Only 2 percent of the world lives in a country where broadband penetration has exceeded 80 percent, according to a report out today from TeleGeography. The report noted that worries over broadband saturation... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Jul 2009 | 2:34 pm
Brad Pitt has been shooting TV commercials for Japan’s third biggest cell phone carrier SoftBank for a few years now, and more often than not, he plays a total moron. In this newest spot, currently in heavy rotation on Japanese TV he tries everything to please sumo champion Musashimaru.
Musashimaru (who became Japanese sumo champion in 1999 and who was born in American Samo) is in a bad mood, and Pitt tries everything to make him happy. The point of the video is to point out that SoftBank offers particularly slim and light cell phones.
Building a Skype phone into a mouse has indeed been done before but here’s another implementation for your perusal. This one’s got a nice 128×64-pixel LCD display, too, which ought to make it easier to see who you’re drunk-dialing after a long night of drinking Mudslides.
Billed as the first ever sliding-cover VoIP mouse, the “Skype Travel Mouse” features a USB connection, 800-DPI optical sensor, built-in mic and speaker, and automatic detection between mouse and phone mode. That is to say, if it rings and you pick it up and put it next to your ear, it’ll know to work as a phone. Magic!
Ah, Project Pink, I haven’t heard anything from or about you in quite a long time. But it looks like Redmond made some key changes to its agency roster and McCann picked up the “Pink” account. McCann also handles Windows Mobile.
According to ZDnetter Mary Jo Foley, Pink will be built on top of Windows Mobile 7, which MS plans to release the code for this fall when WinMo 6.5 devices start to flood the market. Foley goes on to say that she’s heard that Motorola will manufacture Pink alongside the Sidekick. Except she fails to realize that Sharp manufactures the Sidekick; Motorola built the Slide that has since been axed from the lineup. So does that mean Danger is in the mix? Maybe. On a side note, it’s pretty funny that the UI for Pink is codenamed “Purple” because Bing’s earliest codename was also Purple or so I’ve heard.
Going back to early May, Foley detailed purported specs for Pink and the biggest indicator that the device could be tied in with the Zune platform is the use of Nvidia’s Tegra platform. And it wouldn’t surprise me if Danger had a big hand in all of this because they haven’t done much with the Hiptop unit other than including Live Search in the latest Sidekick LX. Just don’t go to Verizon.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
The era of stereo Bluetooth is upon us. While AD2P - essentially the part of Bluetooth that enables stereo transmission of audio - has been around for years, it’s taken Apple two years to get off its duff and add it to the iPhone Bluetooth stack and, me being an iPhone LUVR, it took me that long to actually pay attention to AD2P. I’ve tested wireless Bluetooth headsets before but most of them made me look like Lobot from Cloud City.
The BackBeats are the first pair of Bluetooth stereo headphones that are actually worth looking at. They weigh almost nothing - one ounce - and pair with almost any AD2P compatible phone. The 906 model comes with a Bluetooth adaptor and costs $129.95 while this pair costs $99.95.
These things are delightfully small. You can put them on and forget you’re wearing them. They have adjustable earpieces along with bulbous buds that fit right into your ear for maximum noise prevention. You can control playback, volume, and pick- and hang-up the phone with buttons on the side.
The frequency response is 80 Hz - 12 kHz and I found these headphones to be on par with better earbuds I’ve used. The over-the-ear form factor, however, meant that I did deal with a little separation between the bud and the ear at times, reducing the volume and clarity. A quick fix is all that’s needed to move things back into place.
These are the closest I’ve ever come to the ultimate pair of earbuds. Altec Lansing makes great audio gear and these are small enough - and cool enough - to wear on the subway or during a workout. Sadly, my ultimate earbuds would be as small as peas and simply slip into the ear permanently, directly controlling my auditory system through the use of magic and lasers. Seeing as how Altec Lansing has no patents on magic or lasers, these will have to do.
Bottom Line
If you’ve avoided AD2P wireless headphones thus far, stop. These are a great pair and well worth the $99, especially if you plan to use them for workouts or just strolling about town. These are the best Bluetooth headphones I’ve seen in a few years.
GizaPage is a new "social network organizer" - not aggregator, mind you - what they do is different. Instead of pulling in your social media posts and updates from around the web into a content stream... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Jul 2009 | 2:09 pm
ozydingo writes "The RIAA has scored a victory in a decision on a copyright case that they filed back in 2007. US District Judge Harold Baer ruled in favor of the music industry on all its main theories: that Usenet.com is guilty of direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement. In addition, and perhaps most important for future cases, Baer said that Usenet.com can't claim protection under the Sony Betamax decision stating that companies can't be held liable of contributory infringement if the device is 'capable of significant non-infringing uses.' Bear noted that Usenet.com differed from Sony in that the sale of a Betamax recorder was a one-time deal, while Usenet.com's interaction with its users was an ongoing relationship. The RIAA stated in a brief note, 'We're pleased that the court recognized not just that Usenet.com directly infringed the record companies' copyrights but also took action against the defendants for their egregious litigation misconduct.'"
Modder extraordinaire, Ben Heckendorn (see our interview) has just finished version 2 of his Commodore 64 laptop. This one will be auctioned for charity and features an SD card reader for loading up various software (games!).
Per Ben:
It is very similar to the first C64 laptop I built, with the key difference being it uses the newer 1541-III Ultimate SD-card based storage solution / disk emulator. USB and Ethernet ports for this device are open and available on the front of the unit.
Other features include dedicated 1541 menu buttons, dual joystick ports, and an original Commodore 64 keyboard.
You won’t be able to buy one unless you bid in the upcoming charity auction for this item. Proceeds will go to benefit the American Cancer Society. No details about the actual auction yet, unfortunately.
Attempting to quell earlier reports that they’ve signed an agreement with Sony to build the rumored PS3 Slim, Foxconn issued an official “no comment” statement with the Taiwan Stock Exchange today.
The Economic Daily News reported yesterday that Foxconn and Pegatron had signed contracts to manufacture a smaller version of the current PS3 with shipments to begin this month. Citing “customer confidentiality” is more or less a clear indication that they’re on board to pump out the Slims this month.
It seems a little too coincidental with the Ars Mole divulging details about a price drop and Slim model, too.
July 1 (Reuters) - Cynosure Inc : * Signs agreement with Unilever to develop light-based devices for home use * Says financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 1 Jul 2009 | 1:47 pm
I was pretty excited about Warpack Grunts when I first started playing it. The game seemed to have promise. And for $0.99, I had inklings that it may have been the biggest steal to come to the iPhone since the OS 3.0 launch. While it still lived up to its $1 price, I can’t say that it quite met my expectations. Though the graphics, the gameplay and the level of difficulty were all rock solid, a few missing features (and some wonky controls) left a sour taste in my mouth.
Developed by Freeverse and Strange Flavour Limited, Warpack Grunts is a third person army combat game in which you travel around in a pack of 4 special forces units and your job is to blow the enemy to smithereens. The pack moves as one group, and drag your army around by swiping your finger in the direction you want to go. Unlike most iPhone real-time strategy games (which this is not, but RTS games are the best point of comparison for the controls), you cannot select a portion of your units, and you do not tap to move them in a certain direction. Instead, you literally slide your finger in front of where you want them to go, and the screen and units move accordingly. This maneuver has a surprisingly shallow learning curve, and I picked it up within five minutes of gameplay. Your units each have their own machine gun, but share one “special weapon” such as a grenade, bazooka or sniper. You tap in the direction you want to fire the machine gun, or can toggle the special weapon to fire it.
Addictive, intriguing and well-designed were three words I thought I would end up describing the game. And the first two still hold true. The game is split up into a series of short missions (not meant to take more than 5 minutes at the most; some of them are as short as 30 seconds), each of which is challenging and engaging. Overall, I had a hard time beating most missions on the first try, but usually handled it on the second or third. That said, some missions (like the 30 second ones) were uselessly easy and some missions were unnecessarily tedious and frustrating.
You weave and wind your way throughout a nondescript South American jungle, and the landscape is filled with trees rocks that force you to stay on a path. The game makers had to be drunk when they designed some of these paths, because they weaved and wound so much I felt like I was getting dizzy while sitting still in my chair. Given the nature of the controls (you have to keep dragging your finger along the screen to move at all), these labyrinthine environments were obnoxious and unwanted.
But the worst part of this game was the design. I loved the actual crux of the gameplay, and think that it would be easy for Freeverse to do a second take on the game, raise the price to $4 and make me extremely satisfied with purchasing it. Aside from the aforementioned controls, another major gripe I had was the inability to save. After dying four (or maybe five; I can’t count) times in one go, you are basically back to square one. It doesn’t save at the last mission you played, and so you are stuck starting over from the tutorial levels and ripping hair out reading the same stale dialogue over and over again.
OK - I’ve talked a lot about how I liked the gameplay, but what did I like? Mostly, it was the tactile nature of the skirmishes. You use the environment (i.e. hide behind trees) and your special weapons (e.g. grenades) to destroy your enemy before they know what hit ‘em. Though this often means having to play the level twice (and just getting man-handled the first time), it also results in a more strategic shooting game. The enemies move in a predictable manner, so you can plan your route ahead of time and carefully pick them off, one by one.
Despite its many flaws, but I would still recommend buying Warpack Grunts if this the type if game you’re into. I was more frustrated about the game because of how much potential it had than anything else, but at $1, I find it hard to believe you couldn’t justify the purchase. That’s one less trip to the vending machine for a game that has major upside if you can look past its pitfalls. Each mission has its own merits, and I found myself glued to the screen while I was ‘nading tanks or gunning down enemy soldiers.
What we like:
The Missions. Though there were definitely outliers, most of the missions were quick and dirty. Plenty of action and they didn’t last so long that you lost interest.
The Grenades. Ok, I know this is specific, but grenades are actually a huge part of the game, and their use is extremely well-done.
Multiple aspect support. Switching between portrait and landscape is essential to the game, and it was a treat to see a game utilize both.
What we don’t like:
The controls. We’ve mentioned this already, but OMFG was I annoyed at having to drag my finger around like a flippin’ drunkard trying to navigate around the landscape to actually kill the enemies. Also, I thought that toggling the special weapons was too difficult and poorly designed.
You can’t save. There are over 30 levels in this game, but if you want to play it campaign-style and go through them, you have to start from the beginning after every 4 deaths. Why a bonafide game manufacturer would put its users through that torture (the first few levels are tutorials) is beyond me.
Only one good special weapon The grenades were fun, yes. But the rest of the special weapons were lame. The sniper and binoculars were too hard to control, and virtually unusable. And the bazooka shot straight at the ground you tapped on, meaning you could only fire at what you saw on the screen. That meant you had to basically stand in front of enemy tank bearing down at you as you frantically fired your bazooka at it, hoping for the best.
Crunch Network: TechCrunchobsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
California might be on the brink of financial ruin and Hollywood stars are dropping like flies, but at least today is DTS 7.1 Day in the State of California! (It’s July, 1st - get it?)
California State Assemblywoman Julia Brownley also offered her well wishes from Sacramento and sent forth a Certificate of Recognition for DTS’ “dedication to delivering unparalleled sound quality to audiences around the world” and honoring DTS’ “stimulus for job creation for over 18 years.”
Not a DTS fanboy? You could always throw a DTS tea party and crank up the Dolby Digital soundtrack.
As far as I can tell, the Fiat 500 gained popularity all around the world after Fiat started producing the mini car in 1957 (it quickly attained cult status and is still around today). Now a Japanese man called Kogoro Kurata decided to transform his 1950s model into a retro bulldozer for some reason [JP].
Kurata says his bulldozer runs at just 3km/h max. But as you can see in the video below, the hybrid vehicle really works and looks pretty cool.
It is now Day 86, and Armstrong is closing in on the end of a Where’s-Waldo commitment that he made then to visit all of the farflung offices of the Time Warner (TWX) online unit globally.
More importantly, as it is almost over, Armstrong also has to make good on another promise he made in that memo he sent to the staff on his first day:
“The culmination of the 100-day process will end in Dulles with an All-Hands meeting in mid-July. At that meeting, we’ll review the feedback we’ve received–both internal and external. We’ll also discuss our strategic direction for the coming years, and highlight areas that will bring AOL and AOL properties into the next decade of digital leadership. Most importantly, we will set a course and focus all of our resources to make that course a success.”
BoomTown is eager to see what Armstrong has found out on his trip and on what path it will ultimately put AOL on.
So far, the broad outlines of his strategy seem to center on expanding AOL’s content assets, strengthening its advertising network and getting out of businesses the company cannot compete well in, such as social networking.
What other pearls of wisdom Armstrong has gleaned are to still to be revealed, presumably.
His corporate version of “The Amazing Race” is certainly a novel idea, born at his first all-hands meeting in Dulles, Va., which used to be the worldwide HQ of AOL and remains its heart.
There, Armstrong (pictured here) joked to the crowd:
“I know that work goes on across the globe and, in the first 90 days, I’m going to try to visit every office we have and sit down and talk to every employee and that will be something that my wife has actually agreed to let me do so.”
Thus, spouse-approved, the former Google (GOOG) exec has circumnavigated the globe and has held meeting with employees in a wide range of places: Dulles, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Mountain View, Ca., Toronto, Lancaster, Pa., Denver, Hamburg, London, Paris, Bangalore, Dublin and, next week, Tel Aviv.
But it has not been all tourism, in search of innovation.
During this time, Armstrong has also dispatched employees and top execs, such as advertising head Greg Coleman and communications and communities head Joanna Stevens and hired a few key staffers of his own; announced a pending spin-off of the company; and bought some stuff (including a company he funded).
It will be interesting to see what come next–after the July 15th 100-day gathering in Dulles, of course.
AP - Beijing's retreat on its latest Internet-censorship effort highlights the rise of China's increasingly tech-savvy, vocal public as a factor in the authoritarian government's decisions.
IamTheRealMike writes "It's been a few months since we last checked in on how the Blu-Ray group was doing in their fight against piracy. In December 2008, a new generation of BD+ programs had stopped both SlySoft AnyDVD HD and the open source effort at Doom9. At the start of January, SlySoft released an update that could handle the new BD+ programs, meaning that Blu-Ray discs could not be decrypted for a period of time about the same length as SlySoft's worst case scenario. The BD+ retaliation was swift, but largely ineffective, consisting of a unique program for every Blu-Ray master. Users had to upload log files to SlySoft for every new movie/region. They would then support that unique variant in their next update, usually released a few days later. Despite that, the open source effort never did manage to progress beyond the Winter 2008 programs and is currently stalled completely; SlySoft is the only group remaining. This situation remained for several months, but starting around the same time as Paramount joined Fox in licensing BD+, a new set of programs came out which have once again made Blu-Ray discs unrippable. There are currently 19 movies that cannot be decrypted. It appears neither side is able to decisively gain the upper hand, but one thing seems clear — only full-time, for-profit professionals are able to consistently beat BD+."
Does anyone take manufacturers claims about battery life seriously anymore? Apparently someone does. A law firm out of North Carolina and they want to know if you feel cheated, ripped-off or otherwise victimized by manufacturer claims regarding your laptop’s advertised battery life.
That’s right, the law offices of Girard Gibbs, LLP is interested in hearing from you
“if you believe that your laptop battery has a shorter life span than what was advertised or represented to you”
Damn lies
The law office cites reports that AMD (Advanced Micro Design) says battery test information is based on a misleading test that exaggerates the batteries life. What is AMD’s beef? They believe the battery life test ought to be more like cell phone battery info: talk time vs standby time. Currently, the test is more like just standby time.
“AMD is basically saying that MobileMark 2007 tests the equivalent of the standby time in cell phones. That’s a little unfair. Granted, the laptop is using roughly 10 percent of the system resources and there are idle times during the test that brings CPU utilization down to nil.” - PC Mag
AMD suggests that a test looping HD video should be used as well. Most people use laptops for surfing the web, document and spreadsheet editing and the like; stuff that nowhere near approaches HD video playback demands on resources. PC Mag goes on record behind the old test, citing:
Perhaps most importantly, MobileMark allows us to test consistently. It offers a fair comparison of battery life across the swath of laptops on the market, at least for the scenario BapCo has created. Of course it could use improvement, but right now MobileMark is the fairest battery test on the market.
Really? AMD wants to be accurate like cell phone battery info? Puh-leeez
Cell phone battery life is the next biggest joke to laptop battery life. Standby time is a pretty useless stat as it assumes you have no friends to call and interrupt standby time. Talk time assumes you won’t be multitasking and playing Black Jack while your parents ramble on about the squirrel in the bird feeder.
The problem with battery life is baselines are pretty useless. It is like measuring potential. Sure you have to measure something, but knowing my phone’s battery is supposed to last 19 hours doing absolutely nothing isn’t very helpful. If I wanted to get a phone to last the longest doing nothing, I’d just get a cell phone sized rock and be pleased at my cash savings.
Pig Pile on the manufacturers
Girard Gibbs wants to get the word out. Google “laptop battery life” and you’ll find their sponsored link in the #1 position in results:
Short Laptop Lifespan?
www.GirardGibbs.com/batterylife Law firm investigating misleading ads re lifespan of laptop batteries
The lawyers are now looking for laptop users unhappy with their battery life. That should be just about everyone. You can submit your info at their website and be part of the coming class action.
Internal conflict
I am having trouble putting my finger on why I think this lawsuit is a bit of a sham. Maybe it is how jaded we’ve become at manufacturers claims. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten the miles per gallon on my Ford that the EPA suggests I should if I knew what I was doing. I’ve come to take these numbers at less than face value. To me, it seems silly to argue over something I don’t believe in.
I see the legal suits point and I am sure there are many customers that are genuinely surprised when their battery runs out well before they expect. Is it class action worthy? What is your take? Let us know in the comments.
Tesla Motors wants a judge to toss out the lawsuit company founder Martin Eberhard filed against current CEO Elon Musk, calling it a groundless personal attack that attempts to stifle Musk’s right to free speech.
According to MediaPost, The Online Publishers Association yesterday announced that 37 of its members, including juggernauts like The New York Times, Forbes, ESPN, CNN and MSNBC.com are (or are soon going to start) running the new, larger ad units the organization introduced last March. Since the members who are running these campaigns for brands like Bank of America and Mercedes-Benz reach about 68% of the total U.S. Internet audience, there’s a good chance you will soon see them, too.
There’s also a good chance you’ll hate them.
The three new ad units are named and sized as follows:
- The Fixed Panel (336×700) - remains in view as a user scrolls up or down the page
- The XXL Box (468×648), the extra wide side-of-page ad that expands to 936 x 648 and includes page-turn and video capability
- The Pushdown (970×418), which opens big to display the ad and then after seven seconds rolls up to the top of the page (collapsing to 970 x 66).
The first one was actually supposed to be 860 pixels in height, but they reconsidered it and brought it down to 700, reportedly after feedback from publishers.
In order to visualize how big these ads are in their most expanded state, I overlayed the TechCrunch homepage with boxes of the same size:
Here’s how OPA President Pam Horan justified the introduction of the new ad units:
“The real motivation was to provide marketers and agencies with the opportunity to deliver a branded experience directly on the pages of these very rich content sites.”
But what about the children website visitors?
Nobody seems to really care, apart from the fact that OPA recommends their members that the frequency of the pushdown ad be capped at once per day per page. Horan says it passed that recommendation on because they “want to stay close to consumers”. I puked in my mouth a little.
Is it just me or does anyone else think that display advertising units on websites should become more relevant to them instead of just bigger? What’s next, 1200×600 ads?
According to MediaPost, The Online Publishers Association yesterday announced that 37 of its members, including juggernauts like The New York Times, Forbes, ESPN, CNN and MSNBC.com are (or are soon going... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Jul 2009 | 1:15 pm
(TrendHunter.com) This Vauxhall Skate event promotion features a limited edition set of Corsa-shaped roller skates. The Vauxhall Skate night will take place on July 29th in Shoreditch, London, and will... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Jul 2009 | 1:10 pm
(TrendHunter.com) Inspiration can come on the wings of the wind, or cicadas. While walking through the poster sessions at a conference, researcher Dr. Paul Stoddarts eyes were drawn to a photograph of... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Jul 2009 | 12:59 pm
Brain differences reinforce preferences for those in same social groupAn observer feels more empathy for someone in pain when that person is in the same social group, according to new research in the July 1 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 1 Jul 2009 | 12:45 pm
Macworld.com - The Game Developers Conference (GDC) Austin is set to return to the Austin Convention Center in Austin Texas in September. When it does, the even will include the inaugural iPhone Games Summit, offering a focus for iPhone and iPod touch game developers. GDC Austin takes place from September 15 - 18, 2009. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 1 Jul 2009 | 12:45 pm
Reuters - A little-known Swedish software firm has snapped up file-sharing website The Pirate Bay with the hope of turning the source of legal controversy into a money-spinner that appeals to both users and content providers. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 1 Jul 2009 | 12:44 pm
e9th writes "Despite a bump or two along the way, it seemed that compulsory ID cards were a done deal in the UK. Now, the Financial Times is reporting that the scheme has been shelved. Unfortunately, it seems that this was more a matter of convenience than of concern for citizens' privacy."
By Andrew Liszewski Instructables member ‘laxap‘ has posted a relatively painless tutorial on how to turn an actual cigar into a glowing, fully functional USB flash drive. The most involved... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Jul 2009 | 12:40 pm
(TrendHunter.com) Although Michael Jackson died less than a week ago, one of his photo shoots is just now being picked up by the blogosphere. This editorial shoot for L'Uomo Vogue by Bruce Weber is part... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 1 Jul 2009 | 12:39 pm
AFP - European holidaymakers can expect a lower bill for using their mobile phones while abroad in Europe this summer because new EU regulated price caps took effect across the 27-nation bloc on Wednesday.
Apple has taken the latest build of iPhone OS 3.1 in its gentle hands, climbed to the roof of the Cupertino campus and lofted the update to the winds, shouting “Fly, my little one! Fly!”
The beta version of the next update contains some new features, most of which will only be useful to 3GS owners. Developers at the Redmond Pie blog have played around with it and report the following tweaks:
Video editing on iPhone 3GS won’t overwrite the clip over the original when you are editing a clip.
iPhone will now vibrate whenever you switch to the mode where you can move and arrange icons on the iPhone home screen.
“Fraud Protection” toggle has been added to settings under Safari.
iPhone boot time is now faster.
Voice Control over Bluetooth.
New APIs to enable third party apps to access videos and edit them.
Of these the video editing change seems useful, the faster boot time useless, the vibrating alert when arranging icons frivolous, the voice control over Bluetooth an erstwhile oversite and the new APIs an investment in the future. Coming to an iTunes near you soon-ish.
A Japanese company called Marshal (yes, one “l”) announced [JP] the MAL 1925 today, a netbook stand that doubles as a DVD super multi drive, has room for a second HDD and comes with an extra USB 2.0 port. Century’s stand, which I blogged in April, is pretty similar but lacks the slot for an alternative 2.5-inch SATA HDD or SSD.
Dubbed DVD Power Up Dock, the Marshal model is sized at 227×180×16mm and weighs 453g. It’s compatible with Windows 2000/XP and Vista.
The netbook stand will be available only in Japan where it will hit stores in the middle of this month (price: $95). I suggest you contact the Japan Trend Shop or Geek Stuff 4 U if you live outside Nippon and are interested in the device.
In the next update to the iPhone's operating system are non-destructive video editing, bluetooth voice control, improved OpenGL and quartz performance, and video editing APIs for developers. [theiphoneblog]
Here’s an interesting metric. Apple’s (AAPL) Web site last month drew more than 55.7 million unique visitors, more than the site of any other computer hardware manufacturer, according to a report released this week by Nielsen Online. The number of visitors was more than double that of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), which drew in 21.9 million people and triple Dell’s (DELL), which drew 16.8 million. May visitors to Apple’s Web site spent an average of an hour and 14 minutes on it.
Not much of a surprise here, I suppose, given the level of anticipation that typically accompanies the release of a new iPhone. Nielsen says “anticipatory buzz” for the iPhone 3GS was near-deafening. “The new iPhone 3G S sent blog mentions up 1,226 percent week-over-week on June 8, the day of the announcement. After the initial announcement, buzz dipped but again picked up after the phone became available to consumers on June 19, with blog mentions more than doubling compared to the week prior.” The chart, below:
Did you know you can switch tabs in Firefox by making a twisting motion with your fingers on a multi-touch surface? I did. Turns out I've been doing it for months — I thought I was late to the party and was too ashamed to mention it to anybody for fear of an epic internet ribbing ("What, you just figured that out?"). But no, apparently it was top secret and highly experimental. That was in the beta, though; it looks like the official version has reduced it to a hack.
Fortunately, mastering this multi-touch-enabling technique will allow you to tweak your gestures, resulting in everlasting glory.
Contrary to previous public statements by the company, Palm CFO Douglas C. Jeffries has not been registered as a certified public accountant in the state of California since 1984, records from the California Board of Accountancy show.
In an 8-K filing announcing his appointment last December, Palm stated that Jefferies “is a certified public accountant.” Likewise, the company until this week stated in a bio on its Web site that “Douglas is a CPA.” The company on Tuesday changed the wording of bio following a query on the issue this week from Tech Trader Daily; the new language reads “Douglas was formerly a CPA.”
andy1307 writes "Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, announced on Tuesday a new Web site designed to track more than $70 billion in government IT spending, showing all contracts held by major firms within every agency. The (Flash-heavy) site, USAspending.gov, shows detailed information about whether IT contracts are being monitored and budgets being met. The data also show which contracts were won through a competitive process or in a no-bid method (the latter approach is criticized by good-government advocates for excluding firms from business opportunities). Each prime contractor is listed as well as the status of that project; sub-contractors are not yet shown."
PC World - Only two weeks after launching the 3.0 software update for iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple is now working hard on delivering an update to the iPhone OS. The iPhone SDK 3.1 beta has been pushed out to developers last night, which already reported a few new features and refinements. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 1 Jul 2009 | 12:02 pm
Energizer has launched an extremely useful range of products. XPal consists of various battery/charger packs which acknowledge that the batteries in your devices suck, and then do something about it.
The packs have lithium polymer batteries and come in various sizes and capacities. You plug in your cellphone, say, and while it charges from the mains, the battery pack in the XPal is also topped up. Later, when things run down, you can get another chage away from a wall-wart.
So far, so normal. Except that Energizer also promises that, if you buy a pack and it doesn’t have the tip you need, they’ll send you one, free. And to keep the packs in use in the future, Energizer will also send you two tips a year for any new kit you might buy, free, forever. Prices run from around $20 up to $200, depending on size and power.
Also part of the range is a this USB clip charger, which allows you to throw out clunky proprietary camera battery chargers and just slip the naked cell into the claw to charge. As it’s USB powered, you’re limited to five volts output, but that could be fine in emergencies.
Here we are with another selection of Palm Pre related news, and first things first, a GSM version has been spotted.
GSM version Palm Pre spotted in Vietnam
Just recently a video has surfaced showing off a GSM version of the Palm Pre. Of course, we knew that such a model would eventually be released, however this one seems to have come from out of nowhere. What does this mean in terms of a release, unfortunately nothing. That said, it is nice to see that at least one is out there though. Here is hoping that we see a release of the GSM Pre sometime before the year is out, preferably in the form of an unlocked handset as opposed to being tied to a specific carrier.
webOS gets updated to version 1.0.4
Moving on, webOS has just gotten another update, which brings the current version up to 1.0.4. As with previous, and all the future updates, current users will be able to get the update over-the-air. The update comes in at 12MB and according to the official statement offers a fix for an “address security vulnerability.” Of course, what we are hearing is that it actually patches the loophole that allowed users to install homebrew apps through an email link.
Quick hack for your Pre enables a landscape mode for email
Finally, after Palm updated webOS to 1.0.4 and closed one loophole, we have yet another little hack that has surfaced. This one is pretty simple, and I hesitate in calling it a hack, however there is good news for those that feel the need to have a landscape mode for email. Anyway, thanks to a tipster over at PreCentral, you will be able to enable landscape mode for email by entering a code. According to the tip, users will have to enter the code “RocknRollHax” on the keyboard. Of course, on the downside, you will have to enter that same code each time you launch the email app. In other words, at this time it can be considered a neat trick, but it is not for everyone.
PC World - Web video site Joost is restructuring, abandoning its hopes to be a successful ad-supported Web TV provider. Instead it will sell its video-serving technology to other media companies. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 1 Jul 2009 | 11:50 am
Fifty-seven percent. That’s how much overall venture-backed liquidity decreased in the second quarter of 2009 compared to that of last year: from $6.48 billion to $2.8 billion, if you want the hard numbers. Looking at the chart, I’d say the drop compared to the second quarter of 2007 ($14.6 billion) is even more telling. It’s the bad news from this just-released Dow Jones VentureSource report, with the only positive nugget the fact that three VC-backed companies have been able to complete IPOs (raising a total of $232 million), ending a nine-month drought.
Just half an hour ago, we reported separately that the National Venture Capital Association actually counted five IPOs during the quarter in which a total of $721 million was raised (including DigitalGlobe-$279, SolarWinds-$152 million and OpenTable-$60 million). Also, while the NVCA pegged the number of venture-backed acquisitions at 58 in the second quarter, generating $2.6 billion, the Dow Jones VentureSource report says $2.8 billion was reached through M&As of 67 portfolio companies instead.
Either way, it’s looking very bleak out there, as venture capitalists are not only struggling to take their portfolio companies public but also to sell them. According to the Dow Jones report, M&As were down 60% from the $6.48 billion raised via 89 M&As in the same quarter in 2008. This represents the lowest quarterly M&A deal total since 1999. Furthermore, the median amount paid for a VC-backed company in the second quarter of 2009 was just shy of $22 million, a 46% drop from the nearly $41 million median paid during the same period in 2008.
Jessica Canning, Director of Global Research for Dow Jones VentureSource, commented that the market appears to be correcting the “possibly inflated figures” posted in 2007, but sees the IPO window finally opening up again.
I second Erick’s comment that it’s a bit too early to call it a come-back, but I’m sure a lot of people are happy to finally see at least some IPO activity again, even if it pales in comparison to what we’ve seen from 2004 to 2007.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Reuters - Microsoft Corp's new Bing search engine gained U.S. market share in its first month in operation but still trails dominant rival Google Inc, according to data released on Wednesday.
This is the Solar Vest. If you didn’t know that it was a solar vest, may we draw your attention to the giant, two-inch high letters on the back which spell out “SOLAR VEST”. This is, incredibly, touted on the product site:
In case your friends think this is only an ultra-fashionable vest, the words “SOLAR VEST” in big stitched lettering on the back let them know this is really a high-tech solar battery.
The vest, as you’d expect, is covered in expandable “nerd-pockets”, suitable for all kinds of devices, including the honking great charger and battery pack that comes with it. Also supplied are various tips to hook this charger up to your devices, and the pack will output 5V, 6V, 9V and 12-20V from its 8800mAh battery (roughly equivalent in storage to a nine-cell netbook battery).
It’s easy to scoff, but if you think of this as a replacement for a be-pocketed photo vest, only with added charging power, then it comes out looking a lot better, and at €100 ($140) it is actually quite a deal, considering I paid around that for just a netbook battery. Available now, possibly not washable, and with the following endorsement from the FAQ page:
After four quarters in which venture-backed IPOs have been dead in the water, a handful finally poked their heads up in the second quarter. The National Venture Capital Association counted five IPOs during the quarter, including DigitalGlobe ($279 million raised), SolarWinds ($152 million), and OpenTable ($60 million). A total of $721 million was raised. Just for a little context, two years ago during the same period, there were 25 IPOs which raised $4.15 billion.
So don’t call it a comeback just yet. But any activity is a sign of hope. And this was the most active period since the fourth quarter of 2007. Will it keep building, or will IPO candidates duck their heads back under water?
On the M&A front, the pace remained lackluster. There were 58 venture-backed acquisitions in the second quarter, which was down from 84 deals a year ago (and 62 deals in the previous quarter). The total value of M&A deals was $2.6 billion.
Transcriptomic tests have uncovered the protein composition of venom from the Scorpiops jendeki scorpion. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 1 Jul 2009 | 11:26 am
California celebrated on Tuesday when the Obama administration approved their longtime bid to sanction their own stringent requirements for vehicle emissions, a conclusion right in sync with a national goal to increase fuel efficiency and reduce greenhouse gases causing climate change, Reuters reported.These standards are not only effective in California, but also immediately active in 13 other states and Washington D.C., officials at the Environmental Protection Agency said.By honoring this request, the EPA said it identified California’s need for a strict emissions program that addressed limits on climate-warming gases.The national plan shares California’s goal for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2016. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 1 Jul 2009 | 11:15 am
Strangely shaped fruits and vegetables, such as bendy cucumbers and knobbly carrots, will be allowed back into European supermarkets on July 1.On Tuesday, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel stated that the regulations on the shape of produce were an example of "unnecessary red tape.""We don't need to regulate this sort of thing at EU level. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 1 Jul 2009 | 11:11 am
The European Food Safety Authority declared on Tuesday that a genetically modified strain of maize banned in some EU countries poses no risk to health or the environment, AFP reported.This means the European Commission, which supports use of the maize, will be battling the member states, most of which are against it.After studying the strain, the independent risk assessor said the Monsanto MON810 maize was as safe as its conventional counterpart with respect to potential effects on human and animal health.The molecular characterization of the DNA insert into the maize, which gives it its special insect-repellent quality, does not raise any safety concern, and sufficient evidence for the stability of the genetic modification was provided, according to the European Food Safety Authority's (EFSA) GMO panel. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 1 Jul 2009 | 11:03 am
InfoWorld - Atlassian this week introduced FishEye 2, which adds social networking capabilities to source code repositories, including Subversion and CVS, and boosts agile programming projects. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 1 Jul 2009 | 11:00 am
Stacks is an add-on for jailbroken, or hacked, iPhones which brings a distinctly Mac-like tweak to the iPhone UI. As the video shows, Stacks lets you replace the icons in the home row (the non-moving row of icons at the bottom of the screen) with, well, stacks. Touch one with your finger and it expands to show a bendy column of extra icons. Think of it as piling up app shortcuts and then fanning them out like a pack of cards to pick one. Stacks has been around for a little while, but the video shows the soon-to-be-released v3 which adds renaming and drag’n’drop editing.
As Erica Sadun over at the Unofficial Apple Weblog notes, it’s a shame that you need a Jailbroken iPhone to run this neat and rather handy tweak. On the other hand, though, the OS 3.0 search feature all but renders this obsolete. .
The wave of investments in "realtime" is continuing with today's announcement from Cognitive Match that it has raised Series A investment from Dawn Capital. Terms were undisclosed but it's understood the figure was in the £1m+ ballpark, in tranches. The UK company applies artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content to individuals in, you guessed it, realtime. This content can be product, offers, editorial or advertising of course, making it a very interesting prospect for an outfit like Twitter.
The Walkman is 30 years old today, but Sony (SNE) isn’t throwing the iconic gadget much of a birthday party. More of a somber memorial, really: There’s a special exhibit at Sony’s archive, but that’s about it.
Why so reserved? Maybe it’s because Sony is struggling through yet another restructuring, so a big party would seem inappropriate. Maybe because Sony views the Walkman’s birthday like a lot of middle-aged people view their birthdays: Markers of bygone eras and missed opportunities. Or else it’s just Apple’s (AAPL) fault. Associated Press:
The manufacturer, which also makes Vaio personal computers and Cyber-shot cameras, hasn’t had a decisive hit like the Walkman for years, and has taken a battering in the portable music player market to Apple Inc.’s iPod.
Sony has sold 385 million Walkman machines worldwide in 30 years as it evolved from playing cassettes to compact disks then minidisks — a smaller version of the CD — and finally digital files. Apple has sold more than 210 million iPod machines worldwide in eight years….
The archival exhibit shows other Sony products that have been discontinued or lost out to competition over the years — the Betamax video cassette recorder, the Trinitron TV, the Aibo dog-shaped robotic pet.
I do remember hearing some Sony folks mutter hopeful words about a new line of Walkmans that came preloaded with music from Sony artists like Beyonce, and were supposedly flying off the shelves at Wal-Mart (WMT). But that was a while ago, come to think of it, and I haven’t heard about it since.
And, yesterday, Baldwin became an official Yahoo exec, as SVP of global integrated marketing and brand management.
Baldwin, said Yahoo (YHOO), “will lead the company’s global brand efforts, and is responsible for developing and executing Yahoo!’s brand marketing approach including brand management, corporate messaging, integrated marketing and advertising.”
Said Baldwin in a statement, signaling that Yahoo is poised for an important brand makeover: “This is a seminal moment for the Yahoo! brand and for the business overall.”
While the company said Baldwin was a newly created position, it is not hugely different than the job that was held by Allen Olivo, who was SVP of global brand marketing until he recently left Yahoo.
Yahoo had previously described his job as “overseeing all aspects of its advertising and brand marketing strategy worldwide, including design and editorial.”
But, said many sources at the company, Baldwin’s purview is much larger, especially as it will involve a major overhaul of Yahoo’s image, which is likely to be rolled out as the Internet site also launches its redesigned front page in the fall.
In addition, unlike past Yahoo marketing execs, Baldwin has been described to me by many people at the company as much more colorful and bold in her style, and that she has been advocating more aggressive ideas about reinvigorating the Yahoo brand.
“Well, Penny is definitely not Yahoo,” said one Yahoo source, joking about the company’s quainter, yodel-focused and purple-toned image. “Which is probably a good thing.”
Baldwin reports to CMO Elisa Steele. It’s Steele, as I previously reported, who has been leading the rebranding effort at Yahoo.
It is aimed at repairing a damaged public image, communicating innovation and focusing consumers on what defines Yahoo in the years ahead.
Besides the hiring of Baldwin, Steele has also retained well-known (and pricey!) brand consulting firm Landor Associates.
Many themes have been considered to depict Yahoo going forward–most along the lines of Yahoo still being a key hub destination for Internet users.
Those possible directions were discussed at a recent off-site meeting of Yahoo’s top execs, led by Steele, who ran through the tangled history of Yahoo’s marketing efforts and showed off some rough ideas for the future.
One motto considered, among several: Yahoo as “your home on the Web.”
It is not clear how much Yahoo is prepared to spend on this rebranding effort. Microsoft (MSFT), for example, is in the midst of a $100 million marketing campaign around the recent relaunch of its Bing search service.
Here is the official press release about Baldwin:
Penny Baldwin Appointed to Senior Vice President of Global Integrated Marketing and Brand Management at Yahoo!
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jun 30, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE)–Yahoo! Inc. announced today that Penny Baldwin has been appointed to senior vice president, global integrated marketing and brand management. She assumes this newly created position immediately and reports to Yahoo!’s chief marketing officer, Elisa Steele.
Baldwin will lead the company’s global brand efforts, and is responsible for developing and executing Yahoo!’s brand marketing approach including brand management, corporate messaging, integrated marketing and advertising.
“One of Yahoo!’s greatest assets is its brand,” said Steele. “Our integrated, global approach is critical to our success and we have a deep business commitment to fulfill our promise to our users, customers and partners. Penny is uniquely qualified to lead the effort and her leadership, experiences, knowledge and skills are excellent additions to the Yahoo! marketing team.”
She is a 20-year veteran of global brand strategy development and execution across all internal and market-facing touch points. Most recently, Baldwin served as Managing Partner of Young & Rubicam Brands, Y&R Advertising and Wunderman Direct Marketing. As agency leader and manager, she was responsible for leading the efforts of large global teams across industries. Her experiences span technology, retail, packaged goods, finance, travel, gaming, wireless communications, entertainment, healthcare and sports marketing.
Baldwin has worked with several Fortune 500 brands including Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, AMD, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, Siebel Systems and Hewlett-Packard, among others. She has also worked with leading brands including Cadbury, Schweppes, Foster Farms, Jacuzzi, Wells Fargo, DHL, AT&T and Palm.
Agfa, the troubled Belgian film and photo company, isn’t quite dead yet, and somebody, somewhere, has slapped the company’s logo onto a new waterproof camera and is offering it under the tagline “sporting submersion”.
You may remember Agfa-Gavaert as a heavyweight imaging company. The medical and industrial side doesn’t concern us here, but Agfa made some stunning films and decent enough cameras. Then, digital photography came along, the company choked and now all that is left of the photographic side is the name, Agfaphoto, used under license from the still ailing parent company.
The new DC-600uw appears to be a pretty good and simple sports cam. It can survive dunks of up to 10 meters (33 feet) and the waterproof sealing keeps out dust, too. The pixel count is kept deliberately small at 6MP to combat high ISO noise (the camera will shoot at up to ISO1600) and it will shoot VGA-quality video with sound.
Other than that, there isn’t much. Zoom is digital only (5x) and focus is fixed, not auto. This is all for a reason: the DC-600uw costs just $200, which, if the pictures are actually any good, is a fine price for an underwater camera. In fact, it might just be the perfect holiday snap machine.
Microsoft recently took steps to address concerns raised by the case, but nothing about this will mean higher prices for Windows 7 in Europe.
Bill Veghte, senior vice president for Microsoft’s Windows business group, says the company is not punishing Europeans users for its spat with European antitrust regulators
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that dozens of users of the recently released iPhone 3GS have reported overheating issues, with some iPhone owners unable to pick up the device because the handset gets so hot to the touch, while others say the casing turns pink with the heat. 'I am definitely experiencing issues with the iPhone running warm and quick battery life lost,' writes Tom Goldstein on one discussion board. 'The phone seems to warm up almost immediately if I am doing anything that pulls data over the network.' Some users have said the device has been too hot to put to their ear while making a phone call, and others say the overheating seems to occur when owners are using the iPhone's mapping software, which uses the handset's built-in GPS technology. Melissa J. Perenson writes at PC World: 'I became aware the handset had become very hot. Very, very hot — not just on the back, but the entire length of the front face, too.' Some gadget experts believe faulty batteries could be the cause of overheating and poor battery life. 'My guess is there's going to be a whole lot of batteries affected because these [iPhones] are from very large production runs,' said Aaron Vronko, who fixes iPods and iPhones. 'If you have a problem in the design of a series of batteries, it's probably going to be spread to tens of thousands [of device], if not hundreds of thousands, and maybe more.'"
We were just forwarded an e-mail conversation between a Twitter API team member and a third-party developer because the latter was using a UI for its web-based service that was admittedly very similar to Twitter’s web application.
The startup of course has the right to protect its assets and do its utmost to avoid confusion with users who might think they’re using a Twitter product rather than that of a developer making use of its API.
But something else caught our attention in the thread:
Hi,
Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?
Thanks,
First of all, I had no idea that the word ‘tweet’ was trademarked by Twitter, and after browsing its Terms of Service and API documentation I couldn’t find any reference on their website about this either. (update: a commenter links to the US trademark application, which was filed April 16, 2009 and another one claims a trademark application has been filed in Europe in June as well)
Second, I’m assuming that the note about the company being ‘uncomfortable’ with the use of the term was in reference to the combination of that with the closely resembling UI of the web application. If I’m wrong and this signals that Twitter wants to move forward with actively barring third-party apps from using the word ‘tweet’ in their names in the same way that it refrains them from using the word ‘twitter’, then this could have consequences for a plethora of developers.
Should TweetDeck, TweetMeme, Tweetie, BackTweets, Tweetboard etc. start worrying?
We’ve asked Twitter management for clarification.
Update: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s response (emphasis ours):
“The ecosystem growing around Twitter is something we very much believe in nourishing and supporting. As part of this support, we encourage developers of new applications and services built using Twitter APIs to invent original branding for their projects rather than use our marks, logos, or look and feel. This approach leaves room for applications to evolve as they grow and it avoids potential confusion down the line.
As we build our platform team, we will be adding more guidelines and best practices to help developers get the most out of our growing set of open APIs. We have healthy relationships with existing developers who sometimes include Twitter logos, marks, or look and feel in their applications and services. We’ll continue to work together in a fair and flexible way to ensure success for Twitter, developers, and everyone who uses these services.”
It’s a rather vague statement that doesn’t really make it clear whether the use of the word ‘tweet’ is now frowned upon or not. We’ll see when the API team puts forward clear guidelines on this in the future.
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It’s sad to see a company that we were all so excited about fade further into oblivion. Today Joost, one of the most anticipated startups in 2006/2007, is just an also ran in a sea of big online video sites like YouTube and Hulu. Today CEO Mike Volpi stepped down, the company is laying off most of staff, and refocusing the business to “white label online video platforms for media companies.”
Om has a good monday morning quarterback overview of why they failed, but to me it comes down to just a few things. They over funded ($45 million before they even launched) and they ignored the fact that users were quite willing to sacrifice quality in online video for the convenience of Flash in the browser. Joost waited until late last year to go all Flash - until then users had to use the downloadable Joost software and allow P2P streaming of shows. In the meantime there was no linking to Joost videos. YouTube and Hulu got all that social media and SEO juice that could have gone to Joost.
Founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who founded Skype and Kazaa, see the world in terms of P2P and downloadable clients. The joke about how everything looks like a nail if you’re a hammer is very true with Joost. But what worked with Kazaa and Skype a decade ago doesn’t work with online video in today’s world, obviously.
And this new business focus for Joost - white label video platforms - is a very tough market. Yahoo just bailed on it entirely after investing $160 million or so in an acquisition of Maven Networks last year. And competitors like Brightcove and Ooyala aren’t just going to roll over and let Joost take market share in this space.
Here’s what I learned from Joost’s failure - celebrity founders, celebrity CEOs and tons and tons of cash can be a recipe for disaster. Applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems isn’t an interesting business. And finally, knowing when to throw in the towel and just return what’s left of capital to investors is an important skill as well. That way everyone can move on and focus on real value add opportunities. There’s no room for Joost in the consumer online video space, and there’s almost certainly no room for them in white label video, either. Time to call it a learning experience and move on.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Richard "God Delusion" Dawkins' foundation has helped fund an atheist/sceptic summer camp that teaches 8-17 year olds how to think critically about the world:
Alongside the more traditional activities of tug-of-war, swimming and canoeing, children at the five-day camp in Somerset will learn about rational scepticism, moral philosophy, ethics and evolution.
Camp-goers aged eight to 17 will also be taught how to disprove phenomena such as crop circles and telepathy. In the Invisible Unicorn Challenge, any child who can prove that unicorns do not exist will win a £10 note - which features an image of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory - signed by Dawkins, Britain's most prominent atheist.
My latest Guardian column, "When I'm dead, how will my loved ones break my password?" describes the process my wife and I went through when we drew up our wills and realized that our encrypted hard-drives and our network passwords would go with us if we died or were incapacitated, and how important it was for us to have a secure, long-term solution for decrypting our data if we croak.
I don't want to simply hand the passphrase over to my wife, or my lawyer. Partly that's because the secrecy of a passphrase known only to one person and never written down is vastly superior to the secrecy of a passphrase that has been written down and stored in more than one place. Further, many countries's laws make it difficult or impossible for a court to order you to turn over your keys; once the passphrase is known by a third party, its security from legal attack is greatly undermined, as the law generally protects your knowledge of someone else's keys to a lesser extent than it protects your own.
I discarded any solution based on putting my keys in trust with a service that sends out an email unless you tell it not to every week - these "dead man's switch" services are far less deserving of my trust than, say, my wife or my solicitor.
I rejected a safe-deposit box because of all the horror stories I've heard of banks that refuse to allow access to boxes until the will is probated, and the data necessary to probate the will is in the box.
I pondered using something called Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS), a fiendishly clever crypto scheme that allows you to split a key into several pieces, in such a way that only a few of those pieces are needed to unlock the data. For example, you might split the key into 10 pieces and give them to 10 people such that any five of them can pool their pieces and gain access to your crypto-protected data. But I rejected this, too - too complicated to explain to civilians, and what's more, if the key could be recovered by five people getting together, I now had to trust that no five out of 10 people would act in concert against me. And I'd have to keep track of those 10 people for the rest of my life, ensuring that the key is always in a position to be recovered. Too many moving parts - literally.
XINYU CITY, China and SUNNYVALE, Calif., July 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- LDK Solar Co., Ltd. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 1 Jul 2009 | 7:15 am
As most know by now, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduced the software giant’s relaunch of its search offering, dubbed Bing, onstage at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.
You can see that here, as well as Ballmer demoing the product, which is Microsoft’s biggest and priciest attempt yet to catch archrival Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) in the search business.
It is a market where the typically dominant Microsoft (MSFT) is a mouse in comparison, although it is also trying to innovate.
That did not stop Ballmer from doing some roaring about Bing, in an interview with Walt Mossberg, as well as the status of other Microsoft products like its upcoming release of the Windows 7 operating system, an arena where Microsoft does rule.
Ballmer also talked about ongoing talks with Yahoo about a search partnership, and other Microsoft initiatives.
Here’s the video of Ballmer’s full D7 session (this video is missing a promotional video for Bing, which the audience saw, but that Microsoft did not give us video rights to use here):
When Sam Altman visits New York, he’s never alone for very long. Altman is the 24-year-old CEO of Loopt, a company that makes a “location-aware” app for mobile phones that tracks where all of your friends are and what they’re doing.
Everyone’s coverage of the uprising in Iran has been Twitter-centric, for obvious reasons. But CNN, in an apparent attempt to look like they have real, non-Twitter newsgathering capabilities, has been regurgitating Twitter posts and attributing them to unnamed “sources.”
The EU has mandated that, effective from today, European mobile carriers will have to offer a single rate for all of the EU, setting a maximum on the blisteringly high roaming charges. It's a cop-out, though: Orange and T-Mobile and Vodaphone and others have this legal fiction that Orange France and Orange UK are different companies and that an Orange UK customer should pay a premium to connect to Orange France's network. But in reality, Orange is perfectly capable of acting like a single company when it is in their interest. The Commission has set rates at about 10X what I pay for domestic use in the UK (still 60% less than I presently pay to roam) and says it will consider forcing lower rates in future.
"The roaming rip-off is now coming to an end," said EU telecommunications commissioner Viviane Reding in a statement. "Expect the new roaming rules to make it much cheaper to surf the web on your mobile while abroad in the EU."
After years of experiencing high prices for making phone calls abroad - or receiving them - the new tariffs are radically lower: sending a text message, for example, will drop from an average of 28 Euro cents to just 11 cents. The move should end the well-worn fear of opening a huge phone bill when returning from holiday or business abroad.
The new tariffs include the following maximum costs:
- making a call while abroad will cost 37p per minute
- receiving calls will cost a maximum of 17p per minute
- sending a text message from another country inside the EU will cost 10p
- Data transfers will also fall dramatically, with a megabyte of data costing 85p
Wataru Itou created an immense and breathtaking paper castle, currently exhibited at Uminohotaru in Tokyo. It took Itou, an art student, four years to complete. The pictures are a must-see, do click through.
Victor sez, "Our documentary on virtual worlds, Second Skin, which premiered at SXSW last year, will finally be coming out in theaters and DVD in August. I produced it with my friend Peter Brauer and it was directed by my brother Juan Carlos. The three of us spent two years racing around the world following gamers who had fallen in love, become addicted, formed enormous guilds, or made their living playing MMOs like World of Warcraft, Everquest and Second Life. From gold farmers to disabled gamers, we tried to get a sense of how integral virtual worlds are to the fabric of life these days. We'd love you to check it out- the first five minutes are available on Current TV- here. The movie's coming to NYC, LA, Austin and Boston in mid-August, and DVD everywhere on August 25th."
I saw Second Skin at the Toronto Film Festival and was blown away -- by turns touching and funny, and always fascinating, this is a loving but clear-eyed look at the relationship of gamers to their games.
Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Steven's found this delightful old Byte cover, celebrating the release of the Smalltalk programming language; it's part of BBG's tribute to Xerox PARC, the legendary R&D center that invented everything and commercialized practically nothing.
This special issue of Byte Magazine was dedicated entirely to Smalltalk. The image is based on the actual balloon launch at PARC that celebrated the release of Smalltalk.
The iPlayer is a hardware video-decoder for your Nintendo DS. It plugs into your cartridge slot, and uses its on-board processor to send video in a variety of formats (avi, mov, RealPlayer, wmv, DivX, Flash, 3GP, asf, mpeg) to the screen and speakers. You load the video through a MicroSD card. Haven't tried it, got no idea if it's any good, but the premise is delightful.
(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
Researchers say baldcypress trees in central Texas provide a record of past weather and clues to the region's future.
Malcolm Cleaveland of the University of Arkansas and his team have been taking cores from the trees that show the rings, the Austin American-Statesman reported Tuesday. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 1 Jul 2009 | 6:06 am
Gamasutra has an interesting article about how the push toward realistic graphics and extremely lifelike characters in modern games is making the term "murder simulator" — once laughed off for referring to pixelated dying Nazis — a concept to take more seriously. The author is careful to simply explore the issue, and not come to a specific conclusion; he doesn't say that we should or shouldn't prevent it from happening, only that it's worth consideration. (One section is even titled "Forget the kids," saying that decisions for what children play fall under parental responsibility.) Quoting: "We should start rethinking these issues now before we all slide down the slope together and can't pull ourselves back up again. Or, even worse, before governments step in and dictate what can and can't be depicted or simulated in video games via legislation. ... Obviously, what makes an acceptable game play experience for each player is a personal choice that should be judged on a person-by-person basis (or on a parent to child basis), and I believe it should stay that way. As for me, I'm already drawing the line at BioShock — I can barely stomach the game as it is. Sure, I could play it more and desensitize myself, but I don't want to. And that's just me. It's up to you and a million other adult gamers to decide what's best for yourselves and to draw the line on virtual violence where you feel most comfortable."
Some of the results are in for the Alpha-test Meatcard Challenge, and they are terrific. The rules were to photographically recreate one of several famous Frank Frazetta paintings (without using Photoshop or the like). The winners get business cards made from laser etched beef jerky.
If the desire to spend ten grand on an aluminum soma cube thumbdrive ever takes you, this one, by Toshi Satoji Design of Milan, comes highly recommended. [Mnemosyne via Akihabara News]
Adds Savings Guarantee, Home-Selling Service, New Website Features
WASHINGTON, July 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Online real estate broker Sawbuck Realty (http://www.sawbuck.com) today launched its real estate e-commerce service in the Greater Los Angeles area, covering Los Angeles and Orange counties, and the Inland Empire. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 1 Jul 2009 | 5:00 am
Are you rich and short about 16GB of storage? Buddy, have I got a product for you. The SolidAlliance Mnemosyne USB drive is a beautifully designed little object that not only looks money, but stores your deepest, chromiest secrets (or mp3s). What’s the catch, you ask? No catch! Unless you consider a price tag of $10,000 a catch.
Yes, like many pieces of excellent design (and, of course, many pieces of terrible design), the Mnemosyne is so overpriced as to be relegated to the position of status symbol. Aside from its colossal MSRP, there are some other problems. It will, of course, be a fingerprint magnet if you use it at all. And honestly, 16GB is a little skimpy for ten grand.
I’m sure they could contact Guinness if they wanted to and get the record for most expensive USB drive, but the peasants who that record would impress aren’t exactly their target demographic! HA HA HA! (rich guy laugh)
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go sail around on my solid gold schooner, the “Galleon.” Get it — galleon? HA HA HA! Collar up!
DALLAS, July 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Contrary to conventional wisdom, netbooks aren't just for consumers. AT&T* today announced another way for small businesses to enjoy access to the nation's fastest 3G network in 350 major U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 1 Jul 2009 | 4:01 am
Tech luminariesRay Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near) and Peter Diamandis (X Prize) recently opened Singularity University, which offers an interdisciplinary "graduate studies program" combining genetics, artificial intelligence, and engineering. It's nine weeks of deep thought with eminent theorists and business leaders. Just getting accepted would be... something.
Materials engineer Edgar Burchard has been watching packing materials fail for his entire career. In 1964, when he was a recent hire at BASF, the conglomerate narrowly escaped a public scandal. It had been crowing about the quality of its foam shells—brand-new tech at the time—so the PR guys dreamed up a brilliant publicity stunt: They would ship Michelangelo's La Pietà from the Vatican to the World's Fair in New York. Packed, of course, in their product.
But when expo workers in Queens pried open the wooden crate, they found the massive marble masterpiece listing dangerously to one side, just a bump away from catastrophe. Vatican staff chalked up the barely averted disaster to their excellent relations with God. But Burchard knew that divine intervention would never have been necessary if BASF's product were better designed.
Fast forward 30 years, to 1995. While Burchard was experimenting with refrigerator insulation, he came up with a novel way of molding low-density foam. The foam wasn't a very good insulator (in other words, not useful to him at the time), but he was impressed by how light and strong it was. He realized that he could use it to improve upon the packing peanut. Burchard shaped the new material into rough- textured lightning bolts of foam that locked together to stay put under the weight of heavy, priceless objects. He christened his creation Expans O Fill and in 1998 sent it to Michigan State University's School of Packaging for independent testing. It trounced all seven competitive products, transmitting up to 90 percent less shock and cushioning four times better than the packing peanut. Five years later, 3M bought the design, renamed it the Packing Noodle, and rolled it out in 2004.
Even though the Noodle was a vast improvement over the peanut, "they didn't sell well," says Carter Swift, a brand manager at 3M. "They were just too different." The Noodles came fitted together in compact, shrink-wrapped blocks. Retailers loved them because they took up such little shelf space. But consumers didn't understand that the blocks broke apart into hundreds of Noodles. In June, Burchard's brilliant idea was discontinued, and once again we're left with only God (and a few lesser earthly products) to protect our precious cargo.
If we know our readers, and we suspect that we do, many of you have tried your hand at building a model train at some point. In fact, we think you probably have some pretty impressive trains up and running right now. And we want to see them.
Use the Reddit widget below to submit your model train photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. Tell us as much as you can about your train set, like how long you've had it, what scale it is, how long it took to build, etc.
Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800-1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. By submitting your image, you are giving us permission to use it on our site. Please do not include watermarks on your photo.
We don't host the images, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).
Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions.
If we know our readers, and we suspect that we do, many of you have tried your hand at building a model train at some point. In fact, we think you probably have some pretty impressive trains up and running right now. And we want to see them.
Use the Reddit widget below to submit your model train photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. Tell us as much as you can about your train set, like how long you've had it, what scale it is, how long it took to build, etc.
Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800-1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. By submitting your image, you are giving us permission to use it on our site. Please do not include watermarks on your photo.
We don't host the images, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).
Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions.
Revealing your amazing artistic endeavors online can require a thick skin and maybe a sick sense of humor. Outsmart the crowd-sourced critical machine with these handy tips.
Let’s be clear: it was his prerogative to put his race in the advert. I’m just repeating what I heard. But let’s also be honest. Say you wanted soccer (football) lessons. Given two identical ads on Craigslist, would you go with a guy born and raised in Brazil or some local yokel? I realize this is a sticky issue for potential Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, but for us it’s less of a problem. The Brazil guy, am I right? Because he’s more likely to have been immersed in soccer culture from birth and to have played since childhood, developing skills people like me think only exist in Shaolin Soccer.
Sure, we’ve got our own, more official courses, but how can you resist one-on-one tutoring on such topics as:
Muta stacking
Lurker stop and stacking
Cloacked zergling
Learn Korean lango, like “chobo” “gosu” “ww” etc
Advanced micro/macro management (able to stand off 12 zerglings with just 3 zealots or fend off 18 zealots with just 4 cannons) <- EXTREME SKILL
Sounds pretty serious, and for $20-$35/hour, you’d better be serious too. I think a lot of these skills will carry over to Starcraft II as well, so you’re getting kind of a bargain here. Bay Area only, unfortunately.
I’m especially intrigued by the promise that “Korean girls will be intrigued that you’re such a good Starcraft player.” That’d be good, because my “blogger” lines are starting to wear thin on that variety.
1sockchuck writes "Yahoo has come up with a data center design called the Yahoo Computing Coop, which it says will make its new data center in Lockport, NY one of the most efficient on earth. The design features 120-foot by 60-foot metal prefabricated facilities with louvers on the side to support free cooling, and a peaked roof to manage the release of waste heat from the hot aisle. Chief Yahoo David Filo said the name was adopted 'because it looks like something chickens live in.' The $150 million data center in Western New York, which was announced earlier today, will run on cheap hydro power from the Niagara River."
A research team in Texas has mapped the genome of the parasite that causes schistosomiasis, a debilitating disease that can impair childhood development.
The work done at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research may lead to a vaccine and better treatments, Timothy Anderson, the research leader, told the San Antonio Express-News.
If we can understand why parasites can be resistant to drugs, if we can understand the biochemical pathways that are attacked by these drugs, we can re-engineer those drugs so they do work, or we can design new drugs,
The research was published Tuesday in Genome Biology.
Unlike the most common parasitic disease, malaria, which remains a major killer, schistosomiasis, the second most common, is not usually fatal. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 1 Jul 2009 | 3:24 am
Oh boy. I’ve found a reason to charge my Pre back from the dead. ZodTTD, purveyor of iPhone emulators galore, has struck again by installing psx4all on his Palm Pre. Surprisingly enough, Zod says the Pre’s hardware runs the emulator way better than the iPhone 3GS. But it’s not all peaches and cream.
* There is no sound output (but it’s emulated), as Pulse Audio is required for the Palm Pre, and I have yet to support it. It will come soon.
* I have not figured out hardware rotation or scaling, or whether it is possible. Until then I am using the raw framebuffer device and blitting 320×240 software scaled.
* I figured out how to read the keypad device on the Palm Pre, though there are times it fails to give a keyup event, making keys “stick”. This is annoying and I’m looking for a workaround.
* As things progress I will have fullscreen landscape working as well.
This guest post is written by Mary Hodder, the founder Dabble. Prior to Dabble, Hodder consulted for a number of startups, did research at Technorati and wrote her masters thesis at Berkeley focusing on live web search looking at blog data.
Real time search is nothing new. It is a problem we’ve been working on for at least ten years, and we likely will still be trying to solve it ten years from now. It’s a really hard problem which we used to call “live web search,” which was coined by Allen Searls (Doc’s son) and refers to the web that is alive, with time as an element, in all factors including search.
The name change to “real time search” seems a way to refocus attention toward the issue of time as an important element of filters. We are still presented with the same set of problems we’ve had at least the past ten years. None of the companies that Erick Schonfeld pointed to the other day seem to be doing anything differently from the live web search / discovery companies that came before. The new ones all seem to be fumbling around at the beginning of the problem, and in fact seem to be doing “recent search,” not really real time search. While I’m sure they’ve worked really hard on their systems, they are no closer than the older live web search systems got with the problem. All the new ones give a reverse chron view, with most mixing Twitter with something: blog data, other microblog data, photos, creating some kind of top list of recent trends. Some have context, like a count of activity over a period of time, or how long a trend has gone on or a histogram (Crowdeye) which both Technorati and Sphere experimented with in the early years. Or they show how many links there are to something or the number of tweets. All seem susceptible to spam and other activities degrading to the user experience and none seem to really provide the context and quality filters that one would like to see if this were to really work. All seem to suffer from needing to learn the lessons we already learned in blog search and topic discovery.
Publicly available publishing systems starting in 1999 took the value of time and incorporated it into what was being published (think Pyra which is now Blogger, Moveable Type, Wordpress and Flickr, among the many) as well as search and discovery systems for those published bits like Technorati, Sphere, Rojo, Blogpulse, Feedster, Pubsub and others, to walk down memory lane . . . (btw, for disclosure purposes I should state that I worked for Technorati in 2004 for 10 months, and consulted or advised most all the others in one form or another).
I started working on this problem in 1999, at UC Berkeley, and eventually did my master’s thesis on live web data search and topic discovery at SIMS (or the iSchool as it’s now known). From 2000 to 2004, people at SIMS would say to me, “What are you doing with blogs and data, it’s just weird. Why does it matter?” But the element of time was the captivating piece that was missing for me from regular search. It’s the element that makes something news, as well as the element that can group items together in a short period to show a focus of attention and activity that often legacy news outlets miss (until more recently when they decided that live web activity was interesting).
At Burning Man in 2005, under a shade structure during a hot, quiet afternoon, I remember having a four or five hour conversation with Barney Pell (who would later found Powerset) about the Live Web and Live Web Search, how to do it, what it meant, how to understand and present time to the user, how much was discovery and how much was search, how structured was the data you could get and how reliant on the time could you be with the data, what meaning you could make from that data, etc. Sergey Brin was sitting and listening, and finally, after a couple of hours, he asked me, “What is the live web and what is live web search?” Since Barney and I had already been doing a deep dive, I assumed Sergey knew what we were talking about, so it surprised me, but I explained why I thought time was a huge missing element of regular search, and that this was the type of search I worked on. Barney and I continued for a couple more hours. And it got cooler so it was time to go admire the art and that was the end of that. But I have wondered over the years where Google is with the live web and when they might do something with time. Twitter seems to be prodding them.
When I look at the latest crop of search startups, I think: Why are we doing it all the same way again? Reinventing the wheel? Is anyone doing anything original either with data or interface? Is anyone building on what we’ve learned before about the backend or UI’s?
Frankly, our filters suck.. and I suppose that if a name change gets us to think anew about better filters, well, I should rejoice. I’m partly to blame for the bad filters we have to date because in having worked on this problem, I’ve contributed to some of the various live web or real time or whatever the word of the moment is to describe trying to solve this problem. We are very good at publishing our thoughts and visions, with time stamps, but not very good at the filtering side of things. The old method of information search and discovery was to open the paper or magazine, turn the pages with editorially filtered and placed information, and when you were finished, you said, “Okay, I’m informed” (whether you really were or not). But the media got complacent, missed stories and with the ease of blog publishing and sites like Flickr for photos, we could replace paper and supplement our information needs with the whole web. The only problem is, it’s the whole freaking web. An avalanche. We feel anxiety on the web from the lack of filter and editorial grace that one or two printed news sources used to give us.
I did a study in 2002, which I repeated in 2004 and again last year in 2008. I asked users to track their online information intake for one week. There were only 30 people in each study, chosen randomly from Craiglist ads, but what I found across each group of 30 was that the average time spent online with news and information sites was 1.25 hours in 2002, 1.85 hours in 2004 and 2.45 hours in 2008. These people are not in Silicon Valley, but they do all have broadband at home and live in the US. Every one of them reported some level anxiety over the amount of data they felt they needed to take in in order to feel informed. They often dealt with it by increasing the time they took to stay informed. They didn’t know that better filters might actually reduce their anxiety.
As Erick noted, the tension to solve this problem is between memory and consciousness; or as Bob Wyman and Salim Ismail called it at Pubsub: retrospective verses prospective search. And it is part of the issue. But there is more.
Discovery does mean you have to introduce time as an element. The user cannot be expected to know what is bubbling up, or the specific phrases that will name the latest thing.
Some people will say “michael jackson” and some will say “MJ” and some will say “king of pop.” And Michael Jackson as a topic is actually pretty easy. I remember once doing usability tests for a live web search and discovery system in 2003, where we asked users to search on Google News and various live web systems for an incident in Australia where a “giant sea creature” was found. But since all the media covering it originated in Australia, and they’d all called it a “massive squid,” and all the follow-on American sources including bloggers had copied the Aussie language, there were no recent hits for “massive sea creature.” Testers had to think creatively about how to get to the info they knew was there, and yet it was a semantic leap. One search tester actually cried as she refused to give up, she was so determined to find the result in any of the live web systems we were testing. We begged her to stop; it was painful. Good discovery could have helped.
Another key element of discovery and live web search is getting structured data, because spidering, which Google uses to get data from the web for it’s regular retrospective web search, makes understanding time with a published work more difficult. It’s hard to work with time if you only know for sure when you spidered the page. Twitter on the other hand has structured data because everything is published in their silo so the sites they provide their complete stream to get it in a structured format. They know the time of each tweet. Not to mention the data is available through API’s. This is the most efficient way to draw out meaning for search because you know for sure about the context of each piece of data, with time as one of the pivots, for search and discovery.
You also need to get the data model right for the backend search data base, in order to get meaning and link metrics. And you need to understand the different corpuses of data to know what things mean to users (not engineers), and figure out the spam and bad actor problems. There is the original context the data had and there is the UI which is so difficult when trying to make time understandable for many users. In fact some think that communicating the time element to regular users is so hard that making time focused search is really an “advanced search” problem.
If designed poorly, the system can contribute to the unnatural production of skewed data by users. If the system involves some sort of filter for authority or popularity, they are subject to power law effects (Technorati calls their metric “authority” but inbound link counts from blogs are not authority, they’re just a measure of popularity). What’s a power law effect? It’s when a system drives activity to reinforce unnaturally the behavior that caused something to be there in the first place. For example, if one of the metrics of a filter counts the number of people clicking on a top search, then the more clicks, the longer the item will stay at the top of the list of searches, even if naturally it would have fallen off the list earlier. Conversely if a metric for a filter involves a spontaneous act, driven by imagination, like writing a tweet, then exposing those items at the top of the filter might be less likely to drive up activity. However, if you show the results to the users, upon seeing a popular topic, they might begin tweeting about that topic without having thought of it before seeing the popular topic. In other words, by revealing the metrics you focus on, you can push users to change their behavior. By driving behavior, power-law distributions keep things with some power at the top because they are at the top or can drive them higher. It becomes a loop. And because no distinction is made between the quality or strength of a unit or what that unit might mean to a group of users in a topic area, straight number counts just aren’t very smart.
For example, if we made a system that counted Om Malik’s inbound links and called it authority, no matter the topic, I think Om would agree that even he wouldn’t have great authority and insight on the subjects of say, modern dance or metal working, if he happened to mention those words in a blog post. But on broadband issues, he is most definitely an authority. But Technorati, OneRiot, and other services that take a metric count and apply it for all topics, all circumstances, all search result matches, without context, randomize the quality of the information the user sees. They may provide a filter across the whole web, but they don’t give us any real help in judging what is useful or not. It’s why topic communities are helpful, and once you find a good editorial filter, driven by the human touch, you glom onto it for dear life because it’s such a time and energy saver.
I’m under no illusions that we’re remotely close to solving Live Web or Real Time search or even recent search. We are not. Nor are we near solving discovery. But I hope we will. Sooner rather than later. Because I need it now. The opportunity is huge. It means really building algorithmically the editorial filters we have today in the form of people, while balancing the mobs’ activities. Solve that and the prize will be big.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
An anonymous reader sends news from The Washington Post's Security Fix blog of a new Trojan horse program that takes click fraud to the next level. The Trojan, dubbed FFsearcher by SecureWorks, was among the pieces of malware installed by sites hacked with the Nine-Ball mass compromise, which attacked some 40,000 Web sites this month. The Trojan takes advantage of Google's "AdSense for Search" API, which allows Web sites to embed Google search results alongside the usual Google AdSense ads. (SecureWorks' writeup indicates that Yahoo search is targeted too, but the researchers saw no evidence if the malware redirecting Yahoo searches.) While most search hijackers give themselves away on the victim's machine by redirecting the browser through some no-name search engine, FFsearcher "...converts every search a victim makes through Google.com, so that each query is invisibly redirected through the attackers' own Web sites, via Google's Custom Search API. Meanwhile, the Trojan manipulates the victim's PC and browser so that the victim never actually sees the attacker-controlled Web site that is hijacking the search, but instead sees the search results as though they were returned directly from Google.com (and with Google.com in the victim browser's address bar, not the address of the attacker controlled site). Adding to the stealth is the fact that search results themselves aren't altered by the attackers, who are merely going after the referral payments should victims click on any of the displayed ads. What's more, the attackers aren't diverting clicks or ad revenue away from advertisers or publishers, as in traditional click fraud: They are simply forcing Google to pay commissions that it wouldn't otherwise have to pay." If FFSearcher were the only piece of malware on the machine, it would have a better chance of staying under the radar.
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., June 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) today announced the pricing of its sale of $1.5 billion of 3.750% Notes due 2014 (the "2014 Notes"), $1.75 billion of 5.000% Notes due 2019 (the "2019 Notes") and $1.25 billion of 6.125% Notes due 2039 (the "2039 Notes"). Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 1 Jul 2009 | 1:13 am
If you saw this text on a webpage, how would you figure out what it means?
Если вы читаете этот текст, вы, вероятно, уже говорите по-русски. Однако миллионы людей не знают русского и не могут прочитать миллионы русскоязычных веб-страниц.*
You would likely need to translate manually via our language tools or in Toolbar. Today we're excited to announce that translations will be even easier with the newest release of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. We have been working with the Translate team to make translations a faster and more integrated part of your browsing experience.
The Translate feature automatically detects if the language of a webpage you're on is different from your default language setting and allows you to translate it. With one click, you can now instantly translate the page and all of its text will appear in the new language.
Language detection happens only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google until you choose to translate a page. You can find more details about how the feature works in our help center.
If you go to another page in the same language, you will continue to see translations rather than have to translate one page at a time. And if the page has dynamic content, like Google Reader, you will get translations in real-time. Finally, if you frequently translate pages in the same language, Toolbar will let you translate that language automatically without any extra clicks in the future.
The new Translate feature is available in all international versions of Toolbar, including English, and the translation service supports 41 different languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Download Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer to try it out for yourself. We'll add this feature to Toolbar for Firefox soon, too. * In case you don't speak Russian, we translated the paragraph above for you using our translation engine:
If you are reading this text, you probably already speak in Russian. However, millions of people do not know Russian and cannot read the millions of Russian-language webpages.
Posted by Jerry Tang and Dick Sites, Software Engineers
Bet you didn’t see this one coming. Back in 2007 we wrote about a service called Dial Directions which lets you call a special phone number and verbally ask for directions, which are immediately sent to you via SMS. Today comes news that the company has been acquired by Sakhr Software, a development house specializing in Arabic natural language processing (NLP). And with their powers combined, they’re building a real-time voice translation service that will allow users to translate phrases from their mobile phones on the fly.
It’s a better fit than it sounds. Dial Directions has spent the last few years building mobile applications (it has an app for the iPhone on the App Store), and has also built out the technology required to efficently transfer voice input to servers, where it can then be processed (this server-side processing is also used by Google Voice Search and a number of other apps). Once it makes it to the cloud, this speech will be routed through Sakhr’s software, which is capable of translating English to Arabic and vice-versa. Translated audio and text are then sent back to the mobile phone, all within a matter of seconds.
The companies have jointly produced a beta version of the application for the iPhone and BlackBerry, which you can see in the video below. The application is currently in testing with select enterprise customers, with plans to release a consumer version around the end of the summer.
Sakhr’s customers include the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the technology makes its way out to defense personnel. A Dial Directions spokesperson says that most translation devices in the field abroad rely on a set library of phrases, and says that the new Sakhr translation software should be more flexible. That said, it sounds like this will come with one significant drawback — if your phone can’t reach the network, the software won’t work.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Dial Directions intends to keep its service running for now, though it may not be indefinitely.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Gadgetell’s own JG Mason visited with Doug Aamoth from CrunchGear on Randall Bennett’s tech show, TechVi to talk about the latest Pirate Bay news. The company has been sold to a gaming company. Does this sale make any sense? What’s next from the Pirate Bay guys? Find out what JG and Doug had to say.
Watch more episodes: [TechVi]
Read Doug Aamoth’s work at CrunchGear: [CrunchGear]
Well, iPhone OS 3.1 Beta just went live on Apple’s developer center and, as usual, it’s a quest to figure out what has changed. Our lovely developer friends have already started tearing it apart in search of that hidden gem detailing the iPhone 4GFP (The FP stands for “Face punch”), and we’re keeping tabs on what they find.
As far as we can tell, it’s almost entirely developer-oriented stuff.
New stuff:
Around 15 new OpenGL toys for handling 3D models
VideoEditorController API, which should let third party apps call up the video editing UI
Video picker API, goes hand-in-hand with the above
Plenty of obligatory “It seems faster!” reports
Some are claiming that MMS is now enabled by default, though still not functioning properly on AT&T. Seems strange to us that this would come via an OS update and not a carrier file update.
Let us know what you uncover, and we’ll add it to the list.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
snydeq writes "Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP a year ago today, no longer selling new copies in most venues. Yet according to a report from InfoWorld, various downgrade paths to XP are keeping the operating system very much alive, particularly among businesses. In fact, despite Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs. Microsoft recently planned to further limit the ability to downgrade to XP now that Windows 7 is in the pipeline, but backlash against the licensing scheme prompted the company to change course, extending downgrade rights on new PCs from April 2010 to April 2011."
SkyGrid, the nifty, free financial news aggregator, is now publishing a stream of news on Twitter, letting users follow breaking business news headlines via the microblogging network.
The news aggregator, which only features stories about publicly traded companies, not only has an comprehensive Twitter feed for news stories, but the site also has Twitter feeds that are broken down by sector. So users can follow SkyGridHealth or SkyGridEnergy for sector-related news. SkyGrid currently has separate Twitter feeds for 8 different industries. SkyGrid says that the Twitter feed may be especially useful to users who want to access SkyGrid on their mobile devices.
Similar to TechMeme and Google News, SkyGrid clusters related news stories based on keyword analysis, what they’re linking to, etc. SkyGrid also tries to determine the sentiment of each article - red for negative, green for positive.
As we wrote in our earlier review of the services, SkyGrid is an incredibly useful tool, especially now that it is free. But the one element that is missing from SkyGrid is coverage of larger private companies, like Facebook. In order to become a serious competitor to popular aggregators like Techmeme (which also has a Twitter firehose), the site will need to expand its range of coverage. But especially for people in the financial services industries who use Twitter as a news source, SkyGrid is on the right track to providing users with real-time valuable financial news.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we paid homage to the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, the amazing research facility responsible for hundreds of patents and myriad innovations in technology. Steven and Lisa visited the facility in May and got a behind-the-scenes look at several of their newest innovations. As a result, we have:
WASHINGTON, June 30 /PRNewswire/ -- More than 500 educators from 48 states and territories took part in a once in a lifetime event during the 30th Annual National Education and Computing Conference. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 30 Jun 2009 | 11:08 pm
Whenever a hyped phone debuts in its first month, it is always interesting to see how well it does, compared to other hyped phones. As you can imagine, every number released by Palm and analysts would be compared to Apple. According to Ed Snyder, of Charter Equity Research, 300,000 Pres have been sold by Sprint and Palm in its inaugural month of June.
300,000 represents hope for a struggling Palm company and certainly is a nice number for Sprint. Consider this, Palm only shipped 351,000 phones in the quarter before the Pre launch. Already in the first month of the Pre launch 300,000 units were shipped, and let’s not forget the 70,000 in May. In addition, Snyder estimates that 15,000 Pre units are manufactured everyday just to keep up with the strong demand. Moreover, if this continues pace, 1 million units could be shipped within the first quarter of launch, a mighty feat.
Take these numbers with a grain of salt because no official records have been released by Palm yet. My bet is they are waiting for a truly startling number to occur before they release any information. The Palm Pre looks to be doing pretty well, especially with the amount of downloads the App Catalog has seen. Hopefully, Palm and Sprint can keep up with consumer demand.
Paleontologists visiting the Creation Museum at the conclusion of a convention got more than they bargained for when they found their life’s work under attack. After having a few laughs and taking some pictures, most were surprised and offended to see the way in which evolution was being ridiculed by the museum, which some call a “creationist Disneyland”."It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?" Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley, told the AFP news agency."Like Sunday school with statues... Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Jun 2009 | 10:50 pm
An anonymous reader brings us another bump on the bumpy road of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which we discussed a week ago. Now the Times (UK) is reporting on a dustup between Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Recently Gladwell reviewed, or rather deconstructed, Anderson's book in the New Yorker. Anderson has responded with a blog post that addresses some, but by no means all, of Gladwell's criticisms, and The Times is inclined to award the match to Gladwell on points. Although their reviewer didn't notice that Gladwell, in setting up the idea of "Free" as a straw man, omitted a critical half of Stewart Brand's seminal quote.
A Chinese publication has reported a rumor that a slimmer version of Sony’s PlayStation 3 console will be hitting stores July.
Anonymous sources told Economic Daily News that a lighter, smaller PS3 is due in stores July “to cope with extended summer vacation demands.” (Translation: Sony is targeting parents eager to spend money on a gadget to distract their bored, restless kids who are out of school for three months.)
The rumor conflicts with a previous report published by Ars Technica, who received a tip from an inside source that the rumored “PS3 Slim” would launch fall. This would give Sony ample time to clear out its current PS3 inventory before the slimmer version hits shelves. (We’re betting a fall release is more likely due to this reasoning.)
Venture capitalists drop $100 million into the coffers of software firms seeking to make their fortune selling apps for the iPhone. Clearly, the VCs are expecting consumers to keep falling in love with mobile devices and the apps that extend their usefulness.
These albums ought never to have sullied an unsuspecting public's ears. We'd need a time machine to keep them from being released; until we get Terminator technology, the sonic black hole will have to do. Rate these audio atrocities and submit your own.
In 1983, my former professor and friend Howard Rheingold read an article by Alan Kay. Immediately, he wanted to experience the Alto and the future of networked minds. He started calling PARC on a weekly basis. Nothing. Then when he called back to remind HR of his existence, he was given an immediate assignment: write a last-minute speech for a Xerox executive.
With that, Howard had landed himself his "dream job" at PARC as an in-house writer. Howard's gig involved interviewing researchers and scientists about their work with interfaces, LAN, etc. Super cool in retrospect and at the time, I'm sure.
He goes into great detail in his book Tools for Thought (pictured), which explores batch processing, the 1960s, time sharing, and more at Xerox PARC. Howard's insights into the successes and failures of Xerox PARC are well worth a read.
Here's how he framed PARC's trajectory and missed opportunity in his Wired article from 1994:
Personal computers did not spring naturally from the computer industry. They were deliberately realized by a radical fringe, against all the force of the day's accepted wisdom... These zealous wizards handed Xerox an astounding lead in information technology in the early 1980s, but by the end of the decade, Xerox watched as upstarts like Apple and Microsoft grew wealthy off Xerox's discoveries. Neither Apple nor Microsoft even existed when the first Altos were designed in the early 1970s; by 1990 either company could have bought Xerox. The tragicomic Xerox saga is recorded in Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander's Fumbling the Future.
Here's the question he ended his 1994 article with:
So how will PARC guarantee that this time they won't fumble their new future? Three ways, says JSB [John Seely Brown]. "One, we are more careful about intellectual property. Two, we are working smart - looking for entrepreneurial partnerships to develop ideas quickly. And three, Xerox has radically repositioned its organization so that its corporate strategy is shaped and informed by PARC and PARC is being shaped and informed by corporate strategy."
And, of course, here's what eventually happened:
By 2002, PARC became in independent research business with the ability to license its own patented tech and discoveries to other companies, institutions, and start-ups, especially the recent wave of alternative energy upstarts. While there are still ties to Xerox, PARC's profits are entirely its own. What's more, I'm told revenue is even split up among PARC employees.
Our first stop on our visit to PARC was Room 1229, where staff researcher Willie Wong and several team members are perfecting advanced flexible electronics technologies. By building circuits and electrical connections into bendable plastics, glass, and metal foil substrates, they're paving the way for new technologies like flexible flat-panel displays, medical image sensors, and electronic paper. Because flexible electronics are super lightweight, rugged, and can be rolled or folded into smaller pieces, they are expected to take mobility and portability to new levels.
After a mere nine months, I’m dumping my Hackintosh netbook (more precisely, selling it to my editor Dylan Tweney so his children can make better use of it). This is by far the shortest relationship I’ve ever had with any of my gadgets. Why the abrupt end? Oddly enough, the puny, low-powered computer didn’t fit into my lifestyle. And my recent purchase of an iPhone 3GS made the netbook completely lose relevance.
Allow me to explain.
Like I said in a previous post, my Hackintosh (10-inch MSI Wind) and I went through a brief honey moon phase before stuff got rocky. Most notably, I eventually encountered problems with Wi-Fi connectivity in “Hack OS X.” And the most annoying quirk was when the netbook kept shutting down with the slightest bump or nudge.
But even then, I gave my HackBook a second, third and fourth chance. I fixed the aforementioned problems. And then I kept finding weird applications for the netbook: I turned it into a pet cam to check on my kitten, and recently I used it as a virtual instruction manual to guide me through installing an iPod-integration kit in my car trunk. While the netbook was indeed useful for these instances, I realize these are rather rare instances. (My kitten has grown since, so I no longer need to check on her. And how often am I going to be installing iPod kits in cars?)
Then came the iPhone 3GS, which I purchased June 19. After work, I found myself plopping down on my couch and pulling out my iPhone to browse the web, check e-mail and instant message friends. The speed boost makes the iPhone much more bearable to use as a companion computer for extended periods of time. And the introduction of push IMing enabled me to switch between apps without logging out of chats. With those two changes, the iPhone 3GS became a perfectly adequate gadget for casual computing — perhaps even better than my netbook, whose keyboard and track pad create a pretty crampy experience over time.
During Apple’s quarterly earnings call in October 2008, Steve Jobs said the iPhone could compensate for Apple’s lack of a netbook offering. Back then, I disagreed with him because the previous iPhones were just too slow for me, and the lack of the ability to run multiple apps in the background was a serious drag. But the 3GS and iPhone 3.0 OS cover those shortcomings, and Apple could stall for even longer on offering a netbook if the company chose to.
One could argue that a netbook would be better than the iPhone 3GS for doing work. I’ll be honest: I didn’t get crap done on my netbook. I tried reporting for Gadget Lab once using my HackBook, and I gave up after 30 minutes squinting at the 10-inch screen. (For serious work, I use a MacBook Pro.) I could find a bunch more kooky applications for my netbook, but let’s face it: If you’re looking for reasons to use something, it means you don’t need it.
Crazy how much can change in just nine months, huh?
Let’s face it: there are a lot of crappy games available for the iPhone. Even 99 cents — as cheap as that is — is more than I’m willing to pay for most games, since I’m unlikely to get even a dollar’s worth of enjoyment from them. Not so with Freeverse’s Flick Fishing. This 99 cent game offers a lot for that very small price tag. In addition to great graphics, excellent sounds, and decent gameplay, you can purchase expansion content in-game. And there are a variety of clever multiplayer aspects built in, too.
Flick Fishing is, as you’d guess, a fishing game. You can fish for fun in a number of locations, each with different kinds of fish and weather conditions. You can also play tournament games against CPU and human opponents, to see who can catch the most fish, or who can catch the biggest fish, in a specific period of time. The graphics are quite good: water ripples or waves realistically and the sunlight glints off the surface of the water. The sound effects aren’t quite like those you’d hear were you fishing for real, but they’re relatively soothing such that this game can be a good surrogate for actually fishing.
Gameplay is easy. You flick your iPhone to cast your line out. An on-screen reel appears. When you hook a fish, you simply use your finger to wind the reel. At the top of the screen are two status bars: one for line strength, and one for fish strength. The line strength represents your fishing line. As you reel in your catch it will increase the strain on your line. If you reel too fast, the line strength status bar will grow toward the right: when it reaches the end, your line snaps and your fish gets away. The fish strength indicator works the other way: it starts full and decreases toward the left as you wear down the fish. At the first couple of locations, you’re unlikely to pay any attention to line strength, as you’re reeling in smaller freshwater fish. When you go deep sea fishing and hook a marlin, though, you’d better pay attention to that line strength if you want to collect your prize!
Flick Fishing offers a nice compliment of baits. Different fish respond to different bait types. There’s bait fish, luncheon meat, lures, flies, and more. Lures and flies operate just like their real-life counterpart: you need to slowly reel them in after you cast them in order to get the fish to see them. Bait fish, luncheon meat and other baits use the traditional red and white bobber that floats at the surface. When a fish bites, your bobber will submerge, and it’s time to start reeling!
Truth be told: Flick Fishing got a little repetitive. But then again, I’m not a fisherman. Sitting in a boat — or on a dock — for a couple hours waiting for a fish to bite my line isn’t my idea of a good time. At least with Flick Fishing I’m guaranteed to get a bite every time! Plus, there’s no bugs!
I didn’t get the chance to test any of the multiplayer aspects of Flick Fishing, unfortunately. You can do tournament fishing against another human using a single iPhone, simply by taking turns. Bluetooth multiplayer tournaments are supported, too, assuming your friends have purchased Flick Fishing.
Flick Fishing also introduces Fish Net, a shared leaderboard function that allows you to asynchronously compete against others. Create or join a Fish Net, and then simply go fishing. If you catch the biggest fish, all the people in your Fish Net group will be alerted. If someone catches a bigger fish than you, you’ll get alerted. That’s a pretty clever, low-impact way to enjoy multiplayer gaming. No need to coordinate times to play, no need to pass an iPhone back and forth between players. Simply fish as normal, and let the Fish Net work its magic for you!
Finally, for the really die-hard Flick Fisherman, there’s the “Brag” feature. You can email a photo of the largest fish you’ve caught. I’m sure all your friends will be very interested to know about that 20 pound trout you caught at the old pond!
Once you’ve finished playing through the default locations, and have collected all the fish, you can buy access to “Private Beach” right from within the game. This adds a couple new fish, as well as a new game mode called “Fish Jack”, which is like Blackjack, but with fish! Expect to see more and more games (and apps in general) provide expansion content via in-app purchases.
Bottom line: you get a lot of game for 99 cents. You don’t need to be a fisherman to enjoy Flick Fishing.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
So called “Hit Man” spam is back. This type of spam attempts to extort people rather than sell them things or trick them into installing malware on their system. Basically, they get an email from someone claiming they have been hired to kill them but if they pay a certain amount the hit man will walk away rather than complete the job. It’s similar to ransomware and scareware in that all of them attempt to trick the victim into sending money.
This latest attack features emails claiming to be from someone in a group called the Ishmael Ghost Islamic Group. The group member explains that they were hired to kill the recipient and would also kill their family - but if they send $800 via Western Union they can save their lives and those of their loved ones. The Islamic mention is surely there to further frighten and inflame in hopes of convincing the recipient the email is real and the need to send money critical.
If you receive an email like this, ignore it. It’s a complete hoax and you are in no danger. Don’t send any money and don’t even reply as that can get you put on a list of people who read spam and that means even more of it will flood your inbox.
When it became clear that HTC’s oh-so-pretty Sense UI wasn’t going to make it to the G1 by any official means, we figured it wouldn’t be too long before the goods leaked and an unofficial port was made. Hell, we outright said so.
Less than a week has passed since then, but a pair of Italian hackers has already managed to jam the final Hero ROM onto the G1. Now, the G1’s packing a bit less muscle than the new guy (192 MB of RAM as opposed to 288, for one), so it’s not quite as buttery, and the port has its share of glitches - but progress is progress, right?
This build features a ton of new widgets, Facebook support in the address book, and visual overhauls across the apps. Oh, and Flash in the browser - but who cares about that, right?
All around Google, we're proud of our work, our culture and, most importantly, our people. In the spirit of celebration, this spring and summer Googlers have participated in Pride celebrations in Tel Aviv, New York, Zürich, San Francisco and many other cities around the world. Pride is a time for the LGBT* community along with families, friends and supporters to stand up for equality, and to honor those who paved the way for us to express sexual orientation and gender identity openly.
In the U.S., this year's celebration is historically important: it's the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, a response to what was then routine police harassment of LGBT people. Some 75 Googlers, family members and friends marched with several hundred members of New York's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center. Hundreds of Googlers also joined other U.S. celebrations in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Earlier this month, around 50 Googlers and friends gathered to celebrate at Europride, Europe's best-known Gay Pride celebration. This year it was in Zürich, Switzerland. After weeks of sunshine, on the morning of the parade it began to storm, but that didn't deter our intrepid Googlers from being out at 6:30am turning a 28-ton truck into a rainbow-colored nightclub on wheels. Hundreds of nuts, bolts and gallons of helium later, the truck was transformed, the sun came out and we were ready to march through the city streets, cheered on by a crowd of 50,000.
Google is a company that supports its LGBT employees, taking a public stand stand on issues that are important to our community. This is not the first year that Google has supported Pride, and it will certainly not be the last. We hope you enjoy this photo album of our global celebrations.
*LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered people and is also intended to include people who identify as queer, asexual or intersexed, amongst others.
If you work in a top secret area (read: government agency, weapons lab, or Apple campus), phones packing cameras (or standalone cameras, for that matter) are usually frowned upon. Remember the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” campaign of WWII?
Fortunately for you high-falutin folk, RIM kept you in mind when designing the BlackBerry Tour. You’ll be able to pick one up 100% camera free come July 12th, ready to lurk in your pockets as you slink around your hush-hush headquarters. Plus, going with the camera-less version ought to save you some ducats, right? Nope. Both the version with eyes and without are $199.
Note to employers: If you’re going to set your employees up with Tours, don’t buy the sans-camera version unless it’s actually necessary. We’ve seen too many employers cut their employee’s work phones off at the knees, only to allow them to bring big-boy cameras to work. Yeah, that makes sense.
Most of the major cell phone companies based in Europe have signed an agreement that requires them to employ a universal cell phone charger for all of their models. Newly released models will all use the same port in order to charge, the micro USB. This transition is supposed to start as quickly as next year.
Manufacturers that have currently signed the agreement, include Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Apple and RIM. Apple was a surprise addition to the agreement since everyone knows that Apple utilizes a dock connector. The agreement is not legally binding, but it is expected that most companies will cooperate in order to offer universal charging capabilities in Europe.
Currently, there are dozens of mobile phone charger types available for European cell phones, which makes this agreement all the more impressive. Unfortunately, the United States has no such deal in the works, which probably means we’ll be stuck with different charger types for years to come.
Palm is tightlipped about sales of the Palm Pre smartphone released earlier this month but one analyst claims the device is off to a great start.
About 300,00o Pres have been sold since the launch on June 6, says Edward Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. That’s the same number of phones sold in one month than Palm did in its entire previous quarter. Palm may have gathered about 70,000 Pre pre-orders in May, estimates Snyder.
An earlier estimate from analyst Mike Abramsky at RBC Capital Research pegged Pre sales at 150,000.
Palm is counting on the Pre to turn the tide for the company. Palm has been plagued by financial woes and in the fourth quarter, which ended before the launch of the Pre, Palm posted a net loss of $105 million, compared to $43.4 million the year before.
The company is now likely to capitalize on the success of the Pre, says Snyder in his report. Palm is likely producing about 15,000 Pre phones a day and will ship one million phones to Sprint, its exclusive carrier partner, in the first full quarter of production, he says.
Still Palm has a long way to go before it can catch up with the Apple iPhone. The Pre has been often mentioned as one of the strongest rivals to the iPhone. Apple sold more than one million iPhone 3G S models in just three days after its release on June 19.
With 2009 halfway over, the US Government is gearing up for what’s sure to be one of the next year’s biggest undertakings: the tedious process of counting every single one of its citizens. That’s right folks, it’s T-minus 9 months to the 2010 Census.
It’s a huge job for sure, and that’s exactly why the Census Bureau has partnered with with Sprint and Harris Communications to get the job done. Sprint’s bringing their nationwide network to the table, and Harris (a wireless equipment and systems producer) is handling the hardware for all the Census takers on the job. That combination means realtime updates from the field, and hopefully greater accuracy than previous attempts. Things have been going swimmingly so far: 140,000 field workers have been up and running with the Sprint-Harris units since April, and so far features like integrated GPS and biometric security have been serving them well.
According to a recent release, Sprint’s really throwing their weight into this whole Census business. Integration with Harris equipment is only a fraction of how involved they’re getting; in addition, Sprint is providing
* Approximately 500 Sprint Global MPLS sites across United States, allowing local Census offices to connect on a single IP-based network
* Roughly 1,500 managed devices including routers, switches, firewalls and Intrusion Detection Service (IDS) for additional security
* More than 150,000 active telemetry wireless devices that will allow workers to collect data remotely, resulting in more accurate reporting and substantially less use of paper
* About 1,500 mobile broadband connection cards, offering high speed connectivity on America’s most dependable 3G network*
* Significant professional services and integration expertise such as on-site security management, dedicated program management, and data center hosting services from Sprint, providing the critical infrastructure “glue” for one of the most complex activities of 2010
Hopefully, all the hard work pays off and we get the most accurate Census ever, but we’ll have to take their word for it: folks like you and me can’t see the raw data until 2082.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
We use the Internet all the time: at home, at work (especially at Google!), on the move, and, increasingly, at school. We believe that the Internet and cloud-based tools are a key part of a 21st century classroom, helping students learn and teachers teach in collaborative and innovative ways. Students use Google Docs to work on group projects; classrooms use Google Sites to show off their work; and teachers use Forms in Google Docs for instant grading and Google Calendar for lesson planning. Google Apps Education Edition is helping schools build online communities for students, teachers and parents, and we now have 4 million students using Google Apps Education around the world.
This week the Google Apps Education team is launching a few new ways to make it easier for K-12 schools to use Google Apps, and attending the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in Washington D.C. To help address schools' email security needs, Google Message Security (GMS) will be offered free to current and new eligible primary and secondary schools globally that opt in by July of next year. GMS filters out email messaging threats, and education IT departments can customize the filtering rules and group messaging lists to suit their schools. We're also launching the Google Apps Education Community site for educators and students to share tips and ideas for using Google Apps in their classrooms, as well as the Search Education Curriculum and a Google Apps Education resource center with more than 20 classroom-ready lesson plans for teachers. We'll be adding more to these resources going forward.
If you're at NECC this year, come visit the Google team in booth #3148. If not, the teaching and learning continues with some cool presentations and lesson plans on the Google Apps Education Community site, or you can learn more at google.com/a/edu.
A lot of the time the name “Comcast” is met with disgust, or just general loathing thanks to its poor customer service and bandwidth caps. This time, however, Comcast is rolling out a new service that might actually raise some opinions. Comcast is the first cable company in the US to offer a wireless broadband connection through WiMAX.
The program, called “Comcact High Speed 2go,” starts today in Portland, Oregon. It covers the entire city in 4G wireless WiMAX, and will soon be bringing it to other cites, specifically Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia by the end of the year. The service will cost $50 per month for those who want use it only within those cities, or $70 to use the WiMAX in the cities, and Sprint’s 3G network elsewhere in the country. However, it looks to be that the nationwide plan will not allow you to access Sprint’s 4G networks already in some cities, which seems a bit counter intuitive. For $70 a month it would be nice to be able to use the Sprint WiMAX network in Baltimore and other cities.
While Comcast isn’t the first cable company to offer a wireless connection outside the home, it does seem to be the first to use WiMAX rather than Wi-Fi access points. Although, as Time Warner Cable gets into the same space elsewhere in the country it might not be all that great. If users of one WiMAX service can’t access the WiMAX in other cities, it might be better to wait until the other cell phone companies roll out their LTE networks. Nationwide 4G connection would be nice without having to worry about which company is providing it, though it’s probably just a pipe dream right now.
If you’ve been biting your nails off anticipating the launch of the Blackberry Tour, you probably want to visit a psychiatrist ASAP. But you can also be happy to know that Verizon Wireless just announced that they’ll be releasing the Tour on July 12th. The Tour provides anyone hell-bent on Verizon (like people who actually want their phone to make and receive calls) a good multimedia phone in the $200 price range.
The more cargo bikes I see, the more I want one. They’re immensely practical in any city, and can carry enough junk to make most car journeys pointless. But if you’re already used to a bike you likely think smaller — daily rather than weekly trips to the grocery store, for example. The cargo bike, then, may best be marketed at the guilt-ridden car user.
And this cargo bike might be just the one to pry you away from your gas-fuelled obsession. The Madsen Bucket Cargo Bike is a purpose built, long-wheelbase bicycle with a giant plastic bucket on the back. The $1300 bike comes with an eight-speed derailleur with trigger shifers to get things moving and a disk brake to stop when fully loaded. The bucket at the rear holds 40 gallons and can be swapped out with a supplied two-seater bench and seat-belts. There’s a bucket free version, too, for $1100. It’s not a steal, but compared to a car it looks very cheap, and you’ll be traveling in style.
In fact, one way to think of this is as a stretch limo with a pool in the back, for little people at least — just add hot water and cold champagne.
Here’s one more thing that separates the Palm Pre from Apple’s iPhone: the removable battery. A new battery from Innocell promises longer standby and talk time than the original. The additional battery life is crammed into the exact same specifications as the original battery and costs just $44.95.
Battery life is the bane of smartphones. Many believe the next big thing in smart phones is battery advances as it doesn’t matter if your phone has GPS, Bluetooth, a billion Apps; if your battery runs out of juice, it is just as handy as a brick. Manufacturers are very aware of fine line they walk in keeping weight and size to a minimum while trying to eek out significant battery life.
But smart phones like Apple’s iPhone have a non-replaceable battery. This means users must plug the phone in or slide the phone into a battery pack such as Mophie’s Juice Pack, a clever work around that adds some bulk but carries more charge than the original battery.
According to Seido’s online store, Innocell is developing a super-duper extended battery that will include a rubberized battery door to accommodate the slightly bigger size. From Seido, “This Innocell extended battery provides up to nearly twice the capacity than the standard battery. Even with heavy phone and data usage, this battery will keep your Pre charged and ready to go.” Price and availability has yet to be announced for this battery.
For those traveling with their Palm Pre, extra batteries make a whole lot of sense. Having the ability to change out a common wear item, such as a battery, makes the Palm Pre a smarter smartphone.
AFP - European holidaymakers can expect a lower bill for using their mobile phones while abroad in Europe this summer because new EU regulated price caps took effect across the 27-nation bloc on Wednesday.
Here’s an interesting metric. Apple’s (AAPL) Web site last month drew more than 55.7 million unique visitors, more than the site of any other computer hardware manufacturer, according to a report released this week by Nielsen Online. The number of visitors was more than double that of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), which drew in 21.9 million people and triple Dell’s (DELL), which drew 16.8 million. May visitors to Apple’s Web site spent an average of an hour and 14 minutes on it. 
Did you know you can switch tabs in Firefox by making a twisting motion with your fingers on a multi-touch surface? I did. Turns out I've been doing it for months — I thought I was late to the party and was too ashamed to mention it to anybody for fear of an epic internet ribbing ("What, you just figured that out?"). But no, apparently it was top secret and highly experimental. That was in the beta, though; it looks like the official version has reduced it to a hack.
Fortunately, mastering this multi-touch-enabling technique will allow you to tweak your gestures, resulting in everlasting glory.
Energizer has launched an extremely useful range of products. XPal consists of various battery/charger packs which acknowledge that the batteries in your devices suck, and then do something about it.
Here we are with another selection of Palm Pre related news, and first things first, a GSM version has been spotted.
Fifty-seven percent. That’s how much overall venture-backed liquidity decreased in the second quarter of 2009 compared to that of last year: from $6.48 billion to $2.8 billion, if you want the hard numbers. Looking at the chart, I’d say the drop compared to the second quarter of 2007 ($14.6 billion) is even more telling. It’s the bad news from this just-released Dow Jones VentureSource report, with the only positive nugget the fact that three VC-backed companies have been able to complete IPOs (raising a total of $232 million), ending a nine-month drought. 
Reuters - Microsoft Corp's new Bing search engine gained U.S. market share in its first month in operation but still trails dominant rival Google Inc, according to data released on Wednesday.
The wave of investments in "realtime" is continuing with today's announcement from Cognitive Match that it has raised Series A investment from Dawn Capital. Terms were undisclosed but it's understood the figure was in the £1m+ ballpark, in tranches. The UK company applies artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content to individuals in, you guessed it, realtime. This content can be product, offers, editorial or advertising of course, making it a very interesting prospect for an outfit like Twitter.
The Walkman is 30 years old today, but Sony (SNE) isn’t throwing the iconic gadget much of a birthday party. More of a somber memorial, really: There’s a special exhibit at Sony’s archive, but that’s about it.
I was pretty excited about 
Addictive, intriguing and well-designed were three words I thought I would end up describing the game. And the first two still hold true. The game is split up into a series of short missions (not meant to take more than 5 minutes at the most; some of them are as short as 30 seconds), each of which is challenging and engaging. Overall, I had a hard time beating most missions on the first try, but usually handled it on the second or third. That said, some missions (like the 30 second ones) were uselessly easy and some missions were unnecessarily tedious and frustrating.
You weave and wind your way throughout a nondescript South American jungle, and the landscape is filled with trees rocks that force you to stay on a path. The game makers had to be drunk when they designed some of these paths, because they weaved and wound so much I felt like I was getting dizzy while sitting still in my chair. Given the nature of the controls (you have to keep dragging your finger along the screen to move at all), these labyrinthine environments were obnoxious and unwanted.
OK - I’ve talked a lot about how I liked the gameplay, but what did I like? Mostly, it was the tactile nature of the skirmishes. You use the environment (i.e. hide behind trees) and your special weapons (e.g. grenades) to destroy your enemy before they know what hit ‘em. Though this often means having to play the level twice (and just getting man-handled the first time), it also results in a more strategic shooting game. The enemies move in a predictable manner, so you can plan your route ahead of time and carefully pick them off, one by one.
According to 
We were just forwarded an e-mail conversation between a 
It’s sad to see a company that we were all so excited about fade further into oblivion. Today 
Bet you didn’t see this one coming. Back in 2007 we 
Let’s face it: there are a lot of crappy games available for the iPhone. Even 99 cents — as cheap as that is — is more than I’m willing to pay for most games, since I’m unlikely to get even a dollar’s worth of enjoyment from them. Not so with Freeverse’s 
So called “Hit Man” spam is back. This type of spam attempts to extort people rather than sell them things or trick them into installing malware on their system. Basically, they get an email from someone claiming they have been hired to kill them but if they pay a certain amount the hit man will walk away rather than complete the job. It’s similar to ransomware and scareware in that all of them attempt to trick the victim into sending money.
Palm is tightlipped about sales of the Palm Pre smartphone released earlier this month but one analyst claims the device is off to a great start.
The more cargo bikes I see, the more I want one. They’re immensely practical in any city, and can carry enough junk to make most car journeys pointless. But if you’re already used to a bike you likely think smaller — daily rather than weekly trips to the grocery store, for example. The cargo bike, then, may best be marketed at the guilt-ridden car user.
Here’s one more thing that separates the Palm Pre from Apple’s iPhone: the removable battery. A new battery from Innocell promises longer standby and talk time than the original. The additional battery life is crammed into the exact same specifications as the original battery and costs just $44.95.