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iCanSee iPhone app turns your phone into a magnifying glassIntomobile reviews iCanSee, an iPhone app that converts your iPhone into a magnifying glass. iCanSee is designed to turn any iPhone into a magnifying glass. The iCanSee on-screen magnification controls...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Oct 2009 | 4:27 am The Elbit Systems of America Closed Hatches Concept Enables Fighting as Effectively Under Closed Hatches as in Exposed ConditionsFORT WORTH, Texas, Oct. 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Elbit Systems of America, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Elbit Systems Ltd. (Nasdaq: ESLT) will present its latest concept...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 Oct 2009 | 4:09 am Padang. SMS sent from rubble offers hope of survivorsAccording to Sky News, a text message was sent Friday night asking for help, from a trapped guest under the remains of the ruined Ambacan hotel. "We think there are eight people alive in there. One sent...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 Oct 2009 | 3:57 am Judge to decide Monday on bail in Andrews stalking (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 Oct 2009 | 3:53 am Cybersecurity starts at home and in the office
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 Ethio Planet News | Scientists find pre-human ancestor skeleton in Africa Belleville News Democrat WASHINGTON -- Move over, Lucy. A 4-foot-tall female nicknamed Ardi, who lived 4.4 million years ago in Africa, has replaced you as the earliest best known ancestor of the human species. ... CONSIDERED | Art by Lou Beach Ardi explodes a human myth Sharpening the Focus On Human Evolution |
Lots of negative feedback from our post the other day on Cash4Gold’s amazing growth and profitability. This year, their third year of operations, they are on track to make $160 million in revenue and $50 million or so in profits. All from encouraging people to send in gold jewelry in exchange for cash.
A handful of comments pointed out the very funny Onion spoof on the company where the U.S. government uses Cash4Gold to pay down the national debt. But many of the rest say the company is a scam.
Example: “They offer people significantly less money than their gold is worth and prey on people’s ignorance and desperation. If those profit margins are right, they’re basically stealing from the uninformed. Search online and you’ll find a ton of scam stories about them. It is a very, very shady business…”
Another: “There must be a difference between doing business and stealing from people. I can not believe that this company is still in business. goverment should bring some regulations and monitoring to this industry. due to the recession people are desperate and this company is taking advantage from people. how the owners can sleep at nights. they are taking advantage of people in need of money.”
And: “It appears they are litigious scammers. Running scams is a great way to rake in money.”
Etc.
The chief complaint is that the company offers customers too little money for their gold compared to the spot price at any given time. My understanding is the company aims to pay no more than 50% of the spot price to sellers. The rest, after operational and substantial marketing expense, is profit.
And there is certainly nothing wrong with a company making a profit. They are offering a convenient service to consumers (they send you the prepaid envelope to ship your gold, pay insurance, and ship the gold back to you if you don’t take their offer). If you don’t like what they offer to pay you, use another service. The site even tells you that pawn shops, local jewelers and online services like eBay and Craigslist may fetch you a higher price.
Overall I don’t see any serious ethical issues at all with Cash4Gold, with one exception. If the company is in fact not sending back jewelry promptly to customers who have declined the offer, that needs to be fixed. But hard bargaining and lowballing offers to consumers isn’t evil. It’s just a business decision.
There are no ethical issues here that you don’t see with Google’s business model that generates obscene profits. Or the Windows/Office franchise. Or the exorbitantly priced hot dog vendor at the baseball stadium. Or $30 wifi in a hotel.
I’d personally like to see them make a flat out promise to pay some percentage of the spot price of gold – say 50% or 66%. That way people can have a better idea of what they’ll be offered. Given how many competitors there are in this market, I wouldn’t be surprised for something like that to happen eventually anyway.
But let’s save the “this is evil” comments for the really insidious stuff. Like Jigsaw, who continues to make a killing of the sale of our personal information. Or the Intelius scam we reported on last year where consumers were being automatically signed up to useless credit card subscriptions.
Making obscene profits may make you jealous, but it isn’t evil. There’s a reason so many people are using the Cash4Gold service – it’s easy and convenient. They don’t make promises on their website that they don’t keep, and they aren’t tricking or scamming people. They are simply buying low and selling high, and that’s capitalism at its finest.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
"Outrage" premieres on HBO this week.An official selection of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, OUTRAGE investigates the hidden lives of some of the country's most powerful policymakers - from now-retired Idaho Senator Larry Craig, to former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy - and examines how these and other politicians have inflicted damage on millions of Americans by opposing gay rights. Equally disturbing, the film explores the mainstream media's complicity in keeping those secrets, despite the growing efforts to "out" them by gay rights organizations and bloggers.
Through a combination of archival news footage and exclusive interviews with politicians and members of the media, OUTRAGE probes the psychology of a double lifestyle, the ethics of outing closeted politicians, and the double standards that the media upholds in its coverage of the sex lives of gay public figures. As Barney Frank, perhaps the best-known openly gay member of Congress explains, "There is a right to privacy, but not a right to hypocrisy. It is very important that the people who make the law be subject to the law."
OUTRAGE (Thanks, Kirby!)
 Examiner.com | Microsoft hopes Windows 7 makes you forget about Vista Los Angeles Times The new operating system is more consumer friendly and includes several upgrades, including a lightning-fast search function. By David Colker Microsoft Corp.'s new Windows 7 computer operating system hopes to pull off a major trick with memory. ... Native Client in Chrome: Google flexes Web muscle Upgraded Google Chrome loaded with Native Client Google's PC operating system: The dawn of a new tech war? |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It’s just weird.
It’s weird that Justin Timberlake, he formerly of *NSync and Emmy-award-winning dick boxing fame, is currently spending his days pretending to be the guy who founded Plaxo. It’s also just weird that – along with Shawn Fanning’s pivotal cameo in the blasphemous remake of the Italian Job – both of the founders of Napster have now been key plot points in major Hollywood movies. And furthermore, as if all of that wasn’t just batshit weird enough – I discover that Justin Timberlake – when he’s not dressing up as the dude from the board of Yammer – has started to invest in Silicon Valley start-ups. Weird weird weird.
Those, roughly, were my thoughts on Thursday evening, as I stood - clutching a bottle of water – at the launch party for Robo.to, the latest product from Particle, which happens to be the start-up that Timberlake invested in. Timberlake was in town too – in order to dress up as the guy from Causes – but couldn’t make the party due to work commitments. That was also weird, I thought. Not that he’d bailed in order to dress up as the other Facebook guy, but rather that him doing so had resulted in a reporter from US Weekly (which I discovered is pronounced “us”, rather than “US” – which is also weird, given that it’s not about “us”, but rather about “them”) emailing me for a comment.
The subject line of the email read ” US WEEKLY WOULD LIKE TO CHAT WITH YOU” which made me think, as it would you, Holy Shit! All caps! This must be important!
And indeed it was…
Hi Paul
Just touching base with you in regards to your article you wrote regarding Justin Timberlake snubbing the event. Would love to chat with you. Can be OFF THE RECORD and totally CONFIDENTIAL if you prefer.
How much notice did JT people give you guys? Did he call himself personally to cancel? I heard that he may actually be in San Fran, is there any chance he will make it to the after event festivities?
Give me a call or let me know how I can reach you.
Thanks,
xxxxxxx
Staff Reporter, US weekly.
My first instinct, of course, was to fuck with her. To reply with a whole bunch of lies about how Timberlake had sent me flowers, or written me a really sweet note of apology. That would be hilarious, I thought, especially if it ended up in US Weekly. I mean, the fact that their fact checking doesn’t even extend to ensuring that they’re emailing the right person (it was MG’s story) or even the correct organisers (it wasn’t our event) suggests that I could basically send them any old bullshit and see it in print.
But that would be wrong, and unfair. After all, it was MG’s moment, not mine. So I did the right thing.
I fucked with MG…
from Paul Carr
to xxxxxxxx
cc: MG Siegler, Melissa Klein
subject Re: From blog: US WEEKLY WOULD LIKE TO CHAT WITH YOUHi xxxxxxx,
Thanks for your email. Actually the piece was written by MG Siegler,
who I’m copying in to this email, along with Melissa who is handling
PR for the event.MG would be better placed to tell you either ON or OFF the RECORD how
he heard the news. As far as I know JT sent him a bouquet of flowers
and a hand-written note of apology, which was both sweet and entirely
unnecessary.Good luck with your story.
Best,
Paul
For good measure, I also Tweeted MG’s reaction to the fictitious flowers. I mean, sure, anyone seeing the tweet would think it was weird that Justin Timberlake would send flowers to a TechCrunch reporter. But then again, they’d also think it was weird that an US Weekly reporter would email me to ask about Justin Timberlake. They might also find it weird that, despite being in town, one of Particle’s main investors was too busy dressing up as the dude from the Facebook movie to attend his own party. If only Sean Parker had shown up at the party, wearing a three-piece suit and a trilby, the weirdness would have reached such a pitch that the world might have fallen off its axis.
But back to me. As I considered the almost countless ways that Timberlake slowly turning into the character he’s playing is weird, it occurred to me that something very weird is happening to geeks and celebrities generally. It’s been happening for a while in fact, starting probably – and fittingly – with Shawn Fanning appearing in the Italian Job.
For their part, geeks are becoming cool. And by cool I don’t mean ironic cool, like Michael Cera in Juno, or fake cool like Abby the would-be Suicide Girl in NCIS – I mean actual geeks are becoming actually cool, to the point where movies are getting made about them.
At the same time, cool people – celebrities, former boyband members, husbands of Demi Moore – are doing their best to become geeks. It used to be that computer club nerds grew up wanting to be celebrities, or at least to have sex with them. Now those same celebrities are so keen to emulate the nerds that they’ve started Tweeting and blogging and investing in startups. Equally, it used to be the natural order of things that rich movie stars got paid millions of dollars to dress up as people with a fraction of their personal wealth, now it’s the precisely the reverse: Sean Parker is paid considerably more to be Sean Parker than Justin Timberlake ever will.
If this trend continues, there has to be a point when the lines on the dorks/celebrities graph cross: when to all intents and purposes the two switch roles. And that day will not just be weird, but also terrifying. Just think of it for a moment: US weekly reports of Larry Page punching a staffer when he finds a green M&M in his dressing room. Scoble passed out in front of the Viper Room, a dozen paparazzo surrounding him, unaware that he’s already uploaded the photos himself to Flickr. And what’s that commotion in the bathroom stall? Oh, it’s just MG making out with a Pussycat Doll. Meanwhile the old-style celebrities will be working late at the office, pushing out a new release of their iPhone app before heading home to catch Arrington hosting the Soup.
Or at least that’s what I imagined as I stood at the party, holding my bottle of water and listening to the expectant hubbub of people speculating as to whether Timberlake might show up after all. We were all pretending to care about Robo.to, of course, but we all knew why we were really there. And at that, came a shout…
“Justin’s here!”
Holy crap! HE’S HERE! All caps – I panicked. I’m terrible at meeting celebrities; I always say exactly the wrong thing. “Roman, great to meet you. Have you met my 12 year old sister? You guys can use my room.” That kind of thing.
Heads turned. If there had been a piano player, he’d had stopped playing and you would have been able to hear a pin drop. But there wasn’t so he didn’t and you couldn’t – and anyway it was soon revealed to be a cruel joke. Justin was indeed at the party, but the geek Justin – Justin Kan from Justin.tv – not the celebrity one whose mere hint that he might show up at a party guarantees its success.
Saddened yet somehow relieved that – for that night at least – the natural order of things remained intact, I took a final sip of my water and headed home, via dinner at In-N-Out Burger. Meanwhile, somewhere across the city, I imagined Justin Timberlake partying with the Pussycat Dolls, or drunk dialling Britney Spears or whatever it is that proper celebrities do.
I’m only speculating on that last bit, of course, but what the hell – US Weekly, call me. I’ll Photoshop up some pictures.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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With over 300 million users and 40 million daily status updates, Facebook has an immense amount of data that could potentially be used to gauge any number of things, from the hottest up-and-coming bands to the most discussed political issues. Earlier this week some of the site’s engineers decided to use this dataset to measure something a bit more fundamental: happiness. Dubbed Gross National Happiness, this new prototype application does its best to determine if Facebook users in the United States are happy or sad.
Here’s how the application’s developers describe it:
…Grouped together, the status updates of millions of Facebook users from every demographic in the nation can work together to say something about how we as a nation are doing. Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. This graph represents how “happy” the nation is doing from day to day, by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when they update their status: When people are using more positive words (or fewer negative words) in their status updates than usual, that day is happier than usual!
Data is collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook, which is all anonymized before its analyzed. To determine if a particular status message is happy or sad (or neither), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment.
You can adjust the graph by sliding the bar at the bottom of the screen. You can also adjust the zoom by dragging the handlebars on the slider, and can actually watch happiness jump hour-to-hour, though it’s a bit difficult to navigate when you’re zoomed in that far. It’s fun to play around with, but you aren’t going to find many surprises: happiness generally hits a low on Mondays, then gradually grows up through the weekend when it drops again as the work-week begins. Peaks are all found around holidays, with Thanksgiving drawing the most happiness. Also worth nothing: this year there was an abrupt drop in happiness in late June, which is likely associated with the tragic death of Michael Jackson.
The app is part of Facebook’s recently released Prototypes section, which gives Facebook engineers a chance to show off the projects they’ve built before they’re ready for prime-time.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
While gadget recycling services like Gazelle are handy and more people should take advantage of them, this in-store “ecoATM” is perhaps an even better idea. You put your old phone in there, identify it, and it checks for signs of wear. You get a quote on the spot, redeemable in store credit or whatever — or if it’s not worth anything, you can have it safely recycled and they’ll plant a tree on your behalf.
The first ecoATM, installed in a furniture store in Omaha (???), appears to work fine, having bought over 20 phones on its first day. I imagine if they’d installed it at a Best Buy or in a mobile retail store, they might have gotten a bit more, but they consider it a success and that’s what matters. They’ll be rolling out more over the next few months — check back later to see if one’s coming up near you.
AP - The nation needs to give the same urgency to making sure all Americans have broadband access as the Eisenhower administration did in building an interstate highway system a half-century ago, a report released Friday concluded.
"Ex-county man ready to go home after double-hand transplant" (via Fortean Times)In a strange way, the double transplant was a bit of setback for Kepner, who had lost part of both of his arms and legs in 1999. Doctors amputated the limbs in a bid to save his life after Kepner came down with a strep infection that plunged him into a coma.
After the amputations, Kepner was outfitted with prosthetic hands and feet and forged on with his life.
"He had gotten quite used to his hooks," his mother says of her son's artificial arms. "He could dress himself. He could drive his car. He could do a lot of things..."
Now in therapy (after the transplants), he is learning how to pick up small items, like cotton balls, and catch a ball, but he still has no feeling in his fingers. The nerves grow about an inch a month from where the hands were attached, at the forearm.
"They told him it will be at least until the end of the year before those nerves get down into those fingers," Doris Schafer said. "Then he'll begin to do things."
 Rediff | Bing's Biggest Enemy in Search Wars (Hint: Not Google, Exactly) PC World It won't be clear for some time whether Bing's attempt to grab search engine market share from Google has stalled, or even gone into reverse. The September numbers from Web metrics firm Net Applications show a slight drop in Bing's global market share, ... Bing Gets Dinged, But The Market-Share Game's Far From Over Bing takes first slip in search market More Search Features for Google, Less Market Share for Bing |
Fall is here, don’t get me wrong. It’s NOT time to start thinking about winter yet – no sir. However, let’s start thinking about winter.
I live in an old apartment in Boston and the radiator in my office is half the size of all the other radiators in my place. As such, it doesn’t put out much heat in the winter time and I’ve had to resort to space heaters (which I’m not too fond of) and Snuggies when it gets cold.
These micathermic heaters have caught my attention, though. They’re kind of like space heaters but they’re super thin and can be wall-mounted. I saw this particular one in the SkyMall catalog today and wondered if anybody that’s reading this post either owns this exact model or one like it.
The product description says the following:
Energy-efficient Micathermic Heater uses less electricity because it makes you comfortable sooner.
Micathermic heater uses 80% convection and 20% reflective heat to quickly warm all the air in a room so you’re more comfortable immediately. Silent operation and a 12-hour digital timer make this heater ideal for the bedroom. Includes adjustable digital thermostat to maintain desired temperature, and heats up in about a minute.
When room temperature reaches the desired level, the ECO function automatically cuts one-third of the power usage. Automatic overheat and tip-over safety shut-off. Includes casters for portability, but they can be removed so the panel can be mounted on a wall, if desired.
Wonderful, yes, I like where this is going. This model can apparently heat a 150 square-foot room – the exact size of my office. It all sounds a bit too good to be true, though, especially at $120. So my question to you, if you’ll humor me, is how well do these things actually work?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nobody expected that this Apple-Psystar affair would be rapid or easy, but at this point it’s positively interminable. Psystar has just switched out a lawyer, who probably just about keeled over from constantly parrying Apple’s well-founded injunctions against his client’s business. Here’s hoping Mr. Welker takes a well-deserved vacation.
Even reporting this may be making too much out of it; it’s stated that he never received any money from Psystar and didn’t even have any direct communication with them. Perhaps the firm they do work with hired him as a jackal, poring through law-books in an effort to find fresh allegations to throw at Apple. After all, every day they aren’t shut down is one more day they’re selling hot Macs.
Oh dear - it's on now.
Either Palm's making a stand — or they've stepped in it big time.
Wow, it’s on. I thought that Palm was going to work out an alternate solution after that official reprimand from the USB Implementers Forum, but they’re going right ahead with iTunes compatibility again. I suppose they feel that it’s more of a crime for Apple to restrict device access than it is to spoof a device’s maker. At any rate, the conflict just got escalated. This will be remembered, 24-style, as the moment Palm went rogue.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Here’s the latest movie based on a video game that’s sure to be horrendous: Spore will be turned into a movie, ladies and gentlemen! Only five people will be allowed in the theaters at a time in order to prevent piracy, jkjk!
Right, so 20th Century Fox picked up the rights to make the movie, and Robots director Chris Wedge is currently penciled in to direct. Greg Erb (he wrote Rocketman, which I liked as a youth) and Jason Oremland (who doesn’t seem to have done much of any great import yet) will write the movie. They were also involved with the upcoming Disney movie The Princess and the Frog. I wonder what that’s about…
Nowhere do I see Will Wright, the game’s creator, being involved. That’s not to say that he won’t be involved, but you figure that a man so important as Will Wright would at least get a mention of being involved.
One thing’s for sure: it cannot be any worse than 2012.
PSP what? Nobody cares about that old thing. Honestly, do you want to carry around yet another heavy, fragile, state-of-the-art toy? No. What you need (what this country needs) is a cheap little handheld Genesis sporting 20 of the system's greatest semi-hits. No need to worry about managed copies, DRM, firmware updates, or UMD transfer — just hit the power button and you'll be playing Altered Beast or Sonic & Knuckles before you can say "Seeegaaaa!"
It's Saturday. Relax and check out the video while you digest brunch.
Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.
Parade magazine publishes a new poll tomorrow - with a piece on CBS Sunday Morning that I'm part of - which reveals the fluid and expanding meaning of spirituality in America. Fifty-nine percent Americans polled agree that "all religions have validity" and only twelve percent agree that "mine is the only true religion." To an extent, this reflects an attitude introduced into America by Enlightenment philosophy, Freemasonry, Transcendentalism, and, most recently, Theosophy in the late 19th century. Theosophy emphasized the principle that all religions emerge from a universal source. Likewise, the survey reflects the inroads of what might be considered occult or New Age outlooks in America: Seven percent of Americans believe in reincarnation (a concept that few Americans had heard of a generation ago); seventeen percent report having contact with the dead; forty-nine percent read horoscopes "for fun," whereas twelve percent are believers. The poll reveals many other wrinkles, which readers will find cause for cheer or depression, depending upon their outlook. But consider: Gandhi, whose 140th birthday fell yesterday, was making what was considered a radical statement when he declared that "all religions are true" (to which he also added, "all have some error in them"). Today, a majority of Americans agree.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Books vanishing from e-readers…magazines on Hulu…DVDs from a kiosk…cats and dogs living together…mass hysteria!
If the medium was the message in yesterday’s zeitgeist, today’s “message transcends the medium” is a whole new mindset. It’s a brave new world out there, and AllthingsD didn’t fail to help make sense of it this week.
Boomtown was abuzz with the latest conversation from an Internet publishing sensation. Trip Adler, CEO of San Francisco-based Scribd, spoke to Kara about all things text and what its like to share a niche with giants. Speaking of giants, Boomtown was in Seattle this week, peering through everyone’s favorite Windows. While there, Kara caught wind of CEO Steve Ballmer’s embrace of the “new efficiency” by way of some executive belt-tightening. And in a followup to the near-viral “Louie Swisher loves Redbox” video, Kara wrote about a legal slap-fight between the DVD rental kiosk group and Fox.
While Fox was busy giving Redbox a black-eye, Digital Daily covered blows from a different kind of palm. It seems that Palm’s new mobile darling, the Pre, is a little over-abundant on store shelves. An 11 week-deep glut of the device may indicate tough times ahead for the smart-phone contender. If one plucky contender wasn’t enough, Digital Daily also covered IBM’s release of a LotusLive iNotes. This mail, calendar, and task management solution takes aim at a market currently in Google’s crosshairs. Finally, the week wouldn’t be complete with out a good Apple prognostication. John closed things out with some FCC documents that indicate a new wireless mouse and keyboard offering from the crew at 1 Infinite Loop. The logical jump is that the new input devices might be designed to complement a newly refreshed line of desktops.
John had new Macs and Peter had old tricks this week, specifically of the Kindle kind. In a settlement with the now-famous “1984 kid,” Amazon sealed up some of the holes in its policies about removing books from its Kindle devices. Now it’s most certainly against their policy to remove data…except when it isn’t. In a similar vein, more details surfaced about an upcoming e-publishing venture from Time that aims to put the content genie back in the bottle, Hulu style. The concept is to create a clearinghouse for magazines online and take back control of content and advertising dollars. Just in case we were beginning to think that there is always digital strength in numbers, Peter covered Comcast’s squashing of a rumor that it was looking to acquire a stake in NBC. Just the hint of such a move sent Comcast’s stock on a temporary tumble.
Walt was a personal technology machine this week with new additions to both the personal technology section and Mossberg’s Mailbox. And if that weren’t enough, Katie covered an important countertrend in personal tech that really turned some heads.
The personal tech feature of the week was the HTC Hero. This latest offering from the veteran Taiwan phone manufacturer features its most robust customization of the Android platform yet. Walt gave it high marks and placed it squarely among the Blackberry-Palm-Apple pantheon.
Walt checked the mailbox this week and answered some serious questions about the rise of the touchscreen laptop, the finer points of OS X and the iPhone OS, and tried to let a Vista Ultimate user down easy about the limited options for an easy upgrade to Windows 7.
Katie brought her A game to The Mossberg Solution with a succinct and poignant analysis of HP’s new growth model. The new Photosmart All-in-One with “Touch-Smart Web” bucks the current trend of photos and documents for digital display and tried to put consumers back in the printing game. The new printing experience uses a robust touchscreen and Web interface to allow printing of pics straight from the Web without a computer ever being involved. While she did have some good things to say about the printer’s apps and interface, HP’s overall strategy left her underwhelmed.
Whether you want to be the first to know when “that tablet” finally arrives or are just into the best coverage from the industry that is changing the world, there is no better homepage for all-things-tech than AllthingsD.
There have been many Twitter-clones that have emerged over the past few years. There’s been Koornk, and German clone Duduku. Yahoo rolled out its microblogging service, Yahoo Meme, a few months ago in Portuguese, then Spanish and finally in English a few weeks ago. It looks like there is another clone on the block—Birddi.
The microblogging site is a virtual clone of Twitter. Everything from the blue interface to the to the style of the logo to the actual “Birddi” bird is strikingly similar to Twitter. According to the site, Birddi is “a service for friends, family and coworkers to communicate and stay connected with the exchange of quick messages. People write short updates, often called ‘Berddis’ in 140 characters or less.” Like with Twitter, you can Direct Message other users, post pictures and use hashtags to mark communications. Birddi also features trending topics and search functionality. One big difference: the site features advertisements powered by Google AdSense.
According to this Argentinian news article, (here’s the translated version) Birddi was started by 19-year-old Argentinian developer Martin Lio, who saw the power of Twitter during the 2008 presidential elections and hoped to inspire this communication during Argentinian elections with a Spanish clone. In the report, Lio says he is also planning to launch a Birddi iPhone app.
The site has basically stolen all of Twitter’s lay out, branding and wording, which seems totally sketchy. This must surely infringe upon a patent or copyright.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Last night, I was out with some friends in search of a particular bar. Naturally, we did the 21st century equivalent of asking a gas station attendant for directions, we pulled out our iPhones to look it up in the Maps application. The result was odd; the bar we were looking for was there, but there was another result in the same spot, labeled as “User-created content.”
Yesterday, Search Engine Land noted that sponsored links (ads) are starting to show up in the Maps application on the iPhone. It would appear that Google is slowly adding some new features. But what’s odd is that these features are showing up without warning, and, as far as I can tell, without a way to turn them off.
While clearly, Google is not going to let you turn off sponsored links, the user-generated content element is odd. These pins show that some random person I don’t know was at the place I’m looking for, at some random time. It’s simply not useful at all.
I also wonder how Apple, which loves to have total control of its devices, feels about these additions. Google helped Apple build the default Maps application, but it is still one of Apple’s own apps and now it seems that Google can simply inject any content it wants into Maps from its end. Also a bit odd is that this particular piece of user-generated content comes from the location-based social network Plazes, which is owned by mobile rival Nokia.
I’m all for Google injecting user-generated content into Maps on the iPhone provided that it’s useful. So far, it doesn’t appear to be. There also needs to be a way to turn it off if you don’t want to see it. Without those two things, Maps on the iPhone could become a cluttered mess of useless information quickly. Perhaps that’s why Apple bought its own mapping company this summer.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
This is not the car he was driving.
Despite cutting a impressive figure at 2.02 meters, having the finest weaponry and starfighters Imperial credits can buy, and controlling the Force, it seems that Darth Vader has gotten stuck on the side of the road.
Dave Prowse was the physical form of Darth Vader for the original Star Wars trilogy, with James Earl Jones as the voice. The BBC reports that Lord Vader was en route to the 501st UK Garrison’s (which ironically is dubbed “Vader’s Fist”) reunion at the National Space Center in Leicester when his car broke down. Traffic officers assisted Lord Vader in getting from the M1 in Northamptonshire to the event. Officer Chapman later remarked, “Meeting Darth Vader is definitely one of the strangest situations I’ve been in.”
The car that Lord Vader was driving also has a interesting bit of history to it. The Mercedes was previously owned by actor Kenny Baker. At only 1.12 Imperial standard meters (which are identical to Earth measurement units), Mr Baker was the man inside R2-D2 for the original trilogy. Lord Vader told the BBC, “He used to keep a little ladder inside the boot so he could climb up and put his suitcases inside. When he had finished, he’d put the ladder back and used a cord to shut the boot. I decided to leave the cord there as a reminder of the car’s previous owner.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I loaded up Gmail this morning expecting to see the usual assault on my inbox, when something new caught my eye. Apparently, Google has started inserting favicons, the little icons that many browsers put next to a website’s URL or bookmark, next to messages.
So far, I’m only seeing it for emails from Netflix. As you can see below, their Gmail favicon matches their website favicon. Others are seeing it too, but again, only for Netflix right now.
The use of these icons is somewhat interesting because it definitely does draw your eye’s attention to these emails. If spammers figure out how to insert these, it could be a bad thing. But for sites like Netflix, it’s another fairly useful way to visually sort email. Anyone else seeing these for any other sites yet?
Also, yes, I realize that I’ve just revealed to the world that I rented Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Don’t judge.
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 Ars Technica | Week in gaming: PSP Go is fail, Uncharted 2 is win Ars Technica This week brought us the PSP Go and reviews of a pile of PSP and PS3 software. Whoever thought we'd end up missing UMDs? This is your week in gaming. By Ben Kuchera | Last updated October 3, 2009 12:15 PM CT This week saw our feature review of Sony's ... Sony's PSP go is good for the road Sony's PSPgo Goes On Sale In North America For $249.99 Possible Proof of Game Rentals for PSPgo? |
The free ride is over, ladies. Go ahead and fire up the Google Maps Apps for your iPhone (or iPhone touch), and you may well run into something you've avoided for so, so long: an ad. That's right: Google Maps now shows advertisements. Things fall apart.
A few days ago, Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur (@Loic) sent out a retweet with a link to a screenshot of his CTO’s Seesmic Web client showing 1,200 Tweets across nearly 20 columns. The joke was that his CTO was trying to achieve a “world record” for how many Tweets could be loaded up into a Twitter client at one time. (It’s not a world record. Competitor TweetDeck can display an unlimited number of Tweets and columns as well). If you click on the screenshot and pan across the enlarged version of it, there you’ll find a dialog box with Loic’s old avatar doing a hang-10 while kite surfing. The juxtaposition is comical, if a little sad—poor @Loic lost in the overflowing stream of Tweets his company is trying to tame.
The image reminded me of another screenshot (see below, click to enlarge) that I once took of an earlier Twitter client called Twhirl, which Seesmic bought before developing its current product. About a year and a half ago, I complained that Twhirl took over my desktop when I first installed it with a constant stream of pop-up messages. I wrote in that post:
This highlights a bigger problem with the Web today. There is too much to pay attention to and not enough ways to reduce the noise.
It’s 18 months later and the problem hasn’t been solved. The screenshot I took back then still resonates because the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information.
This is not to say that there hasn’t been considerable progress in stream readers since that time. Containing 1,200 Tweets within neatly defined columns is definitely better than 1,200 separate dialog boxes taking over my screen, and these apps today are much more able to handle massive amount of messages. But the fact that Seesmic or TweetDeck or any of these apps can display 1,200 Tweets at once is not a feature, it’s a bug. Again, what I said 18 months ago is just as true today:
I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know.
One the main methods emerging to cut down noise in your personal stream is to set up different groups of people or keywords (via search) to follow. Twitter is going to tackle this problem with its new “lists” feature. Seesmic and TweetDeck already address this problem by creating a new column for every group or category you want to follow.
But as the image above makes clear, that strategy breaks down fairly quickly. I have ten columns in my TweetDeck, for instance—one for my personal Twitter account, one for the TechCrunch account, one for my Facebook stream, one for mentions of “techcrunch”, another for mentions of my name (so I can respond to people trying to talk to me whom I don’t follow), another two columns for direct messages, and so on. I rarely look at more than two columns. It’s just not an efficient way keep track of all my different interests in the stream.
And if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all. Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening. It’s enough to make your brain explode.
What these services should strive to do instead is hide the noise, keep it simple. Letting me sort through the stream by creating different groups and lists and columns of things and people I want to pay attention to is great, but it hardly solves the problem. Finding that one great Tweet from @Loic or anyone else I follow shouldn’t be a game of Where’s Waldo?
Really, all I need is two columns: the most recent Tweets from everyone I follow (the standard) and the the most interesting tweets I need to pay attention to. Recent and Interesting. This second column is the tricky one. It needs to be automatically generated and personalized to my interests at that moment.
It would definitely include the most retweeted messages from people I follow over the past 24 to 48 hours because I miss these things during those hours when I am not staring at the stream. (And I stare at my stream more than most people). It would also prioritize tweets from people I follow based on who I pay attention to the most, based on my past history of retweeting, replying to people, or simply lingering over a Tweet while I’m reading. Look at my behavior, and then create a favorites list of sorts out of that.
And if those two columns aren’t enough, then there’s always search. Except search is broken on Twitter. Unless you know the exact word you are looking for, Tweets with related terms won’t show up. And there is no way to sort searches by relevance, it is just sorted by chronology. Maybe Twitter can use some of its $100 million in new funding to fix that, and solve the noise problem while it’s at it.
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Oh, it’s really on now. This morning Palm announced webOS 1.2.1 another point release to its new webOS platform that restores media synchronization with the latest version, 9.0.1, of iTunes. Moreover, the company has gone the extra step of extending that synchronization feature to photos. This despite Apple’s repeated efforts to disable that feature and warnings from the USB Implementers Forum that Palm is potentially violating its USB-IF Membership Agreement by disguising its Pre handset as an Apple device.
From Palm’s webOS 1.2.1 version information:
Feature changes to existing applications
System
- Resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with latest version of iTunes (9.0.1).
- Media sync now synchronizes photo albums, maintaining the album structure in the Photos app.
How did Palm (PALM) do this? By once again making the Pre masquerade as an Apple (AAPL) device. Plug your Pre into your computer and set it to Media Sync and it identifies itself like this:
USB Product ID: 0×1209
USB Vendor ID: 0×05ac (Apple, Inc)
Manufacturer: Apple Inc.
A brazen move, considering the USB-IF specifically warned Palm against doing exactly this in its Sept. 22 letter to the company:
I attach for your information the USB-IF’s adopted and published policy regarding Vendor Identification Numbers (VIDs). Under the Policy, Palm may only use the single Vendor ID issued to Palm for Palm’s usage. Usage of any other company’s Vendor ID is specifically precluded. Palm’s expressed intent to use Apple’s VID appears to violate the attached policy.
Please clarify Palm’s intent and respond to this potential violation within seven days.
Now that Palm has “clarified its intent” with regard to this potential violation, I wonder how Apple and the USB-IF will respond. Do they have any recourse? The USB-IF could revoke Palm’s membership in the group, but what would that accomplish? Very little, as far as I can tell. Certainly, it wouldn’t prevent Palm from continuing to update its devices to synch with iTunes.
Reached for comment, Palm declined to offer one. Apple and the USB-IF have not yet responded to my requests. If and when they do, I’ll update here.
UPDATE: Looks like this cat and mouse game is going to go another round. This just in from Apple: “As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.” Presumably, iTunes 9.0.2 will disable Palm’s latest fix.
 Telegraph.co.uk | Week in Apple: Light Peak, MMS, and dropped calls Ars Technica This week's top Apple news wasn't just about MMS coming to the iphone in the US. It also highlighted Apple's involvement with the new Light Peak optical connection, environmental issues, more tablet rumors, and some new iphone apps that caught our eye. ... The Macalope Weekly: Who's the boss? Newly revealed Apple patent application looks suspiciously tablet-like Apple Patent: Likely a Mouse, Not the Fabled Tablet |
I was on a panel a few weeks ago with Rob Enderle and he was asked by an international journalist what he expected in terms of financial news in the next few months. He made a very interesting point that, being an Apple fanboy, I ignored at the time. He said that Windows 7 would drive a whole new wave of hardware buying and inflate (in a good way) IT spending.
I filed this tidbit away next to my thoughts of maybe one day buying a Zune, but then I cracked open the HP Envy 13 and thought back on my own recent experience with Windows 7— and what he’s saying makes sense.
A few calls later and I found that a number of IT guys I know are genuinely excited about installing Windows 7 in their shops, guys for whom Vista didn’t even register. We’re about see an IT renaissance, and it will be driven by Microsoft.
Remember: Apple may change the way we think, but Microsoft changes the way we spend. Windows 7 is a solid operating system with lots of great IT-oriented features, including an XP emulation mode, an imperative for skittish IT guys. It also runs fairly well on smaller notebooks (although Envy wasn’t technically a netbook, at least by HP’s emphatic definition, it’s still thin and light) and it has most of Vista’s eye-candy with none of the distrust most users had when they saw Vista’s eye-candy when it first came out.
Harbinger of things to come.
There are three forces at work here. First, there is the IT shop. They haven’t upgraded their machines since XP. XP was, at best, 2001 technology and by 2006 over 400 million desktops running the OS. Assuming that even half of those were paid XP seats at major corporations, and you understand that this monster would not just roll over and die. It costs money to upgrade — money companies did not have in late 2007 through all of 2008. Now, with a bit of a loosening in the credit markets, IT departments are going to be upgrading en masse, causing a surge in PC sales and sales of attendant products like drives, memory, and monitors.
Second, consumers are just about done with netbooks. This is an unpopular opinion, I know, but as evidenced by the Envy, the underpowered netbook will be replaced by a more powerful, slightly more expensive mid-tier model that will appeal to everyone, businesses included. Instead of a 15-inch Dell monster, road warriors will carry lighter Windows 7 machines with low-voltage but highly optimized components. Netbook advocates cite cloud storage and a lightweight OS, but when Internet Explorer takes forty seconds to load GMail because you’re running a single core Atom, you’re going to have upset customers. It’s getting harder and harder to go from a peppy computer to a slow one simply because the difference in speed is so staggering. The netbook will remain but it won’t be anybody’s every day computer.
Finally, it’s time for an gamer upgrade. The holidays are upon us, there are no new consoles to buy, and a new cohort of PC gamers is appearing: kids who grew up on powerful consoles like the XBox 360 and the PS2/PS3 family, kids who started gaming perhaps at age 10 and are now 16 or so, who are looking for a bit more power. Windows 7 will give them that slight perceived boost and, since it will come with new machines, it will increase the install base by accretion.
As much as we slobber all over Apple, Microsoft makes the world go around. Google or no Google, the desktop belongs to Redmond and Windows 7 is one of the building blocks of a strong future economy. Here’s hoping they can maintain their Office hegemony but even if they don’t, there’s always Google Wave.
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The free ride is over, ladies. Go ahead and fire up the Google Maps Apps for your iPhone (or iPhone touch), and you may well run into something you’ve avoided for so, so long: an ad. That’s right: Google Maps now shows advertisements. Things fall apart.
As you know, I don’t have an iPhone, nor will I ever, but here you can see what happens when you search for “sushi” in the City of New York. The ad itself, as Search Engine Land agrees, is rather unobtrusive; it’s not like one of those dumb Hulu ads that prevent you from using the site while it airs.
SEL also throws in some speculation that I’ve never seen before, that Apple is working on its own Map App, one that, presumably, wouldn’t bombard you with ads.
The 21 Club is a fancy restaurant on West 52nd Street. Like, we’re talking suit and tie fancy.
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
I was on a panel a few weeks ago with Rob Enderle a few weeks back and he was asked by an international journalist what he expected in terms of financial news in the next few months. He made a very interesting point that, being an Apple fanboy, I ignored at the time. He said that Windows 7 would drive a whole new wave of hardware buying and inflate (in a good way) IT spending.
I filed this tidbit away next to my thoughts of maybe one day buying a Zune, but then I cracked open the HP Envy 13 and thought back on my own recent experience with Windows 7— and what he’s saying makes sense.
A few calls later and I found that a number of IT guys I know are genuinely excited about installing Windows 7 in their shops, guys for whom Vista didn’t even register. We’re about see an IT renaissance, and it will be driven by Microsoft.
Remember: Apple may change the way we think, but Microsoft changes the way we spend. Windows 7 is a solid operating system with lots of great IT-oriented features, including an XP emulation mode, an imperative for skittish IT guys. It also runs fairly well on smaller notebooks (although Envy wasn’t technically a netbook, at least by HP’s emphatic definition, it’s still thin and light) and it has most of Vista’s eye-candy with none of the distrust most users had when they saw Vista’s eye-candy when it first came out.
Harbinger of things to come.
There are three forces at work here. First, there is the IT shop. They haven’t upgraded their machines since XP. XP was, at best, 2001 technology and by 2006 over 400 million desktops running the OS. Assuming that even half of those were paid XP seats at major corporations, and you understand that this monster would not just roll over and die. It costs money to upgrade — money companies did not have in late 2007 through all of 2008. Now, with a bit of a loosening in the credit markets, IT departments are going to be upgrading en masse, causing a surge in PC sales and sales of attendant products like drives, memory, and monitors.
Second, consumers are just about done with netbooks. This is an unpopular opinion, I know, but as evidenced by the Envy, the underpowered netbook will be replaced by a more powerful, slightly more expensive mid-tier model that will appeal to everyone, businesses included. Instead of a 15-inch Dell monster, road warriors will carry lighter Windows 7 machines with low-voltage but highly optimized components. Netbook advocates cite cloud storage and a lightweight OS, but when Internet Explorer takes forty seconds to load GMail because you’re running a single core Atom, you’re going to have upset customers. It’s getting harder and harder to go from a peppy computer to a slow one simply because the difference in speed is so staggering. The netbook will remain but it won’t be anybody’s every day computer.
Finally, it’s time for an gamer upgrade. The holidays are upon us, there are no new consoles to buy, and a new cohort of PC gamers is appearing: kids who grew up on powerful consoles like the XBox 360 and the PS2/PS3 family, kids who started gaming perhaps at age 10 and are now 16 or so, who are looking for a bit more power. Windows 7 will give them that slight perceived boost and, since it will come with new machines, it will increase the install base by accretion.
As much as we slobber all over Apple, Microsoft makes the world go around. Google or no Google, the desktop belongs to Redmond and Windows 7 is one of the building blocks of a strong future economy. Here’s hoping they can maintain their Office hegemony but even if they don’t, there’s always Google Wave.
Doctor Popular says,
Image: snapshot from 24HCBDay in New Mexico in 2006, by baaadasssscomics. Also, here's a Flickr pool.Today is 24hour Comic Book Day. Cartoonists all over the world will be taking part in the challenge of creating an entire 24 page comic book in just one day. Robots Don't Know Anything About Twitter, which was featured on BB a few weeks ago, was created as part of last years 24HCBDay!Here are some links: Nationwide, in SF, in Minneapolis, in Albuquerque
In certain circles, David Letterman’s extortion/adultery story is huge news. On YouTube? It’s a yawn.
Don’t get me wrong: Google’s (GOOG) video site still appears to be the only place to see Letterman’s jaw-dropping admission that he has had affairs with staffers on his show and that a CBS (CBS) employee attempted to extort him with that information.
Those clips aren’t supposed to be there, and CBS and YouTube keep taking them down, but people keep uploading them. Here’s one that appears to come from a Portuguese user, for instance.
But I had a hunch that the story, which involves a man who has been on late night TV longer than many YouTube users have been alive, might not resonate with the site’s core demo. And data from video-tracking service TubeMogul make me think that’s the case. Here’s the report I got from TubeMogul marketing director David Burch:
Pirated versions only racked up 130,624 views throughout the day, mostly because CBS didn’t post an official version of the clip and was issuing take-down orders (they had already removed five versions of the clip by the time we ran our first report this morning). By way of comparison, pirated clips of the UFC Kimbo Slice fight totaled 1,074,531 views in the past 24 hours.
Oddly, CBS News’ channel released four news videos about the story today, but youtube.com/cbs only had Letterman’s Madonna interview rather than the clip everyone actually wanted to see.
Never heard of Kimbo Slice before? Like Fred, he’s yet another YouTube sensation, albeit one who’s graduated to TV.
 Techworld.com | Week in Microsoft: MSE debuts, Windows 7 OEM prices revealed Ars Technica This week in Microsoft we covered Microsoft Security Essentials, how an Ars reader got the Windows 7 Party Pack first, Windows 7 OEM prices, Windows XP Mode, August 2009 browser stats, Microsoft Courier, Microsoft Recite, and Uniloc. ... XP users: How to upgrade to Windows 7 Rolling Review: Windows 7 Deployment Tools Can Microsoft Security Essentials Do Desktop Security Alone? |
If there’s one boring thing about netbooks, it has to be that they all have essentially the same specs. That will be changing soon with the Pine Trail Atom processors that Intel will be shipping soon, but that’s not enough for Colombian manufacturer Haleron. Haleron set out to make a netbook that’s more useful to students and professionals who do a lot of multitasking, while keeping it affordable to those in South America. The result is the Swordfish Net 102 Dual.
The Swordfish Net 102 Dual has, for the most part, standard specs: 10” screen, 4-in-1 card reader, 2 GB RAM, 3G (WCDMA) module etc. What Haleron did differently, however, is modify the Intel M945 chipset to accept two Atom processors. The dual processors are meant to work much like dual-core CPUs do, split the workload between the two cores to increase the efficiency of both. What they don’t offer, however, is the Atom’s superior battery life, with Haleron claiming a three-cell battery will last two and a half hours, and a six-cell battery will last four and a half hours, neither of which are all that great.
The idea of a dual-Atom netbook, while nice at first, seems to just defeat the entire purpose. Yeah, netbooks aren’t great for multitasking, but that hardly seems to be what they were designed to do. A netbook is meant for using the Internet, and maybe one or two applications on top of that, which shouldn’t put too much strain on the Atom processor. It makes more sense to just buy a small laptop if you really need to do any sort of multitasking. The Swordfish Net 102 Dual does only cost $449, so that is a plus, and great for those who can’t afford anything better, but there’s a reason why few students have netbooks: they have other laptops that they carry around with them instead.
Read [InfoWorld]
Read [Haleron]
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Section:
We may not cover Apple 24x7… but we know someone who does! Here’s a few of this week’s hottest from Appletell to get you started…
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Section: Communications, Cellular Providers, Computers, Networking, Wireless
Verizon DSL and FIOS customers in New York City found themselves cut off from the net Friday afternoon after a router situated between its network and the Internet failed. Despite their assurances that things are back to normal, many Verizon customers are reporting that they are still experiencing issues accessing certain websites.
The outage occurred around 3:15pm. By 4:30 they made an announcement acknowledging the problem and saying they were working on it, and announced it was resolved a short time later. To their credit they did post updates regarding the outage to their Twitter feed. However, you were affected you couldn’t access it so it really didn’t do much good.
Some small business customers are also complaining of server timeouts and other access issues. I happen to be in NYC and I was affected by the outage. For several hours I was unable to access most sites, getting time out or “connection interrupted” messages via my Verizon DSL connection. Fortunately I have a mobile broadband card from Sprint that allowed me to access the web normally.
I’m no longer having problems here, but for those who are, here’s a tip. If you haven’t yet, reboot your computer and at the same time, unplug your router/modem. Wait about 30 seconds and plug back in. This power cycling seems to help, at least it did for us. If you’ve been affected by this outage leave us a comment and tell us about it!
Read [PCWorld]
Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
DJs have been using double turntable setups ever since 1947 with Sir Jimmy Savile. Modern setups, however, forgo the vinyl and even CDs. One such computer-performance system is the Numark NS7 Controller for Serato’s ITCH software.
The NS7 gives DJs the feel of a traditional turntable rig, while functioning as a controller for ITCH. A single USB interface with a computer keeps the rig simple and slightly more “idiot-proof”. But we’re still not at the fun part.
Tomorrow, at the 2009 BPM show in Birmingham, Numark will release the NSFX, a dedicated effects controller for the NS7. This module attaches directly to the NS7 and is completely plug-and-play. DJs can control all of the ITCHs effects systems via USB, without having to go into the software. One of the coolest selling points is all effects automatically sync to the tempo of the track they’re laid on. If I was spinning disks for a living, I would make this module a must-have. A mouse and interface window can’t beat good, solid, hands-on controls. Look for the NSFX at your musical equipment retailers in the last quarter of 2009. (Woah! That’s right now!)
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I'm in Taiwan now and as 
