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The Young Entrepreneur MythMy colleagues at the Kauffman Foundation are on a roll. Following up fast on the heels of a paper last week on Fortune 500 companies, recessions, and startups, Dane Stangler at Kauffman is releasing a...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 18 Jun 2009 | 12:06 pm The Yahoo Annual Meeting Circus Rolls Back Into Town Next Week: Send in the Clowns? [BoomTown]
In exactly one week at 10 am PST, Yahoo will hold its annual meeting in Silicon Valley, the first time where new CEO Carol Bartz will greet its shareholders in person. She should prep carefully, as the event has been quite a drama over the last two years. In 2007, former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel left the company just days after a fractious annual meeting and was replaced by Co-founder Jerry Yang. And last August, the meeting was held in the midst of even more trouble. The walk-up to that gathering included a failed takeover attempt by Microsoft (MSFT), extensive Yahoo (YHOO) management turmoil and a high-profile proxy fight waged by billionaire investor Carl Icahn. And the meeting itself was also a mess, after shareholder voting was miscounted and it turned out that discontent about leadership was double what Yahoo first reported it was. Broadridge Financial Solutions’ corrected tabulation of the vote on Aug. 1, without the “truncation errors,” showed Yang’s disapproval more than double what was previously reported, rising from 14.6 percent votes withheld to 33.7 percent. Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock saw his shares withheld rise from 20.5 percent to 39.6 percent. Yang later stepped down, as well President Sue Decker, both of whom presided over the meeting. Yang was replaced by Bartz early this year. But most of the Yahoo board still remains in place, with the addition of Icahn, including Bostock. And today, just as it was then, Yahoo and Microsoft remain engaged in an ongoing push-me-pull-you relationship about whether to partner in search and online advertising or not. Talks have been on-again-off-again for months now, including a meeting between Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the D: All Things Digital conference in late May. Those talks have now appeared to reach yet another impasse, but that could change again quickly. Sources at Microsoft said the software giant has remained interested in such a deal, although not at any price, a stance that has recently been made firmer by the apparent early success of its rehaul of its search offering, now called Bing. Some inside the company think that puts added pressure on Yahoo to do a deal, before Microsoft actually logs in consistent gains in search share.
Microsoft has long been mired in third place at around eight percent, behind Yahoo by a dozen points and well behind Google (GOOG), which consistently tracks above 60 and 70 percent. “Bing’s success only increases the odds [of a Yahoo deal] and decreases the price,” said one observer. But a big price is exactly what Yahoo wants, with Bartz stating in an onstage interview with me at D7 that she was willing to do a deal for a “boatloads of money,” as well as the right technology and data. (You can see a video of Bartz’s full session here, talking about that and more.) And she is backed, at this point, by the board, except for Icahn, who has been aggressively agitating for a Microsoft deal, in hopes it will return his huge investment in Yahoo into the black. “He has been kind of driving Carol crazy about it,” said one source close to the situation. For her part, Bartz has told many at the company and outside it that she was hired to make such key decisions and if board–especially Icahn–did not like it they could find another CEO. Yahoo has been upgraded recently by some analysts, based on confidence in Bartz’s ability to turn around and reinvigorate the company. The stock has seen a small bump up too. But Bartz, although successfully projecting command of Yahoo and stabilizing the management over the last six months, still has yet to put forth a detailed strategy for the company to staunch declines in profits and revenues and increase innovation. And, although annual meetings are usually painfully scripted affairs, the event might be her chance to perhaps articulate that plan and more. BoomTown will, of course, be front and center to the ongoing show to see what happens next. Until then, here are two videos I did at the 2007 and 2008 annual meetings. And below it, the great Barbra Streisand in a video, singing the classic, “Send in the Clowns”–which is pretty much the perfect theme song for the star-crossed Microsoft and Yahoo relationship. 2007: Source: All Things Digital | 18 Jun 2009 | 11:45 am An Indie Label Sounds Off: Why We Don’t Love Grooveshark [MediaMemo]
My story about EMI’s lawsuit against Web music startup Grooveshark elicited this email from Ben Patterson, who runs indie Web music distributor DashGo, about his experience with the service. I think it’s useful because it spells out Grooveshark’s business plan, or at least part of it: Charge labels to promote their acts on the service’s search engine. And I think it’s also helpful to hear an obvious but little-voiced argument about the “free Web music = valuable promotion” thesis — it works best when the act or label is playing along. With Ben’s permission, I’m running the whole thing.
[Image credit: Mrs. Logic] Source: All Things Digital | 18 Jun 2009 | 11:39 am Build Your Own Paper New York
You can pick the ones you want, but as they cost just $1.50 per building, you could just make the whole set, which includes the Empire State Building, the Flat Iron Building and the IRT Train. There are also a few pdf downloads at the site for you to print and make, and they’re free. These include the World Trade Center and One Times Square, although somewhat inexplicably misses its most important neighbor, Four Times Square, the NYC home of Wired.com. Even if you’re not thinking about buying these, check out the site. The fifties-inspired design is lovely, and there’s a whole section of links to some very interesting stories (storeys?) of the buildings of New York. Product page [Build Your Own New York]
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 18 Jun 2009 | 11:29 am Research Shows Rats Can Gamble - And WinIn a research project designed to shed light on the physiological mechanisms behind addiction, scientists found that their rat subjects were capable of “playing the odds” in a gambling task.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 18 Jun 2009 | 11:29 am Infographic: all US one-time expenditures vs the bailout Barry Ritholz sez, It is exceedingly difficult to convey exactly how much we are spending o bailouts. Start talking trillions (versus mere billions) and you get puzzled looks from people. Humans have a hard time conceptualizing any number that large. I wanted a graphic way to clearly show how astonishingly ginormous the amounts involved were.Bailout Costs vs Big Historical Events (Thanks, Barry!) Source: Boing Boing | 18 Jun 2009 | 11:27 am Doh! Wrong turn? Homer gives driving directions - Reuters
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 18 Jun 2009 | 11:26 am First look: iPhone OS 3.0 is better for business, but IT won't be ... - Computerworld
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 18 Jun 2009 | 11:26 am Lacy, Birch, Krim And Glaenzer To Attend TechCrunch Europe AwardsPreparations for The Europas - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 - are coming together. Held on July 9 in London, these will be the first Europe-wide awards ceremony for technology innovation, honoring...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 18 Jun 2009 | 11:18 am Lacy, Birch, Krim And Glaenzer To Attend TechCrunch Europe Awards
On the evening itself we will be joined by some of the great and good from the European startups scene, and some from the US. Check out who is coming already, and we’ll also be joined by a number of VIPs including Michael Birch (co-founder of Bebo), The main way is to make sure your company is able to be selected for nomination is to put it in CrunchBase, with all fields filled in, as well as key staff, like CEO etc. Don’t forget your logo and your picture! There are more details here. We will be releasing the list of nominees to vote on shortly. We’re also looking for sponsors for the award categories, details here. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Source: TechCrunch | 18 Jun 2009 | 11:18 am Another minister quits as British MPs' expenses published
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 VentureBeat | Sirius XM iPhone app offers free 7-day trial VentureBeat Satellite radio seems to be something people either fall in love with, or can't understand why anyone would. I've been a loyal XM listener for years. Satellite radio deal clears big hurdle XM Sirius iphone app expected very soon |
Are you one of those types that gets nervous when lots of people start announcing that the worst is over and that happy days are here again, or at least on their way? Then you’ll be reassured by a couple of recent research notes warning that the online ad comeback we’ve been hearing about has been postponed.
Earlier this month, Benchmark analyst Clayton Moran announced that he was seeing “softening online ad trends,” and that “recent online activity indicates a further pull-back by large advertisers.” Per Eric Savitz at Tech Trader Daily, Moran had cut his rating on Google (GOOG) in part because “large advertisers appear to reducing commitments heading into the summer…we are hearing that April and May were solid relative to expectations but indications for June through August are poor, thus tempering recent momentum.”
Now comes JMP Securities’ Sameet Sinha, also via Tech Trader, , announcing that “budgets have declined as advertisers are not feeling as chipper anymore,” and that “travel and finance continue to be weak, while retail is exhibiting mixed trends…the initial slivers of hope in May were premature.”
Unclear whether Moran and Sinha are talking about online ads across the board, and whether they’re distinguishing between Google’s search ads and the display ads that Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner’s AOL (TWX) depend on.
For what it’s worth, my thoroughly undisciplined channel checks — whenever I talk to someone who works at a business that depends on Web ads, I ask them how sales are going — tell a more positive story. We’ll get a better idea in a month or so, when the big public players start reporting Q2 numbers.
 Straits Times | Bing v. Bing CNNMoney.com A giant corporation is taking my name for its search engine. At least I'm not the only one this has happened to. By Stanley Bing (Fortune) -- On May 28, Microsoft proclaimed it would launch a new search engine that would compete in the vast hunt for ... Bing Makes Gains, But Is Google Actually Suffering? Microsoft makes gains with Bing |
 CNET News | T-Mobile USA to launch Dash smartphone in July Reuters SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - T-Mobile USA Inc said on Wednesday it will begin selling its new 3G-enabled Dash smartphone in July, yet another entry in the hotly contested mobile phone segment. T-Mobile to Offer Huawei's Android Phone Next Quarter T-Mobile USA launches Dash 3G |
 Canada.com | Palm engaged in handbag fight with Apple Inquirer By Nick Farrell FRUIT-THEMED toymaker Apple is getting miffed that Palm has dared to sync its gadgets to its glorious Itunes digital store. Debate heats up over Apple threat to disable iTunes sync with Palm Pre Palm is mum on official numbers, but analysts predict healthy sales |
Yesterday, we poked fun at Microsoft’s tacky $10,000 online treasure hunt to get people to use IE8, at the domain TenGrandIsBuriedHere.com. We were hardly the only ones. Today, a developer at Mozilla, makers of IE rival Firefox, weighed in with his own way of mocking Microsoft: TenGrandIsBuriedThere.com.
The site is simply a Google Map zoomed out to a certain point. If you zoom in enough, you’ll find a surprise. The developer took exception to Microsoft calling Firefox “old” on its site. That is a bit odd since IE is much older than Firefox.
[thanks Alan]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Dan Blake from Harkness Labs - who is working on far more projects at the same time than he could possibly tell me about in just one conversation - recently filled me in on his latest Twitter-related venture, TinyPetition.
Basically, Blake is looking to address the apparent need for a tool that allows the many opinionated people that inhabit Twitterland to voice their concerns about anything that gets their hearts pumping: a digital petition engine that can quickly spread online thanks to the viral nature of Twitter and the concept of retweeting in particular.
We’ve already seen Twitition pop up, most recently for aggregating opinions from Twitter users on the iPhone 3G S upgrade prices AT&T is going to charge. So far, that service has racked up 41800 signatures for 730 topics. TinyPetition, in contrast, has only soft-launched its website so far and stands at about 5800 signatures for only 5 petitions. Still, Blake thinks he can eventually overtake Twitition, which prompts the question how he intends to do so.
Well for one, Blake has access to an existing user base of millions he could potentially draw from, as he also happens to be the guy behind this website called PetitionSpot, one of the most popular online petition services in the world. It’s a good start: PetitionSpot boasts about 4 million registered users (although Blake says it’s more like 2 million who have actively shared petitions since the site’s inception) and these are all people who have already expressed their interest in signing digital petitions, obviously. We’ll see how far this gets TinyPetition further down the line.
I’ve set up a test petition (unsurprisingly, about our quest to have Facebook management reconsider their policy on Holocaust denial groups), which you can find at tinypetition.com/facebookholocaust. Here’s my tweet about it, which I’ve shared from the TinyPetition website (something seems to have gone wrong with it).
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 Coolest Gadgets | iphone 3.0 from a corporate point of view Macworld If you follow the buzz on Twitter, you'd think that the iphone 3.0 update began with copy and paste functionality and ended with Spotlight search capabilities. AP Mobile pushes top news in iphone 3.0 Spotlight on IPhone 3.0's Spotlight Search |
As founder of a global movement to end violence against women and girls, Eve Ensler has long been focused on human rights issues across the world.
Onstage in an interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, she shed much-needed light on the dire situation in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where some of the worst atrocities are now being committed on the population in a terrible civil war.
Ensler’s aim to end the use of rape as a weapon of war there, in part as a consequence of the region’s coltan trade. Coltan, or columbite tantalite, is a mineral essential to the manufacture of a wide array of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops.
It is well worth hearing about exactly how some of our everyday gadgets come to us at a terrible price.
Here is the video of the full D7 session:
By Paul Carr, Writer, The Guardian
I’m trying to imagine how it happened. The point at which, perhaps three weeks ago, Jeff Pulver convened a meeting of the greatest minds in social media to thrash out the details of ‘140 Characters’ – his conference on Twitter and the “state of now” which kicked off yesterday in New York.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
By Anne-Marie Corley, Technology Review
A 10-person committee charged with reviewing the future of U.S. human spaceflight will hold its first public meeting today, beginning a process that must cover a lot of territory in very little time.
The independent panel of experts will examine NASA’s Constellation Program, which plans to send humans to the International Space Station (ISS), the moon, and possibly Mars, and will consider alternatives to options already on the table.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
By Richard Waters, Reporter, FT.com
European privacy regulators could be about to throw a spanner into the works of attempts by social networking sites such as Facebook to find new ways to increase profits as they try to restrict the way internet groups release personal data.
The European move marks the first attempt by regulators to address the “open” internet platforms that the social networks, led by Facebook, have rushed to create.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
By Chris Messina, Blogger, FactoryCity
I met today’s news about Opera’s new initiative — called Unite — with a mix of shock and awe.
On the one hand, I was sickened by the lack of analysis from the echolalic blogger news corps.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
By Ashlee Vance, Reporter, Bits Blog, The New York Times
There’s a discussion taking place in the PC industry that is equal parts encouraging and sad.
Some of the companies making and selling computers are contemplating a way to give people a more accurate idea of how long the batteries in their devices will last.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Alice and Kev, the homeless Sims
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The anonymous viewer emailed the news station recently to express concern with a component of the city's background check policy, which states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate.Bozeman City job requirement raises privacy concerns (Thanks, Cliff!)The requirement is included on a waiver statement applicants must sign, giving the City permission to conduct an investigation into the person's "background, references, character, past employment, education, credit history, criminal or police records."
TOMORROW-LAND (Apr, 1965)
Source: Boing Boing | 18 Jun 2009 | 5:44 am
Frabjous
(via Evil Mad Scientist Labs)
Source: Boing Boing | 18 Jun 2009 | 5:41 am
They forgot pirates. The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse are gangsters, child pornographers, terrorists and pirates. As a Pirate-Canadian, I am deeply insulted.
The proposed legislation would force Internet service providers to allow law enforcement to tap into their systems to obtain information about users and their digital conversations...Feds to give cops Internet-snooping powers (Thanks, Alys!)Privacy advocates and civil libertarians, however, have vocally opposed the prospect of giving police "lawful access" to the digital conversations of Canadians by being able to access such things as their text messages, e-mails, web surfing habits and Internet phone lines.
It's always been policy but now it will be enforced. Vancouver police are not allowed to seize cameras or cell phones from anyone, unless they have consent, a warrant, or the person has been lawfully arrested.Vancouver police update camera/cell phone seizure policyConstable Lindsay Houghton tells the Province newspaper the policy has always been there, but it's now in writing and updated in their official regulations manual.
Police, Camera, Action... (Thanks, Scott Deathboy!)As soon as I had taken a shot, PC Smith (40144) came out from the train station and asked to speak with me. She asked why I'd taken a photo of her van. I told her that it was parked in a disabled bay. She told me that she'd been called because a woman was self-harming on the station and that was the only place she could park...
I asked her why she wanted the photo to be deleted, she told me that "in the current climate" the police had been asked to stop people from taking photos of sensitive buildings and of the police.
That isn't true - and I told her so.
She was told by her superior that she could take down a description of me. I told her that asking to delete photos was silly because they can be easily undeleted. I also thanked her for not escalating the situation. I left. As I left, I allowed my phone to post the photo I'd taken to twitpic.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Turns out the Internet really is a mess of tubes. This summer marks the third anniversary of the YouTube explosion, and since the site's epic takeover of all things video, a server-farm-load of specialized copycats has swiped its sobriquet. Got time to waste? Go tubing. Here's a sample of what you'll find. Warning: Some of these sites show a lot more than adorable puppies.
Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.
I'm awed and wowed by the huge number of incredible places that people have been adding to the Atlas Obscura over the last couple days. It's especially neat to see folks contributing the sorts of local curiosities that are not only not listed in conventional travel guides, but are barely mentioned anywhere else on the web. Like this odd tree in Grana, Italy, submitted by a user named Alpha:
A very unusual tree grows in the town of Grana, Italy--or rather, an unusual pair of trees. It consists of a fruit tree growing on top of a common willow tree, creating a kind of two-tiered, two-species hybrid duplex. While it's not uncommon for a small tree to grow on a larger one, it is rare to see two fully grown trees in such an unusual configuration. Nonetheless, the arrangement appears to be working well for both individuals, as the fruit tree on top bears lovely white flowers.
In a world where most startups choose gaining users over making money, Animoto is an odd exception: It’s doing both. Since launching in August 2007, the company has signed up some 750,000 users, and some 10% of those are paying customers. And that’s allowed the company to run cash-flow positive since December of last year, CEO Brad Jefferson tells us. And it could keep going on like that, but like most startups that taste success, it wants to do more.
So it has raised by far its biggest round of funding to date, a $4.4 million Series B led by Madrona Venture Group. With an already proven business model, Jefferson says the company just wants to accelerate everything it’s doing, and push harder. That means a more diverse roadmap and more importantly, a much broader distribution strategy with more partnerships. One of those partnerships with with iStockphoto, whose founder, Bruce Livingstone, participated in this round.
For those not familiar with Animoto, the startup basically allows you to take your images and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. What makes the videos cool is the company’s technology that renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects. We’ve gushed over it previously here, here and here.
One relatively new area of focus for the company is the mobile realm. Back in December, it launched an iPhone app that allows you to create videos from your pictures and music on the device. The app already has 300,000 users. And Animoto has had version 2 of the app ready for months, but Apple has yet to approve it. Jefferson isn’t sure what the actual hold-up is since the first version submitted had very little different besides some upgrades from the first version. And later, Apple apparently didn’t like that it was pushing users to its site to sign up for pro accounts, something which should be rectified shortly with the iPhone 3.0’s in-app purchase system, according to Jefferson. The plan is to have an app that charge the same $3 (or less) that it does on the site to make premium videos (using full-length songs).
And another reason the company is going to need that money is because it’s expanding beyond using photos for its videos and into also using actual videos. Jefferson wouldn’t say too much about it, but check out the Webby’s video below for a preview of how that will work. At this year’s Webby’s it won both the Judges Choice and People’s Voice awards for Best Services & Applications.
“We really believe we’re at the tip of the iceberg for cinematic artificial intelligence technology,” Jefferson says. “We want to allow users to create high production video that tells a story. That has the feel of a short form documentary. Right now that’s mostly teed off of music, but in the future it will be done off of meta data in the photos as well,” he says.
Animoto has raised $5 million in funding total so far, including money from Amazon back in May that was rolled into this round. Prior to that a group of personal investors provided $600K. Additional investors in this round beyond Madrona, Livingston and Amazon include Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC. Matt McIlwain, the Managing Director of Madrona Venture Group is joining Animoto’s board of directors.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
If I move to Tokyo, I’m definitely getting one of these little sets, even though I doubt I’ll be having guests and I’ll probably eat every day at ramen stands. Moving on from my sad fantasy, the Offi Paket is a nicely-designed little modular system that folds and unfolds to accommodate up to four people at a little dining table, yet takes up no more space than… a little dining table. The chairs (stools with duck-butts, really) fold up and go right under there. Tiny genius!
Unfortunately, they know it’s awesome, so they’re charging $500 for the table and $250 per pair of chairs. I think I’ll wait for the Ikea knockoff.
[via Gizmag]
No sooner do we finish writing up Yahoo deadpooling yet another project, Gallery, do we get a tip that Yahoo apparently has another money saving/making plan: Selling off domains it owns. That’s exactly what it has done with contests.com, which sold during a live auction last night.
What’s really odd though (aside from an Internet giant actually selling a domain rather than buying one), is the price at which it sold. Contests.com is a killer domain name. People like my mother love nothing more than going online and searching for contests to enter to win stuff. But what’s crazy is that Yahoo sold it for only $380,000.
Let’s put that in some perspective. In February, Toys.com sold for $5.1 million in auction. Sure, that’s a better domain, but not over 10 times better. And a few weeks ago, Candy.com sold for $3 million.
How Yahoo failed to secure even a million for the name is beyond me. Just poor luck in the auction? This guy, who apparently left right before the auction started last night is flabbergasted as well.
I just really would like to know why Yahoo would even sell it in the first place? I know times are tough at Yahoo but is $380K really going to help much in the long run? No. Hell, it’d probably be better to keep the domain and just put a load of ads on it, perhaps even Google ads. Or, I don’t know, run some Yahoo contests on it. People on the web love that stuff, I hear.
[photo: flickr/.larry page]
[thanks Sahar]
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This thing looks great! Solar-powered lamps are often pretty corny-looking, and the ones for outdoors are all so plasticky. The Sun Jar is basically just a couple low-power LEDs in a jar, attached to a solar charger, but it looks great. I always wanted to capture the sun in a jar. Have a couple of these around for emergencies or just for mood lighting.
At £20 or ~$33, they fall under the “pricey but not outrageous objet” category. I’d buy one if I didn’t have to pay for international shipping, but you Brits out there should definitely pick one up. Lots more info here, and you can order one too.
[via The Daily What]
Don’t look now, I think the Apple platform might be approaching a half dozen games! Now in addition to Myst and World of Warcraft, Mac users can also play the not-really-acclaimed shooter Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena. I frankly have no idea why anyone is porting this game. I mean, it’s not especially good, or original. Maybe Vin Diesel is a Mac user?
All teasing aside, the release will include a graphical update, an additional 6 multiplayer modes, and will have the same voice acting and very dark environment of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 versions. No word on pricing or release date, of course, but as with all games I’m sure it’ll be “really soon now.”
But seriously, why this title? Why not one of the Splinter Cell games or something?
[via MacNN]
Announced on Monday, the Samsung Omnia 2 is making its way onto Verizon very soon and we sat down with it for a little groping session.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Announced on Monday, the Samsung Omnia 2 is making its way onto Verizon very soon and we sat down with it for a little groping session.
The first word that comes to mind when looking at the Omnia 2 is wow. That 800×480 3.7-inch AMOLED screen is bright. It’s still a resistive screen, which I’m not a big fan of, but it’s much, much better than the one you’ll find on the Instinct. The rest of the hardware has also lost that ‘cheap’ feeling and the 5-megapixel AF camera puts it onto the premium smartphone tier.
TouchWiz 2.0 appears to be worthwhile this time around. Unlike v1.0, which was basically just shortcuts, the widgets on 2.0 are now active. Did your friend just send you a message on Facebook? The FB widget will tell you if you did. Want to know what the weather is going to be like today? Check the widget.
It doesn’t have the Webkit-based Dolfin browser like the Jet, but Opera will have to do. *sigh* It will ship with Windows Mobile 6.1, but the Omnia 2 will be upgradeable to 6.5 when it goes live.
It seems as though Samsung has ditched the Croix UI and might be going with the Cube from here on out. The six-sided interface is a tad finicky, but I’m used to a capacitive touch-screen and I didn’t really have enough time to readjust the way I handle resistive touch screens. I took a very short video of the Cube interface that’s not very flattering as its probably better than the video makes it out to be. I didn’t really get a full rundown of how it worked before I shot the video anyway.
Overall, the Omnia 2’s biggest selling point is the beautiful 3.7-inch AMOLED screen. Sure, it’s still WinMo, but Samsung has done a pretty good job of covering it up. TouchWiz has also seen a huge jump in terms of functionality with 2.0. So long as the widgets at launch are worth using, I’d say TouchWiz 2.0 will be a huge selling point on future Samsung devices.
Oh, the stacked image is of the Omnia B7610 on the bottom and the Omnia Lite in the middle.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
One thing Yahoo has been very good at over the past year is closing down services. Today brings news of another one shutting down: Yahoo Gallery. Come July 14, it will be no more.
Yahoo Gallery was a project that never left beta testing. It was intended to showcase cool applications that were built using Yahoo’s various services and APIs. And while it was a decent idea as a way to show off cool things like Flickr apps, it never really took off. Here’s Yahoo’s explanation message about the shuttering:
Yahoo! Gallery will be shutting down on July 14, 2009.
After careful consideration, we have decided to close the Yahoo! Gallery beta service. Although the Gallery gained a core of loyal users who enjoyed the service, Yahoo! has been reprioritizing some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers and developers. The decision to close the gallery is part of this larger strategy and will allow us to focus on helping our customers develop engaging applications using Yahoo! technologies.
If you have submitted any applications, you can go to the My Applications page, then download any images or text descriptions you wish to save.
The sentence, “The decision to close the gallery is part of this larger strategy and will allow us to focus on helping our customers develop engaging applications using Yahoo! technologies” doesn’t seem to make much sense. Isn’t that exactly what Gallery was supposed to highlight? But whatever — Deadpool, it is.
Gallery’s closing follows the much bigger decision to shutter Geocities earlier this year. And Yahoo officially shuttered Yahoo 360 last month, and Jumpcut shut down two days ago.
[photo: flickr/marshall astor]
[thanks Akash]
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
If you want an action/adventure RPG worth its salt, look no further. Gameloft’s Rise of the Lost Empires has everything you need! I loved this game and played it so obsessively for the last few days that I developed a severe case of cell phone elbow. This game has awe-inspiring graphics and dazzling gameplay. Aside from some extremely minor performance issues, Rise of the Lost Empires took full advantage of the iPhone’s unique multitouch capabilities. Gameloft has definitely delivered an outstanding product.
If you’re a nerd like me, and love fantasy/adventure RPGs, you’ll be delighted with Gameloft’s Rise of the Lost Empires. In the game, much like a full-fledged real-time strategy (RTS) game, you play God and are tasked with developing an economy and an army to take on the enemy. You build farms to earn money and to increase the total capacity of your army (the more farms, the more soldiers you can have). There are 10 different types of buildings, ranging from towers that can mow down incoming enemy combatants to a barracks to train simple infantrymen. But this is not a true RTS, because you still have a main character in each mission (the hero, described in the next paragraph) and the main character can often complete the entire mission without developing your army at all. Also, it hardly has the expansive environments and long, hard-fought battles of a true RTS. Rather, it is more of a hybrid of an RPG and an RTS: think of it as the best of both worlds.
The aforementioned heroes are the focus of the plot line (which is, admittedly, generic and uninteresting). Each hero has a series of magical powers which you can use for a variety of purposes, including launching a meteor shower on the enemy or regenerating your health. The magical powers added an incredible element of depth to the game; I found myself laser-focused on the screen during battles because I didn’t want to forget to use a replenish charm when my hero’s health was low or an attack spell when he was duking it out with a powerful arch-nemesis. There were 6 total heroes and they each had a few spells, so there was plenty of diversity in case you tend to get bored quickly.
There are 2 campaigns with 10 chapters each, for a total of 20 chapters worth of gameplay. Some chapters were more challenging than others, and Lost Empires definitely provided a lot of variety from chapter-to-chapter. Sometimes you have to complete a task within a time limit, at other times you just have to destroy all of the enemies on the map. You’ve got to be a pretty straight arrow if you aren’t engaged throughout the 20 chapters. The 2 campaigns let you feel both sides of the battle: you first start as humans and try to destroy the Orcs, and then switch. Though the races are basically the same, you still feel like the game is changing due to the shift in the storyline and, most importantly, the heroes.
The controls are awesome, for the most part, but there were some issues. Instead of using the multi-touch to zoom, it’s used (by pinching the screen with your fingers) to select units that you want to control. You tap the screen to select items, which I found sometimes required a double-take. The biggest problems with the controls related to a game feature in which you select a hero to “lead” a group of units. Oftentimes, the game would select the wrong hero and I could not figure out why. This may not sound like a big deal, but given that some heroes have healing powers and others don’t, it definitely caused me to lose a level or two.
And then there were the graphics. Holy moly are they well done. The design team should just pat themselves on the back right now, because the artwork is stupid good. The environment and buildings are intricately drawn, the colors are vibrant and captivating, and the characters just plain rock. There isn’t much else to say - look at the screenshots. If you’re not impressed, then God help the next design team trying to make your jaw drop.
Overall, Gameloft’s attempt to recreate the classic Rise of the Lost Empires was a superb success. It packs plenty of punch to deserve the $4.99 price tag. If you ever wondered if an RPG could be successful on the iPhone, wonder no more: Gameloft has answered the call and produced a hit. We loved it, and think you will too.
What we like:
What we didn’t like:
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Remember Jay-Z's song "Death of Auto-Tune (D.O.A.)"? Well, it's been remixed by Wallpaper, a NY-based group whose singer is known for his ironic use of &mdash you guessed it &mdash Auto-Tune.
Best part is that Wallpaper...
a) Auto-Tunes the heck out off of Jay-Z's voice
b) tweaks the line "I got 99 problems but my bitch ain't one" to "...pitch ain't one."
Clever stuff, fellas!
[via Funny Ha Ha]
photo by Kim Erlandsen
Yep. That 100 percent crop shows a dead pixel close to center on the Olympus E-P1.
While this is more a sociological issue than a technological one, it’s still interesting. Pilot programs in Ethiopia with the OLPC XO laptop have hit a major roadblock: teachers resent the device and consider it a toy. The reasons for this are complicated, but in essence it’s the nature of the educational system there. Imagine a school here in the US where the kids are learning design, coding, and a bunch of other interesting stuff but fare poorly on the SATs. It’s a lot like that, except more so; the Ethiopian schools are very much about memorization and basic scholastic functions, while the OLPC is all about exploration and individual learning.
It’s not like the whole project has been scrapped, far from it, it just exposes the trouble of introducing something as radical as the XO laptop into a school system that isn’t prepared to handle it. Until the teachers consider exploratory learning as legitimate and are equipped to take advantage of the device, the project is doomed to failure. It’s the classic horse/water problem. So the new strategy simply has to include those considerations and work harder on the top-down learning model they have there — something proposed a long time ago but not really implemented. Here’s a talk discussing this and other things in more detail.
I wonder what the risk is of someone considering the XO-2 a toy. They’d probably be hard-pressed to categorize at all.
[via Reddit, photo credit: CNET, it's in Nigeria]
Digital music startups seem to come in two flavors these days: Those that are being sued by the major music labels, and those that have expensive licensing deals that they can’t afford.
But for some reason, plucky Grooveshark, which runs a very nice free streaming music service, has stayed out of both of those buckets until now. I’ve confirmed that EMI Music Group is suing the site–whose motto is “Play any song in the world. For free!”–for copyright violation.
The label filed suit against Gainsville, Fla-based Grooveshark in a New York court on May 8. I don’t have a copy of the complaint yet, but if you feel like sharing hit me at peter@allthingsd.com or use the blind tip box here. No comment from EMI, but Grooveshark sent me a very long statement, which I’ve printed at the bottom of the post.
The takeaway: Grooveshark says they were working on a licensing deal with EMI and now find themselves in court instead. They do reference deals with “many artists, labels and publishers”, but as far as I can tell they don’t have deals with any of the other three majors — Warner Music Group (WMG), Universal Music Group, or Sony (SNE) — either.
Grooveshark started out as a peer-to-peer filesharing startup in 2006, and has since morphed into a streaming model. When I talked to marketing VP Joshua Bonnain in May he told me the company was primarily funded by friends and family — most of the company’s employees are either students at or graduates of the University of Florida, he said. But he also said the company had received a “substantial investment from a large party” that he wouldn’t identify.
Bonnain said the site, which generates at least some ad revenue, planned on splitting half of it with the copyright owners of the music it played. But I was never clear about how that was going to work since it didn’t have deals with the majors. Then again, Bonnain didn’t tell me that the company had been sued a few days before we talked, either.
In the music world, negotiations don’t preclude suits and vice versa; Warner was at one point suing iMeem, then became an investor in the site. Same thing with Universal and News Corp.’s MySpace (NWS). The only real question I’ve had is why the big guys haven’t gotten after Grooveshark yet. I’ve been asking label folks about the startup since November, and I’ve only gotten a shrug as an answer.
Anyway, as I said, it’s very nice service, and it’d be shame if the labels can’t figure out a way to work with it/help it survive. But the odds of that happening, based on the unpleasant history of digital music startups to date, are very low. So enjoy this themed playlist I created with the site’s help, which features music from all four majors, while you can. Grooveshark’s statement is below.
For the past year, Grooveshark has been in talks with EMI Records and other copyright holders to negotiate licensing agreements for the use of their content. We are pleased to announce that over the past few months Grooveshark successfully concluded mutually beneficial agreements with many artists, labels, and publishers that we hope to be a template for other such agreements with additional copyright holders.
Recently, EMI Records chose to abandon the template we’ve built with the help of other major copyright holders and opted for their traditional intimidation tactic of filing a lawsuit as a negotiating tool. We find the use of this negotiating strategy counterproductive, as Grooveshark has been willing to conclude an agreement with EMI Records that is economically sustainable for both EMI Records and a start-up company the size of Grooveshark.
Grooveshark is run by a group of young and passionate musicians. We love music, we make music, and we believe that the use of all music should be paid for. We adopted this core philosophy at our inception and to date have concluded agreements with hundreds of record labels, major US performance rights organizations, and thousands of independent artists who support Grooveshark’s business model. (See: Grooveshark Artists)
As musicians, we support the rights of copyright holders and strive to sign sustainable agreements with all content owners, ensuring that all artists get paid– or we agree to remove content from our system in accordance with our DMCA Takedown Policy. We hope that EMI Records eventually follows the lead of the many forward-thinking labels we are already working with, who would rather get their artists exposure and a fair share of our revenue than block content access and force customers to illegal networks.
We understand that the economy of the digital music business is in a state of flux, and we hope to help ease this transition by providing the required new tools and services that lead to the next generation of the music industry. We respect the ownership rights of the major labels and publishers, and our core mission has always been to compete with piracy by offering a service that is genuinely better than what illegal networks offer, while also ensuring fair payment to copyright holders. Our next important step on our road to success is to conclude a mutually beneficial agreement with EMI Records that is sustainable for both EMI and Grooveshark.
Tinker, the recently launched microblogging topic tracker from Glam Media, will be rolling out several new features to upgrade its service. Tinker, which we covered in depth during its launch here, allows users to quickly browse through different real-time Twitter and Facebook searches relevant to various current events, trends and breaking news. Each event, trend or news item is associated with one or more terms, which Tinker then searches for across all Tweets and then presents the relevant ones in a single stream.
Tinker is launching a people section that allows users the ability to search and discover people on Twitter. Users can find people by name, but also by location and profession. This feature ends up being a comprehensive directory of Twitter users, listed by profession, category or interest, that helps find, follow and filter people that are micro-blogging. Tinker also lets you see the most popular and influential of the Twitterati, by categorizing the people that create events and breaking news by topics such as Information Technology, Media and Real Estate. Within each category, Tinker offers sub categories of popular Twitter users. So under politics, you can search for Twitter user who blog about conservative, liberal and Republican politics.
Tinker has added a featured page, which provides users with lists of hot topics and trends to follow on Twitter, including streams on events, news, celebrities, and topics. Similar is the look and feel of the iTunes homepage, Tinker’s featured page let you browse through categories of the top trends on Twitter. And Tinker now allows a large range of topics to be tracked semantically, creating a powerful search capability across Twitter.
On of Tinker’s most innovative features is the ability to go viral with widgets. After creating an event, users can share the event’s feed using an embeddable widget, which they can place on their webpage or blog. These widgets allow users to both view the feed of an event and to submit their own messages, which can then be sent to Twitter and eventually sites like Facebook and FriendFeed. Samir Arora, Glam Media’s CEO and founder, says that the widgets are being used by brands and companies for advertising purposes. For example, the movie “Away We Go” has created a branded widget and event page, with a video and Twitter stream that can be embedded on any site (see below). Tinker says that the site is now running over 50 million widgets and applications a month on distributed sites and networks. Widgets are getting a slight upgrade, and now let users make widgets in different sizes and colors.
As we said in our earlier review of Tinker, the site is the perfect answer to Fred Wilson’s call for a Twitter events firehose—a place where users could input a handful of keywords collectively referred to as an ‘event,’ which could be used to monitor current news as it happens in near real-time. Of course, there are trending topics on Twitter (which can be misleading) as well as a plethora of Twitter apps out there that try to tell us what exactly the buzz is on Twitter. But Tinker does this and more by doing most of the work for users-by categorizing topics and events, dividing Twitter users by the topics they Tweet about, and letting anyone embed real-time streams into their own sites.
50 million impressions
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Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.
One of the areas of the Atlas Obscura that I hope will get filled out as people continue to contribute content to the site is our "Purveyors of Curiosities" category. Right now it's got a measly six places in it. We're looking to find all those cool stores around the world that share the "wunderkammer sensibility"--places like Deyrolle in Paris (shown above), Evolution and Obscura Antiques in New York City, and Paxton Gate in San Francisco, just to name a few of the more famous and fabulous ones.
Whenever I travel, I always seek these sorts of shops out, but they can be awfully hard to find (there's no page in the phone book for "odd stores"). If we could put together a good list of the world's "purveyors of curiosities," I think it would go a long way to making the Atlas Obscura into a really useful resource for curious travelers. So, please tell us: what are the most "wondrous, curious, and esoteric" stores in the world? (And if you have a few minutes to spare, would you consider writing up a brief description and adding them to the Atlas?)
Apple’s highly anticipated iPhone 3.0 operating system has landed, squeezing in some major enhancements missing from preceding versions. Our first impressions? The free software update is significant enough to beautify even the two-year-old, original iPhone, making it feel brand new.
First things first: Right after we installed the new iPhone 3.0 software, it immediately felt snappier than its predecessor. Most important, the iPhone’s camera is quicker at snapping photos than before, making it better equipped for capturing the serendipitous. Even swiping back and forth on the home screen is slicker, as are launching apps and typing messages.
Keep in mind, however, that any operating system update feels immediately faster out of the box. The previous iPhone operating systems slowed down over time due to system caching and other stored files cramping their style. (My colleague Dan Moren of Macworld warned me that from his experience testing the iPhone 3.0 beta, the OS slowed down over time.)
Moving on to enhancements: The single most useful new feature is iPhone 3.0’s search capabilities. Apple added Spotlight, a systemwide search bar that you access by swiping to the left of your primary springboard screen, or by pressing the home button twice, slowly. A search bar appears at the top of a blank, black screen, and you can type a word to perform a search through your calendar, contacts, e-mail applications and the names of applications. (In the screenshot at right, I’ve typed “Yelp”; Spotlight’s results reveal the Yelp application as well as my friend David Lee, who is a Yelp employee.)
This feature will please iPhone-application addicts, because the more apps they download, the harder it gets to find them; this tool solves that problem. Apple also added a search bar for the Mail application, enabling you to easily search through all your e-mails, even ones that are still on the server and haven’t been downloaded by the iPhone yet.
The major feature that users have been clamoring for is Cut/Copy/Paste. Apple made this tool extremely easy to use: To bring up the functions, you simply double tap on a screen where you wish to copy some text. A bubble appears asking whether you wish to use Cut or Copy, and a box encapsulates the area you tapped. Then, you drag the corners of the box to select the area you wish to copy and tap Copy. To paste, you launch the app where you wish to paste the text, double-tap once again and hit Paste. This tool is long overdue, and we’re relieved it’s finally here.
Another enhancement we’ve been dying for is broader support for landscape mode. That is, the ability to flip the iPhone sideways and use an application sideways. Apple added landscape mode for the iPhone’s e-mail, SMS and Notes applications, and boy is it ever easier to type on a landscape keyboard. It’s about time!
A brand new app on iPhone 3.0 is the Voice Memos audio recorder. We’re not all that wowed, because various audio-recording applications have been available through the App Store for quite some time. But it’s decent at what it does: You hit the Record button, and when you’re finished you hit Pause and then a Log button to store the clip. Then a menu containing the clips appears, where you can play back or e-mail the audio files — in MPEG-4, aka .m4a, format.
We also enjoyed some of the subtle improvements. In the SMS app, for example, you now have the option to delete or forward selected text messages from contacts. (In the screenshot at right, for example, I am individually selecting messages for deletion where a woman is rejecting my subtle invitation to hang out at Outside Lands, as well as her follow-up invitation to a show at Cafe Du Nord.)
Another minor enhancement is the App Store’s Redeem option (below) for gift cards and promotional codes. This eliminates the need to use your computer to redeem these codes and download free goodies through iTunes app. That’s a smart addition: Whatever Apple can do to keep the iPhone experience on the iPhone is a welcome change.
The Mail application also introduces a minor change: When you’re sending an e-mail, you don’t have to wait for it to finish sending before attempting to send another e-mail. Instead, the Mail app puts each message in the outbox and completes each request in the order in which it was sent. I tested this by sending four consecutive photos, and I ran into one problem: When connected on EDGE, Mail consistently failed to send the messages. It wasn’t until I connected to Wi-Fi that I was able to successfully e-mail the four photos.
There are two other features that consumers have been demanding: Tethering support (i.e., the ability to turn the iPhone into a wireless modem) as well as multimedia messaging for sending photos and audio files via a text-messaging-like service. We could not test either of these, because AT&T does not yet support them. The company declined to comment on the reasons why tethering and MMS are not available yet for iPhone customers on AT&T’s network, but a spokesman said it was not a network-related issue. Apple said AT&T iPhone customers can expect MMS support in late summer.
We’ll continue to test iPhone 3.0 over the next few weeks. We’ll also be testing new applications taking advantage of the new features in the operating system. Keep up with Gadget Lab’s iPhone 3.0 coverage.
See Also:
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
A blurry little bird told us a few weeks back that the Dash 3G was incoming, probably for a July 1 release date. Everything in this fresh-out-of-the-oven press release seems to confirm that, so let's all get together and have a tall glass of Dash this Independence Day.
Head on over to MobileCrunch to see what T-Mo has to say about the handset.
A blurry little bird told us a few weeks back that the Dash 3G was incoming, probably for a July 1 release date. Everything in this fresh-out-of-the-oven press release seems to confirm that, so let’s all get together and have a tall glass of Dash this Independence Day. Here’s what T-Mo has to say about the device:
The T-Mobile Dash 3G, designed by HTC and powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile® 6.1, is available in a glossy-black finish with red accents, features a full-QWERTY keyboard, easy-to-use trackball and vibrant display. This latest version of the T-Mobile Dash delivers easy ways to stay connected and organized with voice calling, messaging, support for personal and business e-mail, GPS for location-based services, and synchronization with Microsoft Outlook®. Whether staying organized while traveling or simply staying connected with friends and family, the T-Mobile Dash 3G provides access to the life tools customers need in a small, sleek package.
We’ll be reviewing it soon; we liked the original Dash and maybe this has the same magic. If someone you know isn’t quite ready to jump into something nutty like the Omnia 2, maybe you should point them in this thing’s direction (although I recommend the G1).
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Tethering doesn’t officially work in iPhone 3.0 for AT&T customers, but for Mac users there’s an easy tweak to enable the feature in seconds.
Here are the steps, courtesy of MacMegasite:
1. Download this carrier update file. Then extract it.
2. Launch the Terminal app and type the following command:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
3. Now launch iTunes. In the iPhone window, hold the Option key while clicking Restore. Then select the ipcc file in the disk image you downloaded and click OK.
4. iTunes will update the carrier settings. Now under General settings, tap the Network tab and an internet tethering option should appear. From there on, you should be able to easily tether the iPhone via Bluetooth or USB.
We tested this trick on an original iPhone as well as an iPhone 3G, and unfortunately the technique only worked on the iPhone 3G.
We’re somewhat shocked about how easy this was, and we’re guessing it will disappear very soon: It’s highly unlikely AT&T is going to let us tether for free. But for now, enjoy it!
If you’re looking for a new WinMo smartphone, the Omnia 2 should definitely be on your list. I still think the cube thing is weird-looking, but apparently the phone works quite well and has a nice, polished touch interface.
It’d be superfluous to list all the details they go over, but let’s just say that GSM Arena’s “first look” is more thorough than most reviews.
If you’re looking for a new WinMo smartphone, the Omnia 2 should definitely be on your list. I still think the cube thing is weird-looking, but apparently the phone works quite well and has a nice, polished touch interface.
It’d be superfluous to list all the details they go over, but let’s just say that GSM Arena’s “first look” is more thorough than most reviews. It isn’t a production unit, so there may be changes and probably quite a few fixes, but everything is in place and it looks like a nice system all told.
If I had to switch from Android, I might go with this thing. It seems like it’s got the whole package, but only if you’re interested in getting to know WinMO pretty intimately.
[via WMPoweruser]
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5to1, a stealth startup founded by former Fox Interactive execs Jim Heckman (pictured left) and Ross Levinsohn, has raised $4.5 million according to a recent SEC filing. Heckman is the CEO of the new company. Levinsohn, a partner at Fuse Capital, is on the board of directors.
The company isn’t saying what they’re up to yet. But Heckman has a history of successful startups - he founded Rivals.com (acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for $100 million), and Scout.com (acquired by News Corp./Fox Interactive in 2005 for around $50 million).
Other founders/execs/investors include Dale Strang, Mark Stieglitz, Michael Barrett and Woody Benson.
A summary of funding from the recent filing shows the company closed $2.2 million in April 2009 and $2.3 million in June 2009, bringing the total to $4.5 million. Fuse, Prism, and several angles are listed as investors.
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Section: Computers, Hardware, Wireless, Peripherals, Mice / Keyboards
I’ve seen wireless keyboards, wireless mice, and wireless mouse devices that work in mid-air. However, I have never seen a wireless keyboard that acts like a mouse before. At Computex 2009, Cideko had on display a new gaming keyboard that would act like a 3D mouse when moved around in mid-air.
My first reaction to such a product was, “What’s the point?” But it does seem like a cool idea, albeit a little unnecessary. Think of all those computer games that you could play without actually using a mouse. By simply moving the keyboard around, you have access to all normal mouse features as well as the ability to type at the same time. To right and left click, simply press the buttons located on the top of the device.
It reminds me of a game controller, where the main buttons are located on the top. Otherwise, it’s your average QWERTY keyboard, but a bit more compact for added comfort and portability. No word on exact measurements, though. Lastly, it features a row of media controls that can control songs and volume.
Since it was just shown off at Computex, not much specs or details have been released. We don’t know how long the battery life is, or how sensitive the keyboard is as a mouse, which is definitely important for gamers. Unfortunately, no word on pricing or availability at this time.
Below are a few more pictures of the keyboard.
Via [AVING]
Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If Twitter is good for one thing, it is for promoting whatever it is you have to sell. Some of the best self-promoters out there are rappers, and they’ve taken to Twitter just like every other type of celebrity. Just as Twitter can drive traffic to Websites, it can also drive music sales on iTunes.
On a panel at the 140 Characters Conference yesterday, Xavier Jernigan (@xjernigan, the director of digital marketing at Universal Motown Republic, described how Twitter help put one of his new artists, Asher Roth (@asherroth), on the map. Roth released his first album, Asleep In the Bread Aisle, on iTunes on April 20, a Monday. The night before he Tweeted out to his followers (he currently has 69,566) that the album would be on iTunes. And then he Tweeted out a short link which opened up to the album page in iTunes. With no other marketing, the album rose to become the No. 1 digital album for the week. Since then, it has sold about 100,000 copies. Update: As people point out in comments, Roth’s own team did a lot of groundwork before the album hit. Nevertheless, Twitter did play an important role in turning that early interest into iTunes sales.
The key to engaging fans, as is well known by now, is for the celebrities themselves to really send out Tweets and show fans a more personal side. Then when they Tweet that a new album is out, it doesn’t seem like marketing. It seems like inside information. One rapper on the panel was Jim Jones (@jimjones), who has more than 500,000 followers. He’s also seen iTunes sales spikes after Tweeting out to his followers. In between releases, he entertains them with dirty knock-knock jokes and observations on “What’s Ghetto?” For instance, “drinking out of mayonnaise jars” or getting the last bits of ketchup out of the bottle by putting water in it and shaking it, that’s ghetto. So is using Twitter to move albums on Twitter.
I caught up with Jernigan and Jones in the hallway after their panel and got them on video:
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Conspiracy theory site "Troogle" believes they've discovered a plan by Google and its Bilderbergian allies to take over the internet with something called The New Web Project:
Google has plans to work together with Microsoft and the World Wide Web Consortium (which we discovered yesterday). But also Mozilla and AOL are involved. And.. because of the secrecy of all this (and the cars parked at Bilderberg's) we believe the GOVERNMENT is involved too.There is a TheNewWebProject.com website, registered by someone in the Netherlands. Time to start wrapping each packet in tinfoil.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Interested in a life of cybercrime? All it takes is $50. Researchers at security firm Finjan have discovered that a site called “Golden Cash” is doing a bustling business in the buying and selling of infected computers. A small botnet of 1,000 malware infested PCs goes for just $50. That’s a mere 5 cents each!
The site infects the PCs with their own Golden Cash malware, which allows the purchaser to control the PCs remotely. The seller is also paid to collect the FTP credentials of as many legit sites as possible. Other items for sale on the site include rootkits and malicious websites. It’s being called an eBay for cybercrime.
“Criminals have built an eBay that provides everything to the hacker,” Finjan CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak told InternetNews.com. “People are not even aware their computer is controlled and is an asset that one person is buying and another is selling.”
Once they’ve made their purchase, the budding cybercriminal can add even more malware, send spam, install rogue ant-virus programs (also known as scareware), conducting phishing attacks, hack websites, and more.
The Golden Cash bot seeks out unpatched security holes and uses social engineering tricks to try and dupe people into opening a malicious email attachment. The best way to protect yourself is to make sure you install any and all security updates issued for IE and keep your anti-virus software up to date.
Read [PCWorld]
Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
AP - I'm sick of spending so much time making decisions, like what to eat for lunch or where to go on a date. So lately I've been outsourcing the process to a free new Web service that is happy to do it for me.
Research into color-changing nanoparticles could pave the way for a new kind of display technology. A breakthrough promises tiny molecules that can change color in response to an external magnetic field that can be used to create outdoor displays and posters.
“We have developed a new way to induce color change in materials that can be fabricated on a large scale and is pretty close to commercialization,” says Yadong Yin, an assistant professor of chemistry at University of California, Riverside, who led the study that included contributions from South Korean scientists.
The technique centers on polymer beads, called magnetochromatic microspheres, which are dispersed in a liquid such as water, alcohol or hexane.
Inside the beads are magnetic iron oxide nanostructures. Changing the orientation of the nanostructures with an external magnetic field helps produce the change in color of the beads.
The process is similar to the way electrophoretic displays, more commonly known as electronic ink, work. The two systems share common properties such as being bistable (stable in two distinct states), being readable in direct sunlight and consuming very little power.
To fabricate the polymer beads or microspheres, researchers mixed magnetic iron oxide particles into a resin. The resin solution was then dispersed in either mineral oil or silicon oil, which transformed the resin into spherical droplets in the oil. An external magnetic field organizes the iron oxide particles into periodically ordered chains that display a reflective color if viewed along the direction of the magnetic field.
“For instance, in a vertical field, the particle chains stand straight so that their diffraction is turned ‘on’ and and corresponding color can be observed from
the top,” say the researchers in their study. When the field is switched horizontally, the microspheres are forced to rotate 90 degrees to lay down the particle chains so that the diffraction is turned off. The microspheres then
show the native brown color of iron oxide. Depending on the direction of the external magnetic field there can also be intermediate stages.
As the final step, the liquid system which holds the particles is exposed to ultraviolet radiation to polymerize the resin droplets and make them into solid microspheres. This allows for switching between two states. The solid state allows for the color information to be frozen and retained for long times without the need for additional power.
Yin did not explain exactly how many colors can be obtained from the display but said the system can handle a reasonably wide range, though switching to colors at the opposite ends of the spectrum could be a challenge.
The researchers published the result of their study in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Yin sees applications such large outdoor displays that can be expensive to do with LCDs or other display technologies. “If you want a huge LCD display outside the house it can be uneconomical,” he says. “We can do it for much cheaper with this new technology.”
The displays are reflective, so they can offer high visibility even in strong sunshine, says Yin. The new material also can be used to make environmentally friendly pigments for paints and cosmetics.
Here’s a quick video that shows the rotation of the microspheres in a vertically changing external magnetic field. The color is switched between on (blue) and off states.
Photo: Colorful microspheres/University of California, Riverside
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Apple, Video, Portable Video, Gadgets / Other
The new iPhone 3.0 software gives a lot of extra functionality to apps. As a result, MLB plans to use the iPhone’s streaming capability to allow for full game streaming straight to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Basically, owners of the $9.99 app could listen to an audio feed, watch a Gameday update of the game, and view in-game video highlights. There have been rumors of MLB supporting full streams of a game, but that hasn’t been confirmed until today.
The iPhone 3.0 software begins rolling out to users today, so as soon as you upgrade your device, you can use the MLB At Bat to watch out-of-market games starting tomorrow. The first game set to be streamed on the iPhone will be the Chicago Cubs-White Sox game at 2:20PM ET. In addition, they will be streaming the Tigers-St. Louis Cardinals which takes place at 8:15PM ET.
Unfortunately, they will only cover out-of-market games to start off. Later on, they have plans to stream all games, which will definitely make or break people’s decision to purchase the app. The concept of out-of-market games is simple, you can’t watch games by local teams. Meaning if you live in New York, you can’t watch the New York Yankees or New York Mets, but you will be able to see any of the two games streamed by MLB daily (assuming it is not in your area).
Now, the app will be able to stream games over 3G or Wi-Fi, which is a big plus. The important question is how high quality is the stream over 3G? If it is almost the same as Wi-Fi, MLB has hit a home run with this app. Of course, that will not be known until tomorrow when users can start streaming games. As a big baseball fan, if I owned an iPhone, I would definitely purchase the app probably when all games are covered as I would not receive the local games.
Assuming the MLB At Bat app to be successful, I’m sure many other companies will create apps with live video streaming. A Hulu app, anyone? Be sure to let us know in the comments below if you plan on using the MLB At Bat app for live game streaming.
Via [BusinessWeek]
Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The big day has finally come. You rushed to download iPhone OS 3.0, sat on the edge of your seat as your handset did its thing, and then.. nothing. No glorious homescreen, no new search pane. You look over at your monitor, and sure enough - iTunes is spitting out error messages.
Fear not, though. If you’re getting activation errors or having a hard time connecting to iTunes, you’re by no means alone. Give it a few minutes and try again or, as I imagine most people are doing, just sit there and try over and over again until it works. It took about 8 tries to get ours activated and running after updating to the final 3.0 build (which, by the way, is 7A341 - just like last week’s developer release. If you updated to the most recent developer build, you don’t need to update again.)
While it’s somewhat reasonable to expect the servers to strain under the pressure of many thousands of people all trying to download hundreds of megabytes each, it’s still quite unfortunate. For plenty of users, the mobile has replaced the landline; however it takes for them to get activated, that’s how long they’re detached from the world. When a release goes live in the middle of a work day, that can be bad news.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
The final step of upgrading the iPhone to the new 3.0 operating system is failing, as it appears that the iTunes Store has collapsed under the weight of millions of phones trying to authorize at once. (Complaints are trending on Twitter by the hundreds.)
Without the final authorization from iTunes, the new firmware doesn't activate—bricking the iPhones and leaving them only able to make emergency calls. I know this, because I'm staring at my own bricked 3G.
It is advised to wait a few hours for the store to come back online before upgrading if you want to, you know, use your phone.
Update: And mine just activated. I had to unplug and replug about half a dozen times.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Computers, Software / Applications
If you log on the Microsoft Office website, you will get to view a newly posted trailer for the company’s 2010 version of the productivity software. The trailer teases out the features to expect from the newest Office suite. Besides viewing the trailer, you can also sign up to get a technical sneak peak at the features of Office 2010 starting next month.
Microsoft also posted a fake behind the scenes video that made fun of some of the recent leaks of the software. Screenshots and downloadable files were released illegally on the web with some of the versions containing viruses.
Pricing information or an official release date has yet to be announced for Office 2010, but it will come out sometime next year. The software will contain all of the essential elements of past versions of Office, but will now work within a user’s web browser. Supported browsers will include Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.
Read: [CNET]
Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
We’ve spent some quality time with the iPhone 3GS over the last couple of days and it looks like Apple is going to remain king of the smartphones with its latest iDevice. Although the 3GS is not significantly changed from the older 3G model, there are still a number of updates that make the 3GS noteworthy. From the mind of reviewer Steven Levy:
It’s not as dramatic an advance as the previous ones. But the new phone introduces a long list of improvements, big and small. Taken together, they’re enough to re-establish Apple’s once-shrinking lead in a brutal technology competition that is making the chariot race in Ben Hur look like a walk in the park.
As promised, Apple has indeed ramped up the speed with which the new phone performs tasks like launching apps, loading web pages, and displaying graphics. Apple claims speed boosts of up to two times of what the 3G delivers, and in some benchmarks cites even better performance. I haven’t done scientific measurements, but you don’t need a stopwatch to notice the new phone is zippier than its predecessor. I appreciated getting box scores faster and videos playing sooner in the MLB.com At Bat application, and it was clear that web pages loaded faster. In the case of a game like Tiger Woods Golf, the boost is significant enough to make me more likely to play when I don’t have much time.
In part because Apple is offering many of its innovations as part of the general iPhone 3.0 upgrade — the wise thing for those more recent buyers to do will be to install the new software and stick with their 3G iPhones at least until their contracts run down. This will provide a saner upgrade path to the 3GS’s considerable, but not earth-shattering, improvements. Speed is wonderful. But sometimes it’s prudent to wait for it.
Remember, this isn’t the whole review — just a mere sampling to get your motor running. For the deeper download hit up wired.com/reviews or click here for the full version.
If you’re just weeks outside of eligibility for an upgrade to the iPhone 3G S, you’ve probably been one of the many folks clamoring for a deal. No matter where you turn online, you can find people ranting on the matter - with just 11 months between the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S, lots of folks are getting a bit screwed over. In a pleasantly surprising turn of events, AT&T has listened.
It’s not going to help all early adopters of the 3G, but AT&T has announced that they’ve opened the eligibility window for the 3G S up by three months. If you’re going to be eligible for an upgrade in July, August, or September, they’re going to go ahead and give you the upgrade deal from day one. If you (like me) are only eligible every 18 months, you’re still out of luck - but if you spend $99 a month or more on your plan and are thus prepped for an upgrade after just 12 months, you’re good to go. If your status is changing, ppgrade eligibility tools should begin reflecting your potential savings beginning tomorrow.
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FROM APPLETELL - Apple has officially released iPhone OS 3.0. The software upgrade is available through iTunes for free for iPhone owners, and $9.95 for owners of the iPod touch.
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Let’s roll back the clock to September 9, 2008: on this dreary D.C. morning, Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), head honcho of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee expressed some concerns in a press release regarding the sharp jump in the price of sending and receiving text messages.
Text messages were commonly priced at 10 cents per message sent or received in 2005. As of the end of the month, the rate per text message will have increased to 20 cents on all four wireless carriers. Sprint was the first carrier to increase the text message rate to 20 cents last Fall, and now all of its three main competitors have matched this price increase.
Now, more than nine months later, representatives from Verizon Wireless and AT&T (oh, and Cricket was there too) have appeared at a subcommittee hearing to talk texting.
The big story here is that there were concerns of collusion: Randall Milch (Executive Vice President, Verizon) and Wayne Watts (Sr. Executive Vice President, AT&T) have both vehemently denied that they jointly set text messaging prices. Instead, they claimed, the price hikes were independently decided upon, andaffected only a small number of customers. It sounds plausible: a majority of text messages sent are from a bucket plan offered by the carriers, and Verizon and AT&T execs have claimed the price hike has only affected 17% of their collective customers.
Still, those rising text prices are also raising concerns that carriers are trying to shoehorn customers into messaging packages in an effort to bring in more revenue. Sen. Kohl wondered why most carriers seemed to want to increase prices, instead of cutting them in order to make them more competitive. Competition, however, is something that doesn’t seem to be in short supply in the wireless industry if Milch and Watts are to be believed. Text messaging is only one factor people take into consideration when signing up for service, and their respective companies and heading into a cellular battlefield this summer to fight for the hearts and wallets of potential customers.
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Update 3 p.m. PDT: According to Wired.com’s Dave Kravets, the iPhone 3.0 update tool in iTunes is now working properly. Download away!
Update 12 p.m. PDT: Some users, including a Wired.com staff member, are reporting problems downloading the iPhone 3.0 software. (See screenshot.) This is likely due to server overload; keep checking throughout the day to see if the update is available.
Apple on Wednesday released iPhone 3.0, a major upgrade for its iPhone operating system, delivering capabilities customers have demanded, such as multimedia messaging, copy and paste and universal landscape mode.
The operating system, which Apple previewed in March, became available for download at 10:10 a.m. in the iTunes Store.
The update is free for owners of the original iPhone as well as the current iPhone 3G; iPod Touch users must pay $10. Users wishing to upgrade must plug their device into their computer with the USB dock connector and then load iTunes 8.2 (80MB), where they can download and install iPhone 3.0 (230MB).
iPhone 3.0 (which some have confused with the third-generation iPhone, iPhone 3GS), addresses many complaints about the current and previous iPhone operating systems. Despite iPhone 2.0’s introduction of the iPhone’s phenomenally successful App Store for distributing third-party applications, many Apple critics have blasted the iPhone for its lack of a basic copy-and-paste function, among other shortcomings. iPhone 3.0 adds copy-and-paste functionality and many new features that will give immediate benefits to end users, regardless of which applications they use.
Here are some other noteworthy end-user features:
Gadget Lab will be testing iPhone 3.0 and posting our discoveries throughout the day. Keep up with our posts and follow @GadgetLab on Twitter for the latest scoops!
See Also:
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Here it is, folks. At long last, version 3.0 of the iPhone OS has launched here in the US, bringing with it just about every feature the phone should have had from the start - and a whole lot more.
If you hadn’t already coaxed an iPhone developer into letting you piggyback on their account or (gasp!) actually shelled out for a developers membership, the past 3 months have probably been pretty grueling. You read the blogs, and kept up on every new feature to be uncovered. Maybe you even made a list of all the things you wanted to check out first. No? Well, here you go.
While these are all the big changes, there are plenty of other gems lurking around. Let us know what your favorite one is in the comments below.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
FROM APPLETELL - Today is the day when Apple will release the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade, and on their iPod touch upgrade page they mention gaming accessories as being a new feature/option of the upgrade. Will the iPod touch (and by extension iPhone) finally be getting enough buttons for serious gaming? There really… MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Shown at the most recent Computex trade show, Cideko's "Air Keyboard" combines a 3D mouse with a thumb keyboard, making it completely useless for any duty but home theater control—but it looks like it might be quite nice for couch surfing. The key layout is a bit odd, though, and there doesn't appear to be a Windows/Apple key, which could limit some commands.
Oh, and it looks sort of huge.
But the idea is solid! Cideko will be selling it soon, although whether or not it will make it to North America through official channels is anyone's guess.
I've been playing with the Boxee App for iPhone with my fancy pants new Apple TV that's sitting under the television. It replicates mouse and keyboard funtionality, but I'm not actually a huge fan of either the gesture or button modes. The lack of tactility actually bugs me a bit when I'm sprawled on the couch, a fact that shames me—Mr. Universal Device—just a little bit.
Haven’t done your Father’s Day shopping yet? Maybe you’re a dad and want to get yourself something nice. Well, Gadgetell is giving away some real dad-friendly gadgets.
You can win a prize package of both the Stanley 100 Watt Power Converter and a Black and Decker 18V Smart Select Drill. Gadgetell even reviewed both so you can see what you’re getting into.
How do you enter this giveaway? That’s super-simple. Register with Gadgetell, create a profile and leave a comment to this post saying something nice about your Dad. Remember, you must be registered and have a profile for your comment to count as an entry! It’s that easy.
Contest will close on June 21, 2009.
Read: [Full Contest Terms]
Read: [Review of Stanley 100 Watt Converter]
Read: [Black & Decker 18V Smart Select Drill]
Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
The HTC Magic. The T-Mobile G2. Or, if you prefer to use T-Mobile’s horrible name for it, the myTouch 3G. Call it what you will, but it’s launching soon.
According to folks vouched for by the Wall Street Journal Digits blog, the myTouch 3G is all prepped for launch next week. HTC has got an event going down in London smackdab in the middle of next week (Wednesday, June 24th), with a satellite event in New York. We don’t expect the myTouch to be the star of the show, but we’d be surprised if it didn’t at least make an appearance.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Do you get your mitts on your iPhone 3G S yet? No? Don’t worry - neither did we. Neither did most people, really. But somewhere out there, some guy did - and he’s already crackin’ away at helping people make informed decisions one video sample at a time.
We can’t say for absolute certain that this video comes from an iPhone 3G S, but it all seems to fall in place. Widescreen recording? Check. iPhone 3G S box in view? Check. Going through the effort of making a fake box this close to the eleventh hour just for the sake of faking a video sample seems a bit silly, so we’ll give him the benefit of a doubt.
It looks pretty good to us. It’s not going to dethrone our normal video go-tos, but the quality seems quite a bit better than what we’ve seen out of the unofficial, jailbreak-only iPhone apps thus far. Good job, video-sample-shooting action hero.
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
RWG's mission was to sell parallel-processor RISC based graphics systems that could rival the dedicated rendering hardware put out by the likes of Silicon Graphics or Evans and Sutherland. The big new product of 1990, which I got to re-write and then write new manuals for, was the Reality board; the aforementioned ISA-bus card. By 1990 standards it was a monster, with 4Mb of VRAM, 16Mb of DRAM (the RAM chips packed so densely they were stacked on edge), four beer-mat sized Intel i860 RISC processors, and a Ti 34020 just to do the 2-D head-up overlays. The ten-layer PCBs were so balky that each one had to be hand-finished, and the RISC CPUs selected carefully to fit together in their carriers; it didn't quite glow red hot, but having a well-ventilated case and a powerful fan was recommended. These things sold for £16,000 a pop; I didn't see their like again until 1998, in the shape of a Matrox G400 costing £250 or so and targeted at high-end gamers. Graham was, quite literally, right on the bleeding edge of graphics technology. At one point he bolted together a VME-based massively parallel system for a demo of his new "Super Reality" architecture. I suspect it may have been the most powerful supercomputer in England at the time -- sitting on the desk next to me, with 96 RISC processors churning away to display a large 3D model in real time on seven monitors. (XGA spec, 24 bit colour, mist and fog and multiple light sources -- in 1990!)If that doesn't get you going, don't bother clicking through to read the whole thing.
On Friday, you can buy the new iPhone 3G S, which despite being an incremental upgrade to the current iPhone 3G (non-S) has caused plenty of fuss amongst current owners eager to upgrade. There will always be people who have to have the very latest hardware, but for the rest of us, is it worth it? Especially as today we can upgrade all our iPhones and iPod Touches to a new operating system which brings almost all of the new toys to the gadgets we already own.
IPhone OS 3.0 is available today, June 17th 2009. But today, in Apple speak, means morning in Cupertino, California. Morning after a relaxed breakfast, perhaps a decaf latte and a mango smoothie. I say this because it has been today in Spain for 17 hours and the Apple.es software update page still says “Disponible el 17 de junio.” And the reason I keep hammering the “refresh” button is because there are a lot of goodies in the new update.
First, the actual, real hardware differences. A better, 3MP camera which shoots video, a compass and a faster processor. That’s about it. And while applications may open a little faster, that chip won’t be making much difference to games: developers won’t be writing code specifically for the 3G S chip, at least not until there are more 3G S phones in the world than 1G and 3G iPhones and all iPod Touches put together. So the biggest advantage is somewhat useless, at least right now.
Compass? We can do without it. Sure, it will make the maps function way easier to use in a strange city, but for that I could always buy a real, physical magnetic-needle compass for a few bucks. Actually, this $6.50 Military Marching Lensatic Compass on Amazon is pretty neat looking.
And the camera? Tell me there’s an iPhone owner out there without a camera of at least 3MP somewhere in the house. One that will shoot video and likely give a much better picture from its dedicated hardware than a hybrid phone/MP3 player/camera ever could. You could even buy a decent DSLR camera for much less than the $400- $500 you’ll be dropping to get the new iPhone.
Of course, we know the real answer (although that last point about the camera is actually pretty compelling). It’s all about the software. Sure, it’s handy having all your gadgets in one package, but other phones do that, too. The trick with the iPhone is that all these parts jigsaw together seamlessly. For instance, what other device has a video camera, built-in (and usable, by the looks of it) editing software, and an internet connection to send it off to YouTube? (And before you argue that point, make sure that the editing software, if any, doesn’t make you mad enough to throw the phone out the window).
And that’s the real reason so many people will pay the upgrade tax. Not just because of the hardware, but because clever developers will come up with all sorts of new and fun ways to make all that hardware play together. What about, for example, an app that talks to the compass, knows exactly which way you are pointing the camera, and turns videos into 3D worlds you can later explore?
See Also:
If there’s one thing Asus is good at, it is pushing out model after model of its netbooks and other Atom based machines. Most of the machines tend to be rather cheap and very similar in everything aside from screen size, design, and price. Previously the designs were all standard netbooks with some color variations. Now Asus is offering Disney themed designs.
Asus is teaming with Disney to release two kid-friendly netbooks dubbed “Netpals.” The Netpals look to be slightly modified Eee PC 900s made in Disney Princess Pink or Mickey Blue, both sporting a Mickey-shaped hole for the webcam. The machine’s design isn’t the only thing that is kid-friendly, however. The Netpals will ship with a modified Windows XP with parental controls out of the box, and presumably a fairly locked down end user experience so kids can’t mess up their computers if given the chance. The GUI will also be Disney themed to make it easy for kids to navigate the menus.
The Netpals will be available exclusively to Toys"R"Us in late July, which makes sense. Toys"R"Us has been selling netbooks for quite some time as laptops for kids and the Netpal is now officially a netbook made for kids. At a $350 price tag it might be a bit of a tough sell, but is definitely more useful for kids than $350 worth of plastic toys. Although, come to think of it, Disney could probably sell a lot more of the Netpals if they came out with High School Musical and Hannah Montana branded versions, I doubt many kids would be able to resist those.
Read [Reuters]
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
No collusion here, claim Verizon and AT&T, even though both carriers (as well as Sprint and T-Mobile) doubled the price to send a text message from 10 cents in 2006 to 20 cents in 2008.
But the general counsels of both Verizon and AT&T argued that the price increases affected 1 percent of text messages sent because most consumers bought volume plans that lowered the per-message cost.
So it's okay to double an already ridiculous price because any practical consumer that uses text messages has been forced into paying for an additional text messaging plan?
"We're not extorting this man, your honor. It's just cheaper to pay us not to break his legs than it is to pay for a doctor."
Steve DeSpirito:
while ago, I started making these little wire creations with moving parts just for fun. At the time, I had never heard the term "Automata" but have since realized it's a well established art form. It might be hard to tell from the photo above, but when you crank the tail of the sculpture the wings flap
Automata [Art in High Places via DugNorth]
Section: Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Websites
Has Twitter finally found it revenue source? Bowing to pressure from the US State Department, Twitter put off some downtime in efforts to keep their conduit open for news that is flowing out of Iran. The recent Iranian election results have put the people in the streets demonstrating for what they believe is a fraudulent result. Twitter has become one of the only means they are able to get information out now that the media has had its credentials revoked.
If you are on Twitter, then you know what has been coming through. Things like:
According to CBS News, I’ve become a person of interest now to the Iran Military. According to CBS:
The Revolutionary Guard, an elite military force answering to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , said through the state news service that Iranian Web sites and bloggers must remove any materials that “create tension” or face legal action.
Why not Facebook or email or personal websites to convey the points of view flowing out of locked down Iran? Twitter is free, fast, and very personal. Iran is working hard to block IP addresses as fast as they can identify them and Twitter allows users to be pretty ubiquitous.
Like many of the things on Twitter, you can’t trust it all. There is rampant accusations of the government sponsoring mis-information as well as the opposition dabbling in much of the same.
Certainly I am not suggesting that Twitter make money off the people fighting in the streets for a fair election. But what I am suggesting is this: if the government calls me up and says, “hey JG, we really like the job you do on Halloween. You pass out the best selection of candy this side of the Mississippi and we’d like you to continue passing out candy, starting tonight, until we says stop.” As my Econ professors loved to jabber on about, there is no free lunch.
The State Department didn’t go to Verizon. They didn’t go to Microsoft. They didn’t ask Gadgetell to keep the site going. They went to Twitter, the little dynamo that could. Yesterday I saw a comment that Internet has become as important to modern life as bread and water. Has Twitter just become the same?
Read: [Time.com]
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Radio Valerie is an almost impossibly cute little radio, a squat curved cylinder with a speaker squashed into the end which is tuned by an inventive combination of aerial and dial. So simple and elegant is the design that we wonder if it could have come from the same person that designed the truly hideous website where it currently lives.
The site is Pix Studio and the man behind the little wireless is Valentin Vodev. The radio is exactly the kind of thing that should be on the shelves of the otherwise awful “design” shops where lazy friends shop for “novel” birthday gifts. Vodev should bang these out at $40 a pop and he’d make a fortune. Or at least, he’d make enough to pay for a website re-design.
Product page [Pix Studio (good luck via Noquedanblogs]
Street-food vendors colonize public spaces like bacteria on a toilet bowl (and sometimes they’re about as clean as that bowl). The High Line, an abandoned elevated railway reborn as an aerial park, opened just last week in New York and already there is a concession stand up there (although it doesn’t sell hot dogs - yet). On the beaches in Rio de Janeiro the offerings change throughout the day, from potato chips to skewers of shrimp grilled on portable barbecues. And in Barcelona you can grab a hot, delicious samosa in the early hours for just €1.
All of these are prepared and served from some form of stand, whether a wheeled, powered cart or a picnic cool-box. And these stands are celebrated in Mike Meiré’s “Global Street Food”, an exhibition showing the home-made gizmos of street-vendors around the world, brought together in the gallery of Dornbracht, a bath and kitchen fittings manufacturer.
The exhibition looks fascinating and includes the stands you see above — a grill riding on an old bike wheel in Uganda and a cheese and sausage stand made from a shopping art, from Buenas Aires. Of course, as these contraptions have been transplanted into a gallery, they have to be accompanied by some tortuous and meaningless art-speak. Dornbracht doesn’t disappoint:
Urban fast food stations navigating the contrast between pragmatic dilettantism and complexity in the smallest of spaces [...] Here the de-contextualisation permits an approach from various aspects: Of which materials is such a kitchen unit composed, what are the origins of the materials and how do they communicate?
Etcetera. If you can’t make it to the exhibition in Cologne, take a look at the PDF available from the site, which features photos of the machines in their natural habitats and a commentary (in German).
Exhibition page [Dornbracht via KK]
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These fantastic papercraft models will let you reconstruct a little Big Apple at home. And when we say little, we mean it. The models, which depict landmark New York buildings, come as printed postcards, which means 4-5/8″ x 6-3/4″ in size. You then (carefully) cut them out and stick them together.
Kingston is now making the “world’s first” 128GB USB thumb drive. Or rather, the world’s first real 128GB USB thumb drive. Why the distinction? Because, previous to this product actually showing up on Kingston’s own site, you could buy fake 128GB Kingston drives from Amazon and, of course, Ebay.
So far, this one is being planted firmly in the rumor category, that said, I for one hope it happens. According to Natali Del Conte, Google will be opening up Google Voice for everyone as of today June 18, 2009.
