 Wired News | Miyamoto: Games need controllers CVG Online Nintendo simplified controls with Wii, and with Project Natal Microsoft says it can do away with controllers completely. But Shigeru Miyamoto doesn't think that's the best of ideas. Shigeru Miyamoto Confirms 'Demo Play' for New Super Mario Bros. Wii New SMB Wii, Future Games Getting 'Demo Play' Help Feature |
Installing OS X on a commodity PC box is, to paraphrase a simian, sweating Microsoft executive, all about “drivers, drivers, drivers!” The underlying architecture of any current Intel chip is more or less the same as that of a Mac. The trick lies in getting the OS to talk to the non-standard displays, sound hardware, Wi-Fi cards and the like.
Ryuu123 of the InsanelyMac forums has managed to work this driver and kernel extension magic with the Sony Vaio P, which is extra impressive for a couple of reasons. First, this is a rather more expensive piece of hardware than the typical hackintosh-box, the MSI Wind — almost as much as a real Mac, in fact. Second is that the Vaio P has some very odd hardware. The screen resolution is rather long and thing (1600 x 768) and the graphics “card” decidedly underpowered.
That said, quite a lot is working. There is no Quartz-anything hardware acceleration for graphics, so the fancy OS X 3D effects are out, and you’ll not be getting online via either the Ethernet nor the Wi-Fi (ryuu123 is planning on adding in a Dell 1510 wireless card) but USB networking works, as does the internal 3G modem. Ironically enough, the MemoryStick slot also works.
Not a bad first effort. We look forward to seeing it fixed up properly: If there is any netbook that should be running OS X, its the Vaio P.
Leopard on VAIO P(VGN-P90HS) working! [InsanelyMac via BBG]
See Also:
Nokia Expands XpressMusic Line With Cheap Touch Phone PC World Nokia has announced the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic, a cheaper version of its successful touch phone, the 5800 XpressMusic, it said on Monday. Nokia E72, 5530 XpressMusic And 3710 fold Coming This Fall Nokia launches new touch-screen music phone |
“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” (source)
Or in this case, on the Internet Fidel Castro’s son wouldn’t know you’re actually a male Cuban living in exile posing as a woman just to play a number on you. Apparently, Miami-based Luis Dominguez has duped 40-year old Antonio Castro into believing that he was chatting with a 27-year old female sports journalist named Claudia Valencia, using the man’s alleged weakness for “young women and sports”.
Dominquez told the BBC that he has no regrets for the deception - which consisted of eight months of on-and-off chatting - saying he wanted to expose the hypocrisy of Cuba’s leadership, who enjoy “oppulent lifestyles”. No state secrets were revealed during the chats, and it’s unclear if the sessions involved cybersex of any kind.
Gotta admire the dryness of the BBC report, which ends with:
“The Cuban authorities have made no comment about the chats, but Claudia says the relationship has gone cold.”
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
You may find this hard to believe, but back in the 90s, I was what you might consider a bit of a Microsoft fanboy.
I bought practically every piece of software they made (yes, including Bob). I was at the midnight launch of Windows 95 in my hometown. I bought Windows Me and XP the day they came out. But then a combination of things happened. First, Apple’s products started to get better and the iPod served as a gateway drug of sorts to their computers. Second, the rise of Google and the web as a whole made what desktop software I was using less important. Third, Microsoft’s products went through a period of lack of innovation, or worse, regressed.
I bring this up because some people familiar with my work, seem to want to believe that I dislike all Microsoft products by default. That’s simply not true. Even to this day, I will praise the work Microsoft has done with the Xbox 360. And I find a smattering of other things within the company that I find interesting, like Azure. And now something else from Microsoft is coming on my radar: Bing.
I’ll admit that I mocked Bing from the second I heard its name, as basically a non-starter. But here we are a few weeks later, and I’m still hearing a significant number of people talking about it when I go various places. At the very least, that’s a marketing win for Microsoft — but that will only get you so far. More interesting to me is that Bing does actually seem to be pretty good at what it was built to do: Search — er, sorry, “Discovery.”
Take tonight, for example. The Los Angeles Lakers just won the NBA title, so there are a ton of searches right now for Kobe Bryant, the Lakers’ star player. I just did a search for him on both Bing and Google, and to be honest, Bing’s results are a lot better, at least for the here and now.
On Bing, the top result is a full listing of Kobe’s box score from tonight. On Google, the top result is a link to his NBA.com player profile. A few spots down, Google gives me some YouTube clips, but they’re all old. There are no clips on Bing’s main page, but in the top “Highlights” tab, there is a ton of video from tonight’s game. The other tabs on Bing offer easy access to relevant information as well. Sure, Google has its own options to better tailor the results to my liking, but they’re still tucked away, the average user is not going to click on those. And so I really have to say that Bing’s results, as presented to me in this case, are better than Google’s.
Now, that’s just one example, and it’s of a breaking event. But still, I’ve noticed this on a few hot items recently. And perhaps that’s why we’re hearing all the talk about Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin scrambling a team to address the Bing question. I’m not sure how much weight to put in such a report — while it’s become basically the company’s canned response, I’m sure Google really is always tweaking its search engine/strategy. But even the rumor of Google being at least interested by anything Microsoft is doing in search is something we really haven’t heard before. And that’s more than anything Yahoo — still the #2 search provider — can say recently.
So will Bing replace Google as my default search engine? No. The main reason for this is still very simple. Even if Google and Bing have similar results, and even if Bing offers better results in some cases, Google has already won the search war as it exists today. It already exists in people’s minds as basically synonymous with search. Bing could do very well on the desktop web, but that will basically mean low double-digit share versus Google’s high double-digit share.
And while you might point out that something like how Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser once had an over 90% share of the market, but has been failing steadily in recent years. I’d blame that on the fact that Microsoft rested on its laurels with that huge lead for far too long (it basically stopped work on IE for several years), and now has a browser that is arguably the worst on the market.
Google, as a search engine is not in any way, shape, or form the worst on the market. And plenty would still say the exact opposite. I just can’t see Google becoming complacent and yielding ground on search the same way Microsoft did with IE. And so its success should remain perpetual. If nothing else, Google is now built-in as the default browser or homepage on far too many web browsers. That’s not a battle Bing can win.
I know that it’s touting itself as the “discovery engine,” but that’s a marketing gimmick that will wear off soon. Search is search — ultimately, people want one place to do it. For now, many will settle for two (Google and Twitter being two examples), if they serve a completely different purpose, but that will change with time. And everyone will also realize that despite the rhetoric, Bing is really not any different as a tool from Google. And when that happens, Google will win that battle.
But there is an interesting opportunity for Bing in the mobile space, I think. Yahoo has been touting mobile as a bright spot for its search product in recent months because it knows that the one really hot area where Google had not yet fully won the battle. The reason for that is that mobile web browsing is still a fundamentally different beast than desktop web browsing. While some browsers like Safari on the iPhone have search built-in, most do not. And so the playing field is much more open on the mobile web.
Microsoft should be pushing hard to make Bing the mobile search (or discovery, or whatever it wants to call it) engine of choice. Because mobile browsing on the smaller screen with different input methods is different than the desktop, it stands to reason that searching on these devices should also be somewhat different aside from the simply cosmetic changes. And there are quite a few interesting things you can do easier on mobile device than you can on a desktop, like location. And location leads to some interesting things with advertising, which, at the end of the day, is what this all really comes down to for both Google and Microsoft now from a business perspective.
It’s interesting that Microsoft seems to have some good buzz for Bing so far. And I do think it’s actually warranted. But it’s just a first step. Bing has a name that is on people’s minds right now, but it needs to continue innovating to keep it there. And in my mind, that extends far beyond the desktop space, which Google is not going to yield anytime soon. If Microsoft insists on playing Google’s game on Google’s turf, I fear Microsoft Bing may ultimately end up just as forgotten as Microsoft Bob. But I think these past few weeks have proven that there is at least a little something to Bing, and so it doesn’t have to be that way.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 WA today | Microsoft's Bing strikes fear into Google founders TG Daily By C Shanti Google is so rattled by the introduction of Microsoft's revamped search engine Bing that it's pulling all the stops out to offer new features in its own engine. Does Microsoft's Bing have Google running scared? Google might be worried about Bing |
This week’s viral video is for filmmaker Michael Moore’s latest, which takes direct aim at the banking bailout.
Here’s a picture of Moore, from his Web site, trying–in his usual annoy-security manner–to get into Goldman Sachs (GS).
Called, “Save Our CEOs,” the teaser for the movie notes: “This time it’s personal.”
Well, Moore is always pretty much personal, so slapping around Wall Street and the politicians responsible for the econalypse should be interesting, so say the least.
Here’s the video:
Hunch, the new startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, has launched and it's beguilingly fun. After filling out 42 questions ranging from "Have you sky dived" to "Do you like it when the cabin crew cracks jokes on airplanes?" I was presented with a number of things I might be interested in (I chose which film directors I should watch: Tim Burton). I was hooked enough to fill out the profile page (you can get answers without logging in) and at this point it becomes clear: Hunch is a social network where the social object is sharing questions (and thus answers) which might be relevant to you. The more questions you answer the more your profile page become relevant to you. And you can of course share those questions around with a widget.
JVC today announced a new brand for LCD TVs in Japan [JP]. The first model of the badly named XIVIEW series is the LT-42WX7, a full HD display sized at 42 inches. JVC said they first want to target business customers with the new model, possibly followed by XIVIEWs for home use.
The new TV covers 100% of the sRGB color space and is able to reproduce 96% of the Adobe RGB color space. Other specs include a contrast ratio of 4,000:1, 450cd/m2 brightness, 178° viewing angle and a 5.5ms response time. Buyers also get 2×10W speakers and 3HDMI interfaces.
Sales in Japan start at the beginning of next month. The LT-42WX7 will be priced at $3,700. JVC is yet to say if the XIVIEW TVs will ever make it outside the Japanese market.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 Digital Arts Online | MacBooks afflicted with SATA 'degrade' Register By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author Apple had used Sata II for its MacBooks but appears to have reverted to the older and slower Sata I for some new MacBooks. MacBook Pro 13- and 15-inch limited to SATA not SATA-II? Apple MacBook Pro owners reporting lackluster speeds possibly ... |
 MiamiHerald.com | Scribd Adds 5000 E-Books In Simon & Schuster Deal InformationWeek The store offers best-selling books from horror master Stephen King, as well as from other authors, such as Dan Brown, Mary Higgins Clark, and Chelsea Handler. The Hulu of publishing has arrived! Scribd To Offer Simon & Schuster Books Online |
AFP - The designers of controversial Internet filtering software that China has ordered shipped with all new computers said they were trying to fix security glitches in the programme.
 SINDH TODAY | NASA/Ames ready to explode one of the coolest space missions ever San Jose Mercury News By Mike Swift In an unprecedented scientific endeavor - and what may be one of the coolest space missions ever - NASA is preparing to fly a rocket booster into the moon, triggering a six-mile-high explosion that scientists hope will confirm the ... Moon mission aimed at manned return NASA to launch 2 spacecraft to the moon |
Here’s Sony’s Jack Tretton, speaking to Chris Morris at CNBC, on leaks:
People don’t respect confidentiality in this industry. It’s tough enough to keep a secret within your own company, much less when you speak to third parties.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Mock not. As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
A hotel bar in Arlington, Virginia, 23 October 2008. A group of computer security experts has spent the day holed up with law enforcement agencies.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
There…I’ve said it. I’m filled with self-loathing for saying it, but Bing’s new approach (and the speed with which they rolled it out) is a model for easy avenues to block objectionable content.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
 Chicago Tribune | Hunch wants you to give it some ideas Los Angeles Times Founder Caterina Fake calls Hunch “a kind of shortcut through human expert systems.” Users are invited to answer as many as 1500 questions. Hunch: A Real Decision Engine Hunch Goes Live. It's Neat! |
As the Iranian election aftermath unfolded in Tehran–thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to express their anger at perceived electoral irregularities–an unexpected hashtag began to explode through the Twitterverse: “CNNFail.”
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Peeling and Cracked 2
Source: Boing Boing | 15 Jun 2009 | 6:46 am
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 CTV.ca | NASA delays space shuttle launch over gaseous hydrogen leak TG Daily By Wolfgang Gruener Cape Canaveral (FL) - NASA said that it has decided to postpone the launch of the launch of Endeavour and mission STS-127 because of “a leak associated with the gaseous hydrogen venting system”. NASA hopes for Wednesday shuttle launch Bottleneck at launch pads costly for taxpayers |
MPAA's Fritz Attaway said that "high-value content will migrate away" from television if the broadcast flag wasn't imposed; he told Congress that fears of infringement without a broadcast flag mandate "will lead content creators to cease making their high-value programming available for distribution over digital broadcast television [and] the DTV transition would be seriously threatened". Most famously, Viacom said thatInto the DTV era, with no broadcast flag mandate"[i]f a broadcast flag is not implemented and enforced by Summer 2003, Viacom's CBS Television Network will not provide any programming in high definition for the 2003-2004 television season. "
It's six years later and these threats have all fallen flat. This week, CBS will broadcast dozens of popular programs, like CSI, Without a Trace, Survivor, and The New Adventures of Old Christine, in high definition via over-the-air broadcast. So will all the other major networks. Digital TV also continues to feature popular movies with no DRM.
I love to see projects like this that display work ethic and talent. Good luck, Jonathan!
free reads
Source: Boing Boing | 15 Jun 2009 | 4:56 am
In Brooklyn, about a mile south of us
(via Making Light)
Source: Boing Boing | 15 Jun 2009 | 4:52 am
So, maybe you heard about Microsoft’s newest promotion to get people to use one of its products. If you download Internet Explorer 8 through this site, Microsoft promises to donate 8 meals per download to a group called Feeding America, which wants to end hunger in this country. Sounds great, right? Read the fine print.
Only complete downloads of Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 through browserforthebetter.com from June 8, 2009 through August 8, 2009 qualify for the charitable donation to Feeding America®. Microsoft® is donating $1.15 per download to Feeding America® up to a maximum of $1,000,000. Meals are used for illustrative purposes only. Meal conversion is effective until June 30th, 2010.
In case you missed it, let me highlight the hilarious part: $1.15 per download. For 8 meals. Let’s do the math.
$1.15 divided by 8 equals just about $0.14 a meal. I don’t know where Microsoft is eating, but I have never heard of any place that you can get a meal for 14 cents. And this isn’t one of those “for just 10 cents a day…” commercials that promise to feed starving children in Africa, this is meant to feed people in the United States. Hell, a gum ball from one of those machines at a convenient store costs 25 cents. Some cost 50 cents. That’s almost 4 meals by Microsoft’s math.
We all know how this works. Microsoft was never actually giving anyone any meals (hence the, “Meals are used for illustrative purposes only.”), it was just pledging to throw money at what sounds like a worthy cause if it got something in return — users to download what many consider to be a sub-par web browser. But if you’re going to do that, don’t claim to be giving 8 meals away for every download, when you’re really only donating $1.15. That’s just misleading.
If you’re really interested in helping to fight hunger in America, go to the actual Feeding America site and donate. They don’t even force IE8 upon you. Of course, the minimum donation amount they recommend on the site is $25 — which is something like 180 Microsoft “meals.”
Update: Rather than respond to all of the comments saying the same thing, let me be clear: I understand how this works — as I said above, it’s all about Microsoft donating a dollar amount to a charity, and not really about the meals. That’s why it’s misleading to say in big bold letters that it’s donating 8 meals for every IE download. Microsoft is not actually donating any meals, it is donating a relatively small amount of money to a charity that provides meals.
How small is the amount from Microsoft? Well, it’s spending a reported $80 million to promote Bing, but is only giving $1 million to fight hunger. This despite the huge words talking about how awful it is that 1 in 8 Americans struggle to have enough to eat. One thing Americans aren’t struggling with is a lack of web search options, or a lack of advertising.
Of course, I’m being a bit facetious, hunger is a very real issue and Microsoft has a right to wrap its own agenda (getting people to download IE8) in a charitable cause. I just find it inappropriate to use the cause in a misleading way. If you’re donating about a dollar per download, say that. Don’t say how many meals you’re providing based on some numbers that, as commenter Josh Forman notes, don’t even add up. That was obviously just a tacky way for Microsoft to get a number “8″ that would match its own IE8, for branding and marketing purposes.
[thanks Andrew]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Salesforce.com Offering No-charge Access to Force.com PC World Salesforce.com is hoping to drive more interest from corporate developers and ISVs in its Force.com development platform by offering limited, no-cost access, the on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) vendor announced Monday. Salesforce Unleashes Free, ... Salesforce opens Sites; offers free version to help push cloud ... |
You might remember a time when everyone—from telco giants to corner coffee shops—was furiously serving up Wi-Fi. McDonald's became an Internet café, and dozens of municipalities nationwide were racing to set up open hot spots. Your broadband connection was about to be as portable as your cell phone. That was like five years ago.
What happened next? Zilch. "There has been a complete lack of leadership from the regulatory agencies, service providers, and device makers," says Ashvin Vellody, senior vice president for enabling technologies at communications research firm Yankee Group. Fortunately, cellular providers are stepping up to fill the motivational vacuum. Omnipresent broadband access is almost here. Again. Really.
Even skeptics have to concede that the odds look pretty good this time. The technology won't be your familiar 802.11—it never had the bandwidth or range to be viable anyway. The airwaves will instead be paved with a new generation of wireless broadband. Some of these so-called 4G networks will use the 700-MHz spectrum that the government auctioned off last year, and they promise to blanket every medium to large city in Net-ready radio waves.
It's about time. Cell phone companies have been asleep at the wheel for years, loath to upgrade to expensive new networks when their old ones "work just fine." The iPhone slapped them awake. Before Apple's smooth-talker, portable broadband didn't look juicy enough to chase—cellular data usage was slim. But the typical iPhone owner uses five times more data than the average cell user. "It took Apple and its ecosystem of apps and interactivity to prove the pent-up demand for ubiquitous broadband," Vellody says.
And now, mobile devices like netbooks and Google phones have joined in to force the issue. Clearwire introduced a WiMax service in Baltimore and Portland, Oregon, with a commitment to add 80 more markets by the end of 2010. Verizon is testing a related technology, Long Term Evolution, and aims to roll out coverage by 2010; Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Nokia are all building compatible devices. Both WiMax and LTE will offer about the same DSL-ish speed (5-6 Mbps), but bitrates could grow to 15 Mbps by 2012.
Unfortunately, the current economic malaise is slowing some capital expansion plans. (How convenient.) "It won't be overnight, but you're eventually going to see mobile broadband replace your at-home connection," says Barry West, Clearwire's president and chief architect. A bright forecast—but believe it when you actually see the sun.
Gastric condom n. An alternative to gastric bypass surgery in treating morbid obesity. The polymer sleeve is fed through the patient's gullet and fixed below the stomach to prevent calorie absorption in the first 2 feet of small intestine.
Equasy n. Short for equine addiction syndrome, the clinical name for avid horsemanship proposed by David Nutt. The British psychopharmacology expert peeved the Home Secretary and the British Horse Society by claiming that equasy is as risky as taking the drug ecstasy.
Dark flow n. An unexplained force drawing galaxy clusters toward a stretch of sky between the Vela and Centaurus constellations. As mysterious as dark energy and dark matter, dark flow may be the gravitational pull of other universes.
Virtual parent n. An AI that would converse with kids, mimicking military moms and dads who are off fighting. The Defense Department is fielding proposals from software developers for a virtual parent able to respond tenderly when a child says, "I love you."
You might remember a time when everyone—from telco giants to corner coffee shops—was furiously serving up Wi-Fi. McDonald's became an Internet café, and dozens of municipalities nationwide were racing to set up open hot spots. Your broadband connection was about to be as portable as your cell phone. That was like five years ago.
What happened next? Zilch. "There has been a complete lack of leadership from the regulatory agencies, service providers, and device makers," says Ashvin Vellody, senior vice president for enabling technologies at communications research firm Yankee Group. Fortunately, cellular providers are stepping up to fill the motivational vacuum. Omnipresent broadband access is almost here. Again. Really.
Even skeptics have to concede that the odds look pretty good this time. The technology won't be your familiar 802.11—it never had the bandwidth or range to be viable anyway. The airwaves will instead be paved with a new generation of wireless broadband. Some of these so-called 4G networks will use the 700-MHz spectrum that the government auctioned off last year, and they promise to blanket every medium to large city in Net-ready radio waves.
It's about time. Cell phone companies have been asleep at the wheel for years, loath to upgrade to expensive new networks when their old ones "work just fine." The iPhone slapped them awake. Before Apple's smooth-talker, portable broadband didn't look juicy enough to chase—cellular data usage was slim. But the typical iPhone owner uses five times more data than the average cell user. "It took Apple and its ecosystem of apps and interactivity to prove the pent-up demand for ubiquitous broadband," Vellody says.
And now, mobile devices like netbooks and Google phones have joined in to force the issue. Clearwire introduced a WiMax service in Baltimore and Portland, Oregon, with a commitment to add 80 more markets by the end of 2010. Verizon is testing a related technology, Long Term Evolution, and aims to roll out coverage by 2010; Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Nokia are all building compatible devices. Both WiMax and LTE will offer about the same DSL-ish speed (5-6 Mbps), but bitrates could grow to 15 Mbps by 2012.
Unfortunately, the current economic malaise is slowing some capital expansion plans. (How convenient.) "It won't be overnight, but you're eventually going to see mobile broadband replace your at-home connection," says Barry West, Clearwire's president and chief architect. A bright forecast—but believe it when you actually see the sun.
AP - Every time you swipe your credit card and wait for the transaction to be approved, sensitive data including your name and account number are ferried from store to bank through computer networks, each step a potential opening for hackers.
It seems like I’ve heard that title somewhere before. Oh yeah, almost exactly. So this time a guest at our party last week decided to corner Chandra Rathakrishnan, the CEO of our CrunchPad partner Fusion Garage, and talk him into doing this ridiculous “unboxing” of the CrunchPad. The video went up and the blogosphere went wild, just like last time.
The video has now been removed from YouTube.
This was not a sanctioned or official video, nor is it even very interesting. It’s just the last prototype being taken out of its box (which should be sort of obvious, pictures of the prototype in the video have been circulating since April). It’s certainly not the launch prototype, pictured here, which doesn’t actually exist yet.
The only official information on the CrunchPad at this point is in the blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, and you can send an email to crunchpad@techcrunch.com for various updates. We’re planning an event in July to give more information. Until then, I hope we’ve seen the last of these ridiculous fingerprint smudged “unboxing” videos.
And that guest who took the video without talking to me first won’t be back at any TechCrunch events anytime soon.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This past Thursday, the GeeksOnAPlane group of traveling techies had the opportunity to attend Startonomics Beijing and learn about broad swaths of the Chinese web industry. The speakers, who represented companies such as Google China, Kong Zhong, Five Minutes and ChinaNetCloud, discussed topics such as gaming, social networking, network infrastructure and internet cafes. Overall, we were impressed not only by how massive the Chinese market for computing-related services is, but how fast it’s still growing as well.
According to Georg Godula, whose company Web2Asia helps internet companies get off the ground in East Asian countries, there are currently about 350 million internet users in China, many of which are very new. In 2008 alone, the internet population grew by approximately 80 million people. That’s an astonishing 220,000 per day, or 9,000 per hour. Most of these users are quite young, with a distribution centering around 18-24 years old. Since the number of users outstrips the number of computers, Chinese youth spends much of its time browsing the web and playing games in Internet cafes, particularly in less dense parts of the country where few alternative entertainment options exist.
Perhaps the most refreshing presentation of the day came from Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, President of Google China, who admitted that Google has had a difficult time breaking into the Chinese market and competing against Baidu, the dominant search engine here. He attributed the slow advances in their marketshare to patience and humility, explaining that Google has had to carefully learn about the market and how it differs from those in the West.
This was a trend that appeared throughout many of the presentations. Foreign companies who try to localize for China are often outgunned by Chinese competitors who know the culture and business environment here better. They also tend to suffer from a litany of other missteps, such as entering China too late, failing to set up a local development team, getting blocked by complex local legislation, and simply being outwitted by local competitors with better ideas.
Lee gave an overview of how Chinese internet usage differs from what we see in the United States. According to studies, the Chinese read news and conduct searches at a similar level to their American counterparts. But they read and write email a lower frequency, preferring other communication methods like instant messaging (Twitter, for that reason, has the potential to take off here…if numerous other clones like Digu, Fanfou or Zuosa don’t take the wind out of its sails first). The Chinese also consume a lot more music, almost all of which is pirated or provided by free by companies like Google. Gaming and blogging are also two popular activities, while ecommerce still plays a comparatively smaller role in the web industry.
Kaiser Kuo, a technology commentator in Beijing, presented the Startonomics crowd with a balanced view of how censorship works in China. On the one hand, it poses a definite human rights issue that needs to be solved over time. On the other hand, reports of censorship in China are often over-exaggerated, especially when they affect Western services like Twitter (which is only used by a very, very small fraction of the population here).
He was keen on pointing out that the Chinese government isn’t like a bogeyman always lurking around the corner ready to crush out any and all vocalized signs of dissent. Instead, it tends to focus on preventing organized resistance, while leaving most individuals who air their grievances online alone. If anything, censorship plays out indirectly, with the government putting pressure on web companies to patrol their own users’ content. Pornography, for example, is strictly banned here, so companies need to police their services vigilantly or suffer penalties.
The biggest trend we saw throughout the presentations was just how big gaming is for Chinese youth. While mobile technologies aren’t as big here as in Japan, the Chinese spend a lot of time and money on casual games, especially in internet cafes. The industry is lucrative, with a fraction of wealthy gamers (~10%) willing to shell out lots of money for virtual goods. It’s no surprise then that 6 of the biggest 10 internet companies are game publishers.
World of Warcraft is unusually popular, given that it’s made by a Western company (Blizzard), although legacy games such as Starcraft and Counterstrike also make the rounds via piracy. Other big players include the Chinese companies Netease, Giant Interactive (who among other titles developed Zhengtu Online), Kingsoft and the9. While there’s been a shift from console to browser-based games in the last few years, the impulse has remained the same: Chinese youth play games not particularly because of the challenge or entertainment, but rather because they are lonely bored and have few other recreational options.
Steve Mushero of ChinaNetCloud, an internet service provider, gave a detailed overview of how fractured the internet infrastructure is here. Unlike the mesh of networks that carry data across the United States, data served up in China tends to stay on the network of one monopoly. Unfortunately, these monopolies tend to be region-specific, making it difficult and costly to send data across the country latency-free. The Chinese also don’t apply standard internet protocols such as BGP, complicating life for system admins who already have to deal with data centers that vary widely in quality and price. While bandwidth is a big business here and readily available, connections in and out of the country are flaky - here one day, gone the next.
There’s a perception in the West that Chinese web companies clone Western services instead of coming up with their own ideas. My impression has been that this is certainly the case, although not exclusively. There are also web companies trying new things, or at least copying Western services and then remolding them for China; they just tend to get drowned out by the clones, which actually affect Chinese companies as well. The popular social network Kaixin (at kaixin001.com), for example, was cloned by competitor Xiaonei after the latter company bought the domain kaixin.com. Overall, the industry is like the Wild West. There are a slew of startups (unlike what we saw in Japan), many of which are going after the same markets and creating an intense competitive environment for foreign and local companies alike.
Slides from Startonomics Beijing can be found on SlideShare. Dr. Kai-Fu Lee’s presentation is embedded below.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Founders Fund and BlueRun Ventures for helping make this trip possible for the entire GeeksOnAPlane group.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Thanks to Mark and the other BoingBoing bloggers for the chance to put words in front of the world's most interesting and lively blog readers. It's been great. You've been great.
I'm taking took a page from previous guest blogger Gareth Branwyn's final post and putting hyperlinks to many of my posts all in one place for those who may have missed them and so I have one place I can link to:
Summer Road TripsMy new book, Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously continues to do well, as does Backyard Ballistics, The Art of the Catapult and the rest, no doubt helped by the interest fueled by posting on this wonderful blog.
Hit By Rock From Outer Space?
Rocket Making for Amateurs
A Monkey on My Back (non-metaphorically speaking)
Growing the Poison Pepper
Licensed to Drink
Knife Throwers Just Want a Little Respect
Happy 35th Anniversary, 10 Cent Beer Night
The Least Exciting Moments in Sports
Wails and mumbles: So Effective It's Given Away in Bags!
Wails and Murmurs: Eating Couscous at the Chi-Chi's in Walla-Walla
Exploring Your Own Backyard:
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Now this is the hack of the weekend or the hoax of the weekend. Some intrepid hackers have run what appears to be iPhone OS 2.x on a "multi-touch" monitor with accelerometer support. I've found a few examples of monitors that could potentially pull this off but I haven't been able to pin down a model number. However, because iPhone OS is basically a
Now this is the hack of the weekend or the hoax of the weekend. Some intrepid hackers have run what appears to be iPhone OS 2.x on a “multi-touch” monitor with accelerometer support. I’ve found a few examples of monitors that could potentially pull this off but I haven’t been able to pin down a model number. However, because iPhone OS is basically a Linux Mach kernel it should be bootable on Intel hardware - at least in an emulator - all of this is feasible.
We’ll do a little digging but as it stands it’s an impressive hack.
UPDATE - It looks like it comes from Dreamfield.se, a Swedish design firm. They say it’s from their “labs” but they’re of an artistic bent.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
KIGALI, RWANDA– As I’ve mentioned before I like my entrepreneurs risk-taking and a little crazy. Earlier this week on TechTicker, we ran an interview with a guy who fits that bill: Shai Agassi.
In some ways, Agassi is even more ambitious than Elon Musk—you know, the guy who builds rockets and $100,000 electric sports cars. Agassi wants to re-engineer the entire auto and oil infrastructure with electric cars, charging stations, battery replacement stations (staring robots who actually change the battery for you) and sophisticated software to keep it all running—one country at a time. His company is called Better Place, and while some have accused Agassi of being an egomaniac, I give him huge props for walking away from one of the most powerful jobs in the tech world to start a new company that was this hard to pull off.
I last interviewed Agassi several years ago on stage when he was at SAP, and I was covering the oh-so-sexy enterprise software beat for BusinessWeek. If memory serves, we were good-naturedly sparring about whether Oracle’s acquisition strategy would work. (I’d argue I was right.) But I have to say, I like this Shai better. He made his name as an intense and gifted entrepreneur who wasn’t afraid to take risk and sometimes people like that are wasted inside big organizations, even if they have the top job. Agassi seemed inspired and unleashed compared to his SAP days. There’s more about Better Place itself and Agassi’s plan here.
But at the end of the third segment (embedded below), Agassi said something that’s been sticking in my head ever since: America has to start making things or the economy won’t work. He argues you don’t have a country with just a service economy to support it. I’m starting to fear that he’s right, especially spending time last month in China and this week in central Africa, both places where manufacturing and consumer goods industries are being built fresh and in incredibly innovative ways. It’s a bit like what you kept hearing after the dot com bust: When things turn south it’s good to have hard assets to fall back on.
Trust me, as I sit on a terrace in a landlocked African nation that has to import almost everything to great expense, America doesn’t want to get in the pure-consumer, non-producer game. And while some argue the intellectual work—ala thinking up the idea or doing the hard core engineering—is higher margin, it’s absurd and arrogant to think we’ve got a lock on the people who can do that kind of thinking.
This is clearly the biggest concern in the rust belt where thousands of manufacturing job are at risk. But if Agassi is right, Silicon Valley is in trouble too, because we hardly make anything anymore. Look at the semiconductor business: Most start-ups for the last ten years have been so-called “fabless” chip companies. And how many gadgets are made here? The great age of networking and telecom rollouts are over—instead monopolies are upping revenues by “metering” our broadband not rolling out a newer, faster infrastructure. Even outsourcing low-level software development to Balkan states contributes to this. It’s a win-win for now, but long-term emerging markets benefit more than we do.
Tech got in this situation for two reasons: technology advanced quickly enough we could outsource all the assembly and VCs liked it that way because it’s cheap. But there’s more than enough cash flowing around this Valley to fund a few risky, expensive manufacturing plays. Here’s what I’d like to see America start making again. Leave your ideas in the comments.
1. Better consumer devices. For decades VCs have shied away from consumer devices given the manufacturing and consumer marketing costs. Sure there are loads of duds out there to support that point. But whether they’re entirely made in the US or not, haven’t the iPhone, the Flip, the Kindle, the Jawbone and others proven a good device that does something well still has a future coming out of the Valley? Increasingly, people will pay up for brilliant device execution even if it only does one thing well, even if it’s not necessarily a new category.
2. Cars. Yep, we’re doing it already but it largely hasn’t been funded by the Valley. Musk invested $70 million of his own money and Agassi’s cash mostly came from Israelis. Props to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for funding Tesla competitor Fisker. But now that these pioneers have proven there’s a viable market here, the US establishment whether it’s the Valley top brass, DC lawmakers or Detroit need to get behind it in action, not words. Although President Barack Obama has been careful to say the government won’t dictate strategy for the car companies we now own, Agassi thinks America should take the opportunity to push on electric manufacturing hard. After all, we do own them. Why not get something out of it? (More on that in the video below too.)
3. Medicine. What ever happened to the biotech boom? The promise from decoding the genome? The rhetoric that the Valley was going to give birth to dozens of Genentechs? I’ll tell you what: VCs got into the habit of selling promising pre-clinical research to big pharma early and often. There’s no more company building in biotech, and that’s a shame. I get that drug discovery is hard and expensive, but we need the innovation, real science and jobs if you ask me. There’s also the side benefit of screwing with the big pharma oligopolies. And saving lives is generally a good thing for the country.
4. Electric planes that go really fast. Ok, it sounds even crazier than rockets or electric cars, but every time I board a creaky old Boeing jet for a 10-hour-plus international flight, I can’t stop thinking about Musk’s idea for an electric plane that’s supersonic and lands vertically. I don’t even know if that’s feasible, but I’m ready to retire my much-beloved noise-reduction headset if it is. If anyone would like to build a teleportation device I’ll sign up for a beta tester on that one too. I don’t care if there’s a risk that my organs will arrive on the outside of my body, I’m so over 20-to-30 hour flights on planes older than I am.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Voice, formerly GrandCentral, is a seriously heavyweight product. When it relaunched in March, just a couple of months ago, we gave Google Voice a glowing review.
Once you've jumped in head first to the product it will straighten out your phone life forever. You'll never have to worry about figuring out which phone numbers to give to different people. Give them one number - your Google Voice number - and then use rules to determine where your calls go based on who's calling and what you are doing.
There are significant switching costs, though. You have to tell everyone your new phone number and get them to start using that, instead. New business cards have to be printed, which is another cost. For most people, that's just too much heavy lifting to fully embrace the service. And there's the additional problem of your outbound calls and outbound text messages showing the phone number of the device you are calling from instead of your Google Voice number. Your friends need to store that number or they won't know who's calling. And once it's stored, they'll use it, bypassing all the great voicemail and call routing features of Google Voice.
But Google has a plan to deal with all of these issues, we've heard. And it starts with Number Portability.
Google Voice, formerly GrandCentral, is a seriously heavyweight product. When it relaunched in March, just a couple of months ago, we gave Google Voice a glowing review.
Once you’ve jumped in head first to the product it will straighten out your phone life forever. You’ll never have to worry about figuring out which phone numbers to give to different people. Give them one number - your Google Voice number - and then use rules to determine where your calls go based on who’s calling and what you are doing.
There are significant switching costs, though. You have to tell everyone your new phone number and get them to start using that, instead. New business cards have to be printed, which is another cost. For most people, that’s just too much heavy lifting to fully embrace the service. And there’s the additional problem of your outbound calls and outbound text messages showing the phone number of the device you are calling from instead of your Google Voice number. Your friends need to store that number or they won’t know who’s calling. And once it’s stored, they’ll use it, bypassing all the great voicemail and call routing features of Google Voice.
But Google has a plan to deal with all of these issues, we’ve heard. And it starts with Number Portability.
Today you are issued a new phone number when you sign up for Google Voice. But we’ve confirmed that a very small number of people have ported their existing numbers to Google (Google uses Level3 to handle phone numbers). In the U.S. it’s possible to port any phone number to another service provider - even a mobile number to a voip provider like Level3.
Google is only testing the service for now, but we’ve heard from a source inside Google that they plan to roll out number portability as a general feature later this year. Once that happens, users will be able to move the phone number they’ve had forever to Google, and avoid the switching costs.
That means you can switch your mobile number to Google and then just use whatever device you happen to have in your hand to receive calls. That’s an extremely powerful feature for Google Voice.
Outbound calls from those devices will still show whatever phone number is assigned to it, though. But Google has that covered, too. We’ve learned that they are preparing to launch apps for the major smartphone platforms that will automatically route outbound calls through Google Voice. That means whoever you call will see your Google Voice number as the caller.
I’m banging on every door I can find to get Google to let me port my mobile number over to them as soon as possible. I’ll have to pay a $175 fee to AT&T to switch away, but it’s worth it. As long as Google is around I won’t have to be shackled to any of the ridiculous U.S. mobile carriers. I can just use whatever device I’m testing at any given time as my main phone. And I won’t have to ask people to call me at my home VoIP line when I’m here just because my iPhone doesn’t work at all at my house. Instead I can just switch my inbound calls to Vonage. Callers won’t know the difference.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AP - Hollywood star Julia Roberts and detained Chinese activists are among celebrities and political prisoners tweeting and signing petitions for the release of Myanmar's democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi as she approaches her 64th birthday her 14th spent in detention organizers said Sunday.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here’s a big TV for under $400. Best Buy is selling its house brand 37-inch Insignia 720p LCD TV for just $398, down from $600.
Features: 37-inch LCD at 1366×768, 500 cd/m2 brightness, 1500:1 contrast ratio, three HDMI inputs, VGA input, two each S-Video/component/composite video inputs, built-in HDTV tuner, built-in speakers, and optical audio output.
The brightness and contrast ratio seem a tad low but other than that, this is a pretty enticing deal for such a big 720p TV.
Insignia® - 37″ 720p Flat-Panel LCD HDTV [Best Buy via Slickdeals.net]
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones
We’re just over a week removed from the launch of the Palm Pre and it looks to be shaping up as a fairly hacker friendly device. Within a few days users had figured out that the famous Konami code (“upupdowndownletftrightleftrightbastart”) enables dev mode on the device. Then it was found out that by holding the volume up button while booting would allow the user to flash their own custom firmware onto the device.
Now some crafty users have figured out how to gain root access to the Palm Pre. The process requires a PC or Mac (a Linux solution has yet to be determined) and requires the user to be comfortable with light command line usage. Getting root access allows the Pre devs to enable hidden features such as displaying call duration in the call log, install and delete (or hide) apps. It’s only a bit amusing that the only hide/delete article is how to delete the NASCAR app. The process is fairly involved, but it might be worth it to get back however much space the app takes up for those who aren’t fans of turning left for hours.
Of course, now that they have root access one of the first moves was to put Linux on the device, or more correctly, to put Debian Rootfs onto the Palm Pre. With the Debian Rootfs the Pre can be turned into an official hacker’s toy. Debian allows the device to do NES emulation as well as play Doom. Of course it’s not recommended to try these things if you’re not comfortable with the command line or fear you might brick your phone. The ultimate goal of the project looks to be to enable tethering, and we can always hope that the group will get together to make a simple way of doing these things eventually, like QuickPwn for the iPhone/iPod touch.
Read [Pre dev wiki]
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Short Version: The HUGlight is a flexible foam rubber flashlight-type apparatus that can be worn around your neck. It can also be bended and positioned to illuminate hard-to-reach areas, making it more useful than just a simple wearable flashlight.
Long Version: HUGlight: a silly name for a product that’s actually quite useful. Please note that it does not give hugs like you’d get from an old Army buddy or from your grandma.
The “hug” part is for the fact that it can hug itself around your neck for some hands-free light dispersal. On the end of each foam rubber arm, there are two LEDs. One’s a wide beam, one’s a spot beam. You can use one or both via a series of clicks to the button atop each end. Four beams total.
And here’s a shot of one of the LED clusters:
My first thought was to put HUGlight to the test as a reading lamp. It actually doesn’t work quite as well as you’d think. The light is more focused than a traditional book light, so it would only illuminate a certain area of my book’s pages. Luckily HUGlight is flexible, so I eventually got both arms pointed well enough to ensure adequate coverage of my reading area. After that, though, I had to be conscious not to move my book or my head around too much. So, yes, HUGlight works okay for reading but I wouldn’t buy it just for that purpose.
Aside from reading, HUGlight worked really well when I needed to carry a bunch of boxes down the dark and creepy back staircase in my apartment. I positioned one side of HUGlight to shoot light directly out in front of me and the other side down at my feet to illuminate the stairs as I made my way to the basement. I could see everything fine thanks to the super bright light from the LEDs and both my hands were free to carry the boxes.
HUGlight can also be wrapped around stuff like doorknobs and whatnot to allow you to shine light into hard-to-reach areas. Or you can coil HUGlight up to allow it to function somewhat like a desk lamp:
So it serves a few purposes in one: average book light, above-average hands-free flashlight/worklight, and makeshift desk lamp. Although the beams of light are a bit too focused in some cases, the LEDs are very bright and HUGlight provides great value in its ability to be used for a wide range of household projects.
HUGlight uses two AAA batteries, which are included and apparently good for up to 40 hours of use. At $14.95, it’s not a bad tool to pick up just to have around the house — I found myself using HUGlight far more than I thought I would.
HUGlight [MyLight.com]
"It beggars belief that our police, who are supposed to be solving crime, are suspected of fraud on a grand scale."Card fraud probe targets 300 detectivesAuditors at the Metropolitan Police Authority have spent two years examining receipts from the accounts of more than 3,500 officers. The Amex cards were issued in 2006 to detectives from specialist operations, which includes counter-terrorism and those involved in diplomatic and royalty protection.
The scheme was then extended to the specialist crime directorate, which counters organised crime, as well as conducting sensitive inquiries such as the cash-for-honours investigation...
Sources have told the Observer that some detectives had fallen into the habit of withdrawing hundreds of pounds at a time from cashpoints. Other officers appear to have filled in blank receipts from restaurants to account for cash payments.
It gets better: Italian law says that the penalty for currency smuggling is 40% of the seized cash, and that 40% (US$28 billion) will take a huge bite out of Italy's public debt.
If the certificates were real, for Italy it would be like hitting the jackpot. The fine alone would amount to US$ 38 billion, five times the estimated cost of rebuilding quake-devastated Abruzzi region. It would help Italy's eliminate its public deficit.US government securities seized from Japanese nationals, not clear whether real or fake (via @stacyhebert)If the certificates are fakes the two Japanese nationals could get a very lengthy jail sentence for fraud.
As soon as the seizure was made the US Embassy in Rome was informed. Italian and US secret services were called in to assist the Italian financial police.
Some important international financial newspapers had already reported on the existence of 'funny money' circulating on parallel, i.e. unofficial, financial markets.
Section: Video, DVD/DVR/Blu-ray, Gadgets / Other
Samsung’s latest offering into the Blu-ray market is the SD-P4600. Very glossy and streamlined in appearance, but when are they going to give up attempts into the Blu-ray foray? I just don’t see Blu-ray making it.
This one is different from other ones out right now due to its design. It’s super thin and can be wall mounted. But although they earn some kudos for “cool design” that doesn’t mean it actually works as well as it looks.
From several reviews I’ve read, set-up can be a pain in the rear. Lots of “well that didn’t work” kind of steps to make all the features work correctly. The side-loading discs are not exactly convenient and the port compartment is rather cramped.
The BD-P4600 has built in streaming for Netflix movies and Pandora music. Unfortunately, the Netflix movies didn’t work for many people trying to get them. Instead, they got lots of error messages, without streaming any movies.
My point regarding Blu-ray is that I just don’t see how it is going to be a “stick around” kind of thing that really makes it into every family’s home. Discs are still expensive, and there are so many other viable opportunities to get your movie entertainment delivered right to your living room without this kind of price-tag attached.
Then when you have the fact that people can buy upscaling DVD players and still get good quality video on their HDTVs using regular DVDs, there goes that perk Blu-ray tries to sell.
But, if you are a technophile that needs one of every gadget in your home, now you have another choice for your product lineup. It runs about $500 and just released June 10th.
Read: [Wired]
Full Story » | Written by Jodie Andrefski for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Tactical Corsets
(via @richardkadrey)
Source: Boing Boing | 14 Jun 2009 | 3:55 pm
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Some good news for your Sunday, your day of rest. Retromags, a Web site that scans and archives old (up till 1999) video game magazines, has got its hands on the very first issue of Game Informer. Let us celebrate!
The issue hasn’t been scanned yet, so you’ll wait a little while longer to read about Game Genie Controversies, Funco and how to beat that new Sonic game.
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Retromags, but it’s pretty great. (Is what the site’s doing legal? I don’t know and, more importantly, I don’t care.) It’s just great to go back and read some of the old mags every now and then.
And while we’re on the subject, it’s the site’s 4th birthday this month, so lifetime premium accounts (you can download more magazines per week), the money of which goes toward buying more old magazines from eBay, is only $10. That’s so cheap even I can afford it!
Now then, back to my day of rest, which includes watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War.
Today's the end of my guest blogging stint on BoingBoing and I'm in the mood for a summertime road trip. Unfortunately, my car is 1999 AWD Ford Explorer with a 5.0 V-8 and gets, maybe, 16 miles to the gallon. The thing about it is that nothing ever goes wrong with it. It's a great vehicle, gas mileage aside. Wired magazine ran a great article explaining that the greenest vehicle is the car you already own. So, If I do go somewhere, I'll rent a Civic instead.
A great road trip requires more than just driving. It should be something like and retracing the route of Lewis and Clark. Or retracing the route of H. Sargent Michaels 1905 "Photographic Guide for Motorists from Chicago to Lake Geneva."
Matthew Algeo new book, Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure, is the account of a great road trip. The book's conceit is marvelous: almost immediately after leaving office, ex-president Truman and his wife Bess got behind the wheel of a new Chrysler New Yorker and drove from Missouri to New York and back, as plain old private citizens.
Harry loved to drive, so he and Bess loaded up the trunk with a few suitcases and took off. No bodyguards, no secret service. Harry and Bess ate in roadside diners, stopped at country gas stations, and just made like normal people, as well as the recently retired leader of the greatest nation in the free world could do. Impossible to imagine Clinton, Bush, or Bush doing that (Carter, maybe.)
Algeo retraced the route, visiting the places Turman stopped at. He uses newspaper accounts and interviews with the still living but now usually elderly people that interacted with Harry - waitresses, hotel clerks, even a cop who stopped him on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for driving too slow - to weave together a terrificly interesting story.
So, I need a road trip. Maybe I'll retrace the route of the Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test trip, or Hernando Desoto's quest for the fountain of youth through the Southeast. I'm still thinking of more.
Source: Boing Boing | 14 Jun 2009 | 2:54 pm
Some people use Twitter to organize street protests in Tehran. Some people use it to share their daily thoughts and observation. But it is increasingly becoming clear that one of the most common ways people use Twitter is as a social information filter and link distributor.
Over the past few months, TechCrunch has experienced the power of this micro-media firsthand as the percentage of traffic we get from Twitter has grown to the point that it is now our second largest source of outside traffic after Google. In the past 30 days, Twitter accounted for 9.7 percent of all traffic to Techcrunch.com, up from 1.8 percent six months ago. This is out of millions of visits.
Looking at our Google Analytics numbers, here is the breakdown of visits to TechCrunch by source over the past 30 days:
Top Sources of Traffic To TechCrunch
1. Google: 32.7%
2. Direct: 22.7%
3. Twitter: 9.7%
4. Digg: 7.4%
5. Techmeme: 2.4%
6. Other: 25.1%
Twitter has been rising up that chart, just recently surpassing Digg. TechCrunch is certainly not typical of most Websites, but this data certainly shows the potential of Twitter to generate traffic. A large portion of that traffic comes from the TechCrunch account on Twitter, which has nearly 715,000 followers (it is one of the accounts suggested to new users). For many people, Twitter is replacing their RSS readers. One of the ways we use that account is to Tweet out links to our stories, which then spread virally as followers retweet those links. Retweets are becoming a new type of link currency. We are big believers in retweets (in fact, there is now a retweet button at the bottom of every post).
About a month ago we started using Awe.sm, which lets us send out our own custom short links (http://tcrn.ch) and track how much traffic we get from them. About 73 percent of our Twitter traffic comes from people clicking on an http://tcrn.ch short link. Another 23 percent comes directly from Twitter.com via other short links such as bit.ly’s.
We can also approximate how much Twitter traffic comes from desktop and mobile clients. At least 44 percent of Twitter traffic comes from clients, and that counts people clicking directly on http://tcrn.ch links from those clients. So the true number is easily more than half.
For us, and I’d argue increasingly for other large Websites as well, Twitter is not just about micro-media. The most powerful Tweets are those which point elsewhere. Or to put it another way, the shortened link may just be the most powerful type of micro-media there is. Those retweeted links are turning Twitter into a social broadcast media that rivals any other on the Web.
(Photo credit: Flickr/Brett Weinstein)
Top 5 TechCrunch Traffic Sources
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Got a Pre? Like Nintendo? If you fit in the overlapping intersection of that particular Venn diagram, then have I got some good news for you. Some enterprising individuals over at the Pre Dev Wiki have gotten a NES emulator up and running on the Palm Pre.
It’s not for the faint of heart, as it’ll require you to gain root access to your Pre followed by compiling FCEUltra and then tweaking a few display settings to get the games to run at 320×480 resolution. But if you’ve gotten your hands dirty before and you know your way around Linux, it’s a fairly straightforward five-step process. Actually, the fifth step is “Play your favorite games.” So that’s an easy one.
Pre Dev Wiki [via Engadget]
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones
Pretty much like has happened the past couple of years, it looks like those folks pre-ordering the iPhone 3G S probably aren’t going to get their phone on the launch date. Due to major sell-outs, anyone pre-ordering from Saturday, June 13th and later are not going to get them at launch. AT&T’s internal sales system is directing staff to let customers know sorry, it’s not going to happen. Instead, they can expect their phone to show up 7 to 14 days after the order is made.
So, if you want one on launch day, and you held out on placing a pre-order, you are going to have to go to an AT&T or Apple store and wait. The regular availability is now set to begin at 8:00 am, rather than the 7:00 am start time they were previously hailing. Those people who did place a pre-order are supposed to expect an email letting them know when their phone is in stock.
For those that already have a pre-order in, you still get to join the line at 7:00 though, and let everyone else duke it out later for what is left. Best Buy and Walmart are also supposed to have them, but not until regular store hours on June 19th.
Can’t wait to see this circus when it comes to town.
Read: [appleinsider]
Full Story » | Written by Jodie Andrefski for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Newegg.com is selling the Asus Eee PC 900 for just $170 with free shipping. That’s for a new unit, too, not a refurbished one. The specs won’t blow your toupee off your head but, hey, the price is right.
You’ll get an 8.9-inch screen at 1024×600, a 900MHz ultra low voltage Intel Celeron M processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB solid state drive, four-cell battery, and Linux.
ASUS Eee PC [Newegg.com via dealnews]
AP - The Minnesota woman who became the nation's only music file-sharing defendant so far to go to trial is getting a replay two years after losing the case.
| World : News Archives | Business | Entertainment | Sports | Technology | Science | Marketplace Audio |
| India : News | Business | Entertainment | Sports | Telugu | |
| Blogs : Humor pages | Norkay's Blog | Kids Stories | Indian Recipes | Database Tech Blog |
| Sundries : World Video Clips | Songs Clips | Indian Video Clips | |
