increments: 100MB, 250MB, 500MB and 1GB. Here’s where it gets a little confusing; 100MB will cost you $10, but you have to use that within 10 days. For $20 you get 250MB, 500MB for $40 and 1GB for $60, which have to be used within 30 days.
$60 for a 1GB of data is quite a bit considering you get 5GB for the same price from the major carriers but you’re not locked into a two-year contract either. VMU will provide an online portal to keep tabs on how much data and time you have left as well as a handy activity chart of sorts that lets you know how much browsing is allocated for your pre-purchased data.
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To stay competitive in the increasingly comfy world of business-class travel, the brass at Continental Airlines knew they had to ditch their stodgy old recliners and install seats that transform into flat beds. But to stay solvent, the bean counters warned, the airline needed to maintain the number of passengers crammed into its cabins. And beds take up more space than chairs. Right?
Not necessarily. B/E Aerospace, the design firm Continental hired to develop its new loungers, dreamed up a seat called the Diamond—a 25-inch-wide high- altitude throne that converts into a 6-foot, 6-inch bed. And they promised to fit just as many of these larger seats in the same space.
That would seem an impossible equation, but the solution was elegant in its simplicity. "The real innovation," says Glenn Johnson, B/E's design director, "came in the configuration." Instead of lining up the seats in straight rows, his team staggered them. So when a passenger kicks back into the lie-flat position, the foot of the bed slides into the space between the two seats in front. But don't worry: A wraparound shell ensures you won't have someone's feet in your face.
 The Age | Marcial: Apple Shines, No Matter Who's in Charge BusinessWeek By Gene Marcial Even though Steve Jobs took a medical leave in January, Apple Inc. (AAPL) remains as innovative and creative as it was in 1984 when Jobs unveiled the Macintosh to wide acclaim. Steve Jobs' Jackling mansion nightmare still not over Option Traders Take a Shine to Apple |
(Download MP4 / YouTube | Warning: NC-17, cartoon nudity/ultraviolence)
Boing Boing Video proudly presents the world-premiere of a third video, above, from the N.A.S.A. music project (here was our first, here's the second) -- "A Volta," featuring Sizzla, Amanda Blank & Love Foxxx. Video by Logan, with art by The Date Farmers. Executive Producer: Susan Applegate.
NASA, short for "North America South America," is a music collaboration project assembled by Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel, brother of film director Spike Jonze) and DJ Zegon (Ze Gonzales, professional skateboarder).
Buy the album, The Spirit of Apollo, here. More than 40 music artists are featured, including David Byrne, Kanye West, Ghostface Killah, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O and Nick Zinner, M.I.A., Santogold, E-40, Tom Waits and Kool Keith. Music videos for the project involve a similarly diverse team-up of visual artists and directors.
Logan, the folks who directed the video for this track, create TV commercials and music videos, content for video games, and experiment with animation and visual effects. We caught up with Alexei Tylevich of Logan for a conversation about how this unusual music video -- kinda like GTA: Juarez -- came together with the Date Farmers.
The text of our interview follows (+ more after the jump).
Video #2, embedded below (Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube): Logan's mockumentary web-film about the making of this NASA video.
[Q] XENI JARDIN / BOING BOING VIDEO: When I was struggling to explain your "A Volta" video to others, I found myself referring to it as an "8-bit narco nightmare." What's the story we're seeing here?
At first there was no plot, just a setting: an isometric metropolis inhabited by deranged inhabitants, full of senseless violence and anarchy. Then it sort of evolved into a semblance of a story. We started imagining what these characters could do and the plot sort of developed on its own, little by little.
Their world is devoid of perspective, decidedly two-dimensional. Their visual vocabulary is a mix of pop culture references and cholo folklore, a violent combination of corporate iconography, found objects and jail tattoos. The smelly back alley of our collective subconscious soaked in pop culture detritus. It's pretty disturbing, but somehow endearing at the same time. They don't seem to be taking themselves too seriously.
Besides paintings and collages, they make these robots out of scrap materials. There's a whole series of them. The lineup in its entirety is like a medieval bestiary.
What is the cinematic equivalent of the Date Farmers' pictorial universe? A blunt storyline, trite genre referencing and Scarface quotations. Compulsive borrowing and regurgitation of pre-existing elements. Lack of any sort of narrative syntax and the overall "flatness". "Poor acting" on the part of the characters that have no range and no faces. Canned robotic voice-over. A patchwork of elements and layers that make up a saturated cacophonous experience of visuals, music, plot, voiceover and subtitles...
And so on and so forth. What would normally be considered negative connotations could actually be used to attempt a different approach. It was really liberating.
[Q] How did you come to collaborate with the Date Famers?
[A] The idea of our collaboration with the Date Farmers I believe came from Syd Garon and Sam Spiegel, who chose the pairings of artists and directors for each of the tracks on the NASA album.
I am not quite sure what criteria was used to make the pairings. Maybe they thought we had some similarity in our work, or maybe it was just the opposite. Or maybe it was a random juxtaposition. We didn't get to pick the music track from the album either. I guess the whole thing was conceptualized as a bit of an exquisite corpse. In any case, I am quite pleased with the way it all worked out.
I recently saw the Date Farmers work at a group show and it really stood out. It has freshness and immediacy that makes it instantly recognizable as theirs, despite the fact that a lot of it is based on found or appropriated imagery. They seem to have found a magic formula.
[Q] Did you all work in the same space at any time, or was the collaboration virtual?
Photo (courtesy Flux): Left, Alexei Tylevich of Logan; Right, Carlos Ramirez and Armando Lerma, aka The Date Farmers.
The camera movements had to be repetitive and mechanical to illicit the sense of anxiety and paranoia. I wanted it to have a Q*bert feel with a bit of "Street of Crocodiles" mixed in, a video game with a stop-motion feel which seemed right for the track. The subtitles where designed to be part of the stimulation overload... like watching Santo movies on VHS late at night.
Source: Boing Boing | 10 Jun 2009 | 2:23 am
It was bound to happen eventually: the recovery tool used by, presumably, Palm and Sprint employees to breathe life into dead Pres has leaked onto the internets — I’m thinking maybe some techno-Robin Hood did it and jacked a copy of Snow Leopard on the way. Included with the tool is a full root copy of webOS. Inconceivable!
While this doesn’t mean anything for the lay Pre-user at the moment, it does mean that enterprising developers can start rifling through Palm’s code and perhaps finding unfinished or locked features (what Java VM?). Pretty soon I expect that you’ll be seeing hacked ROMs to flash with enabling buggy and weird apps, interface items, and so on.
You can download it if you want, but at the moment there’s very little you can do with it unless you’re an experienced coder… you know, like me. I’m super experienced.
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Japanese photographer/hacker has put together an interesting camera hack, essentially pairing a regular SLR lens with an enormous digital back: a flatbed scanner. The scanning head moves across the exposure area, as far as i can tell, and gets the correct exposure, which much have been a pain to work out. Like many other mega-cameras, the exposure takes a long time to finish (though for a different reason than usual), so you won’t be getting any action shots with this thing.
I’d like to see what a populated picture looks like with this thing, though. It’s not clear how the scanner head works its way through the picture, so depending on that you’d have people cut in half, bits of the background obscured or in shadow, etc. Could be pretty freaky. What am I talking about, you can see some pictures like that here at his Flickr page. It’s mostly still stuff, unsurprisingly, but you can see on this one what happens when there’s jitter. The full resolution one here also has some discussion of the scanner’s sensor.
Some of these pictures are quite good… there’s some quality to them I just can’t place.
[via Bouncing Red Ball and Hack a day]
It’s hard to remember a time not long ago when Web browsing required sitting in one place and using a computer plugged into a cable. Now, people expect to hop online whenever they want from wherever they want using wireless Internet connections. But it isn’t always easy. Mobile devices lose their capabilities when the carrier’s signal drops out; laptop users struggle to find a public Wi-Fi network that will work; and the Wi-Fi networks that are available get slowed down by overcrowding.
Why not bring your own Wi-Fi? I’m not talking about stuffing a cumbersome router and cables into a backpack with hopes of setting up shop wherever you go. I’m referring to a new product called MiFi. It is what it sounds like: a private Wi-Fi network for you. It’s a one-button gadget that measures about the surface size of an Altoids tin, only thinner and lighter.
This week, while I was traveling, I used Verizon Wireless’s MiFi 2200, made for the phone carrier by Novatel Wireless. The MiFi brings in the Internet using Verizon’s 3G network and creates a Wi-Fi zone that can be reached from up to 50 feet away, even through thick hotel walls. Its connection can be used by up to five devices at once. At one point, I had a Lenovo ThinkPad, Apple MacBook, iPhone, Palm Pre and iPod Touch simultaneously using the Web via the MiFi’s connection. Although video playback stuttered under these busy conditions, other tasks did well. And with just three devices using the connection at once, the connection worked normally.
The luxury of MiFi doesn’t come cheap. The device itself costs $100 with a two-year service agreement and after a $50 rebate. Two monthly plan options are available: $40 buys 250 megabytes with a charge of 10 cents per megabyte over that allotment; and $60 buys five gigabytes with a five-cent charge per megabyte of overage. Users who don’t want to mess with the monthly service plan can buy the device at its full retail price of $400 and pay $15 per 24-hour access period, which is called a Verizon Wireless Mobile Broadband DayPass.
Of course, you already can get online over cellphone networks for similar monthly fees and at similar speeds, with external or internal laptop cards that usually cost less upfront. So why would anyone want or need MiFi? The answer is that it serves multiple devices at once, without requiring you to buy multiple cards or pay a separate fee for each.
I can imagine plenty of scenarios where the MiFi would come in handy, including colleagues traveling together, college students studying together with laptops on a campus lawn and families riding in a car with multiple laptops and/or portable game devices. In my trip alone, I used my MiFi and avoided paying for wireless Internet fees in the airport and four days of my hotel’s expensive in-room Internet charges. As long as there’s a Verizon network in the area, the MiFi will work.
Last week, Sprint Nextel entered the MiFi fray by offering its own MiFi 2200, also from Novatel Wireless. Like Verizon’s MiFi, Sprint’s costs $100 after a rebate and with a two-year contract. While Verizon offers all-data plans, Sprint offers a monthly plan of broadband-only for $60 as well as a $150 monthly Simply Everything Plan + Mobile Broadband for data and phone use. Both of these plans include five gigabytes a month with a five-cents-a-megabyte charge for overage. Sprint’s device isn’t available with pay-as-you-go options, like Verizon’s MiFi. Unlike Verizon’s MiFi, the Sprint device has built-in GPS.
The Verizon MiFi looks unassuming. It weighs just over two ounces, so it really could be held unnoticed in a pocket. In fact, it’s so small, you could easily misplace it. Its glossy black exterior is interrupted only by a Verizon Wireless logo and a power button, which changes colors to indicate different things, like red for low battery and blue for when it’s on. A separate indicator light blinks green when the MiFi is transmitting or receiving data. The MiFi runs on a rechargeable lithium-ion battery; spare batteries cost $40. Its battery charges when MiFi plugs into a Windows PC or Mac using a USB cable or plugs into a wall adapter.
After the initial registration of the MiFi device, which happens the first time you plug it into a Mac or Windows PC and takes just five minutes, the device is set to work without any wires simply by pressing its power button on. The personal Wi-Fi network shows up in a list of available networks on your device and requires a password, which is written on the back of each MiFi. Users can change this password to something more memorable by adjusting wireless security settings in a browser menu.
Verizon estimates that if just one device is tapped into a fully charged MiFi, the tiny gadget’s battery will last for about four hours, and this was the case in my tests. The battery is designed to last 40 hours in standby, a plus for busy travelers who might not think to charge the MiFi each night.
Even when two laptops and a Palm Pre were connected to the MiFi, speed tests showed positive results of about 1.4 megabytes per second for downloads and roughly 500 kilobits per second for uploads. Verizon says its device uses something called NovaSpeed, which enhances upload and download performance.
The MiFi offers reliable Web access for you and the four lucky souls who are sitting near you, if you’re feeling generous. Its ease of use — take out, turn on, start surfing the Web — means there aren’t any excuses for not hopping online from anywhere at any time. And it comes just in time for those summer vacations that were meant to let you get away from it all.
Edited By Walter S. Mossberg
 All Things D Blogs | Google book deal faces growing scrutiny Financial Times By Richard Waters in San Francisco Google confirmed on Tuesday that it has come under the scrutiny of both the Department of Justice and a number of state attorneys general over a proposed deal with book publishers to put millions of books online. Reports: DOJ steps up Google Books settlement probe Justice Department extends Google probe |
The American Journal of Preventative Medicine, in a release that is sure to get onto daytime television news and talk shows for the rest of the month, published a study that found that computer-related injuries are on the rise. But these are not the traditional carpal tunnel/too much frozen yogurt problems. It seems people, mostly kids, are tripping, falling over gear, and getting smashed with monitors more than ever before.
According to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database, over 78,000 cases of acute computer-related injuries were treated in U.S. emergency departments from 1994 through 2006. Approximately 93% of injuries occurred at home. The number of acute computer-related injuries increased by 732% over the 13-year study period, which is more than double the increase in household computer ownership (309%).
The most common injuries are falling over computers while monitor-based injuries are down thanks to LCD monitors - they’re easier to lift and won’t smash you as much.
Young children particularly at risk
San Diego, CA, June 9, 2009 – While back pain, blurred vision and mouse-related injuries are now well-documented hazards of long-term computer use, the number of acute injuries connected to computers is rising rapidly. According to a study published in the July 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers from the Center for Injury Research and Policy and The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital; and The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Columbus have found a more-than-sevenfold increase in computer-related injuries due to tripping over computer equipment, head injuries due to computer monitor falls and other physical incidents.
According to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database, over 78,000 cases of acute computer-related injuries were treated in U.S. emergency departments from 1994 through 2006. Approximately 93% of injuries occurred at home. The number of acute computer-related injuries increased by 732% over the 13-year study period, which is more than double the increase in household computer ownership (309%).
Injury mechanisms included hitting against or catching on computer equipment; tripping or falling over computer equipment; computer equipment falling on top of the patient; and the straining of muscles or joints. The computer part most often associated with injuries was the monitor. The percentage of monitor-related cases increased significantly, from 11.6% in 1994 to a peak of 37.1% in 2003. By 2006, it had decreased to 25.1%. The decrease since 2003 corresponds to the replacement of heavier cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors with smaller and easier-to-lift liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors.
Children aged <5 years had the highest injury rate of all age groups. The most common cause of injury was tripping or falling by patients aged <5 years (43.4%) and ≥60 years (37.7%) and hitting or getting caught on computer equipment for individuals of all other ages (36.9% of all cases). While injuries to the extremities were most common (57.4%), children aged <10 years most often had injuries to the head (75.8% for those aged <5 years and 61.8% for those aged 5 years).
According to Lara B. McKenzie, PhD, MA, Nationwide Children's Hospital Center for Injury Research and Policy, Columbus, "Future research on acute computer-related injuries is needed as this ubiquitous product becomes more intertwined in our everyday lives. More information is needed on the types of computers and equipment used, the layout of these systems, and the furniture utilized in order to develop household-safety practices in this area…Given the large increase in acute computer-related injuries over the study period, greater efforts are needed to prevent such injuries, especially among young children."
Seriously: did your kids or you ever get smashed by a monitor?
R. Crumb's upcoming "The Book of Genesis" was excerpted in The New Yorker this week. It looks amazing.
At first, he thought about doing a take-off of the story of Adam and Eve, and then a friend suggested he do the whole of Genesis. Crumb accepted the challenge, but the text seemed to him so bizarre that he quickly realized he couldn't sustain a satirical approach. He resolved to use the words of the Bible unabridged: "I did it as a straight illustration job."
Pre-order R. Crumb's Book of Genesis on Amazon.
UPDATE: You can see a poor-quality scan of the excerpt here.
R. Crumb's Book of Genesis excerpted in The New Yorker
Source: Boing Boing | 10 Jun 2009 | 1:22 am
The development house Big In Japan has just rolled out its 3.5 update to its ShopSavvy Android app. ShopSavvy is the useful app that allows you to use an Android phone’s camera to scan barcodes and get pricing information. More importantly, it allows you to compare prices of that item to prices on the web, where you’ll many times find a better deal. This new update which the team calls “Rodan” offers 1,000 new retailers and 750,000 new products, is better optimized for battery life and is much faster, I’m told.
ShopSavvy, which was one of the original Google Android Challenge winners when it was still known as GoCart, launched with the Android platform last October and has been one of the most popular applications on the device since then. The company claims it now can compare over 20 million products at over 22,000 retailers.
Here are the full list of enhancements the company is claiming with this release:
* More than 1,000 additional participating retailers
* More than 750,000 additional scannable products
* Faster barcode scanning
* Faster, more accurate product search
* Faster load times
* Faster animations
* WiFi and GPS setting retention
* Notification of whether or not an item is in stock or out of stock
* Improved battery life
* Optional registration
* Option to search by title if product is not found
* Google Product Search integration
* Ability to visit retailer Web sites inside or outside ShopSavvy
* Additional polish to user interface
The company has yet to launch an iPhone version of ShopSavvy, a lot of that had to do with the iPhone’s current junky camera that can’t do things like auto-focus. But as we all learned yesterday, that’s about to change. And Big In Japan has been working on an iPhone version for some time.
The concept of using a mobile device to scan barcodes is an interesting one. Others apps in this space have since risen up, and pretty much anyone make their own simple barcode scanner using the Android Scripting Environment. The other day we covered Googler Matt Cutts using a barcode scanner to scan books into the Google Book Search database, but a couple days later, he and some fellow Googlers actually came up with a way to do the same thing with the Android phone.
You can find the new version of ShopSavvy in the Android Market, or download it directly here.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, was in New York City today and dropped by my office to talk about Firefox 3.5, which is now officially a “preview” version (a very stable beta). Firefox 3.5 is supposedly much faster than earlier versions, which is always a good thing. Honestly, the nanosecond speed differences between most of today’s latest browsers is becoming hard to detect. Three features of Firefox 3.5 which stand out for me are: 1) its embrace of open-source video standards, 2) its geo-location capabilities, and 3) support for downloadable fonts and other graphic tricks.
In the video above, Beltzner demos some of the new video and graphics capabilities of Firefox 3.5. Built into the browser is a video player based on the open-source video formats Ogg Vorbis and Theora. The video player supports HTML5, which means that links and other interactive elements can easily be placed inside videos. The demo page Beltzner shows in the video can be found here (but the effects only work if you are looking at it in Firefox 3.5). Being able to treat the content inside videos like Web pages opens up a whole new world of possibilities for Web video. Already, DailyMotion offers all of its videos in the Ogg Theora format. If this takes off, Flash video could be come history.
Look closely at what Beltzner is showing off in the video, because you can’t do any of that with Flash.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 DailyTech | Five of my favorite things about the Palm Pre CNET News by Bonnie Cha On Monday, I asked readers to tell me about their experience with the Palm Pre, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Video: Apple unveils newest US iPhone Palm Pre's inner iPhone revealed |
John Gallone shared this story with me and kindly gave me permission to post it on Boing Boing. He writes:
The beaches of the Pacific Northwest are loaded with interesting finds.From glass floats that have drifted from Japan to carcasses of sea life that defy the imagination but one of the items I have been searching for for years has been an eagle feather. Yesterday during a beach hike near my home I found a large wing feather from a mature bald eagle.
Now, not only is the bird a thing of beauty in itself but its feathers are beautifully constructed with ample size and a thick quill.
When proving Galileo’s theory of gravitational pull in a vacuum it was an eagle feather, which Neil Armstong used on the first moon landing. The landing probe was called the Eagle, remember “The eagle has landed” ?
These items are very highly prized among Native Americans and in fact they are the only people allowed to posses an eagle feather and even they must have certification of tribal membership and the appropriate registration license to acquire one legally. And there is the rub... or a mere pale-face such as myself, possession of even one feather brings a fine of $100,000 and a jail sentence.
The law: “Anyone who possesses an eagle feather, and doesn't meet the requirements, could face fines up to $100,000 and a year in prison. A second offense is upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony, and carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The act also provides for a civil penalty of up to $5,000.”
I returned my incredible find to the beach... all I have are these photos.
Take only pictures; leave only footprints indeed...
This cool system uses an Arduino board and home wiring to turn your local home telephone network into an intercom. When you take the phone off the hook it disconnects from the phone line and rings all of the phones with a different cadence. When you pick up the phone you get an open line so you can talk with loved ones and burglars who have broken in anywhere in the house.
The plans are amazingly complete and it could be a fun home project although it looks like it could take a while, especially if you electrocute yourself while wiring everything up.
More information on the Arduino board is here.
As a longtime fan of the Tiger Woods series of golf games from EA Sports, I was quite disappointed with last year’s effort. You can read the review and yell at me if you’re so inclined, but I stand by the review. I took issue with what I called an “atrocious” putting system, the lack of realistic motion sensing for half and three-quarter approach shots, and really bad voice commentary from Kelly Tilghman and Sam Torrance.
Thankfully, this year’s version of Tiger is already lightyears beyond last year’s.
For starters, the putting system is outstanding. You get one putt preview (on the middle skill level, no putt preview on the advanced level) and then you make a putting motion just like you would in real life. It works… it really, really works. Approach shots work well now too — pull the club back half way, and you hit a 50% shot. Pull it back 3/4 and you hit the ball 75% — the MotionPlus add-on really takes everything to the next level this time.
Graphics and sound are about the same. There are actual people in the crowd this year, which is nice, but player models and course renderings look only slightly improved. It’s nothing jawdropping, though. We’ve also hit a nice compromise with the commentary: it’s now Kelly Tilghman and ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt. I’ll take it, it’s not bad at all.
Check out the above video for a look at some of the gameplay. I’ll have a full review up once I dig into everything a bit more. So far so good, though.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Today, WD announced the My Book Studio Edition II in a 4TB variety. The RAID 0 configurable dual-drive storage system works with Apple’s Time Machine and has four interfaces: eSATA, FireWire 800/400 and USB 2.0. WD is touting the 4TB behemoth as an eco-friendly product because of the GreenPower drives.
The 4TB My Book Studio Edition II retails for $650 and comes with a five-year warranty.
My Book Studio Edition II [Product Page]
We the people of CrunchGear would like confirm a quick, informal meet-up today at 7pm at the View Lounge at the San Francisco Marriott. The meet-up will include drinking, talking about the iPhone 3G S, and the fondling of the Palm Pre, allowing you, the reading public, to try the cellphone of the moment before the next cellphone of the moment comes out.
Special thanks to BrightKite and PageOnce for sponsoring the event.
Is it just me, or is that cube that comes up at about the minute mark totally ridiculous? Supposedly this UI feature will be in the Omnia II and possibly other Samsung WinMo handsets, but I'm really not feeling the magic.
Check the video through that link thar.
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Gadgets / Other, GPS/Navigation
Wow, I’m actually pretty surprised Navigon announced a new app for the iPhone today. I thought TomTom would be the only major GPS company that would create an app for the iPhone’s new 3.0 software. Navigon officially announced today about a new app, called MobileNavigator, that will make its way to the app store later this month.
In an attempt to explore a new market for GPS software, and possibly to compete with their rival, TomTom, the new MobileNavigator app boasts many cool, typical Navigon features. For example, it sports Reality View Pro, Real Roadsign Pro, Lane Assistant Pro, Speed Assistant, Day & Night Mode, POI information, “updated map material and intelligent navigation,” as well as a few other undisclosed features.
You know how when you turn the iPhone 90 degrees, the orientation changes from portrait to landscape? Well the GPS app will also change based on your iPhone orientation for your viewing comfort. It is set to work “seamlessly” with the iPhone, in the sense it can navigate to an address saved in a contact, as well as stop when a call coming in, and then immediately resume after the call has ended. It would definitely be a pain if after every phone call, the GPS resets itself and has to start from the beginning.
As I previously mentioned, MobileNavigator will be made available later in June, presumably after the 3.0 software has been pushed out to all iPhones. In addition, Navigon is going to offer two versions of the app, one will be a LITE, free version, and the other will cost money. The LITE version comes with the core features but lacks active route guidance. Meanwhile, the paid version comes with all the features listed above. It will definitely be interesting to see how the Navigon app compares to the TomTom app and which of the two will prove to be more popular amongst the public.
Back in March, you may remember that I contacted Garmin, TomTom, and Navigon to see if they had anything doing with the iPhone. At the time, I thought Navigon would be most likely to create an app for the iPhone, as they specifically said, “We would put the IPhone into the category of ‘potential opportunity.” Hey, who knows, maybe Garmin will come out with their own app for the iPhone also.
Via [Navigon Press Release]
Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
AFP - Research released Tuesday indicates that US parents are rearing a young gadget generation that is at home with smartphones, laptop computers, and videogame consoles.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Reuters - Microsoft Corp issued software to fix a record 31 security flaws in its programs, and Adobe Systems Inc warned that glitches in its products could let hackers take control of a user's PC.
(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube || Warning: NC-17, cartoon-cholo ultraviolence)
Boing Boing Video proudly presents the world-premiere of a third video, above, from the N.A.S.A. music project (here was our first, here's the second) -- "A Volta," featuring Sizzla, Amanda Blank & Love Foxxx.
Video by Logan, with art by The Date Farmers.
NASA, short for "North America South America," is a music collaboration project assembled by Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel, brother of film director Spike Jonze) and DJ Zegon (Ze Gonzales, professional skateboarder).
Buy the album, The Spirit of Apollo, here.
More than 40 music artists are featured, including David Byrne, Kanye West, Ghostface Killah, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O and Nick Zinner, M.I.A., Santogold, E-40, Tom Waits and Kool Keith. Music videos for the project involve a similarly diverse team-up of visual artists and directors.
Logan, the folks who directed the video for this track, create TV commercials and music videos, content for video games, and experiment with animation and visual effects. We caught up with Alexei Tylevich of Logan for a conversation about how this unusual music video -- kinda like GTA: Juarez -- came together with the Date Farmers.
The text of our interview follows (+ more after the jump).
Video #2, embedded below (Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube): Logan's mockumentary web-film about the making of this NASA video.
[Q] XENI JARDIN / BOING BOING VIDEO: When I was struggling to explain your "A Volta" video to others, I found myself referring to it as an "8-bit narco nightmare." What's the story we're seeing here?
[A] ALEXEI TYLEVICH / LOGAN: I hope that the "narrative" is not taken too seriously. It wasn't meant to be a great "story" but just another structural device to keep the viewer occupied. It's a music track with a "plot" thinly stretched over it. I thought it might be clever to turn this video into a mini-film with a semblance of a plot. A plot that has the same level of strategically naive incompetence and misdirected energy that is implied in the work of Date Farmers.
At first there was no plot, just a setting: an isometric metropolis inhabited by deranged inhabitants, full of senseless violence and anarchy. Then it sort of evolved into a semblance of a story. We started imagining what these characters could do and the plot sort of developed on its own, little by little.
[Q] Can you walk us through the creative process behind this video? A collaboration between Logan and the Date Farmers, but -- how did these characters morph into digital form, what came first, the music or the story or the look and feel... how did it all unfold, who did what?
[A] It began with looking at the Date Farmers' work, and trying to figure out a way to bring it to life that would not fight against their aesthetic. It's always hard to adopt an accomplished visual style from a static medium without compromising it.
Their world is devoid of perspective, decidedly two-dimensional. Their visual vocabulary is a mix of pop culture references and cholo folklore, a violent combination of corporate iconography, found objects and jail tattoos. The smelly back alley of our collective subconscious soaked in pop culture detritus. It's pretty disturbing, but somehow endearing at the same time. They don't seem to be taking themselves too seriously.
Besides paintings and collages, they make these robots out of scrap materials. There's a whole series of them. The lineup in its entirety is like a medieval bestiary.
Video #3, above (Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube): A soft rock introduction to the Coachella Valley, CA-based art duo of Carlos Ramirez and Armando Lerma, better known as the Date Farmers .
(Interview continues after the jump...)
What is the cinematic equivalent of the Date Farmers' pictorial universe? A blunt storyline, trite genre referencing and Scarface quotations. Compulsive borrowing and regurgitation of pre-existing elements. Lack of any sort of narrative syntax and the overall "flatness". "Poor acting" on the part of the characters that have no range and no faces. Canned robotic voice-over. A patchwork of elements and layers that make up a saturated cacophonous experience of visuals, music, plot, voiceover and subtitles...
And so on and so forth. What would normally be considered negative connotations could actually be used to attempt a different approach. It was really liberating.
[Q] How did you come to collaborate with the Date Famers?
[A] The idea of our collaboration with the Date Farmers I believe came from Syd Garon and Sam Spiegel, who chose the pairings of artists and directors for each of the tracks on the NASA album.
I am not quite sure what criteria was used to make the pairings. Maybe they thought we had some similarity in our work, or maybe it was just the opposite. Or maybe it was a random juxtaposition. We didn't get to pick the music track from the album either. I guess the whole thing was conceptualized as a bit of an exquisite corpse. In any case, I am quite pleased with the way it all worked out.
I recently saw the Date Farmers work at a group show and it really stood out. It has freshness and immediacy that makes it instantly recognizable as theirs, despite the fact that a lot of it is based on found or appropriated imagery. They seem to have found a magic formula.
[Q] Did you all work in the same space at any time, or was the collaboration virtual?
Photo (courtesy Flux): Left, Alexei Tylevich of Logan; Right, Carlos Ramirez and Armando Lerma, aka The Date Farmers.
The camera movements had to be repetitive and mechanical to illicit the sense of anxiety and paranoia. I wanted it to have a Q*bert feel with a bit of "Street of Crocodiles" mixed in, a video game with a stop-motion feel which seemed right for the track. The subtitles where designed to be part of the stimulation overload... like watching Santo movies on VHS late at night.
(Special thanks to Susan Applegate and Syd Garon)
A hot area of development right now is in the field of desktop Twitter clients. Some like Tweetie, are Twitter-only, while others like Seesmic Desktop, handle a few different services with a focus on Twitter. The area is apparently so hot that Google is now even getting involved.
While technically, its Google Quick Search Box (QSB) is a Mac desktop application meant to make searching the web and your desktop a breeze, you’ll notice that it comes with exactly one additional account type (beyond Google) built in: Twitter. Yes, aside from typing queries into the QSB and getting results, you can also use it as a Twitter status updater.
Google isn’t the first of the big boys to get involved with Twitter on the desktop side of things, Yahoo recently launched Sideline, which is a much more full-fledged client. Unfortunately, QSB doesn’t allow you to see your Twitter follower stream, it just allows you to update your status right now.
There is a Quick Search Box built-in to the Windows version of Google Desktop as well, but to the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t promote this Twitter functionality in the same way, if it offers it at all.
Actually tweeting from QSB it is a bit tricky at first, so I’ll copy Google’s directions below:
It’s a pretty quick way to tweet something, actually. And it does a very nice job for searches as well, obviously. But one thing it doesn’t do that would make perfect sense, is search Twitter. Come on Google, get on that. What I want to know is, does anyone still really believe that Google has no interest in Twitter?
As many commenters are noting, this can basically replace Quicksilver for the Mac, and shares one of the same developers.
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Despite the avalanche of mobile apps that let people access local information, the mobile browser is still the king when it comes to finding out what’s going on in your city or neighborhood. People across the board are using their mobile phones to look up local info. ComScore reported today that the number of people in the U.S. who sought local content on mobile devices grew 51 percent from March 2008 to March 2009. The report also shows that the mobile browser is the most popular way consumers find local information, with 20.7 million browser users in March 2009, up 34 percent versus a year ago. Only about half as many people (11.3 million) use downloaded apps to find local data.
But downloaded apps did exhibit the strongest growth, up 83 percent versus a year ago. I’m sure the growth of the iPhone had something to do with that. What’s interesting is that despite the popularity of local content apps like those from Yelp and CitySearch, apps still remain the least popular method for mobile access of local information, with 11.3 million users in March. ComScore says that slightly more consumers use SMS for obtaining local information (11.7 million users) than apps, but the browser is still by far the most popular way for consumers to find info on local restaurants, bars, businesses and more.
Drilling down into the local content categories, the number of people accessing online directories has seen the greatest increase during the past year (73 %), followed by restaurants (70 %), maps (63 %) and movies (60%).
(Photo credit: Flickr/kballard).
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Section: Computers, Security, Features, Originals
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We’ve all gotten them - official looking emails that look like they are from Paypal, eBay, our bank, or credit card company. They usually say there is a problem with our account or something needs updating and to please click the convenient link provided and log in. Dire consequences such as suspension or deletion are mentioned if the request is not complied with. So do you do it? The scammer who sent it to you sure hopes so, because it’s fake and designed to steal your information and your money. Welcome to phishing!
Phishing gets its name from an old hacker magazine called 2600 and it does just that - it fishes for info. The first phishing scams were on AOL back in the 90s. Scammers posing as AOL employees would send emails or IMs to members saying their account needed to be verified and asking for their passwords. They would then use the stolen accounts to send spam. Later phishing became more sophisticated and went after sensitive information such as credit card numbers and banking info.
Today most phishing attacks are conducted via botnets such as Waledec and reach millions. Even if only a small percentage falls for the scam, the gangs behind the botnets make money. Sometimes the stolen information is used to clean out bank accounts and run up huge charges on credit cards. Some gangs use the stolen numbers to make fake credit cards and commit identity theft. Others make their profits by selling the information they steal. There are whole black hat communities that thrive on the buying and selling of stolen information.
Here’s how a common phishing attack works. You get an email that looks like it came from a company you do business with such as Paypal, eBay, or your bank. It tells you something like you credit card on file is expired, your account needs to be verified because of suspicious activity, etc.
A link is provided and clicking on it takes you to what looks like the company’s site, but it’s actually a fake one set up by the scammers. When you log in your username and password are instantly sent to the scammer’s database. Often times malware will be silently installed in the background. Common types include keyloggers, which record every single thing you type and sends it to the scammers, and Trojans, which can do everything from scan your computer for specific kinds of information to adding it to a botnet, and rootkits, which allow the scammer to have complete control over your computer through a “back door” it creates.
How do you protect yourself? Here are some tips.
Phishers are hoping to exploit people’s lack of common sense, so use yours and stay safe!
Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
The possibilities there are huge. They could certainly do object recognition - a game could not only model and mimic you, but could know when you pick up a cup or soda can. At a most basic level, in social networking environments you could have an avatar truly do what you're doing including munching on chips exactly as you do or taking a sip of beer or whatever. At a more advanced level, you could build object recognition into games - literally take a sip of water or whatever you have around (or mime it with an empty cup) to drink a health potion. With that kind of notion as a starting point, imagine what they could do with recognizing other objects. Imagine the real-world and marketing implications of recognizing specific products. Get a bigger energy boost from drinking a Mountain Dew!I'm a believer. Even if the gameplay implications end up being Wii-grade—amusing, joyful, occasionally engrossing but typically lacking any verisimilitude of real behavior—the ability to to control media playback with simple gestures and voice controls is going to be a big deal. The first time someone flips through a list of Netflix streaming with their hand all the neighbors will be buying Xboxes.
For our routine late morning walk today and at a neighborhood BBQ on Saturday, I put Uncle Milton's Pet's Eye View cameras on Ruby and Malcolm's collars. They're lightweight, mini cameras that clip onto collars and snap 640x480 photos at 1, 5 or 15 minute intervals. I set them on 1 minute intervals, and we were off!
Photo: Ruby Keilana
The above is Ruby's photo stream. Most of the pics were blurry shots of the grass or of my legs, but she took several solid nature photos. I especially love the one of the gravel &mdash nice, isn't it? The shot of Malcolm's butt is lovely too. The camera only stores a maximum of 40 photos for up to 5-6 hours &mdash after that, the 8MB SDRAM internal memory erases itself and you lose everything. Most of the pics ended up pretty blurry, which made me wonder why this thing doesn't have motion sensors or at least some kind of basic blur reduction mechanism.
Photo: Malcolm Keilana
Malcolm took a lot of pictures of my legs &mdash he must have wanted cookies from my treat bag. I expected to see a lot more of other dog's butts, or maybe even their faces because he likes to sniff muzzles, but one major flaw of this cam is that it takes pictures not necessarily of what he sees, but what his neck is pointing to. Also, the camera just takes pics randomly every minute, so it's likely they're either sleeping or running around &mdash neither of which yield quality photo opps. These were the best six shots out of two rolls of 40 each.
These cameras are $40 apiece &mdash it's super low tech and doesn't take great photos, but could be a fine gift for crazy dog moms and dads, maybe.
Product page [Uncle Milton]
This post is part of a Theme Day: BBG on Dogs.
Man's best friend just got even better! A dog you don't have to walk or feed, and you control its every move!
Runs on 4 C batteries and 1 9V. Only $200 from the Electronic Eclectic Company.
Or you could go 21st Century with HPI's G-Dog, a $700 mutt that runs on a 7.2V Ni-MH and can do a break dancer's headstand (00:20!):
This post is part of a Theme Day: BBG on Dogs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Alexx Henry Photography used Red One cameras to make "living movie posters", essentially trying to replicate the look of a one-sheet photograph but using video. I don't know if this is a promo for the Red One, but it's technical enough that it's actually really interesting. If nothing else, think of it as advertising that will inoculate against other advertising!
Is it just me, or is that cube that comes up at about the minute mark totally ridiculous? Supposedly this UI feature will be in the Omnia II and possibly other Samsung WinMo handsets, but I’m really not feeling the magic. The gallery was pretty nice, though. I liked the visual indicator for zoom.
[Mobile Port via Phone Arena]
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My pug Gus is a lazy sack. No disrespect, but it's true. Which is why I'm not at all opposed to putting him to work and/or keeping more rigorous tabs on his extreme indolence so that I can hold it over his head.
Enter the SNIF system, an accelerometer built into an RFID tag that logs and transmits motion data to an Ethernet base station that plugs into your router. In addition to streaming real-time, online status updates (sleeping, sitting, walking, etc.), the SNIF web site creates a browse-able history of your pets activity or, in Gus' case, inactivity.
Check out my pug's data, and observations after the jump...
This post is part of a Theme Day: BBG on Dogs.
Quantifying your life, a variety of health data points, experiences, food consumed, etc. makes sense. But doing it on behalf of your dog? Well, I just don't know.
The SNIF Tag system is simple to set up, easy to use, and $150, which is about as expensive as a no-frills, wristwatch heart rate monitor you could use to track your own activity level. However, what's important to realize, is the SNIF doesn't actually provide any hard and fast health data. It doesn't measure calories burned or heart rate or even GSR.
So what does it track?
"Average Power Correlate" (APC), which the company claims is a "correlation based on empirical measurement." In other words, a relative measure of the amount of energy that accumulates in the tag's accelerometer. Thus, the charted numbers themselves are rather meaningless, which was a bummer in that I was unable to make any comparison(s) to my own level of fitness, distance traveled, etc.
Still, the visual cues are interesting and do provide a clear picture.
Days can be broken down by the hour:
Then into 5-minute chunks:
Potentially helpful if you have a sick animal (sad!) and want to determine whether he/she consistently loses energy after meals &mdash or anytime you're not home. You can also call up historical data and "Compare" your dog to other animals registered for SNIF, including by breed, zip code, and general classification (Gus is a "Toy"):
Of course, this data is potentially meaningless for a variety of reasons, least of which is the fact the data are only as good as the people submitting it. If I forget to put the tag on until after Gus' morning walk, or neglect to charge the battery every night, then I'm submitting only a portion of his actual activity, which skews the results others might be comparing their animals to.
It's also worth considering the Hawthorne Effect, which suggests people don't behave naturally in situations where they know they're being monitored. Hence, some SNIF users might be taking their dogs on longer or more frequent walks than normal. And that, right there, seems to be about the only real reason I could see someone buying this device. It's a reminder to take care of your dog, to dedicate extra time and energy towards his/her health.
The real-time monitoring &mdash perhaps by virtue of the fact Gus isn't a sporty little pugger &mdash was fun at first, but got old real quick:
From a technical perspective, too, the system could be improved. I really wish the base station was wireless. Having to plug directly into my router was a pain in the ass &mdash and if I wanted to upload data via USB (instead of wirelessly via the tag, which only works up to 50 ft.*), I would've had to lug my laptop across the room to the router. It's worth noting this was a non-issue for me, because the SNIF USB software isn't yet Mac-compatible (another complaint).
Lastly, SNIF offers all the familiar social networking tools and features: friend invites/accepts, messaging, wall posts, etc. To be honest, I found these all useless. There simply isn't a critical mass of users:
One suggestion that could be kinda fun for some dog owners: Add in a customizable status update a la Critter. SNIF could let you program in a range of phrases for specific APCs, and then broadcast those 140-character messages to your mobile: "Dad, I'm totally bored right now," "Your socks are delicious!", "Am I kidding about the socks? Guess you'll have to come home to find out, dude!"
Then again, do I need or want to receive regular, sarcastic Tweets from my dog? ...probably not.
*you can purchase extra base stations for $75
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Zazzle.com has a collection of fun, geeky dog t-shirts. Ruby used to have a Fake Steve Jobs t-shirt, but I think she was too embarrassed to wear it.
(Thanks, Brannigan M!)
This post is part of a Theme Day: BBG on Dogs.
In a bid to attract more business users to the iPhone, Apple introduced several security enhancements on Monday for its popular handset. However, there are still a number of weaknesses that need addressing before the company can climb into the business market.
At its 26th Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple demonstrated an emergency feature that remotely erased an iPhone’s data in the event that the handset is lost or stolen. Additionally, a new tool called “Find My iPhone” will enable users to view the location of their lost or stolen iPhone on a map. Third, for the next-generation iPhone 3GS, Apple implemented encryption to prevent thieves from retrieving confidential, sensitive information.
While these new features do increase security, they still fall short of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, said Jonathan Zdziarski, forensics expert and author of the book iPhone Forensics: Recovering Evidence, Personal Data, and Corporate Assets.
“I don’t think some of the features were as big of a solution as Apple made them sound,” Zdziarski said. “The remote wipe is useful, but for someone who’s targeting an enterprise phone specifically, that remote wipe can only take place if the iPhone is on a network. If I steal someone’s phone and I have the goal of stealing information on that phone, the first thing I’m going to do is pop the SIM card out.”
Historically, Apple has aimed its products at consumers, and thus the popular iPhone has received criticism for its relatively lackadaisical security. In September, for example, Zdziarski revealed a security flaw in Cupertino’s wonder device: The handset snaps a cached screenshot of your most recent action whenever the Home button is pressed. A tech-savvy thief could potentially access a pilfered iPhone’s cache and see previously written text messages, password entries and so forth.
Despite this, Apple recently began heavily marketing the iPhone as a business device. A recent iPhone ad (above) demonstrates business apps available for the iPhone. Apple even launched an entire web page hoping to pitch the iPhone’s suitability in this area.
But as intriguing as business applications can be, the security of the iPhone still isn’t on par with BlackBerry smartphones, Zdziarski said. For remote-wiping on a BlackBerry, customers can opt for an emergency feature where their phone automatically erases all of its data if it’s been off the network for a set amount of time — think of it as the cellular equivalent of the nuclear option. Even if the SIM is removed, the phone would still wipe itself, Zdziarski said.
As for encryption for iPhone 3GS, security experts have yet to put the smartphone through any thorough testing. Thus, employees and business users eager for new iPhones should wait to see just what level of encryption has been deployed before putting in orders, he said.
“Any kind of encryption is an improvement … and Apple is heading in the right direction. But BlackBerry still has the upper hand in their technology,” Zdziarski said.
Nonetheless, Apple is just beginning to tap the business market with these new announcements. And tech strategist Mike Gartenberg says to expect Apple to shake up the OS space, as the company continues to roll our additional enterprise-centric features for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and future iPhones iterations.
“The OS wars have finally begun,” Gartenberg said. “Apple is very well positioned in the PC space for consumers, and we can expect Apple to begin its first major onslaught in the business market.”
See Also:
Photo: brandon shigeta/Flickr
FROM APPLETELL - The first major post-Macworld keynote shouldn’t have us hoping Gil Amelio will swoop in and save the day. But, if you’re a glutton for punishment, by all means, watch the video. Just understand that you’ve been warned.
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
From ISAZ Newsletter, Number 29 [pdf]:
Robotic Pets and Children: A Developmental StudyPhoto: vpassonGail F. Melson, Alan M. Beck, Peter Kahn, and Batya Friedman (University of Washington) All data has now been collected for our study of children across three age groups (7-8, 10-11, 13- 14 years) as they separately interact with a live specially trained dog and with a robotic dog (Sony's AIBO). The analysis is now underway and international presentations of the data are scheduled. Children aged 7-9 yrs. (n=26), 10-12 yrs. (n=24), and 13-15 yrs. (n=21), half boys, participated. After a 5-min. play session with AIBO, each child completed a 20-min. interview, with AIBO present and "on." The same play session and interview was conducted with "Canis," an Australian Shepherd. As part of the interview, each child was asked whether or not the target dog possessed biological properties, social companionship, and moral standing. Most dog type comparisons were significant.
For 23 of 25 questions, fewer children affirmed AIBO's (as compared to Canis') biology, psychology, companionship, or moral standing. However, more children endorsed punishing Canis (80%) than AIBO (51%) for breaking something expensive. Children unanimously affirmed Canis' biology, at least 70% of children affirmed all mental state and companionship questions about Canis, and at least 80% stated it was "not OK" to cause Canis harm (5 questions). However, over 50% of children also affirmed AIBO's mental states (4 of 6 questions), companionship (5 of 6 questions) and moral standing (6 of 7 questions). In summary, while children sharply distinguish living and robotic dogs, most children attribute psychological, companionship and moral standing (but not biology) to a robot dog, even after a brief exposure. Preliminary data were presented at the Tenth International Conference on Human- Animal Interactions, Glasgow, Scotland, October 8, 2004.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gus loves chew toys, carrots, spinach, dog treats, and he's especially fond of ice cubes (or "free treats" as my bro-in-law calls them). Since the pugger enjoys each of these independently, I figured freezing 'em all into one massive block of ice on a sunny Sunday afternoon would pretty much rock the little dude's world.
So did Gus finally figure out what to do with that thing?
Pics, video and details after the jump...
This post is part of a Theme Day: BBG on Dogs.
The short answer: yes.
The Kool Dogz kit is easy to assemble, fill, and use. It comes with a plastic bucket, three-prong stake and metal dish. You simply drop the provided bone-rod into the middle of the bucket, fill with water, and then add in whatever goodies your dog might enjoy.
After freezing the bucket overnight, I placed the stake in the backyard, flipped the bucket upside down on top of the metal plate, and waited a few minutes for the block to unfreeze from the plastic before removing.
From there, it was up to Gus. He is a lovable dude with no lack of loyalty or good looks. He is, however, not the sharpest little guy. After some prodding, though, he got licking...
As the ice melted, he enjoyed finding the carrots. Then I got bored. Then I forgot to check up on him. As you can see towards the tail end of the video, by the next morning, spinach shreds and two chew toys were left in a puddle of water.
Lesson learned: Gus mainly loves carrots.
So is this thing worth it? Maybe. You could easily freeze treats in your own bucket, then place the block on a trash can lid to keep the ice clean. Still, Kool Dogz sells their kit for $20, which is by no means unreasonable.
So, when the Kindle store was first introduced, the prices were a breath of fresh air: finally some reality in ebook pricing. In-print hardbacks were never more than $10.00. Paperbacks were deeply discounted from list price (30 to 60 percent or so). But since I've bought my Kindle, I've been dismayed to see the price rise steadily. Current hardbacks probably average $16 to $21 dollars, often more than the price Amazon sells the physical copy for. Paperbacks, the majority of books I'm interested in buying, have seen an even more extreme and nonsensical increase in price: the Kindle price is almost always more than the physical list price. Let me repeat that: MORE than the list price.
Section: Computers, Hardware, Laptops
Every product hitting the market tries for an angle to reach a target demographic. Someone to sell their stuff to. And HP really throws age distinction into the ring with their latest offering, the Artist Edition 2 Notebook PC.
The big angle on this one? Youth. It’s like they are selling us the Fountain of Youth although you probably shouldn’t attempt to put anything from this one in your mouth. They say it “was designed by the youth, for the youth.” I wonder though if the instruction book tells us what the age break-off is? Guessing I am too old to play?
It was designed by Hisako Sakihama (27 years old young by the way), and is supposedly inspired by the sights of sea and sky in Okinawa, Japan. The design is an award-winner too, it snagged first place in the HP MTV “Engine Room” Notebook Design Contest last year. The judges must have liked really bright, bordering on obnoxious. (Then again..I guess I’m not the target demographic).
They want the notebook to “inspire creativity.” To this goal, it offers intuitive software applications for working with music, video and photos. The big push is them wanting to make it fun?
So, what do they serve up to get you there? For the music, you’ve got Magix Music Maker 14. Corel is the application favorite on the Artist Edition 2, with VideoStudioX2 (used to make videos obviously), Painter Sketch Pad (to create digital art, etc.), and the classic Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 (for working with your photos).
What does it have under it’s pretty little hood? Well, option-wise, it gives you AMD Turion Processors with graphics from ATI. You also have a Blu-ray optical drive. You can pick either a 15.6 or 16-inch diagonal BrightView widescreen. It has an integrated microphone and web cam so the youth can keep chatting it up with their buddies. You can also pick to purchase some extras like a comfort mouse, a custom-fit sleeve, a Universal Notebook stand and a 12-cell battery.
How much will all this bright, creative fun run you? $950 for the package with the options added in, or you can get the scaled down version which doesn’t include the software bundle and graphics for $649. It will be available starting tomorrow, June 10th at the HP website.
Full Story » | Written by Jodie Andrefski for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Last year, the results of the New York CityRacks Design Competition were announced. The winner? Woking, in leafy Surrey, England. While New Yorkers get a fragile, ugly and hard-to-use steering-wheel-shaped rack, the rather prettier and much more functional Y-Rack (a losing entry in the contest) is being installed on English streets.
Just take a look at the picture and decide which you would be happier locking your ride to: The useless, circular rack that looks like a quick kick would snap it off at the root, or the handsome, thick y-shaped rack, a sturdy looking design that looks like it could even accommodate four bikes.
On a related note, I’m in NYC right now and I have been checking out the bikes. You guys need to learn to use a lock. Do you really think that locking a fixie to a railing using a single D-lock around the seat-stem is secure? If you do, you deserve to have your bike stolen. Just sayin’ is all.
Product page [Y-Stand via Core77]
CityRacks Design Competition [NYCityracks]
See Also:
Electronic book readers may be the future of publishing, but in one important respect, they’re still stuck in 1950: Almost every e-book reader on the market has a black-and-white display. Most can’t display more than a handful of different shades of gray.
That’s why display makers are racing to bring color to the world of e-books. Their goal is to make Gray’s Anatomy and its more than 1,200 full-color illustrations as interesting as the next Dan Brown novel.
The hitch is that color e-ink technologies aren’t anywhere near ready for prime time. Amazon chief Jeff Bezos recently told shareholders that a Kindle with a color screen is “multiple years” away.
“There’s no doubt color displays can offer much more compared to black and white, which is why we are working on it,” says Sri Peruvemba, vice president of marketing for E Ink. “And so far we have hit all the milestones that we had set for ourselves.” Last week E Ink was acquired by Taiwanese company Prime View International for $215 million.
E-book readers have become the hottest consumer products of the year. Since the first e-reader was introduced by Sony in 2006, and particularly since the introduction of Amazon.com’s popular Kindle in 2008, demand for e-readers has taken off. More than 1 million black-and-white displays have been sold so far, says E Ink, whose black-and-white displays power most of the e-readers on the market. And there are more than 15 e-reader models currently available or in the works.
With the exception of the Flepia, though, almost all e-readers are monochromatic. So what’s the technological holdup? To understand that, you first have to understand how E Ink’s black-and-white displays work. Electronic ink, pioneered by the company, is composed of millions of microcapsules. Each microcapsule has positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a positive electric field is applied, the black particles are attracted to the top and become visible to the user. That makes that area appear black. The reverse is also true: A negative electric field draws white particles to the top, making the area appear lighter. For an electronic display, the ink is printed on a sheet of plastic film, and a layer of circuitry is laminated to it to drive the ink.
For a color display, E Ink needs to put a color filter on top of its black-and-white display. A color filter usually has four sub-pixels — red, green, blue and white — that are combined to create each full-color pixel. That also means reduced brightness of display.
“With four sub-pixels, we get only a fourth of the area that we use today in the black-and-white displays. That means the resolution of the black and white display needs to get higher for the color filter to be effective,” says Peruvemba. A 6-inch E Ink black-and-white display has a SVGA resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. To put a color filter on top would require the underlying display to have almost double the existing resolution.
The color filters also block a large amount of light, making the displays look dull and washed out, says Young. “The challenge is to balance the color output of the filter with the amount of light blocked by it,” he says. The good news? When E Ink figures it out, its black-and-white displays will be better than ever, says Young.
E Ink says it is on track for large scale production of color displays at the end of next year. At the recent DisplayWeek conference in San Antonio, Texas, E Ink showed off prototypes of its color screen. Meanwhile, E Ink rival Kent Displays has already seen its color screen included in the Fujistu’s Flepia, the only color e-reader available today. The Flepia is for sale in Japan only.
Other contenders in the race for color e-reader displays include Pixel Qi, the startup founded by former One Laptop Per Child project CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, and Qualcomm. Qualcomm could improve its existing line of low power displays called Mirasol and introduce a color version next year.
There’s a caveat. E-readers with color displays can’t match up to the standards set by LCD and now OLED displays. “Color displays for e-readers doesn’t have anywhere the contrast ratio of LCDs or OLED,” says Barry Young, managing director of the OLED association. “For color electrophoretic displays, the contrast is down to about 20 to 1, while for LCDs it is in the 1,000s to 1 and for OLEDs is 10,000s to 1 range.”
“People don’t like color screens that are dark,” says Raj Apte, manager of prototype devices and circuits for PARC, formerly known as Xerox PARC, “and so far, the displays for e-readers we have seen lack the brightness that makes color screens attractive.”
E Ink’s rivals are facing their own challenges. Kent’s color screens are based on cholesteric LCDs (liquid cyrstals where the molecules are arranged with their axes parallel to each other in one layer and then are displaced a little for each following layer to give them a helix-like structure.) The advantage with cholesteric LCDs is that they consume much lower power than traditional LCDS and are bistable — which means they can retain their image even when the power is lost. These LCDs stack red, green and blue films to create a color display. The trade-off for them is the refresh rate, says Young.
“It operates in three stages, so we are looking at a refresh rate of probably a second for a page compared to say a Kindle 2’s 250 milliseconds,” he says.
The stacking process also raises questions of whether Kent’s displays can be thinner than its competitors. “Thickness is just an engineering issue that can be solved with the use of the right substrate,” says Asad Hussain, vice president of technology for Kent Displays.
A problem that won’t go away as easily will be in convincing e-reader makers to choose Kent Displays over rival E Ink, which has proven its mettle. A 16-year-old private company, Kent has been showing demos of its color screens for years. But so far, other than Fujitsu, it hasn’t found any takers, at least none announced publicly.
Hussain blames the reluctance of e-reader manufacturers to introduce color displays. “Right now black-and-white displays have momentum and though everyone wants color, no one is willing to make the shift.”
Check out our detailed comparison of how the four color e-reader display technologies
See also:
Photo: E Ink color screen prototype/E Ink
No sooner does Apple drop the MacBook Pro’s ExpressCard slot than the ExpressCard organization itself announces a big upgrade to version 2. The ExpressCard Standard 2.0 has one key difference: speed.
How much faster? Ten times faster, according to the specifications. Transfer tops out at 5Gbps, meaning that anything that needs to shift lots of data will benefit, including video transfer, eSata adapters for external hard drives and anything using the upcoming USB 3.0 spec. In short, it turns the pedestrian slot in the side of many computers into a speedy and useful accessory.
Will we ever see this in a portable Mac? Given that Apple seems to be playing musical chairs with ports specs, killing off FireWire only to resurrect it just months later, for instance, it’s quite possible that this slot will make it into future revisions. Then again, this announcement from the ExpressCard people is only the finalization of the spec itself: We’ll have to wait a while for actual products to ship. By then, we’ll probably be buying MacBooks hewn from solid blocks of adamantium using lightsabers.
Press release [ExpressCard Org via Slashgear]
Western Digital’s huge new 4TB external drive is aimed at Mac Users, but is just as good for anyone else. And with yesterday’s launch of new MacBooks bringing back a FireWire port to the small Mac notebook, the drive looks like a rather good companion.
The white MyBook Studio Edition II has four ways to hook up: eSata and FireWire 800 are the speediest, followed by FireWire 400 and the lowly USB 2.0. Western Digital also says that the drive is Time-Machine compatible, a slightly misleading claim as any external drive will work with Apple’s crappy backup software. What is useful, though, for Mac and PC owners alike, is that the lid of the box flips up to allow fast access to the hard drives inside (two of them are already in there, holding 2GB apiece). This is how all external drives should be made, allowing fast upgrading or replacement when the drives crash.
The price, though, is a little steep. For the 4TB version you’ll need to find $650.
Product page [WD via Digital Trends]
Here’s an updated statement that T-Mobile just released regarding the possible breach of servers that may or may not have occurred over the weekend.
“Following a recent online posting that an alleged hacker apparently accessed T-Mobile servers, the company is conducting a thorough investigation and at this time has found no evidence that customer information, or other company information, has been compromised. Reports to the contrary are inaccurate and should be corrected. T-Mobile continues to monitor this situation and as a precaution has taken additional measures to further ensure our customers’ information and our systems are protected. As is our standard practice, customers can be assured if there is any evidence that customer or system information has been compromised, we would inform those affected as quickly as possible.”
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
One of the additions to be brought to the new iPhone (and any existing iPhone when update to the v3.0 software) will finally make MobileMe useful. The iDisk application will let you remotely access any files you might have on your iDisk and view most of them right there on the iPhone.
This is a neat solution to the problem of remembering to actually put documents on the iPhone. The usual solution is to shuffle the files across to the phone using a third party application, usually over the local Wi-Fi network. IDisk means that all you have to do is remember to put the files on your iDisk when at your computer. The blurb says that you’ll also be able to “e-mail” those big files to other people — you select a video file, say, and the app will mail a download link to the recipient.
It looks like you’ll be able to grab this free app even if you don’t have a MobileMe subscription, so you can access other people’s iDisks. Of course, there’s a free option available to those not wishing to pony up $100 per year. DropBox gives you 5GB of cloud-space and also has an iPhone friendly web interface.
Product page [Apple]
Pleo, the lovable, green robotic dinosaur, isn’t willing to go away quietly. It is set to make a comeback after a Hong Kong based company Jetta bought the intellectual property rights and other assets to it from a bankruptcy sale.
In April, Pleo’s parent company Ugobe had fired all its employees and filed for liquidation. Ugobe had been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for months before that. The company was troubled by management changes, a cash crunch and sagging demand for the robots.
The Pleo was first launched in January 2007 for about $350. With its graceful motion and an uncanny ability to respond to human interaction, it became a favorite among robot and toy enthusiasts. In two years, Ugobe sold about 100,000 Pleos. But the company’s bankruptcy was seen as the end of the road for the robot.
Not necessarily, says its new owner. Jetta is “firmly committed” to re-launching Pleo and its accessories, according to the Robots Rule website. Jetta has five production campuses in Guangdong province in China and hopes to make the Pleo a part of its portfolio.
See also:
Pleo Robotic Dinosaur Maker Goes Bankrupt
Unloved and Overpriced, Consumer Robots Battle for Survival
Photo: Pleo (dh/Flickr)
Section: Apple, Web, Web Browsers
The newest version of the Apple created web browser Safari is now out of beta and available to Windows and Mac users. Apple has added about 150 features to Safari 4 with highlights that include a VoiceOver screen reader, zoom text, full page zooms, ARIA support, scriptable plug ins and smart address field.
Safari 4 joins an already crowded web browser market as many of the top names have recently released their newest versions. This includes Google Chrome 2.0, Opera 10 and Internet Explorer 8. The beta version has been available for several months for Safari 4, but besides some minor graphics upgrades, the full edition has most of the same features.
Safari 4 is definitely super fast, supporting the claims of Apple developers. However, keep in mind that the speed will vary depending on your hardware and any other processes running. You can now download the full version of Safari 4 from the Apple website.
Site: [Apple]
Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
There’s a certain something missing from the e-book, and it’s not just the paper. We tried to add some of the romance back when we disguised the iPod Touch as a Moleskine notebook, but it just didn’t work. The folks at Smell of Books, though, think they have the answer: a spray-can loaded with, that’s right, the smell of books. A quick spritz from the aerosol can and your Kindle, Sony Reader or iPhone will be transformed into a romantic bundle of musty smelling stories.
There’s even a choice of flavors: The default option is New Book Smell, which gives your electronics the tang of a freshly pressed paperback. When thumbing through the classics, you might prefer Classic Musty Scent:
When was the last time an e-book made you sneeze? Probably never. It’s a scientifically proven fact that e-books lack the necessary “character” to trigger a strong physical reaction. Our Classic Musty Scent solves that problem.
Also available are Eau You Have Cats (”It’s just like borrowing a book from grandma’s house), Crunchy Bacon Scent (”a low calorie, low cholesterol alternative for your breakfast reading enjoyment”) and the Scent of Sensibility (”It’s like living in a Jane Austen novel”). Oddly, these are all priced differently, ranging from $5 to $10, although we have a suspicion that this is all a spoof. A link on the product pages takes you to the parent site, Durosport Electronics, where you’ll find some rather odd products, and this news item on legal action from the Author’s Guild against Smell of Books:
While the Authors Guild supports efforts to improve the digital reading experience, we believe this product represents a significant threat to the development of aroma rights, and as such, will adversely impact the rights of our members.
It is important to note that in the digital era, books, and the smell of books, have been decoupled. In the future we expect authors to participate in the development of custom aromas for their books. These olfactory rights constitute a derivative right to be licensed separately. The preservation of these rights is essential as authors explore new markets and distribution channels.
Allowing unauthorized third parties to provide the “scent” for a book substantially changes the underlying work to a degree that infringes upon the author’s copyright, not to mention artistic vision.
Wonderful.
Product page [Small of Books via Neatorama]
Smell of Books™ Under Attack By Authors Guild [DuroSport]
When Apple announced the iPhone 3G S yesterday, some folks were shocked — or disappointed, even — that the new one was a spitting image of the last one. Width, height, depth - besides being 2 whole grams heavier, the physical specs were a perfect match.
We’ve been reminded of this fact roughly 300 times this morning, as every case manufacturer and battery-pack maker from here to Hong Kong writes in to “announce compatibility with the iPhone 3G S”. We get it, guys. Nothing changed, so your case still fits.
That said, it got us to thinking: what other accessories from the last generation iPhone will still work with this upcoming one? So, we compiled a list. It’s not exhaustive, of course - but it covers all of the ones you’re most likely worried about.
Accessory #1: Desks
Go place your iPhone on the desk in question. Now, place two regular-sized paperclips on your desk (as each weighs about a gram). If your desk didn’t fall apart: Congratulations! Your desk is now “Made for the iPhone 3G S” certified.
(If your desk did fall apart, your desk sucked. You’re welcome.)
Accessory #2: Your hand
You like your hands. Sure, they’re not perfect; they get a bit sweaty at times, and you’re fairly sure you’ve heard at least one person mention that your fingers resemble sausages. But for the most part, they’re good hands. You’ve had them pretty much your whole life. Do you really want to have to upgrade?
Fear not - you won’t have to. Your old hands will do just fine. We haven’t done a hands-on with the 3G S yet, but from our experiences with the 3G any standard hand model will do.
Accessory #3: Pant pocket
Next time someone asks “Is that an iPhone 3G S in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”, you can proudly say “HAHAHAHAHAHA! It’s an iPhone 3G S!” and then give them a high five for their originality. Better yet, never speak to that person again.
The same, unfortunately, can’t be said for most pairs of ladies pants. If, like my girlfriend’s pants, your pockets are only big enough to hold 83 cents in change and a few hair pins, you’re still out of luck. This also holds true if you’re a dude who wears ladies pants.
Can you think of any more accessories that ought to play friendly with Apple’s upcoming release? Let us know in the comments below.
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Just hours after the announcement of the iPhone 3G S yesterday, the emails started to flood in about third-party accessories. “Our [insert product name here] is compatible with the new iPhone! ” they said. Which we could have guessed because, y’know, the new iPhone is the exact same size and shape as the old iPhone.
One piece of hardware, though, has our attention. It’s the TomTom GPS unit, which will be one of the first accessories to hook into an application via the dock-connector. The “TomTom for iPhone” sticks onto the inside of your car window and acts as a charging cradle for the iPhone. It also provides a nice, loud (as in audible above the engine noise) sound output for turn-by-turn instruction and also lets you dial hands-free. And even more important, it gives “enhanced GPS performance”, which we take to mean an extra antenna for picking up the satellite signals.
The unit comes paired with a TomTom application, which was demonstrated on-stage at yesterday’s WWDC keynote, and works in tandem with the hardware. TomTom has made no announcement on pricing yet, so we don’t know whether the software will be free or only available as a separate purchase. Also unknown is the precise mechanism for buying software which requires a hardware dongle to work: Will you need to check a box to say you own the hardware before buying the app? We don’t know, but the alternative – actually hooking the hardware up as you make the purchase – seems a little clunky. Still, it’s exciting stuff. Now we just need the folks at OnOne to make a remote camera trigger for the iPhone.
Product page [TomTom]
Section: Web, Web 2.0, Websites
Twitter is the one social network that we all love, or love to hate. A new study, however, seems to indicate that calling Twitter a true social network might be a bit wrong. Sure, there are some people who use it to keep in touch with friends and family, but it does seem that a lot of users don’t.
According to the Harvard study, 10% of all Twitter users generate about 90% of the content on Twitter. That number, while not entirely unsurprising is a bit worrisome to some. On most social networks the amount of content generated by the top users is about 30%, much lower than Twitter. However, when considering that Twitter has about 10 million users, most of whom only tweet a few times, it might not be all that surprising. When the median number of tweets is apparently 1, it’s no surprise that those who actually do tweet often provide the content. Compare the number of users to Facebook, which has over 200 million users most of whom are likely to provide a decent amount of content.
It could be that Twitter is more of a way to get information from Ashton Kutcher, CNN and TweetMeme more than a way to connect with people for most people. However, that might not be a terrible thing. Being able to respond to those top users, even if you don’t always get an @ reply could be worth it to many people. Or it could be that not everybody has such an interesting life, and doesn’t want to broadcast it to everyone. Either way, Twitter will continue to be used by many people regardless of how many studies and blog posts try to say it’s all just hype.
Read [BBC]
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
You would think this is planned, but there is no way that the FCC is efficient enough to release documents detailing the iPhone 3G S on the same day as the announcement. No way. But here they are anyway.
So, if you need to kill some serious time, head on over to the FCC and browse through the pages and pages of patent documentation. There is everything in there except for external photos and the retail manual for both the 16GB and 32GB iPhone 3G S. Enjoy!
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Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank is currently running a summer marketing campaign [JP], using gift certificates, coupons and (almost certainly) the biggest cell phone strap on the planet to attract customers. The strap, a stuffed husky standing 30cm tall, is limited to 30,000 units.
SoftBank is very well known in Japan for their weird marketing efforts, including a family that stars in all TV commercials for the company and has said husky as the father (this is also the way they sell the iPhone over here). This specific campaign ends on August 31.
In the TV spot you can see below the sister of the family (Japanese super star Aya Ueto) says carrying the strap around gave her so many muscles that she is now able to lift up her brother without any problems.
Bonus: Squeeze the dog’s tail and it will say “Stop touching my tail.”
Via MSN Japan [JP]
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Section: Communications, Accessories, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile
We are all nut jobs. We spent 2 hours yesterday hearing Apple ramble through Mac updates, Exchange protocols and App demos all to hear, “we’ve a new standard bearer - the iPhone 3G S.” Finally, we get word that this new phone look almost identical on the outside and all the changes are internal. So now we know the competitors for America’s Next Top SuperPhone.
Let’s start with the flaws. In the end, we’re deciding against the pitfalls of one, versus the pitfalls of another. For the Palm Pre, the biggest flaw seems to be the quantity of 3rd party applications. There just are not that many going and the store itself is in beta. Not ready for prime time. It took Apple a year to figure out that 3rd party apps would be a big deal, but Palm’s got to fight the latest Apple, not Apple-two-years-ago.
Were you a bit disappointed with the new iPhone too? I’ve come to expect to be “wowed” by Apple and frankly that just isn’t happening. Worse still, the thorn in Apple’s side seems to be AT&T whose name was left off many of the super-fun things you can do with the new iPhone thanks to network issues. Heck, the event itself brought down AT&T network in San Fransisco to a crawl.
Note to AT&T: when the technorati is going to gather, beef up the network. It makes you look silly that your partners event brings down the device they made and sell to you exclusively.
We could talk about video (iPhone 3G S has it, Pre doesn’t) or memory (8GB for Pre, 16GB for iPhone at same price) or physical keyboard or camera flash; but which do you put more faith into: 50,000 apps vs. few for Pre or Sprint’s “We Try Harder” network or AT&T’s “we’ll get our act together in the fall”?
As an iPhone owner, I have little desire to upgrade to the “S.” The Pre however still has my attention. Anyone else feeling the same?
For more specifics in the battle, read this: [PC World]
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
With all of the collaboration going on between Qik and Nokia over the past few months, it seemed like it wouldn’t be too long before Nokia went ahead and put the live mobile video broadcasting service onto handsets right out of the box. Sure, enough: Beginning with this morning’s release of the North American N97, Qik will come preloaded onto all Nokia S60-based phones.
This is exactly what we thought had happened months ago with the Nokia 5800, though we later found out that, while Qik did make an appearance on the device, it was simply an icon that led to a download page. This time around, Qik comes installed and ready to go.
This is a fairly significant win for Qik; beyond all the technical hurdles involved with streaming live video from a mobile phone, one of the most challenging things is getting people to use it. Nokia’s been featuring Qik pretty prominently in their Ovi Store, and the aforementioned preloaded download link are nice - but convincing people to make the leap, download the app, register an account, and broadcast their lives seems like a tough sell. Remove one of the steps, and it becomes slightly less so.
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We knew it was coming this month and sure enough, the Nokia N97 is now available for $700 at Nokia Stores everywhere. 700 bones will net you Nokia’s flagship touchscreen device, unlocked and ready to make iPhones jealous everywhere. Well, maybe not the last part, but it’s still a solid device and worthy successor to the N95/N96.
But if the price still seems high - it is - wait until a carrier like T-Mobile or AT&T picks it up and subsidises the price. Who knows when that will happen or what carrier will pick it up, but chances are it’s coming. Other markets should get access to what Nokia calls a Mobile Computer shortly.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile
It seems that at least the executives from Sprint Nextel have deemed the Palm Pre a success. According to some estimates, the Palm Pre sold anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 units in the first two days. Of course, these numbers are just estimates, and to break that down a little bit more, JP Morgan has given the estimate of 50,000 while the WSJ has suggested the higher number of up to 100,000.
Either way though, the launch broke the current sales records for Sprint. Tim Donahue, vice president of business marketing for Sprint, would not discuss specific numbers but did state that,
“We experienced our best one day of sales and single weekend sales for any phone we’ve launched in our history,” he said. “We sold out of the device over the weekend in most of our store locations. And it happened at a much faster rate than we had planned on. “
All-in-all, even breaking the sales record aside, these numbers seem pretty decent. Especially when you consider the original iPhone sold 146,000 units in that first weekend and that AT&T is a larger carrier. Of course, while they seem to have had a great opening weekend, which seems a little sweeter considering many phone geeks could have been waiting for the Apple announcement before committing to a purchase. Now we have to sit back and see if it continues to sell well.
Read [CNET]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
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Microsoft’s (MSFT) recently-unveiled search engine Bing has 
Working off of a leaked copy of the webOS ROM, a few users have discovered some references to a second Palm webOS based device. It was not that long ago we first saw details of the Palm Eos that is rumored to be on its way to AT&T, and this ROM adds some further evidence to the name. 
