Despite the fact that the government is trying to stop Iranians from using Twitter by blocking the site and halting access to SMS services within the country, tech savvy protesters continue to find ways... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 3:38 pm
Gaggle (iTunes URL) is a brand-new web browser designed for the iPhone which lets you share links on the social web while you surf. Thanks to Facebook Connect and Twitter integration, this simple browser... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 3:31 pm
Microsoft's cost-cutting measures drove it to lay off thousands of employees and led to some perks being discontinued for its remaining employees - including no longer paying for their Apple Phone data... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 3:14 pm
Ever come across a Google search result that has the words 'this site can harm your computer' below a link? What about the Firefox red screen of death? If you're a Web surfer, chances are you've likely... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 3:05 pm
We are loving the Viliv X70 with it’s built-in 3G modem, but it’s little brother - the S5 - wants some love too. The 5-inch UMPC will soon be available from Dynamism with 3G and more SSD options. These extras do come at a higher price though.
32GB SSD - $649
32GB SSD with 3G - $799
128GB SSD with 3G - $1299
The importer still doesn’t have solid delivery dates for these model, but hopefully they will come soon.
AP - Forget about Ashton Kutcher. James Joyce's "Ulysses," one of the most difficult novels in English, is on Twitter. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:52 pm
Forget about Ashton Kutcher. James Joyce's "Ulysses," one of the most difficult novels in English, is on Twitter. Two devotees of "Ulysses" have adapted its 10th chapter to Twitter,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:52 pm
So I’m at the Hotel on Rivington in Manhattan at the Olympus press conference and we’re getting the first hands on with the Olympus E-P1 in North America. Dana Wollman from Laptop was kind enough to be my hand model so these aren’t my hands on the Olympus, but I am shooting with one. I’ve included two test images shot at ISO 200 and ISO 6400 shot with the 14-42mm lens.
You can download the JPEG for the ISO 200 image here and the ISO 6400 image here.
Yes, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz did indeed drop the F-bomb on BoomTown quite expertly in an onstage interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference recently–and, yes, it was both expected and enjoyable.
(In this picture above, she is clearly trying to hypnotize me with her stare.)
Discussing the future prospects for Yahoo (YHOO), her reasons for taking the top job at the company, the state of the advertising market, what she thought about Yahoo’s relationships with Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) and more, Bartz’s colorful personality was on full display.
She even managed to tease News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, who was sitting in the front row during the interview (News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site).
And whether one thinks about whether Bartz can save the Silicon Valley icon or not–although she disputed the notion that Yahoo needs saving in the interview–and revive its innovative spirit, it will certainly be interesting watching her try.
Reuters - Social networking service Twitter delayed a planned upgrade to avoid cutting daytime service to Iranians who have been using it to coordinate protests against a disputed presidential election. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:50 pm
Danny O'Brien's got a doozy of a lazyweb idea: "Here's a way to mash-up two of the most talked-about Internet issues today. Opera launched their web-server-in-a-browser, Opera Unite, today. Iranian protestors... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:42 pm
Danny O'Brien's got a doozy of a lazyweb idea: "Here's a way to mash-up two of the most talked-about Internet issues today. Opera launched their web-server-in-a-browser, Opera Unite, today. Iranian protestors are looking for proxies to get around Iran's blocking.
So why not write a Opera Unite service that acts as a simple, quick-and-dirty proxy for Iranians? Danny O'Brien lays down the challenge."
Instead of a real http proxy (like Psiphon), the best implementation would simply let you append a URL to your Unite URL and get a website back, like "http://foo.bar.operaunite.com/www.cnn.com/". That would get rid of handing over your cookies to an unknown third-party; it'd probably also discourage people using the service for private communications (no https, in Unite -- it'd be great if Opera fixed that!).
Maybe I'd also stick in a geoip check to make sure the incoming requests are coming from a known Iranian IP block, just so users could feel worthy that they're just catering to Iranians (you could pull them out of this free geolocation database). That way we wouldn't be creating a permanent global clunky, insecure proxy network -- or at least not until Iran recovers and starts its own phishing services.
I know I'm not a good enough JS programmer to pull this off, but the Unite JavaScript API certainly appears to permit cross-domain XMLHttp calls, and you can catch generic HTTP requests using opera.io.webserver.addEventListener('_request',somehandler,false);, so it is theoretically possible (and here I hand wave to the implementation Gods).
The Garmin nuviphone G60 will come out one day, friends, most likely during the second quarter of this year. And when it does come out, there will be much rejoicing: it's the last time the Garmin-Asus operating system will be used on a device. From there on out it's Android and Windows Mobile all the way.
Investing to Stay Ahead of Growing Demand for Wireless Calling, Data Access and Music LAUREL, Md., June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- In a continuing effort to provide the... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:40 pm
LionMage writes "Much has been made previously of how China's Green Dam software must be installed on all new PCs in China, and of more recent revelations that the software may create exploitable security vulnerabilities or even provide the Chinese government with a ready-made botnet to use for potentially nefarious purposes. (One of those prior articles even discusses how Green Dam incorporates blacklists from CyberSitter.) Now the BBC is reporting that Solid Oak's CyberSitter software may have had more than just a compiled blacklist lifted from it. Solid Oak is claiming that actual pieces of their code somehow wound up in Green Dam. From PC Magazine's article: 'Solid Oak Software, the developer of CyberSitter, claims that the look and feel of the GUI used by Green Dam mimics the style of CyberSitter. But more damning, chief executive Brian Milburn said, was the fact that the Green Dam code uses DLLs identified with the CyberSitter name, and even makes calls back to Solid Oak's servers for updates.'" Relatedly, reader Spurious Logic writes that Green Dam won't be mandatory after all, according to an unnamed official with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Former MySpace CMO Shawn Gold is starting up a new social media business dubbed Cocodot, which is poised for launch next September. The current website for the venture doesn't reveal much, and all we know... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:37 pm
Former MySpace CMO Shawn Gold is starting up a new social media business dubbed Cocodot, which is poised for launch next September. The current website for the venture doesn’t reveal much, and all we know at this point about Cocodot is that it will provide a “style-driven communication and guest management platform for people and brands to create celebrations”.
We didn’t get that either, but apparently Gold is close to announcing several alliances with some of America’s biggest consumer brands pre-launch, so our expectations are on the high side. And investors are interested, too. The startup has just closed its first round of financing, securing seed funding from investors like Anthem Venture Partners and William Morris’ Mail Room Fund. The amount raised was just south of $1 million.
For your reference: Gold was the former President of Intermix Media, the company that used to be eUniverse and owned the MySpace website before it was sold to News Corp. for a reported $670 million. He was also President of Weblogs Inc, which was acquired by AOL for $25 million back in 2005.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on Cocodot for the foreseeable future.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
If you live in Ontario, or want to (quickly!) send some books to a good cause, the Lieutenant Governor of the province is doing his annual drive for new books for kids living in remote First Nations communities. These are generally small, isolated communities located deep in the northern boreal wilderness. Most have a population under 1000 and are accessible only by aircraft. Kids in these communities often have access to only old books in bad condition, so our province's Lieutenant Governor launched this annual effort several years ago to refresh community libraries with up-to-date titles.
The deadline, June 21, is only a few days away, unfortunately. If someone from outside Ontario REALLY wants to help out, feel free to get hold of me directly at dglad@sff.net and you can make arrangements to send a book or two to me, and I'll get it into the donation stream. But for those of you who live in Ontario, or nearby (I'm lookin' at you, folks in northern New York, Michigan, Minnesota, etc.!) this is a great chance to get some new reading material into the hands of kids who really, really need it.
For Cory's benefit, I know where my brand-new hardcopy of "Little Brother" is going. I'm quite happy to live with my digital copy and get the dead-tree version into the hands of a young Aboriginal kid.
Science fiction writer Dave Laderoute sez, If you live in Ontario, or want to (quickly!) send some books to a good cause, the Lieutenant Governor of the province is doing his annual drive for new books... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:37 pm
We all know Carl Linnaeus as the father of taxonomy, but how did he keep all that taxonomic information organized? Turns out he invented index cards:
Speaking at the annual meeting of the British Society for the History of Science in Leicester, UK on Saturday 4 July, Mueller-Wille will reveal his preliminary findings of research on Linnaeus' manuscripts held June 16 at the Linnaean Society of London...
Towards the end of his career, in the mid-1760s, Linnaeus took this further, inventing a paper tool that has since become very common: index cards. While stored in some fixed, conventional order, often alphabetically, index cards could be retrieved and shuffled around at will to update and compare information at any time.
We all know Carl Linnaeus as the father of taxonomy, but how did he keep all that taxonomic information organized? Turns out he invented index cards: Speaking at the annual meeting of the British Society... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:35 pm
The ioSafe Solo(TM), the world's first high capacity, fireproof, waterproof, external hard drive, to be distributed by Ingram Micro. Priced at $149, the ioSafe Solo provides Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:31 pm
LENEXA, Kan., June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, SpreadsheetGear LLC announced the immediate availability of SpreadsheetGear 2009. With one safe managed assembly, SpreadsheetGear... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:29 pm
Investing to Stay Ahead of Growing Demand for Wireless Calling, Data Access and Music LAUREL, Md., June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- In a continuing effort to provide the... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:25 pm
ReadyTalk enhances its audio and Web Conferencing service with bulk email support DENVER, June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- ReadyTalk, a leader in integrated Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:25 pm
Investing to Stay Ahead of Growing Demand for Wireless Calling, Data Access and Music LAUREL, Md., June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- In a continuing effort to provide the... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:25 pm
The Boynq Pad2Go Retractable Mouse Pad has just been deeply discounted at Radio Shack. It’s now $3.99, down from $19.99.
The Pad2Go is billed as “the ideal travel mousepad that can be stored in any type of luggage.” Know what other type of mousepad can be easily stored in luggage? Any regular mousepad.
It probably doesn’t help that the product shot shows a somewhat crinkled mousing surface. Because there’s nothing better than sliding your mouse over across a tiny, lumpy windowshade.
FROM APPLETELL - AT&T just can’t pull MMS together quite yet. No one really knows just when “later this summer” really is, but at least one other question was left unanswered. How much will this all cost? MORE »
Macworld.com - Kroll Ontrack has announced data recovery services for Appleâs Xsan 2. The service offered for businesses using Xsan servers that have experienced volume corruption. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:18 pm
While we like the thinking behind the BaubBike, a bicycle both modular in design and also fairly easy to build from standard square-section steel tubes, in practice it looks both dangerous and rather uncomfortable.
There’s a reason bike frames have been triangular for so long: stiffness. A steel frame will flex a lot, and the triangle is an inherently stable shape. Stiffer modern materials mean that today designers can experiment more, but if you’re using off the shelf tubing, a square is going to crumple in a collision.
Of course, looking at the Bauhaus-inspired frame by designer Michael Ubbesen Jakobsen, we’re not thinking about damage to the bike. We’re thinking about damage to ourselves: Check the iteration with a second saddle and cojones-splitting handle. Ouch. In fact, all the sharp corners in general make this one of the scariest-looking rides we’ve seen. Far better is the slot-in carrying-rack, but that still leaves a lot of sharp corners.
Unlike many concepts, there is a “buy” button on Jakobsen’s site, although right now it leads only to an e-mail contact form. If he does put it into production, he might consider adding a “sue me” button alongside it. Either that or just only sell the BauBike to men who are already wearing tight jeans and taking very hot baths in order to deprive their baby-hungry wives of vital proteins.
Investing to Stay Ahead of Growing Demand for Wireless Calling, Data Access and Music LAUREL, Md., June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- In a continuing effort to provide the... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:16 pm
Everyone moans about the lack of Flash on the iPhone, right? Let’s face it: if someone makes a solid Flash implementation for the iPhone there would be substantially less interest in making native iPhone apps. You could create a rich user environment in the browser, and the iPhone App Store would be less and less relevant. As things stand now, I prefer native apps over browser apps for iPhone services. I use the dedicated mail client to access my GMail account, rather than load the mobile GMail interface in Safari. I use a dedicated Twitter client, FaceBook client, and LinkedIn client rather than load the mobile version of those sites (assuming a mobile version even exists!).
Often, though, no native client exists, and you’re stuck using a web site. It can be a real pain to find a mobile-friendly version of the sites you need, sometimes. Enter Taptu, the alternative search machine. This free app provides iPhone-friendly search results in a surprisingly intuitive way.
The app starts with a simple text entry box. Tap in it, and type in a search phrase. I recently started homebrewing, so beer has been on my mind a lot. I searched for beer.
Unfortunately for this review, the first result was a sucky spam landing page. But in Taptu’s defense, it was a mobile-optimized sucky spam landing page! The second page was the very informative Wikipedia entry on beer. Mmmm…beer.
At the top of the results screen you see your search terms, which you can edit, the Taptu control widget, which we’ll get to in a moment, and some dots. The dots are a pager, and indicate where in the search results you are. You simply flick through the search results in a coverflow fashion, and get to see previews of the result pages. If you want to see the full page, simply click the “View source” link and an inline browser will open. In this case, it’ll open the Wapedia (WAP-optimized version of Wikipedia) page for beer. Mmmmm…beer. Click the little gear in the bottom right and you’ll get options to share or save the link, or email yourself the contents of the result page. Pretty handy.
If you click the Taptu control widget at the top right of the screen, you can filter your search results in a number of useful ways.
As you can see, you can filter your search results to just iPhone sites, just Wikipedia, just Twitter, etc. This is a good way to narrow a search to find stuff you know you want without having to scroll past pages of unrelated results. In an early beta of the Taptu app that I tried, it included an annoying number of YouTube videos in my search results, and I found myself filtering results to get better accuracy. Thankfully, YouTube seems less prominent in search results returned in the current version of the app, and presumably the algorithms will continue to improve.
Another great feature of the current version of the Taptu app are context sensitive search filters included beneath the default search filters. As you can see, my search for beer produced a number of beer-related links.
Mmmmm…beeer.
Bottom line: Taptu is a pretty slick mobile search solution.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
By Shane McGlaun JBL has been making headphones and speakers for a long time. The company makes some of the most popular car and home theater speakers around. JBL and Roxy have teamed up to offer more... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:12 pm
By Shane McGlaun I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid right until the point where I found out that you really needed to be in the military for a shot. The thought of getting ordered around was... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:11 pm
Everyone moans about the lack of Flash on the iPhone, right? Let's face it: if someone makes a solid Flash implementation for the iPhone there would be substantially less interest in making native iPhone apps. You could create a rich user environment in the browser, and the iPhone App Store would be less and less relevant. As things stand now, I prefer native apps over browser apps for iPhone services. I use the dedicated mail client to access my GMail account, rather than load the mobile GMail interface in Safari. I use a dedicated Twitter client, FaceBook client, and LinkedIn client rather than load the mobile version of those sites (assuming a mobile version even exists!).
Often, though, no native client exists, and you're stuck using a web site. It can be a real pain to find a mobile-friendly version of the sites you need, sometimes. Enter Taptu, the alternative search machine. This free app provides iPhone-friendly search results in a surprisingly intuitive way.
...asks Alissa Walker of three smarty designer types:
⌦ "People will design their own phones, picking the size, weight, battery life, materials, screen: Built to order." Doubt it! Standardized forms are necessary for people to write software that provides a consistent experience.
⌦ "The earpiece ring is worn on the thumb, the mic on the pinky." Ha ha, no.
⌦ "I can access all of my communications data from the cloud--from any phone or device that is convenient." Here we go.
Gosh I am so smart.
At this point, imagining phones ten years out seems pretty pointless. The phones we use today are not fundamentally different than the smartphones of a decade ago in conception, but we hadn't anticipated exactly when the touchscreens and the processors would become good enough for programmers and designers to finally crack the user interface issues in a way that worked for the mass market. But if you think about it, many of the things that make the iPhone, Pre, and Android phones work—the gestures, the integration with cloud data services, app repositories—were totally possible at least in modest form ten years back. It just took a while to get everything lined up.
I guess what I'm thinking is that imagining phones ten years ahead isn't nearly as difficult as building the phones in two-year intervals that get us to where that vision may be. We know what we could be doing with phones for several years; now it's up to the creators to add more capability in salable ways. (It would be fantastic if every phone had a barometer and a thermometer to act as weather stations, but until the sensor package is essentially free, it's too specialized of a function to justify the cost. But that does make me realize that phones could stand to incorporate more of the capability of sports watches, including especially water resistance. Tough nut to crack, but maybe Casio is onto something there with their line of "toughphones".)
Reuters - Research In Motion is adding another smartphone to its BlackBerry lineup as it aims to win market share among both executives and mainstream consumers despite tough economic conditions.
⌦ Inflatable Bed – AeroBed Lasting Comfort Air Matress (queen) for $85, shipped. It's at Costco, so non-members pay a 5% surcharge. These are normally around $120. [Slickdeals]
⌦ Gutter Robot – The iRobot Looj gutter-cleaning robot has dropped to $30, shipped, if you pay with PayPal. [Techbargains]
⌦ Watch – The new Timex Expedition WS4 widescreen multifunction watch (alimeter, barometer, compass, thermometer) is 20% at Eastern Mountain Sports, making it $160 shipped. [Dealhack]
⌦ True Blood – The first season DVDs of the HBO vampire series True Blood are on sale for $25, shipped. [Amazon]
⌦ Watch Winder – Wolf Designs Module 2.0 Programmable 3-Slot Rotating Automatic Watch Winder for just $450, or about $1,050 off. It winds watches. [Dealnews]
⌦ Speakers – Today's Woot are two Klipsch Synergy F-1 Floorstanding Loudspeakers for $355, shipped.
The Garmin nuviphone G60 will come out one day, friends, most likely during the second quarter of this year. And when it does come out, there will be much rejoicing: it’s the last time the Garmin-Asus operating system will be used on a device. From there on out it’s Android and Windows Mobile all the way.
Why the switch? Apparently the operating system, despite being based on Linux, isn’t the easiest to develop for—hence the long delay (The G60 was first announced some 16 months ago under a different name.) Inertia may also be to blame: why wouldn’t a company merely use the increasingly mature Android operating system, or Windows Mobile if that’s the crowd they want to target? Developers already have enough operating systems to juggle—iPhone OS, webOS, Android, WinMo—without having to worry about another one, and an unproven one at that.
So, in conclusion, following the launch of the G60, look for Garmin devices to run on Android or WinMo. That is all.
Macworld.com - Olympus on Tuesday introduced the E-P1 digital camera. Itâs not a Single Lens Reflex (SLR) model, though its sports interchangeable lenses, and it can also record High Definition (HD) video. Itâs coming in July starting at $750. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:03 pm
Logitech’s Bluetooth mouse lineup has been somewhat non-exsistant lately, but the M555b takes care of that. This mouse seems like your standard two-button mouse but the wheel features the hyper-fast scolling that some love in the MX Revolution line. Plus the mouse features laser tracking and a low-battery indicator for the AA power source.
Expect this $59 mouse to be available in a couple of weeks from Logitech. But if you don’t mind having a Dell-branded unit, you can pick one up right now and get it tomorrow.
Today we'll be posting items on the world of fashion, clothing and fashionable accessories. We'll be reviewing a gadget-friendly technical jacket with tons of pockets, Heidi Klum's gold headset, a Vivienne Tam netbook, and more. Plus, we'll consider the automated tie rack, a diamond-encrusted USB watch necklace, utility belts and holsters, and &mdash wait for it &mdash a "social networking shoe."
Team investigates the climate of Planet Earth 440 million years agoGeologists at the University of Leicester have shown that an ancient Ice Age, once regarded as a brief ‘blip’, in fact lasted for 30 million years.They have published their findings and are due to discuss them at a public lecture at the University on Wednesday June 17.Their research suggests that during this ancient Ice Age, global warming was curbed through the burial of organic carbon that eventually lead to the formation of oil – including the ‘hot shales’ of north Africa and Arabia which constitute the world’s most productive oil source rock.This ice age has been named ‘the Early Palaeozoic Icehouse’ by Dr Alex Page and his colleagues in a paper published as part of a collaborative Deep Time Climate project between the University of Leicester and British Geological Survey.The Ice Age occurred in the Ordovician and Silurian Periods of geological time (part of the Early Palaeozoic Era), an interval that witnessed a major diversification of early marine animals including trilobites and primitive fish as well as the emergence of the first land plants.The Early Palaeozoic climate had long been considered characterized by essentially greenhouse conditions with elevated atmospheric CO2 and warm temperatures extending to high latitudes, and only brief snaps of frigid climate. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 16 Jun 2009 | 1:58 pm
Security researchers urge Google to enable encryption by default on its most popular web apps, including Gmail and Google Docs, saying the search giant is putting millions of users at risk of fraud from hackers.
Not content to let others do the heavy lifting, Pure Digital, now part of Cisco, has added Flip Channels to their popular - and surprisingly useful - FlipShare software. The software is pre-installed on every Flip devices (we have the HD) and the Channels are yet another way to upload and share your videos in the interwebs.
Videos sent to your channel can be viewed at FlipShare.com or using the FlipShare iPhone app, also available today. The software also supports DVD authoring and standard sharing with YouTube and MySpace. I sent a video to myself using the service, a real cinematic magnum opus. You cannot formally embed videos sent to channels - you can embed them on the sly using the actual HTML or grabbing to a site like Posterous - but obviously you can embed videos sent to YouTube.
You know what it's like, you're out on the town, doing something cool, and you have an urge to tweet about it for your tweeps on Twitter, but the only device you've brought out with you is your Commodore 64. Now there's BREADBOX64, a Twitter client for the C64.
With BREADBOX64 you can post status messages and view your friends timeline. The timeline refreshes every two minutes. After starting you provide your twitter username and password separated by a colon. After pressing enter, the timeline is retrieved and shown. At the bottom of the screen there is an input field for you to type aq status message. Pressing enter will post that message to twitter.
You can run BREADBOX64 on a C64 emulator. I use VICE, because that one supports networking. However, you can better test it on a real system if you have the hardware ready at hand. If so, copy the D64 to a real disk, put it in your 1541 and go ahead!
Not content to let others do the heavy lifting, Pure Digital, now part of Cisco, has added Flip Channels to their popular - and surprisingly useful - FlipShare software. The software is pre-installed on every Flip devices (we have the HD) and the Channels are yet another way to upload and share your videos in the interwebs.
Videos sent to your channel can be viewed at FlipShare.com or using the FlipShare iPhone app, also available today. The software also supports DVD authoring and standard sharing with YouTube and MySpace. I sent a video to myself using the service, a real cinematic magnum opus. You cannot formally embed videos sent to channels - you can embed them on the sly using the actual HTML or grabbing to a site like Posterous - but obviously you can embed videos sent to YouTube.
The rest of the software is surprisingly snappy. I rarely use the built-in software that comes with most cameras but this seems like a quick and easy way to share video anywhere. It is Mac and PC compatible (there are two versions right on the Flip’s Flash memory) and it has a clean, easy to understand interface. In fact, adding a video to your channel is as easy as dragging it to the sidebar.
Overall it’s an impressive addition to an already interesting product. You can upgrad your current Flip hardware and software here and the iPhone app is available in the iTunes store.
Latest FlipShare™ software makes it simple to share video publicly, privately, or with groups
June 16, 2009 – San Francisco, CA
Taking video sharing to a new level, the makers of Flip Video today announced the latest version of its onboard FlipShare software that makes sharing personal video easier than ever before. FlipShare now gives users the ability to publish personal video channels online with Flip Channels™, in addition to easy uploading to popular sites like MySpace™ and YouTube™, and one-click private video emailing capabilities.
The innovative new Flip Channels feature enables users to easily share their favorite Flip content with groups of people they designate. Once created, their personal Flip Channels can be instantly viewed online at FlipShare.com or on an iPhone by using the new FlipShare iPhone application, also announced today.
“Flip Video changed the way people use video by making it simple to capture and fun to share,” said Jonathan Kaplan, senior vice president and general manager of the Consumer Business Group at Cisco, which recently acquired Pure Digital Technologies, makers of Flip Video products. “Our latest FlipShare software, with the new Flip Channels feature, takes video sharing to the next level by making it incredibly easy to share video with a friend, a group, or with the world.”
With FlipShare’s new Flip Channels feature, consumers now have a simple way to share their favorite Flip content – both video and snapshots – with many different groups such as friends, family, classmates or teams. Once a user creates a Flip Channel, it can be viewed online at FlipShare.com or on an iPhone using the breakthrough FlipShare application for the iPhone. This new application gives FlipShare users, as well as their friends and family, instant access to their favorite Flip Video content from anywhere.
These latest software innovations build upon the success of the wildly popular Flip Video camcorder line. Since its launch in 2007, more than 2 million Flip Video camcorders have been sold and millions of videos have been shared using FlipShare software. Flip Video models are ranked as the number one and number two top-selling camcorders in the U.S. for the first quarter 2009, as ranked by leading market research firm The NPD Group.
The new version of FlipShare software will begin shipping as the onboard software for all Flip Video camcorders as of June 16, 2009. The software can also be downloaded for free by visiting www.theflip.com. The FlipShare for iPhone application is available for free in the iPhone App Store.
FlipShare Software Features:
• Preloaded software to save, organize, and edit videos with ease
• Works on any PC or Mac
• Email videos and video greeting cards
• Upload videos instantly to YouTube and MySpace
• Capture HD snapshots from videos using enhanced freeze-frame capabilities and share them along with videos
• Create Flip Channels to share content privately with groups of friends or family or to access your own content on the web
• Watch videos on-the-go at flipshare.com
• Create custom movies with your own music
• Enjoy your videos in full-screen play mode
• Order DVDs and have them shipped anywhere in the world
FlipShare Application for iPhone Features:
• View your favorite FlipShare videos and snapshots on your iPhone
• Access Flip Channels instantly from anywhere
• Watch Flip Channels from friends and family
• Download for free at the iPhone App Store
About Pure Digital Technologies, Inc.
Pure Digital Technologies was acquired by Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) in May of 2009 and operates as part of Cisco’s Consumer Business Group. Its revolutionary Flip Video camcorders changed the way people capture and share video by making it simple, accessible and fun for anyone. Flip Video camcorders are pre-loaded with FlipShare software to enable easy organizing, editing, and seamless uploading to YouTubeTM, MySpaceTM Video and other video sharing sites. Flip Video products are currently available in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom. More information about Flip Video products can be found atwww.TheFlip.com.
AFP - The government on Tuesday declared a goal for Britain become the world's "digital capital" by building cutting-edge broadband, telecoms and media infrastructure to cement its role as a "global economic powerhouse."
sherl0k writes "Opera 10.0, dubbed Opera Unite, has been released. Built into the Web browser is a full-fledged Web server, complete with nifty little gadgets such as a 'fridge' that people can post notes onto, a chat room, a widget to stream your music library anywhere, and a built-in file-sharing mechanism. It also scores 100/100 on the Acid3 test." Readers fudreporter and TLS point to The Register's report on the new release and a 5-minute video demo, respectively.
In order to bring you the best, most in-depth look at the Lonely Planet New York City Guide for the iPhone, I took a week-long trip to the Big Apple. Is there nothing I won’t do for you, the loyal Gadget Lab reader?
A little over a week ago we took a quick look at the rather promising iPhone application, a $16 app which drops almost all the content of the paper book into a handy, searchable pocket sized piece of software. On paper (ahem) it seems unbeatable, especially when combined with the iPhone’s location awareness which means no more searching for a decent nearby restaurant.
How did it fare? The short answer is “not too bad”. For the longer answer, and the major problems (including an iPhone-killing crash), read on.
The biggest drawback was actually pointed out by Gadget Lab reader Jason Halberstadt: The source book itself. Like most guides, the Lonely Planet is not updated every year, so some information can be a little old. This is fine for a book, but somehow it seems that a mobile app should be a little fresher. Also, as Jason points out, “you end up going to all the tourist traps and hangouts that other LP readers all go to.”
The actual app promises much. Once it has (finally) started up, you can browse by section, as in the book, click to see what is nearby, access an offline map, save and view favorites (read: bookmarks), look at a photo gallery and search the entire guide.
Book
This makes for good reading before you leave, or for something to dip into when waiting for the next metro. It also offers a good overview of each section of town. It’s the most traditional, book-like section of the app, so you probably know exactly how useful it is already.
Nearby
Along with the map, this was the most handy part of the app, and worth the $16 price alone. It brings up a list of the places nearest you, ordered by distance. As it uses the iPhone location services to tell where you are, it doesn’t work too well with the iPod Touch (unless you make use of the countless open Wi-Fi spots in Manhattan). If you see something you fancy, tap on the map icon and it’ll show you just where to go.
When the iPhone can get a location fix, this feature was great. When it couldn’t, it was just confusing.
Map
Notably not called “maps” plural, this section omits several of the maps in the paper book, and inexplicably doesn’t feature a guide to the NYC subway. It also has a bad habit of resetting every time you leave the application, which means that you start at the most distant zoom level every time. The map has an overlay so you can see nearby hotels, bars, restaurant, shops and attractions, but these clutter things and slow them down. They can all be toggled on and off but, you guessed it, they default back to “on” every single time you launch.
It is also missing names for any but the largest streets, and you can’t search by street name. It works, and the maps are all offline, but it could be so much better.
Favorites
They’re bookmarks. Hit the heart-shaped icon when you see it to save.
Images
Fine, but we can’t help thinking that this is a major part of the hefty ~50MB download, and possibly one of the things causing such long load times. Better to keep these on the website, we’d say.
Search
The search is fantastic, and is way better than using the index in the actual book (the Lady is one of people who translated the book into Spanish, so we have a copy). It picks up anything, not just place names or titles, so you can use it to search for, say, bagel and browse all the mentions in the book (in New York, that’s surprisingly only eight results).
There was one problem. Although fine when it works, the search function caused the app to crash. A lot. Two or three times it caused a complete freeze of my iPod Touch, which required pressing both hardware buttons down for more than 10 seconds to force a reboot. This isn’t such a handy feature.
Conclusion
The idea is sound, and the fact that its a proper, edited guide means good and accurate content. It’s still very rough (ahem) around the edges, but certainly worth the money. We’d like to see some more user generated content, though: reviews, suggestions and other wiki-like features which are more up-to-date then the fusty old sections found here. The good ones could be folded into future paper books, too.
Also, if you’re going to New York and don’t mind a little grime, stay in the Chelsea Hotel. Bonus: About five doors down (towards the East) there’s a great, cheap Deli.
I'm asking a number of BB friends to contribute guest posts here on the situation in Iran. Next New Networks founder Tim Shey was flying from NYC to LA yesterday, and had an interesting personal story -- he kindly obliged my request to write it up for BB. Tim says:
Like a lot of other Virgin America passengers lately I joined the Mile High WiFi club today, and spent the first hour or so of the flight being marginally productive -- staying in touch with the office via IM and email, catching up on some writing and planning, that sort of thing -- but pretty much ending every conversation or message I had with anyone with "and I'm doing this from A MILE IN THE AIR!" For someone who still remembers the earliest days of dialup, and hasn't completely mastered his animal terror at the sensation of flying at 500mph in a metal tube 32,000 feet above the ground, especially every time a patch of turbulence hits, the idea that we can get fast, stable, $15 Wifi to work on a jet plane seems like technology that's getting close to magic.
But as I starting scanning Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, again for the novelty of doing it in the air, I started seeing postings from friends about the Iranian protests that CNN had also been covering since Obama's AMA speech had ended. First, a Twitter post from Brett Bullington, reblogging a post from John Perry Barlow that you could search Twitter within 15 miles of Iran. I got glued to the stream of messages there, and then hit this vein of extraordinary photos posted on Twitpic by @Iranpishi, especially this one, which I immediately posted to my blog, again amazed that I could follow all this from a plane. Just a few years ago, we got onto a plane and shut the doors, and we could land on a different planet than the one we took off from, depending on what had happened in our world in those eight hours; and just eight months ago, I spent election night flying on a plane across country, feeling cut off from the web and the rest of the world as our plane watched Obama win the presidency and change the world on our little in-seat screens (Daisy Whitney also happened to be on the flight, and wrote this TV Week column about it). This time, though, plugged in and reblogging photos coming out of Tehran and seeing people on the ground then reblogging my posts, I felt like a participant.
As all this was happening, I looked a seat up ahead of me, and saw a young woman also tuned to the footage on CNN, and signing up on her laptop for a citizen journalist account on iReport. I then watched her tabbing through a number of Farsi-language news sites and her Facebook stream, where she was IM-ing and reposting news stories about the protests from her friends in English and Farsi. I leaned over, gave her a card with my email, and asked if she might be willing to forward anything to me so I could share the links. She looked at me and asked, "do you want the real stories of what's going on, or just what some of the news outlets are telling you?" I replied that I supposed I wanted the real story, not knowing what she'd share, and within a minute, we'd become friends on Facebook, and a stream of stories and links were filling my inbox.
The first was an open letter to the world from a group called Iranian Artists in Exile, and I'm posting the full text and video of here. It's a political letter, and should be read critically as such -- but I haven't seen this posted many places elsewhere besides The Washington Times, and that's what this day has been all about -- technology connecting people around the world, and getting us access to voices and perspectives to us we might not have heard otherwise.
Related: this Facebook link inciting people to DDOS pro-Ahmedinejad sites.
At some point, this will no longer be a coincidence: Once again, Amazon’s newest e-book reader has sold out shortly after launch. This time, it’s the Kindle DX, the super-sized reader with the super-sized ($489) price tag. Amazon started selling the DX three days ago, and by yesterday afternoon the e-commerce giant said it was cleaned out. The next batch won’t arrive until next week.
It’s progress, at least: Amazon (AMZN) had much longer outages, multiple times. when it rolled out the first Kindle in 2007.
Amazon doesn’t say a peep about things like actual sales numbers, so no idea how many of these things it sold in the first few days. I would guess, though, that the company didn’t expect gangbusters sales of the device, for a couple of reasons:
One major target market for the gadgets are newspaper and magazine readers. And publishers including the New York Times (NYT) and the Washington Post (WPO) are supposed to offer discounts on the machine for (some) digital subscribers. But unless I missed it, no one has actually rolled out any discount programs yet.
The really big market for the DX will be college students, but it’s going to be quite some time until you see many of these on campus. There’s not much point to buying a DX for school until you can get your textbooks on it, and that won’t happen until schools (and, crucially, faculty) buy in. But Amazon is conducting a test with just six colleges, and a few hundred students, this fall.
If you’ve been holding out for a convertible touchscreen tablet netbook, your wait may soon be over. Asus has put the Eee PC T91 up on its US website. Still no exact pricing or availability info yet, unfortunately, although it’ll apparently be available to retailers sometime this week.
The T91 features an 8.9-inch swiveling touchscreen at what I’d assume to be a 1024×600 resolution, Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, GPS, and even a built-in TV tuner. Looks like storage options are SSD-only with capacities of up to 16GB, which can be expanded via a secondary 16GB add-on card. It also looks like a 3G connection comes standard along with 802.11n wireless.
ASUS also claims up to five hour battery life, all in a body that weighs just over two pounds. Again, no official word on pricing or availability yet although the T91 is already available in the UK for £449 (about $740). That’s not to say it would cost $740 here, though. I’d guess it’d cost closer to between $500 and $600. We’ll hopefully find out more sometime this week.
GIVAT SHMUEL, Israel, June 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Cimatron Limited
(Nasdaq: CIMT), a leading provider of integrated CAD/CAM solutions for mold,
tool and die makers as well as manufacturers of discrete parts, today
announced that its latest release of CimatronE, Version 9, will be
Here is my weak (and slightly unfinished) Atari iPod Dock. I thought sharing may create interest for someone that can do this better. As far as specs, I gutted a broken, iPod clock radio and put it all inside the Atari.
It’s that time of year when kids start bringing home photos from sports, classroom images, artwork, reports and other stuff I typically have no idea what to do with. What to save? What to trash? This year, I think I’ve found a solution.
Meet Picaboo, an online photo finishing solution that turns all these memories that I’ll soon lose or trash into keepsakes in book form. The process works like this: download Picaboo proprietary software, run the program, and you’ll be creating your photobook in no time. The software is 309kb in size. I am not a big fan of downloads and would rather build the book in the cloud, but the software does allow some special things.
I’ve built photo books with other sites like Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Blurb. I found Picaboo to offer a bit more customization than the others allowing me to change more of what is a bit bland in the others. I found the software allows me to be more creative which I really liked.
What’s the deal?
Picaboo is offering a buy one/get one free photo book. Here is how, straight from Picaboo:
*Use coupon code JUNEGF at checkout. Buy any qualifying photo book(s) and get one of the exact same photo book(s) for free when the coupon is applied (for example, order one Large Classic book, get a second copy of the same Large Classic book for free). The cost of the free book(s), including extra pages, will be deducted from your order total
Parody singer "Weird Al" Yankovic poked fun at Segway riders three years ago with his rap song "White and Nerdy," and his latest single "Craigslist" skewers the people who can be found swapping wares and scoring dates on the classifieds ads site. (While there's a verse about the popular "missed connections" feature on Craigslist, there isn't otherwise mention of the current prostitution controversy that the site's been dealing with.)
The video and song are a professed homage to the Doors, and though it isn't a takeoff on a specific song, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek was enlisted to play on the track. "Craigslist" is available for sale as a single now and will appear on an album that comes out next year.
Open Text ECM Suite Now Provides Online Access to 5 Terabytes of Official
Documents within Shared Services Center
WATERLOO, ON, June 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC), a global leader in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), today announced that Austria's Federal Computing Center, the leading IT services organization for the country's federal government, is now offering Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as a shared service using the ECM Suite from Open Text. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 16 Jun 2009 | 1:15 pm
Company's Web Filtering System Underlies New McAfee Offering
ATLANTA, June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- InternetSafety.com today announced a strategic partnership with McAfee, Inc., to supply the technology for the just-released McAfee(R) Family Protection online safety software. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 16 Jun 2009 | 1:15 pm
SAN FRANCISCO, June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Zoosk, the world's largest social dating community, today announced it has raised an additional $6 million. Existing investor Canaan Partners led the round. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 16 Jun 2009 | 1:15 pm
That modders quangDX and DuPPs stuffed an Acer Aspire One inside an old SNES is cool enough, but placing a slot-loaded optical drive inside a cartridge is true genius. [AsoBitech via Gizmodo/Engadget]
Amazon has a one-day deal on the Creative Labs Vado HD camcorder. Normally selling for around $215, it’s on sale for just $130 with free shipping.
The camcorder features 8GB of built-in memory, flip-out USB connector, 2-inch LCD, and includes an HDMI cable for hooking it up to your TV. Video is captured at up to 1280×720 resolution in the H.264 AVI format.
Very Flip-like in simplicity but without the high price tag.
BBCWatcher writes "Despite Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent statement that his company will continue Sun's hardware business, it won't be with Sun processors (and associated engineering jobs). The New York Times reports that Sun has canceled its long-delayed Rock processor, the next generation SPARC CPU. Instead, the Times says Sun/Oracle will have to rely on Fujitsu for SPARCs (and Intel otherwise). Unfortunately Fujitsu is decreasing its R&D budget and is unprofitable at present. Sun's cancellation of Rock comes just after Intel announced yet another delay for Tukwila, the next generation Itanium, now pushed to 2010. HP is the sole major Itanium vendor. Primary beneficiaries of this CPU turmoil: IBM and Intel's Nehalem X86 CPU business."
3-D, real-time X-ray images may be closer to realityThree-dimensional, real-time X-ray images of patients could be closer to reality because of research recently completed by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a pair of Russian institutes.In a paper to be published in an upcoming edition of Physical Review Letters, UNL Physics and Astronomy Professor Anthony Starace and his colleagues give scientists important clues into how to unleash coherent, high-powered X-rays."This could be a contributor to a number of innovations," Starace said.Starace's work focuses on a process called high-harmonic generation, or HHG. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 16 Jun 2009 | 1:04 pm
Quality of Service Expands to Femtocell Networks; Paves the Way for 4G Broadband Network Deployments
RICHARDSON, Texas, June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Tektronix Communications, a leading worldwide provider of network intelligence and communications test solutions, today announced its femtocell monitoring solution based upon the industry-leading GeoProbe network monitoring platform. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 16 Jun 2009 | 1:03 pm
Adam Jones, an evolutional biologist who has studied Darwin’s work for years, says that Darwin’s beliefs about the choice of mates and sexual selection being beyond mere chance have been proven correctCharles Darwin wrote about it 150 years ago: animals don't pick their mates by pure chance – it's a process that is deliberate and involves numerous factors. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 16 Jun 2009 | 1:02 pm
Armorize, provider of web application security solutions, has secured a Series B round of financing from its (unnamed) Silicon Valley-based Series A investors, Estonian seed fund Ambient Sound Investments and Asian firm Birch Venture Capital.
Armorize provides Web application security solutions such as malicious code detection, real time web application protection, and static source code analysis services throughout the system development life cycle, under brand names like CodeSecure, SmartWAF, HackAlert and Archon Scanner.
Armorize caters to a variety of industries, including finance, telecom, government, and technology sectors. The company was founded in 2005 and is based in Santa Clara, California with an additional office in Taipei, Taiwan.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Complete suite of virtual data center health and optimization products provides advanced capabilities and functionality for vSphere 4 environments
PORTSMOUTH, N.H., June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- VKernel Corporation, a provider of affordable, easy-to-use, and quick-to-deploy virtual server health management and optimization software, today announced its complete product suite fully supports the VMware vSphere 4 platform. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 16 Jun 2009 | 1:00 pm
Interoperability program transmits alarm alerts directly to computer aided dispatch system saving response time; becomes a new national standard
HUNTSVILLE, Ala., June 16 /PRNewswire/ -- The City of Richmond, Va. and Intergraph(R) are the first to automate the transmission of security alarm alerts directly to the appropriate public safety answering point's (PSAP) Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system and reduce response time by at least two to three minutes, saving precious time and lives.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081211/DECLOGO )
Richmond's two-year pilot External Alarm Interface Exchange project, incorporating Intergraph public safety incident management and reporting solutions, eliminated approximately 6,000 telephone calls from residential and commercial security companies. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 16 Jun 2009 | 1:00 pm
Water is a crucial ingredient for life, but its level inside cells must be carefully regulated to maintain proper cell shape and size. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 16 Jun 2009 | 12:39 pm
A group of researchers led by Carnegie Mellon University Biological Sciences Professor Aaron Mitchell has identified a novel regulatory gene network that plays an important role in the spread of common, and sometimes deadly, fungal infections. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 16 Jun 2009 | 12:36 pm
Why aren't birds larger? Fifteen-kilogram swans hold the current upper size record for flying birds, although the extinct Argentavis of the Miocene Epoch in Argentina is estimated to have weighed 70 kilograms, the size of an average human. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 16 Jun 2009 | 12:34 pm
PC World - The "S" in the name of the new iPhone 3G S stands for speed, both in the phone itself and how it's being delivered to some customers. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Jun 2009 | 12:22 pm
Spotty (now hopefully fixed) server aside, it's been fun watching new entries pour into the Atlas Obscura from people we've never met. I want to share a place that recently caught my eye, posted the other day by a user named Dave. It's a massive underground coal fire that's been smoldering beneath the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania ever since 1962:
The town sits on top of a rich vein of coal, and the fire has defied every attempt to extinguish it. National awareness of Centralia's unending environmental catastrophe came in 1981 when a 12-year-old boy fell into a 150-foot hole that suddenly appeared in his back yard. Most residents were relocated in 1984, and in 1992 the entire town was condemned. Most buildings were torn down, creating the Centralia that can still be seen today: a network of streets running through empty fields and, increasingly, new growth forest. As of 2007, Centralia had nine residents.
Then Dylan told me about a similar, and even more dramatic, subterranean fire that's been burning for almost as long under the Karakum desert of Turkmenistan (pictured above). Locals call it the "Gates of Hell":
The hole is the outcome not of nature but of an industrial accident. In 1971 a Soviet drilling rig accidentally punched into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and the entire drilling rig to fall in. Having punctured a pocket of gas, poisonous fumes began leaking from the hole at an alarming rate. To head off a potential environmental catastrophe, the Soviets set the hole alight. The crater hasn't stopped burning since.
Turns out, these sorts of mine fires can stay lit for a very long time. One burned in the city of Zwickau, Germany from 1476 to 1860. Another coal fire in Germany, at a place called Brennender Berg (Burning Mountain), has been smoking continually since 1688!
Al writes "Two researchers have found a way to run unauthorized code on an iPhone remotely. This is different than 'jailbreaking,' which requires physical access to the device. Normally applications have to be signed cryptographically by Apple in order to run. But Charles Miller of Independent Security Evaluators and Vincenzo Iozzo from the University of Milan found more than one instance in which Apple failed to prevent unauthorized data from executing. This means that a program can be loaded into memory as a non-executable block of data, after which the attacker can essentially flip a programmatic switch and make the data executable. The trick is significant, say Miller and Iozzo, because it provides a way to do something on a device after making use of a remote exploit. Details will be presented next month at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas." The attack was developed on version 2.0 of the iPhone software, and the researchers don't know if it will work when 3.0 is released.
Looks like McAdam was telling the truth after all, I just hope for VZW customers sake that he was telling the truth about everything, too. Earlier today, Verizon went live with the BlackBerry Tour 9630 teaser site and we'd assume its launch is imminent, but you can never tell with these sorts of things.
Not to be outdone by the competition, Sprint went live with their 9630 teaser site, too. Their BlackBerry Tour will run for $199.
InfoWorld - Software companies are eager to hop on the agile development train, providing wares to help clients leverage agile development processes such as Scrum in their IT shops. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Jun 2009 | 12:05 pm
Not to be outdone by Verizon, Sprint went live with their BlackBerry Tour 9630 site and with it came details of pricing for the 3G variant of the 8900 Curve. If you’re not down with the Pre then I suggest getting this badboy for $199.
Looks like McAdam was telling the truth after all, I just hope for VZW customers sake that he was telling the truth about everything, too. Earlier today, Verizon went live with the BlackBerry Tour 9630 teaser site and we’d assume its launch is imminent, but you can never tell with these sorts of things.
In what is quite possibly the most spot-on comment about Twitter that BoomTown has heard thus far, Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain said:
“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”
Zittrain was being quoted in a New York Times piece today about the use of Twitter by those protesting the election results in Iran, as other means of modern mass communications–such as email, Facebook and texting–got blocked.
In other words, Twitter is so simplistic and silly that it is a perfect digital tool to overthrow a government–which is kind of makes the trendy microblogging service the Forrest Gump of international relations.
Stupid is as stupid does, of course, but what it does illustrate quite smartly is that word of mouth–a concept as old as humanity–remains the most powerful way of distributing information.
While not always reliable, masses of people chattering away has always been the most fluid way in which news has been disseminated and received. Although much of that can be mundane and borderline idiotic, one cannot deny its impact.
What one can deny, though, is the hype that inevitably follows in the wake of every one of these breakthrough technologies like Twitter.
That’s a mistake, because it is how the tools are used by people, more than the tools themselves, that should be the focus.
Still, the media hyping of tech tools as savior is reliably annoying.
Television, of course, changed the Presidential elections, of course, as radio had before that.
And, more recently, weren’t mobile phone cameras critical in reporting the bombing in London’s Underground in 2005?
Or wasn’t Facebook key to protests in Burma in 2008?
And, even more profoundly, didn’t the simple fax machine get lauded during the uprising in China’s Tiananmen Square in Beijing as an heroic gadget?
“When word of the massacre in Tiananmen Square first reached the University of Michigan, the 250 Chinese students studying there jumped into action: they purchased a fax machine. Daily summaries of Western news accounts and photographs were faxed to universities, government offices, hospitals and businesses in major cities in China to provide an alternative to the government’s distorted press reports. The Chinese students traded fax numbers back home along the computer network that links them around the U.S. The fax brigades at Michigan were duplicated on many other campuses.”
Ironically, hardly anyone today uses a fax machine at all, having moved onto more effective methods of sending out critical news, data, pictures, updates and more.
Like Twitter today, which deserves this moment in the sun, to be sure, as long as it lasts.
Which it won’t, as people move onto the next way to do what they have always done, which is to connect.
As for tomorrow, who knows?
After all, digital life was, is and will always be like a box of chocolates–you never know what you’re gonna get.
PC World - One of the biggest problems with open source is understanding what it means out in the real world. I'm not talking about understanding the actual technology. I'm talking about the impact of open source. How open source is actually useful. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 16 Jun 2009 | 11:21 am
Dead simple mobile payments for micro-transactions on the web are slowly gaining traction and a new, well-funded player has entered the growing space. Recently launched mobile payments startup BOKU has acquired competitors Paymo and Mobillcash and raised $13 million in Series A funding from Benchmark Capital, with Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures participating. BOKU did not disclose how much the startup paid to acquire Mobillcash and Paymo.
BOKU, Paymo and Mobillcash all function in a similar way to make micropayments for games and applications. BOKU’s system doesn’t require users to have a credit card or bank account. Users enter their cell phone number on the site, reply to a Paymo text message and then all virtual charges are automatically charged to the user’s monthly cell phone bill. It’s disarmingly easy.
BOKU is gaining a significant international base with the acquisition of Paymo and Mobillcash. Paymo and social network hi5 recently partnered to let members in 24 countries use their mobile phones to purchase hi5 Coins, hi5’s virtual currency. Paymo is available to hi5 users in the U.S., Canada, France, Hong Kong, Thailand, Russia and Colombia thanks to a cash system that accepts and processes various types of currencies. Paymo’s technology can be accessed in 45 markets around the globe, enabling mobile payments in Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Paymo recently expanded service in the U.S. after striking deals with mobile carriers AT&T, T-Mobile and Virgin Mobile to allow users to make online purchases using their phone. Mobillcash is UK-based and has a strong presence mainly in Europe. With these acquisitions and global reach (53 countries), BOKU has been able to secure partnerships with most major global mobile carriers. BOKU’s will initially launch its services on Hi5, Puzzle Pirates,Aeria Games, and on multitude of apps on Facebook and MySpace.
Paymo has said in the past that 75 percent of the online community worldwide does not have a credit card but 3 billion consumers own a mobile phone. And the market for online payments via mobile is being driven by the growth of virtual goods and games on social networks and mobile applications. With that in mind, mobile payments, which avoid credit cards or bank accounts, have the potential to take off.
But there is one obstacle to mobile payments seriously becoming a viable micropayment option. Often, mobile carriers charge costly fees to the payment systems (which are then passed on to the consumer) remains a serious problem. BOKU says that different cell phone carriers charge varying fees that range between 10% to 50% of the purchase price, which is a pretty large amount in transaction fees. As we said in our earlier analysis, this could pose a significant roadblock to these types of services, which channel user payments through mobile carriers. It appears that it would be hard to sustain these fees in the long term.
But if mobile carriers lower their fees, mobile payments have the potential to be the go-to way to pay for microtransactions. And BOKU, with its recent acquisitions and funding could be in prime position to make this happen in the space. Competitors to BOKU include Zong (a former TechCrunch 50 exhibitor) and Netsize.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Although details for both launches are pretty light, we do have some confirmation that both Verizon Wireless and Sprint have plans to launch the BlackBerry Tour 9630.
As for Verizon, this comes with surprisingly few details. Actually the confirmation came in the form of a product teaser page simply announcing the phone. Unfortunately, there was not any mention of a release date or pricing information, but it will allow you to sign up and receive an invitation to pre-order the device when it becomes available.
Sprint, on the other hand, was a little more forthcoming, and I do mean a little more. What we can tell you about the Sprint release is that it will be priced at $199.99, which will be after $50 instant rebate and a $100 mail in rebate. As for availability, expect it later this summer.
As far as the BlackBerry Tour itself—to begin with it will be a 3G capable device. Other features include a 3.2-megapixel camera, a high-resolution 480 x 365 display, microSD/SDHC memory card slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device….It’s a myth that multi-purpose devices are always better…. I like my phone… I like my swiss army knife too, but I’m also happy to have a set of steak knives. I get grumpy now when I have to read a physical book….The physical book has had a great 500 year run, but it’s time to change.
The promise of “virtual goods” — pretend things you buy with real money in cyberspace — has lured entrepreneurs and venture capitalists for years. Same goes for mobile payments — using your iPhone instead of your Amex to buy stuff. But what if you combined the two?
You’d have market that barely exists yet is worth fighting over. At least that’s what Zong, a Swiss-based company, and Boku, a rollup of two other mobile payment companies (Mobillcash and Paymo) are doing. Both offer the same thing: The ability to buy stuff online that gets billed to your wireless account.
In theory, you could use the same technology to buy actual stuff as well, but the businesses are really geared around micro-transactions — pretend weapons on the “Mob Wars” Facebook app, piratey stuff on Puzzle Pirates — where it wouldn’t make sense to use a credit card. They’re also assuming that many of their customers won’t have credit cards at all, either because they’re kids or because they live in countries where it’s more common to own a mobile phone than a Mastercard.
Both companies are happy to explain why they’re better than their rivals — who covers more territory, who has the better carrier relationships, who has less onerous fees, etc — but I won’t bore you with that. Similarly, while Boku is formally announcing its presence today, along with $13 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the Zong guys argue that this is really a rebranding of Mobillcash, which had previously received funding from Index and Khosla. Whatever.
The real story here will be if and when the really big platforms for virtual goods — like, say, Facebook, News Corp.’s MySpace (NWS) and game companies like Electronic Arts (ERTS) — decide that they want to formally integrate one or more of the mobile payment guys, and under what terms.
Right now, for instance, Facebook isn’t involved in any of the microtransactions that any of its apps are generating, and the same goes for mobile payments — each app is free to work with whatever vendor it chooses. But that could change in the near future, as Mark Zuckerberg and company start testing their own payments platform. If there is going to be a big market for virtual goods bought via mobile payments, it could get carved up in the near future.
Accordion Hero 2 is quite possibly our favorite fake product ever, even better than the non-existent Accordion Hero 1.
Hit all the right notes and get the crowd on their feet waving their beer steins in unison - you are an accordion hero! Accordion Hero comes with one Gloss Black USB accordion controller. Kirschrot (Cherry Red) controller sold separately for two-player squeeze action. Awesomely rad sticker sheet included.
Who can argue with “two-player squeeze action”? According to girl-gadget site Chip Chick, the folks behind Accordion Hero actually ran a full page print ad in Computer Games Magazine, which makes this an even more impressive spoof than most, at least in terms of effort. And you know what? We have our fingers crossed (and our Lederhosen in a twist) at the idea that this might one day get picked up and made into a real Guitar Hero expansion pack. Prost!
Happy Bloomsday! Here's a rare reading of James Joyce performing his own work; as John Naughton notes, "When I first heard it I was astonished to find that he had a broad Irish-country accent. I had always imagined him speaking as a 'Dub' -- i.e. with the accent of most of the street characters in Ulysses."
Apple employees will have to go that extra 12 miles for their employers after all.
U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken recently denied a request from the Cupertino, Calif., company to transfer an unusual lawsuit it faces to a federal judge in San Jose, Calif.
Apple argued the move would make for a more convenient trek — about 88 miles round trip when leaving Apple HQ — for Apple employees involved in the case.
Lawyers for OdioWorks, which is suing Apple, characterized its legal foes’ request as an “attempt to undermine the assignment procedure” that paired the lawsuit with a judge in the Oakland courthouse. Last week, Judge Wilken set aside Apple’s request without comment, thus leaving the 100-mile round trip commute between Cupertino and her courtroom in Oakland in place.
A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight's planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).
This movie was shot by (or at least for) Thomas Edison way back in 1899, and shows that the fixie-tricksters are doing nothing much that’s new. The rather dry description from the Library of Congress archive page describes the clip thusly:
“Neidert,” of national fame, does stunts on his wheel that are simply wonderful. Makes his bicycle rear up, and rides around the stage on his back wheel; besides a lot of other easy things, such as riding on one pedal and riding backward, seated on handlebar.
The second section is from 1901, and shows a fellow riding a bike in almost the exact manner that I do when coming home from a bar at weekends. Except for the bunny-hop / rope skipping part, that is.
David Honl makes cheap and useful light shaping tools for flash photographers. You may remember that we liked the look of the gear and had a crack at making our own fake copy of the strap’n’stick Velcro based kit, with pretty successful results.
Just announced today is a new member of the lineup: a purpose made carrying bag. I know what you’re thinking: If it’s so easy to make the actual snoots, straps and gobos, isn’t it even easier to make a pouch in which to put them? We’d be tempted to agree, but we’d also be tempted to take a look at the $30 bag. The nylon sack has a clip on one end (smartly attached to the zipper handle so the bag stays closed when hanging) and a loop on the other. The Honl gear is pretty lightweight but doesn’t all fold down small enough to fit inside a camera bag, so an external pocket is a good idea.
It’s also water-resistant – something a homemade version is unlikely to be – and fashioned from nylon, which means it should last a while and also not stick to the Velcro strips on the tools. And while $30 isn’t a great price for a simple bag, it’s not too expensive, either. In fact, like most of the Honl gear, it’s cheap enough to make you think twice about the home-made version.
What do you do once you have ripped every last one of your CDs to MP3 format? Take out a Dremel and some glue and turn them into a stand for your iPhone, of course. Those pointless plastic disks can now sit supporting your MP3 player rather than taking up much needed landfill space.
To make the Recycled CD iPhone Dock you just stick a stack of CDs together and then shave out space for the iPhone USB cable, following the simple instructions (if you need them) over at Geeky Gadgets. We’d echo commenter Keith’s concerns, though – that the iPhone is not actually supported – and stack a few extra CDs on top, then carve out a more cosy space for the iPhone to rest in. A great DIY project which proves that CDs are good for something other than keeping coffee-rings off the desktop.
sopssa writes "Bing has set up a separate domain just for porn images and videos. '[The] general manager of Microsoft Bing said in a blog post that potentially explicit images and video content now will be coming from one separate domain — explicit.bing.net. 'This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be.' When Bing was first launched, there was some online chatter about explicit images popping up when videos were 'previewed' in the search results. This means the thumbnails and videos are served from that domain, allowing easy filter of them in corporate and school networks. Users still normally use www.bing.com. Instead of heavily filtering the results, this is quite a good move."
We told you last week that browser maker Opera was generating quite some buzz by being secretive about their plans to ‘reinvent the web’. Well, the company this morning unveiled what it was referring to: technology that essentially turns every computer running the Opera browser into a full-fledged Web server. Behold Opera Unite.
You can use Opera Unite to share documents, music, photos, videos, or use it to run websites or even chat rooms without third-party requirements. The company extended the collaborative technology to a platform that comes with a set of APIs, encouraging developers to create their own applications (known as Opera Unite services) on top of it, directly linking people’s personal computers together, no matter which OS they are running and without the need to download additional software. The company recognizes that the current services are fairly basic, but says this is just the tip of the iceberg.
We’ll take a deeper dive in Opera Unite real soon, but I’m impressed with what it looks like on the surface. This is a really good idea at its core, and I encourage you to read Opera product analyst Lawrence Eng’s blog post on the subject for more background and an idea of where Opera is heading with the concept. A small excerpt:
“Currently, most of us contribute content to the Web (for example by putting our personal information on social networking sites, uploading photos to Flickr, or maybe publishing blog posts), but we don’t contribute to its fabric — the underlying infrastructure that defines the online landscape that we inhabit.
Our computers are only dumb terminals connected to other computers (meaning servers) owned by other people — such as large corporations — who we depend upon to host our words, thoughts, and images. We depend on them to do it well and with our best interests at heart. We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet.”
We’ll say it right off the bat: there’s a good chance you have a recent version of Adobe Reader installed on your computer, so that probably means you’ve also installed Adobe AIR, the company’s cross-platform runtime environment for RIAs, as well as the Acrobat.com application. You may not even be aware those came bundled, but you still have the option to uninstall both and still keep Adobe Reader. Glad we got that out of the way.
On to the news: by means of a blog post, Adobe Systems has just confirmed the number of installs for Adobe AIR that had been floating around the Web ever since CTO Kevin Lynch mentioned something along those lines at the recent Flash Camp Keynote in San Francisco: 200 million, double the amount the company touted at the end of January 2009. The number was reached a little over two weeks ago, about 16 months after its debut on the market.
Whether you’re aware that you’ve installed Adobe AIR at some point or not, or whether you think the 200 million installs is actually on the low rather than the high side (I think the number is fairly moderate), there are some really good applications out there that you don’t know yet but might want to check out:
Allows users to upload music, videos, and photos to imeem. This app will automatically discover all your iTunes playlists and enable you to easily zip them over to your imeem profile. You can also drag and drop your desired tracks for upload to imeem, create custom playlists and share your music with others.
An elegant search tool for Flickr, which utilizes several methods of its public API. Flair matches search queries by tags and makes it easy to jump to the original resolution upload (often easily wallpaper quality) and the source photographers photostream (by clicking their user icon).
An intuitive and extensive desktop app for mind-mapping purposes, tied to web app Comapping.com. Use it to manage and share information more efficiently.
Ebook reader for the Gutenberg online book library. Ebooks are available free of charge in both text and audio format. NetBook lets you search the Gutenberg database, download and read/listen to ebooks and store them in cache for offline use.
Yes, Hulu has an official desktop application too, but this one is worth a second look (we’ve covered this one before). MYMediaplayer allows users to browse the Hulu library while watching videos, and you can dock the window to the side of the monitor so you can work and watch TV at the same time. Perfect for procrastination!
You can find these and 500 other applications on the AIR Marketplace.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Orders for the new iPhone 3G S are now in the air from Shenzen, China. And people who ordered them right away last week may be in for a treat - arrival two days early.
A friend who ordered the phone as soon as he could got his UPS notice today that the phone has been shipped, and the tracking page on the UPS site shows a June 17 delivery date, two days before the phones will be available in stores.
If it does arrive then, will AT&T activate it? Or will it be an iBrick for two days?
We’ll check back with him as soon as it arrives for an unboxing. And if he’s amenable, a tear down. I want to see the insides of this thing first hand.
Research In Motion has launched a new 3G BlackBerry phone called the Tour 9630 that continues the design aesthetic of its recent Curve and Bold phones.
“With its striking design and well-balanced mix of powerful, useful features, the new BlackBerry Tour will offer a compelling choice for the growing number of wireless customers looking to upgrade their existing cell phone to a smartphone,” said Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO at Research In Motion.
The BlackBerry Tour will have a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with flash, 256 MB internal memory, 3G support, Bluetooth and GPS. It will have a full-QWERTY keyboard and 2.4-inch display. The dual-mode phone will also include a full HTML browser with support for streaming audio and video, along with all the quintessential BlackBerry services.
The Tour is billed as a device for CDMA customers in North America so it will be available on Verizon Wireless and Sprint networks. Sprint is likely to offer the phone for $200 with a two-year contract. No word on exactly when the phone will be hit the market this summer.
Imeem has a great Android app. In fact, it’s still one of the few very good apps available on that platform as it continues to find its legs. It’s so good that we gave it a Crunchie this year. But as good as it is, it took the application coming to the iPhone platform to push the company past a big milestone: 1 million mobile platform installs.
Imeem Mobile for the iPhone, which we were the first to report on back in May right before it launched, already accounts for 1/3 of Imeem’s mobile users, we’re told. It’s been consistently in the top 5 music apps and near the top 50 overall in the App Store since then. But does that mean that it’s better than the Android version? No, in fact, it’s worse for one reason: It can’t run in the background.
That of course, isn’t Imeem’s fault. Rival Pandora suffers from the same problem because Apple will not allow these apps to stay open while you do other things on your phone, or put its screen to sleep. That may change eventually, but it seems likely that this isn’t happening anytime soon. So, for now, Imeem has decided to continue this fully two-pronged approach to the mobile app world: Android and iPhone.
On one hand it now has the sexy iPhone app, which gives them access to all those iPhone users. On the other hand, it has its fully-functional Android app, which offers much higher engagement. In fact, Android listening session lengths are more than twice as long as they are on the iPhone, Imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell tells us. And the Android platform offers another advantage in that Imeem knows that its app is now on 2 out of every 3 Android phones out there right now. That’s pretty crazy. And 1/3 of the users who install the mobile version of Imeem are completely new to the service.
Of course, all of these things are just fairly inconsequential stats if the service isn’t monetizing them in some way. There has been of a lot of speculation about Imeem’s future, after reports surfaced that some of the major music labels which had been backing it, were not seeing returns on their investment and were backing out. Warner Music was the one in particular that was unhappy. But reports today indicate that they’re back in the mix after renegotiating some kind of deal with Imeem. Caldwell wouldn’t comment on that, but we’ve heard that Warner is back in as well. This follows Imeem raising more money to continue onward last month.
In terms of monetization, Caldwell said that Imeem beat their Q2 goal for ad sales, and that they’re particularly excited about the mobile ad numbers they’re seeing. And there’s apparently a growing interest in cross-platform ad buys, from advertisers who want access to the site, the mobile apps, audio ads, and the widgets that Imeem makes, all in one package.
Pandora told us last month that it had been seeing some great numbers with regards to music downloads being driven by their app. Caldwell sounds less enthusiastic about those, but said the click-through rates are always good in that area because there’s such a high intention rate when it comes to buying music through the app.
So with a million mobile installs and a firm commitment to the iPhone and Android platforms, what’s next for Imeem in the mobile space? Well, the company is taking a wait-and-see approach. When asked about the hot phone of choice right now, the Palm Pre, Caldwell is cautious. “We’ve been very judicious in our use of resources,” he says. But he notes that they are watching the Pre closesly (Pandora was one of the phone’s launch partners), and sounds much more interested in that platform than any of the other ones out there not named the iPhone or Andorid. “They [the other platforms] don’t have a great distribution model. It’s a total pain to install anything on the BlackBerry.”
Instead of an expansion to another platform, we’ll have to make due with an update to the Imeem Android app, which is due shortly.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
As he kicked off the Wired Business Conference on Monday, Wired magazine’s editor in chief, Chris Anderson, started talking about Jell-O.
Anderson was explaining the thesis of his forthcoming book, “Free,” about the realities of making a profit and building a business in an environment rife with digital goods that can be replicated at almost no cost.
The NY Times is running an article about a bunch of illustrators complaining that Google offered to promote their work for free as special skins for its Chrome browser. The concern? That Google wouldn’t pay them to promote their work.
Imagine the odds: No sooner did Facebook swing open the doors to its fire sale of vanity URLs than a geeky frat party ensued, as members reserved prankish, clever and lewd names instead of maybe the digital alias their friends (and mothers) might have hoped for.
Mashable reports that 500,000 people got processed within 15 minutes of launch, which is impressive service, especially since there are virtually no reports of anything going wrong technically.
Does where you start your company matter? Statistically, it may. Jim Karsten pulled data from CrunchBase to look at where startups are based and the likelihood of an acquisition. The results show that 41.2% of startups that we track are based in Silicon Valley, but that those startups account for 53.3% of the reported acquisitions. A startup based in Silicon Valley has a 6.9% chance of being acquired. New York startups come in second with a 4.9% acquisition rate.
It’s not clear exactly what data was pulled (years, transaction size, etc.), although there are more details here. We’re running our own analysis of the data over the last few years (back to startups founded in 2004 and later, to take into account transaction sizes and to include international data) and should have a deeper dive available soon. But until then, the data is clear - all else being equal, start your company in Silicon Valley. Although we strongly suggest that before you relocate your family and employees you wait for our more detailed analysis.
More from John Cook, who’s hopelessly in love with Seattle. Also worth reading is Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman’s rant last year about Silicon Valley working too hard (my response, his last word).
The bottom line is this. If you have the means, start your company in Silicon Valley. It’s the big leagues. Like I said last year to those crazy Seattleites that keep saying they’re basically a suburb of Silicon Valley: “If staring at lakes and skiing after work are important to you, don’t pretend to be surprised when your startup doesn’t cut it.”
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
clemenstimpler sends a link to Groklaw, which has been following the proceedings dealing with the conversion of SCO's bankruptcy to Chapter 7 (i.e., liquidating the company). SCO has announced a prospective buyer. "...SCO has suggested it has a buyer. That doesn't mean it will avoid Chapter 7 of course, nor does it mean that the bankruptcy court will OK the suggested sale. But it likely does mean more delay, which is what this is likely all about. SCO very much wants to wait until the appeals court rules in SCO v. Novell. ... Hearing set for July 16 with backup for July 27. SCO has already moved to make it July 27. combo hearing on convert and sale. Frankly, it would not totally amaze me if the three entities that filed motions to convert were to appeal this. If not, SCO got its desired delay."
Combine the large sensor and interchangeable lenses of a digital SLR with the compact portability of a point-and-shoot, and you get something that looks a lot like the Olympus E-P1.
Cute, isn’t it?
The E-P1 is a design homage to the Olympus Pen F, so unofficially Olympus is calling it the “Digital Pen,” which seems like a good nickname to us. Its steel-and-aluminum body has a retro chic look to it, right down to the faux-leather grip. It is sure to irritate almost everyone: photo snobs, film camera geeks, ordinary folks who don’t understand why it’s so expensive and rich guys who feel that serious cameras need to be big and heavy in proportion to their price tags. As for me, I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
The Pen F, first introduced in 1963, shot on 35mm film but used just half the usual frame, so you could fit 48 shots on a 24-frame roll. Its portability and good looks made it a bit of a cult favorite, eventually selling more than 17 million units across 17 different models, according to Olympus.
Similar to the Pen F, the widely-rumored and often-leaked Digital Pen shoots on a sensor that’s half the size of a 35mm film frame: in this case, an 18 x 13.5mm, 12 megapixel Four Thirds sensor (the same one used in the Olympus E620, a digital SLR). That sensor has 30-40% less imaging area than the APS-C sensors used in many digital SLRs, but it’s 9 times larger than the 5.76 x 4.29mm (aka 1/2.5″) sensors used in many compact cameras.
Sensor size matters: Generally speaking, the larger the image sensor, the less noise you get in the images it produces, particularly in low-light situations. But until recently, if you wanted a large sensor, you had to get a large camera.
With the E-P1, Olympus is making good on the promise of its Micro Four Thirds standard, which combines a Four Thirds sensor with a more compact body. They get the smaller body by eliminating the pentaprism-and-mirror mechanism common to single-lens-reflex cameras, effectively making this into a point-and-shoot style camera, where the light goes directly from the lens onto the sensor.
This cutaway illustration shows the internals of the Olympus E-P1, with the sensor directly behind the lens mount.
There are tradeoffs. With this camera, you lose the through-the-lens viewfinder of an SLR. In fact, the E-P1 doesn’t have a built-in optical viewfinder at all; you have to use the 3-inch LCD on the back. Hope the sun isn’t shining too brightly on that screen!
The camera doesn’t have a built-in flash. You have to use an optional additional flash, which connects to a hot shoe on the top.
Also, you have to hope this camera has a really fast shutter response. One of the attractions of a digital SLR is the speed at which its mechanical shutter responds when you press the shutter button — it’s nearly instantaneous, the way cameras are meant to be. By contrast, point-and-shoot cameras often have shutter lag, partly because of the time they spend focusing and partly because they don’t have actual, physical shutters.
The Olympus E-P1 will be available as a kit with two lens options: One is a 14-42mm, f3.5-5.6 zoom lens, and the other is a very compact 17mm, f2.8 prime lens that’s bundled with an optical “viewfinder” that slides into the hot shoe on the top of the camera (shown in the top photo here). That lens is equivalent to a 34mm lens on a regular film camera, and we’re guessing it will be a really fun one to use for candid street photography.
Olympus offers two lens mount adapters: the MMF-1 adapter will let you mount any Four Thirds system lens (currently, only Olympus, Panasonic and Sigma make these), and the MF-2 OM adapter will let you mount any legacy Olympus lens, going as far back as the 1972 OM-1 camera system.
One intriguing possibility: Panasonic makes adapters so you can mount Leica lenses on Micro Four Thirds cameras. Could you use one to put a Leica on your Olympus Digital Pen?
Abomination or lust-inducing temptation? We’ll leave that debate to the commenters.
For more photos of the EP-1, and details from the press release, see below.
Olympus offers an optional flash accessory that mounts on top of the camera and is "just cute as a button," according to an Olympus spokeswoman.
Size: 4.75″(W) x 2.75″ (H) x 1.43″ (D)
Weight: 11.8 ounces
Available in either silver or white
Accompanying new small and lightweight Olympus M. ZUIKO Micro Four Thirds lenses: 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 (28-84mm equivalent) and 17mm f2.8 (34mm equivalent).
Features:
➢ In-body Image Stabilization
➢ 3-inch LCD
➢ Dust Reduction System
➢ 12 megapixels with next-generation TruePic™ V
➢ HD video (1280 x 720 pixels, 30fps AVI) with high-quality stereo audio (44.1KHz, 16 bits per channel)
➢ In-camera creative features (for still images and video)
➢ Multiple exposures
➢ Multi-aspect shooting
➢ Multimedia slideshows
➢ Digital leveler
➢ Magnified focus assist
➢ 18×18 metering modes
➢ Small accessories
Availability
The Olympus E-P1 will be available in July 2009. It includes E-P1 Body, USB Cable, Video Cable, Li-Ion Battery Pack (BLS-1), Li-Ion Battery Charger (BCS-1), Shoulder Strap, OLYMPUS Master 2 Software CD-ROM, Manuals and Registration card.
U.S. Pricing / Product Configurations
Body only: $750
Body with ED 14-42mm f3.5/5.6 Zuiko Digital Zoom Lens: $800
Body with ED 17mm f2.8 with optical viewfinder: $900
Two optional lens adapters let you mount legacy Olympus lenses or Four Thirds lenses onto the E-P1's Micro Four Thirds body.
The back of the Olympus "Digital Pen" is dominated by a 3-inch LCD. There's no optical viewfinder.
You’ve probably heard of Flip, the little camcorder that pretty much launched the pocket camcorder market. While their cameras are pretty cool, Flip has just upgraded FlipShare, the software that comes with their cameras.
So what can the software do? You can now share video with certain groups of people using “Flip Channels.” Not all video is meant for everyone you know. Say you took some footage of your kids playing soccer—send that out to your family group. Maybe you took some nice video of a project you built—send that out to your builder friends. The new software will be with all Flip cameras starting today, June 16, 2009.
These Flip videos also can be watched on your iPhone on the new (and free) FlipShare for iPhone application starting today as well. This new software is the first major step by Flip since they were purchased by Cisco in March.
Wind power down near the ground is experiencing incredible growth, but the long-term future for wind could be floating machines harvesting energy at altitudes near the jet stream.
Screamer/guitarist Black Francis talks about the ultimate Pixies collectible, a 26-pound box set brimming with audacious art, multi-format versions of the band's five studio recordings and more. Enter to win a copy from Wired.com.
On the cover of indie-rock band Bon Iver's recent Top 20 record Blood Bank is a striking photograph of a snow-encrusted, rusted car door. The record label didn't commission the image, or find it an art gallery or stock photography bank; instead, it licensed the shot from amateur photographer Lauren Hudgins, who had posted it to her Flickr feed last year when she was teaching English in Japan.
She hadn't expected anything much to come of the photo. "I was hoping for Flickr recognition — people viewing it, faving it, making comments about it,” she says.
Hudgins' picture is a success story of the new open source culture, in which anyone with an internet connection can make their creations available to the public, unmediated by the old gatekeepers of mass media. The result has been an unprecedented outpouring of creative works. As of early June, for instance, more than3.6 billion photographs had been uploaded to Flickr alone. As the best of those works are now making their way into the broader cultural landscape, they're breaking mass media's stranglehold on the ownership of meaningful content.
Not long ago mass media was about the only kind of culture there was. The lucky few creative works that made it into general circulation were what copyright law was supposed to cultivate and protect. In the words of Harvard Law School intellectual law professor William Fisher, copyright "provides incentives for creative activities that otherwise would not occur."
The dirty secret of mass media, though, was — and still is — that a great deal of it belongs to the companies that distribute it, rather than to the people who make it. That's begun to change as the internet rewrites the rules about who can put creative work into the public sphere as well as who can take it out. Mass culture has traditionally required corporate middlemen to operate the machinery of publishing and broadcasting; without them, no one's creation had any hope of reaching a broad audience. In the age of Flickr, Blogger, YouTube and Twitter, that's simply not true anymore.
User-created online culture isn't "mass culture," exactly; no single blog post gets as much exposure as, say, an episode of American Idol. But it's culture by the masses. A Pew Internet & American Life Project poll in 2007 found that 64 percent of American teenagers were posting their own content online while 39 percent of teens were sharing art they had created.
One of the biggest expressions of open source culture is Wikipedia, perhaps the most comprehensive and useful encyclopedia ever created. It has been assembled by an anonymous legion of volunteer writers and editors — there are nearly 10 million registered users for the English-language version — who are not motivated by money or fame for their work but by a compulsion to get the facts straight.
The internet's vast, instantly accessible mountains of individually created text, images and sounds are examples of what economist Nicholas Gruen describes as "emergent public goods" — things that simply amass themselves into existence and serve the public interest. (Sometimes their service is particularly immediate, as when Twitter and Flickr provided real-time reports of last November's terrorist attacks in Mumbai and were picked up by such media gatekeepers as The New York Times.)
Most of the sites and platforms that have made publishing one's work as easy as clicking a mouse aren't "open source" in the formal sense that applies to software. Instead, they're tools to facilitate cultural openness.
There's also a whole new category of "works" that has evolved with blog posts and online photo galleries: public commentary. If a MetaFilter post or YouTube video attracts 100 comments, every one of those comments — insightful or inane — is just as much part of the public cultural record as the creation that inspired it, and just as much a gift to the collective body of human knowledge. And they're all governed by one of the basic tenets of the Internet, which was coined by Stewart Brand for the early online bulletin board The Well: "You own your own words."
Open source culture isn't meant to replace mass media but it is changing the way big media operates, as Flickr photographer Lauren Hudgins found. Privately made, privately owned, digitally disseminated creations are augmenting the cultural monoliths of the last century with what Gruen calls "a kaleidoscopic array of new global public goods." It's far more possible now for anyone to be, as the musician Momus puts it, "famous to 15 people" — or to 15,000.
Picture the lobby atrium of a new, green building, one filled with leafy plants and trees. Now imagine that those trees are growing in waste collected from the building's toilets.
If that idea has the whiff of failure about it, well, sniff again. Increasingly, building designers are managing sewage in-house—really in-house. The Port of Portland, for example, is integrating waste management into the lobby of its new headquarters under construction. The Living Machine uses soil and bacteria to filter out pathogens, essentially turning wastewater into nonpotable water. But the signature element of the system is the plant life that grows up and out of it—right into the lobby. "It's going to provide a kind of greenhouse feel," says Greg Sparks, engineering design manager for the port. "It'll soften the hard edges of the typical office building."
Everybody likes trees, but (aesthetics aside) sending poop from the bathroom to the lobby may seem sort of icky. In environmental terms, though, it's a solid choice. Just as photovoltaics can help take a building off the power grid, living machines take strain off the pipes and municipal wastewater facilities on the "sewage grid." They also show that being green means thinking more creatively about our brown and yellow.
1 Wastewater from the entire building flows into a holding tank where solids settle, like in a septic tank. The reclaimed liquid up top gets pumped to the lobby.
2 Garden-like "wetland cells" layered with plants, soil, and rocks collect the water and capture biological compounds and pathogens.
3 On its way out of the garden, the water is further sterilized by ultraviolet light in the pipes. Then it's recycled back into the plumbing system.
Did hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really win reelection with 69 percent of the vote? Statisticians and political experts find worrying signs in the numbers, but no smoking gun that conclusively proves fraud.
ectotherm writes "The nice people behind the recorded phone messages stating 'By now you should have received your written note regarding your vehicle warranty expiring...' — the ones who instantly hang up when you ask for the name of the company — have been busted. Fox News did a little background digging on the four people charged." Don't know about you, but I received three or four postcards in the mail from these scammers, as well as uncountable robocalls. The FTC says they cleared $10M since 2007.
moogsynth writes "Buried in section 329 of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act (H.R. 2410), voted in recently, are measures to oppose any global climate change treaty that weakens the IP rights in the green tech of American companies. Peter Zura's patent blog notes that 'the vote comes in anticipation of the upcoming negotiations in December as part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. ... Previously, there was sufficient chatter in international circles on compulsory licenses, IP seizures, and the outright abolition of patents on low-carbon technology, that Congress felt it necessary to clarify the US's IP position up front.'"
The FCC is reporting that Friday’s transition from analog to digital TV transmissions was largely uneventful. No major outages or problems were reported. Their toll free helpline was flooded with calls - over 317,000 - from people who couldn’t figure out how to operate their new converter boxes, but the FCC said most problems were solved when the customer rescanned their boxes for the channels they were missing.
“I am pleased with the way our FCC team responded to the technical challenges that arose throughout the course of the day,” acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps said in a statement. “But our job is far from over. This transition is not a one-day affair. We have known about re-scanning and reception issues for some time and have been doing our best to get the word out. We will continue to work with every consumer who needs assistance in making this important and necessary transition.”
The markets with the most calls were Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Dallas-Fort Worth. The changeover was originally scheduled for Feb. 17th but was pushed to June amid complaints from irate consumers who couldn’t get government issued vouchers for the needed converter boxes in time.
The newly freed airwaves mean 15 new markets will receive mobile TV broadcasts, Qualcomm said. The company offers TV service for cell phones via its Flo TV network, which delivers up to 20 channels of simulcast and time shifted programming. It includes original programming as well as that from ABC, CBS, ESPN and other popular networks and expects to reach nearly 200 million potential subscribers by the end of the year through AT&T and Verizon phones.
macs4all writes "Apple has finally addressed the Java vulnerability that nearly everyone else patched months ago. Available now for OS X 10.4 and 10.5, and through Apple's Software Update service, this update patches a flaw in the Java Virtual Machine that could potentially allow a malicious Java applet to execute arbitrary code on the machine. Apple had previously advised users to turn off Java temporarily in their Web browsers."
Legoland California's design team devotes more than 1,300 hours to handcraft a 10-foot plastic birthday cake for the park's 10th anniversary in Carlsbad, California.
Jay notes a Wall Street Journal report about ad networks unintentionally selling empty space to malware loaders (the link is to a syndicating site that doesn't require a subscription to view). The submitter comments: "The labeling of the fake ad sellers as hackers is pretty bogus; there's no hacking involved. Simply sign up for one of these networks, create your fake site, put up another company's creative, and you're good to go." The incidents being reported go back a few months, but the pattern of this criminal activity seems to be coming clear only recently."EWeek.com, a technology news site owned by Ziff Davis Enterprise, in February displayed an ad on its homepage masquerading as a promotion for LaCoste, the shirt maker. The retailer hadn't placed the ad — a hacker had, to direct users to a Web site where harmful programs would be downloaded to their computers, says Stephen Wellman, director of community and content for Ziff Davis."
Today, Navteq announced they would be providing many Volvo car models with two complimentary map updates to keep their GPS maps as updated as possible. If you own any GPS, then you probably know how important it is to keep your maps updated. As a result, Navteq announced a partnership with Volvo to help keep customers with updated maps, known as Navteq MapCare.
Later this month, Volvo plans to unveil the 2010 editions of cars including the C30, C70, S40, S80, V50, V70, XC60, XC70, and XC90. Each of the models will be eligible to receive the two map updates.
Basically, the customer will have to file a registration card with key information about your address and model number. Later on, Navteq will send the customer the latest map update at your address. This exclusive deal is available in any Volvo dealership located within North America, Europe, and Russia.
Navteq hopes they will be available to create a loyal fanbase, and it would be another way to create some profit. Although, I’m not sure what happens after you use up the two complimentary updates, expect to pay an annual fee after that time.
Either way, it’s definitely a nice idea from Navteq because updated maps will help save you gas in the long run. Trips can be planned more efficiently as long as they are updated; a study was conducted that found “drivers using a navigation system could reduce the overall distance they drove per year by nearly 2,500 kilometres and save over euro 400 in fuel costs.”
One week after its launch, the Palm Pre appears to be a modest success for the struggling handset maker and its carrier, Sprint.
Despite problems with supply and consumers who are disappointed by the device’s puny battery life, the companies together sold enough smartphones — helped in part by a well-orchestrated publicity campaign — to put the Palm Pre well on the road to success.
“Palm has launched the device without any major snafus so far,” says Jonathan Goldberg, an analyst with Wall Street brokerage firm Deutsche Bank in a research note. “This is a big change from the Palm of the past and the company deserves credit for improving its execution abilities.”
So how well did the Palm Pre do? Here’s a quick score card.
Launch: Since the iPhone, the Palm Pre has probably had one of the best debuts a phone could ask for. Sure, there weren’t any long lines outside stores as with the iPhone but the device built up tremendous buzz on the internet. From its near-flawless press conference to introduce the Pre to the closely managed access to the phone before its retail debut, Palm seemed to have put its past as a bumbling yet well-intentioned company behind it. Instead a confident and aggressive gadget maker seemed to emerge.
The Pre seems to have lived up to its initial billing. The phone garnered favorable reviews and has put Palm back in the game. There’s a lesson here for Research In Motion with its botched launch of the Storm, the touchscreen phone on Verizon that was marred by poor reviews and visible lack of excitement over its launch.
Grade: A
Sales: Sprint or Palm aren’t ready to disclose any numbers yet but the Palm Pre is a hit, says Sprint. Last week, Sprint announced it to be its best selling phone ever.
The Pre sold about 50,000 units in its first two days, estimates Paul Coster, an analyst with J.P. Morgan. It’s a good beginning for Palm and if it can keep up the interest in the face of the new iPhone 3G S and the now cheaper iPhone 3G, then Palm can boast of having a real blockbuster on its hands.
Still, it is no iPhone 3G, which sold a million phones in its first weekend. The T-Mobile HTC G1 Android phone reached the million mark about six months after its release.
Grade: B
Supply and production: Since its first glimpse at the Consumer Electronics Show in January’s year, the drumbeat over the Pre’s arrival has been steadily building up. But Palm seems to have stumbled a bit in its efforts to keep up with demand.
There have been reports of a Pre shortage immediately after the launch of the phone and a recent report suggested that Palm may have some problems with production of the hardware.
“The Pre is probably a little more complex than the iPhone 3G in terms of its production,” says Aaron Vronko, CEO of Rapid Repair, a site that has taken the Pre and the iPhone 3G apart. “The Pre uses some new chips, one of which is likely holding up production.”
The slider design of the Pre allows the device to offer both a touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard. But the design also splits the phone’s build into two sections and adds another element to the process that the iPhone 3G doesn’t have to contend with, says Vronko.
But it is the advanced chips and processors in the Pre that are likely to pose the biggest challenge for a company looking to scale production effortlessly. The Pre is the one of the first major consumer devices to use Texas Instruments’ new TI OMAP 3 system-on-a-chip processor. The iPhone 3G uses an older processor from Samsung, says Vronko. The Pre also has 256 MB of system memory compared to the 128 MB in the iPhone 3G. (The newer iPhone 3G S also has 256 MB of system memory, according to reports.) “It could be an issue of how these new chips in the Pre can scale up to production and yield quality,” Vronko says.
So far Palm hasn’t commented on any of problems relating to production. The only way for the company to silence its critics will be to get the Pres cranking out fast and furious.
Grade: C
Battery life: The Pre’s poor battery life is proving to be in its weakest link. The Pre’s multi-tasking capabilities and fast processor take their toll on the device’s battery. Wired.com’s Pre review showed that the charge on the phone lasted less than 12 hours. Twitter and Palm’s own message boards are full of complaints from users who say they have seen the battery on their Pre die with just few hours of use.
“We don’t think the Pre is a phone where you can get away with charging it just once a week,” says Paul Cousineau, director of software product management, webOS, at Palm. “But we do agree with the user expectation that they get at least a full day’s worth of battery from their phone.”
Palm says it has found a bug with its support of the AIM protocol that draws a lot of power, especially if users have a large number of buddies. “This bug will be fixed, at which point the power draw will be much less,” said Palm in a statement. “For now, we recommend not using AIM until this power draw issue is resolved.”
And contrary to popular perception, Palm suggests that users turn on the Wi-Fi setting on their phone since the Pre is “very efficient at doing data over Wi-Fi.”
To Palm’s credit, the company is moving fast to fix battery life issues. “We are turning the crank relatively quickly to take care of it,” says Cousineau.
Last week, Palm sent out its first over-the-air software update for the Pre to improve on the battery life. And there are more on the way. Cousineau says Palm is working with AIM and Hotmail to resolve issues that impact the Pre’s battery.
Grade: C-
Hardware: Though there have been some reports of problems with the Pre’s screen, the overall build quality of the Pre is excellent. The device feels as comfortable as a bar of soap in the hands and it is well constructed, says Vronko. The Pre’s touchscreen is responsive and Palm uses some of the latest hardware and processor to keep its phone at the top of its peers, he says.
I'd have to use one in real life before I dropped $475 on a one-wheeled stroller, but even if it's not as practical as its creator claims, the one-of-a-kind unit has a neat design. I bet that black plastic shell gets hot on little legs, though.
IT IS MADE WITH A STYROFOAM INNER GIVING IT VERY LITTLE WEIGHT. IT IS COVERED WITH A LEADFREE PLASTICIZED COATING THAT IS UV STABLE AND NON TOXIC. THIS COATING GIVES IT INCREDIBLE STRENGTH AND DURABILITY. IT RIDES ON A SINGLE 10" INFLATABLE TIRE. THIS SINGLE TIRE GIVES THE STROLLER UNMATCHED MANUVERABILITY AND THE ABILITY TO TRANSVERSE ALL TYPES OF TERRAIN. THIS ITEM IS VERY STABLE AND CAN NOT TOPPLE WHILE MOVING.
Have an area around the house you want to keep an eye on? Maybe you want to watch a kid’s room, your garage with your prized car, or just your front door. There are a number of webcam solutions that will let you monitor things, but there’s usually a cumbersome set up process involved. Avaak is looking to change all that by rolling out the Vue personal video network. Shortly stated, this is a package that comes with a base station that communicates with two battery-powered cameras that allows you to monitor things online.
The company behind the Vue claims that you can get up to a year of usage out of the wireless cameras using just one battery. Since these cameras do not need an ethernet or power cable, they can be placed in lots of locations using the included magnetic mounts.
The cameras communicate with a base station, the Vue gateway, which connects to your router. You would have to buy an adapter to make the base station use Wi-Fi. The cameras have to be within 300 feet of the base station.
How do you watch the video? You have to use a special site from Vue The first year’s service is included in the $299 price, and will cost $19.95 per year after that. Extra cameras will cost $99. Each Vue gateway can support up to 50 cameras.
Right now, the Vue personal video network is available for pre-order and will be shipping “Early Summer 2009,” which we found out would mostly likely be July. If it actually works the way the company claims, this could be a very promising product.
The Android userbase may not be quite as big as that of iPhone OS - but man, they are one loud bunch. More so than any smartphone platform past, users of these two operating systems tend to consider themselves rivals of sorts; if you release an application for one, users of the other will begin to clamor almost immediately.
It’s been about 8 months since the launch of their iPhone app, but geo-centric social network Brightkite is about to hush the calls of Android-toting Brightkite users everywhere. Brightkite’s CMO and Co-Founder Rob Lawson just wrote in to let us know that Brightkite’s Android debut should be submitted to the Android Market within the next few days, hopefully going live to all sometime within the next week.
We’ve just cracked open a big barrel of Brightkite beta. Read on for our first impressions - or better yet, read on to find out how you can get beta access as well.
First Impressions: If you liked what you saw of the iPhone app, you’ll probably like the Android app just as much - if not more. At first glance, I thought the Android app was missing a ton of functionality - that is, it seem that everything that’s placed in the row of tabs at the bottom of the iPhone port, such as Friends, the “Nearby” search function, Messaging, etc, was absent. Then I remembered that Android handsets have the advantage of a “Menu” hardware key. Pressed that - sure enough, everything I was looking for was tucked right in that little slide out drawer. It’s a great design decision; when it comes to designing for tiny mobile handset screens, every pixel counts. Moving these navigation items behind a single button press frees up about 15% of the screen real estate.
The application’s interface is dead simple, whilst still providing just about every bit of Brightkite-based functionality you’d expect of it. In fact, we’re having a hard time finding anything you could do in the full-blown Brightkite web interface that you couldn’t do in this app. Check ins? Of course. Messaging? Yep. Search, friend management, even stuff as trivial as editing your profile picture - it’s all here.
The interface is well polished, and the functionality is exhaustive - so is it perfect? Not quite. Just like most older brothers, the iPhone port is quite a bit faster than its fresh-faced Android sibling. The only time the Android app seemed quicker than the iPhone version was during the initial startup; after that, most actions took 2-3x longer. Of course, the iPhone release has been around for 8 months, and we’re dealing with beta software on the Android end. Chances are there’s some room for optimization.
Beta access:
You’re probably tired of hearing us blabber on at this point. iPhone this, Android that - you get it. You just want to play with it yourself.
Fortunately, that’s pretty easy. Brightkite has sent over a few scannable QR codes which will get anyone with an Android phone into the beta. Here’s how:
Make sure you can install applications that aren’t from the Android Market. To do so: Hit the menu, then go to Settings, then Applications, then check the “Unknown Sources” option.
If you haven’t already, install the “Barcode Scanner” application from the Market. You’ll need this to scan the QR code below.
Scan the proper code below. No need to print the QR code out - Barcode Scanner should be able to read it right off your monitor. It will open your browser to the proper page, and download should begin.
If you’re running Android v1.5, otherwise known as “Cupcake”:
If, for some reason, you’re still on Android v1.1:
Disclosure: Brightkite’s competitor Loopt should be considered a TechCrunch sponsor, and Brightkite helped pay for the booze at a recent Crunchgear reader meetup.
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Talk about long lines, Gadgetell has the report from a Sprint representative that thousands Palm Pre units are on back order in the entire USA. Sprint is on the record reporting that the Palm Pre launch was the biggest in the company’s history and the line that has formed for the new phone surely tops waitlist records as well.
Super smartphone
Sprint’s Palm Pre is tracking to become a serious player in the smartphone world. Many of said its WebOS is ahead of even the iPhone, whose operating system still can’t handle background tasks like the new Palm can. Analysts suggest the Palm Pre is the phone that will save/doom Palm’s future.
How many?
According to Gadgetell sources, in Chicago alone, 4,500 Palm Pres are on back order. Another report out of St. Louis says almost 100 are back ordered, just at one location. Palm warned of low initial stock of the phone, which most outlets viewed as a way to build hype, but 4,500 back orders in one city says demand for the phone is off the charts.
Could it be that of the 50,000 reportedly sold opening weekend, that thousands more still have not been delivered? Is the shortage marketing plan really working as more and more people have to get in on the fun or is Palm in a pickle over delivery?
When
On the bright side for those waiting for their Pre, supply looks to be coming quick. According to Sprint locations, new shipments are arriving daily. The question of are these shipments enough to meet demand remain to be seen. Typically ocean freight is scheduled months out; it is unclear if Palm was ready for the apparently big demand for its new beast. But there looks to be an internal Sprint battle brewing.
What?
According to internal Sprint protocol, Sprint stores that order more phones move up the priority list, which makes some sense. However, the sense stops when these locations start to bid the number up to move more units. We could be looking at a glut of phones fairly quickly as stores try to outbid others in efforts to get the phones in and out the door.
Sprint says
Sprint kindly responded to my inquiry for confirmation on the back order numbers with:
“With the strong customer response to the launch of Pre, as expected, Sprint has sold out in many locations. Sprint is getting the device in to its retail locations as fast as Palm can make them.
Sprint doesn’t comment on rumors about inventory.”
That’s right folks, Samsung is on fire today. Hot on the heels of the all the other handsets that they’ve rolled out so far, the Jet looks poised to fill in that crucial gap between feature phones and smartphones.
Support for ActiveSync via Microsoft Exchange is huge here, and it means the Jet can sync with your data remotely to make sure everything you need is up to date when you need it. On top of that, multitasking is aided by the beefy 800MHz processor, which Samsung claims makes the Jet “the fastest full touch handset on the market today.”
All of this wouldn’t amount to anything if the interface was lousy, and for better or worse, Samsung is sticking it out with their classic widget-based TouchWiz interface, albeit slightly tweaked. The new TouchWiz 2.0 (original, huh?) interface features new updates like their new 3D media gate UI and smart unlock, which really means nothing until we get to see it in action.
If nothing else, the hardware is looking mighty impressive. Samsung jammed a 3.1 inch WVGA AMOLED display into a pretty tiny package, and let’s not forget the 5 megapixel camera they’ve thrown in for good measure. Integrated GPS, DNSe, and SRS Sound Effect technology round things out, and all in all, it we’re looking at a very solid niche filler. As of yet, there’s no word on pricing or availability, but we can only hope Samsung doesn’t screw things up by pricing it too high for its intended audience.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
We’re not sure if there’s a direct connection here or not, but here’s the way we saw it: PreDev Wiki opens the floor to anyone looking to discuss tethering the Pre, then nixes the topic at the request of Palm. Just hours later, the first tethering solution has gone up. Coincidence? Did someone get a spark of motivation after the discussion got pushed under the rug? Either way - tethering works!
It’s by no means the most elegant solution ever - but these first ones never are. First you root the Pre, then you SSH, then you solve world hunger, then you set up proxies; it’s messy, but it seems to work. The Pre dev community is already well underway at tearing this thing apart, so it probably won’t be too much longer before a simpler solution pops up - whether Palm/Sprint like it or not.
Yesterday, I talked about how some hackers have been working on the Palm Pre, gotten root, and can make some interesting changes to WebOS. The ultimate goal of the project was to find a way to enable tethering on the Palm Pre. Now it looks like that’s not really going to work out too well.
Palm has asked the Pre Dev Wiki to halt work on the tethering project for now. Palm doesn’t look to have any issue with it; instead it’s warning the developers that Sprint does not want tethering on the Pre and might force Palm to shut down the wiki. The Palm Dev Wiki admins have responded in kind by taking down the tethering goal. The tethering page on the wiki now reads:
We have been politely cautioned by Palm that any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period (and perhaps beyond—we don’t know yet) will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki.
There is always the possibility that once the Sprint exclusivity ends, the tethering goal can be worked towards once again. With the Pre available on more networks it will be difficult for any one network to complain about the hacker/development community. There’s also the chance that despite Palm asking the Pre Dev Wiki to halt the progress some will continue in trying to bring tethering to the Pre sooner rather than later. It wouldn’t be too surprising to see an article or video detailing how to bring tethering to the Pre show up on the front page of Digg eventually, if not within the next few weeks or months.
I’m not a huge movie buff, but I have a pretty good memory and do well enough at movie trivia games. I am also often able to repeat lines verbatim from movies I saw years ago, and usually enjoy doing so. So I was pretty intrigued when I saw Avalinx’s new app, MovieLingo. It’s a simple app, but I think it’s a good example of how to use mobile computing and always-on Internet connectivity to improve the social experience.
MovieLingo is a fun, free app that plays famous (and not-so-famous) quotes from movies. You shake your iPhone and a genre and era will be randomly selected. A movie will then be randomly selected that fits the criteria, and a clip from that movie will begin to play. If you prefer to lock in a specific genre or era, you can simply select it from the scroll list and click the lock icon beneath that list. This is handy if you only like Comedies from the 1980s, as it’ll improve your chances of hitting on all those wonderful Steve Guttenberg vehicles! Once a movie has been selected, you can click the “Reveal Movie” button to find out the source of the quote. This will display for you the movie poster, and provide you with a few options.
You can click the top-right button to get a movie summary, in case you get a movie you never heard of before. This is good for me for all those Golden Age of Cinema films about which I know nothing. You can click the Back button to return to the main screen to shake for a new set of parameters and quote, or you can click the Forward button to randomly select a new movie from within the current era and genre. You can replay clips, and scroll back through clips you’ve already played. The default option is to retain your last 25 quotes in the app’s history.
If you click the action button at the bottom right of the screen, you can select several things to do with the movie, like bookmark it as a favorite, share it on your Facebook wall so all your Facebook friends can enjoy it, buy it from Amazon, or add it to your Netflix queue. Now that Apple has announced the ability to buy movies from the iTunes Music Store directly from your iPhone, expect to see a “Buy Now” option added to the action menu. That’ll be a neat addition to this free application. MovieLingo provides a list of featured quotes you can scroll through, if you don’t feel like taking your chances with a random quote.
The thing that interests me about MovieLingo is that very little of the data is stored in the app itself. Part of building this app was assembling a collection of assets that could be fetched on demand, including the sound files themselves, movie summaries, poster art, and links to the various third-party services. When a movie is selected, the MovieLingo application goes out to the internet to fetch what it needs. This means that new quotes can be added on the fly, presumably without requiring any sort of update to the core app itself.
Is this a killer app for the iPhone? Absolutely not. Will this be an app you pull out at parties? Probably. You can even use it when you’re standing in the Blockbuster, totally overwhelmed by the selection of films and unable to reach a decision with your significant other whether to rent Zombie Strippers or When Nietzsche Wept. Shake your iPhone and rent whatever clip comes up!
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
iPhone game developer ngmoco is announcing today its own cross-promotion publishing network fro iPhone games. The publishing network, called Plus+, will be headed up by Simon Jeffery, the current president and COO of Sega of America. Prior to Sega, Jeffery was president of LucasArts. His new title at ngmoco will be chief publishing officer. This is a major hire for the iPhone game startup, whose CEO Neil Young is also a former star executive from the console gaming world (he came from Electronic Arts).
Ngmoco is already one of the top game developers on the iPhone. Its hits include Rolando, Mazefinger, Star Defense, Topple, and WordFu. Jeffery will be running a new business for ngmoco, Plus+ Publishing. The company already cross-promotes its own games. For instance, about 15 percent of Rolando sales come from cross-promotion, according to Young. With Plus+ Publishing, outside iPhone game developers will be able to apply to become part of this cross-promotion network also.
Ngmoco will offer to publish and market iPhone games under its own Plus brand, as well as simply cross-promote other games using its own popular games and the other games which become part of Plus+ (with different revenue splits depending on the level of service). Developers who want to apply can email gamemakers [at] ngmoco [dot] com.
Nintendo’s Wiimote has been a big hit. Now a new mouse from HillCrest Labs uses similar motion-sensing technology to let users control an on-screen cursor with the flick of their wrist.
The bangle-shaped mouse called the Loop Pointer is designed for use by consumers who connect their PC or Mac to a TV, says the company. Through a combination of sensors and accelerometers, the remote feels the users’ movements and reflects it on the screen, much like the Wiimote. Users can then click the right or the left button on the remote to make their selections.
With the growth of online video and sites such as Hulu, an increasing number of consumers are connecting their home television sets to a personal computer. The Consumer Electronics Association estimates more than 7 million U.S. households have their PCs and TVs linked.
The Loop Pointer will make it easy for these consumers to search, browse and navigate the internet in a way that’s more fun than using the traditional two-button click mouse, says HillCrest Labs. To use the Loop, consumers have to plug a small USB 2.0 transceiver into their PC and get started.
The product was originally been developed as a concept to demonstrate Hillcrest’ motion control technology and we saw it showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show this year.
The Loop can also be used with the PlayStation 3’s web browser and can also work for Apple TV users who use aTV Flash software.
And if you are wondering about the similarity between the Loop and the Wiimote, it may not be entirely coincidental. Last year, HillCrest Labs filed a lawsuit against Nintendo alleging patent infringement over the motion-sensing technology.
Hunch.com has launched this week and is designed to help visitors make difficult decisions that they may be facing. The more you use the site, the more personalized your answers will be. From your profile, Hunch.com can answer questions for you like, “Should I move?” “Should I go on a blind date?” and “Where should I go on vacation?”
Before you ask a question, you will also need to teach the engine some things about you. You will be given a survey in order to let Hunch.com your personality type. Questions you can opt to answer will reflect your political beliefs, relationship status, likes and dislikes. After finishing the survey, you can ask a question and receive an answer specifically for you. Instead of using search engines to find answers, it compares your data to other people on Hunch just like you. You will also be given process of elimination quizzes to help make your decision as well.
Hunch.com states that it will not sell any of the data you give them to third parties. That is an important consideration if you are telling the site exactly what type of things you like. Want to know more about Hunch? Gadgetell took a look at Hunch back when they were invite only. Take a look here.
Today at an event in Singapore, Samsung Korea officially launched four new handsets to the market. The flagship of the four phones introduced was the Samsung B7610, a part of Samsung’s Omnia brand of smartphones. The B7610 comes with a 3.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen display (800×480 resolution), a slide-out keyboard, a 5.1-megapixel camera, 1GB of memory, FM tuner, Wi-Fi, TV Out, and GPS, according to Akihabara News. The B7610 will run Windows Mobile and will surely attract crowds of gorgeous Korean chicks to owners everywhere. It was showcased alongside three other equally average smartphones: the 12-megapixel Samsung Pixon 12 M8910, the Samsung Jackie B7320, and the Android powered I7500.
The Garmin nuviphone G60 will come out one day, friends, most likely during the second quarter of this year. And when it does come out, there will be much rejoicing: it's the last time the Garmin-Asus operating system will be used on a device. From there on out it's Android and Windows Mobile all the way.
Everyone moans about the lack of Flash on the iPhone, right? Let's face it: if someone makes a solid Flash implementation for the iPhone there would be substantially less interest in making native iPhone apps. You could create a rich user environment in the browser, and the iPhone App Store would be less and less relevant. As things stand now, I prefer native apps over browser apps for iPhone services. I use the dedicated mail client to access my GMail account, rather than load the mobile GMail interface in Safari. I use a dedicated Twitter client, FaceBook client, and LinkedIn client rather than load the mobile version of those sites (assuming a mobile version even exists!).
Often, though, no native client exists, and you're stuck using a web site. It can be a real pain to find a mobile-friendly version of the sites you need, sometimes. Enter Taptu, the alternative search machine. This free app provides iPhone-friendly search results in a surprisingly intuitive way.
Not content to let others do the heavy lifting, Pure Digital, now part of Cisco, has added Flip Channels to their popular - and surprisingly useful - FlipShare software. The software is pre-installed on every Flip devices (we have the HD) and the Channels are yet another way to upload and share your videos in the interwebs.
Videos sent to your channel can be viewed at FlipShare.com or using the FlipShare iPhone app, also available today. The software also supports DVD authoring and standard sharing with YouTube and MySpace. I sent a video to myself using the service, a real cinematic magnum opus. You cannot formally embed videos sent to channels - you can embed them on the sly using the actual HTML or grabbing to a site like Posterous - but obviously you can embed videos sent to YouTube.
Former MySpace CMO 
The Boynq Pad2Go Retractable Mouse Pad has just been deeply discounted at Radio Shack. It’s now $3.99, down from $19.99. 
Looks like 
Happy Bloomsday! Here's a rare reading of James Joyce performing his own work; as John Naughton 
We’ll say it right off the bat: there’s a good chance you have a recent version of Adobe Reader installed on your computer, so that probably means you’ve also installed 
Research In Motion has launched a new 3G BlackBerry phone called the Tour 9630 that continues the design aesthetic of its recent Curve and Bold phones.
It’s not clear exactly what data was pulled (years, transaction size, etc.), although there are more details 
The FCC is reporting that Friday’s transition from analog to digital TV transmissions was largely uneventful. No major outages or problems were reported. Their toll free helpline was flooded with calls - over 317,000 - from people who couldn’t figure out how to operate their new converter boxes, but the FCC said most problems were solved when the customer rescanned their boxes for the channels they were missing.
Talk about long lines, Gadgetell has the report from a Sprint representative that thousands Palm Pre units are on back order in the entire USA. Sprint is on the record reporting that the Palm Pre launch was the biggest in the company’s history and the line that has formed for the new phone surely tops waitlist records as well.
iPhone game developer 
