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Will Facebook and Twitter Keep "Paranormal Activity" From Turning Into "Snakes on a Plane"? [BoomTown]
Four years ago, the movie “Snakes on a Plane,” became a genuine Internet phenom well before the movie was in theaters. Which, in the end, only showed that online buzz had negligible impact on the viewing public, given the movie’s box office turned out to be tepid at best. But will another small film, about a demon-plagued couple with a infrared-equipped video camera, called “Paranormal Activity,” prove that the chatter of Facebook and Twitter have more legs today? It looks like it, given the very-low-budget film–acquired by Viacom (VIA) studio Paramount Pictures as a remake–performed spectacularly well last weekend, selling out midnight-only shows focused on college towns. That middle-of-the-night tactic was made larger this past weekend, creating a ton of online heat, which led to an expanded release planned for this coming weekend at all hours. Of course, along with a clever television marketing push, the studio is using Internet feedback to discern where to head next and how. Well, “Paranormal Activity” looks scary and all–although BoomTown would like to know exactly when people will stop trying to irk demonic spirits. That quibble aside, it will be interesting to see if the reliance on Facebook (where the movie has about 32,000 fans, most whom are posting variations of “It scared the crap out of me!!!!”) and Twitter (where is it now a trending topic) turns a cult win into a mega-hit.
That’s what many predicted would happen to the camp thriller “Snakes,” starring Samuel Jackson, especially considering the deluge of Internet frenzy starting in 2005 that actually forced Time Warner (TWX) studio New Line Cinema to finally release it. But the movie buzz peaked too early, well before the film debuted, and it limped to a weak box office–leaving the blog-fueled “Snakes” as an asterisk in the annals of failed Web marketing hype. So, until all the tweeting gets you to the theater–I shall pass, as I prefer skeletons in my closet–here is the clever promo for “Paranormal Activity,” as well as the classic line from “Snakes”: Source: All Things Digital | 5 Oct 2009 | 4:30 am Hottest Mobile Business Apps Depend On Predictive Text Software Says WordLogic CEO Frank EvanshenVANCOUVER, Oct. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Imagine that within just a few years the hottest apps in the mobile phone market will be for business -- specifically vertical apps...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 5 Oct 2009 | 4:13 am Big Brother says no texting
The list of compatible phones is pretty limited. Support is primarily for the BlackBerry series, with Android and iPhone capabilities coming later. But if you bought your teenage driver a brand new smartphone, you probably can afford to shell out the $24.99 setup fee + $9.99 a month. P.S. Be forewarned, if you go to the TXTBlocker website, it plays a audio file of a mother explaining exactly how totally awesome this service is. On every page. You also can’t turn it off.
Source: CrunchGear | 5 Oct 2009 | 4:07 am Vonage unveils mobile app for iPhone, BlackBerry
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 Macworld UK | Pirate Bay back online and back on Google Register Pirate Bay is back on Google, and back online, following a double whammy of downtime and a wrongly served DMCA notice. Last week thepiratebay.org was removed from Google's search results. ... Google says sorry for booting Pirate Bay Google Pulls Pirate Bay From Search Results Google: Pirate Bay booted off search by mistake |
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It seems like we’ve all been waiting forever for the new version of Yammer’s iPhone app, version 2.0. And we really have, it had been about a month and a half since we announced it was sitting in the App Store, waiting approval. But today, finally, it’s here — and it’s great.
The big addition here is Push Notifications. This is really a key feature since you now can see whenever someone in your network says something without having to open the app. And there are Push settings to allow you to see all messages, replies to you, direct messages, “liked” items, bookmarked items, events, and editorial items — and combinations of any of those. You can also set whether or a not a sound plays when the notification comes in (it seems to say “Yam”), and set “quiet” times; times when you don’t want to get any notifications (such as at night).
Here’s a little refresher of the other new features:
The app remains free. If you use Yammer and have an iPhone, this is clearly a must have. You can find it here.
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It’s about time the big companies are killing the power cord. After Dell unveiled a notebook that can be charged wirelessly, it now seems to be Sony’s turn to do away with those cables. The company has announced this past weekend [JP] a power transfer system that can bring electricity to electronics wirelessly.
The system is still in experiment stage, but Sony says it’s already capable of sending 60W of electricity to a 22-inch LCD TV that’s about half a meter away. The distance can, at this point, be extended to 80cm when using a repeater. Another potential device the system could be eventually used for is a laptop.
Sony uses magnetic-resonance-based technology to transfer electricity from the transmitter to the receiver. The company is now working on commercializing the system but hasn’t said when we’ll see it in action.
By Geoffrey A. Fowler and Joseph De Avila, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal
The Web can be a mean-spirited place. But when it comes to online reviews, the Internet is a village where the books are strong, YouTube clips are good-looking and the dog food is above average.
One of the Web’s little secrets is that when consumers write online reviews, they tend to leave positive ratings: The average grade for things online is about 4.3 stars out of five.
People like Jonas Luster aim to introduce a little negativity. A private chef, Mr. Luster recently beckoned fellow San Francisco area diners to “quit with the nicey-nicey” in a blog post titled “In Defense of Negative Reviews.” His own average rating on restaurant-review sites is 3.6. He even awarded celebrity chef Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant a 1-star rating after he felt he had been served an overdone duck.
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Last week, the only known filmed images of the doomed teenaged diarist Anne Frank were posted online.
The short video from 1941 is part of a whole channel the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam launched on YouTube last week.
The clip of the inspiring Frank has had close to 1.7 million views so far.
Frank, of course, became a heroine worldwide after her death for her eloquent diary that was published, chronicling the many years she and her family spent hiding from the Nazi during World War II.
In the 20-second video below, before any of that happened, Frank appears about nine seconds in, peeking from a balcony at a wedding couple below her.
A year after it was taken, Frank and her family were living in fear from Nazi persecution in an hidden attic space above the family business.
She and many others there were later discovered and taken to concentration camps, where she died in 1945 just before the war ended.
The Anne Frank Museum is now located at the building where she hid and wrote the diary–which, for anyone who has gone can tell you, is a wonderful memorial to her and the many victims of the Nazi regime.
Here’s the video of Frank, and there is much more worth checking out on the channel on YouTube, which is owned by Google (GOOG):
If Google were a sitcom, it would open every week with co-founder Sergey Brin arriving late to a meeting “out of breath in a T-shirt, gym shorts, and on Rollerblades.” This familiar depiction of Brin finds its way into practically every major profile ever written about the company, and so too does it dutifully roll into Ken Auletta’s newest book, Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It.
The first scene is a 2003 meeting with Mel Karmazin (then CEO of Viacom) at the Google campus with a sweaty Brin, Google’s other co-founder Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt. At the end of a his visit, Karmazin tells them he is appalled that Google is “fucking with the magic” of the media business by actually telling advertisers which ads work and which ones don’t.
Auletta is a writer for the New Yorker steeped in the media industry, and while he spent a lot of time with Brin, Page, and Schmidt, his best stories like this one come from the titans of media he’s been covering and schmoozing with for decades. As such the focus of the book is on Google’s rise as a media company at a time when every other media company is feeling threatened by the Internet, and Google specifically.
Googled is not published yet, but I managed to get my hands on a copy of the uncorrected proofs. One of the most startling assertions Auletta makes right up front and repeats throughout is this:
In 2007, Eric Schmidt told me that one day Google could become a hundred-billion-dollar media company—more than twice the size of Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, or News Corporation.
Later on, you find out that Schmidt qualified this statement with a list of very large businesses Google would have to enter successfully to some day get to that $100 billion figure. These include mobile, TV, enterprise, and existing bets like YouTube will have to pay off financially as well. All of this was part of a hypothetical “planning process where we said, is it mathematically possible for Google to become a hundred-billion-dollar corporation.”
But no matter, $100 billion sounds impressive. Auletta does a masterful job turning Google’s story into one that is about his favorite subject, the media firmament, and how Google secretly plans to shake it.
Auletta, however, is forced to hinge his narrative on quotes like that one from 2007 because Schmidt isn’t saying things like that anymore. Google is currently so vilified by the fearful media industry—from newspapers and book publishers to TV networks and movie studios—that Schmidt is bending over backwards these days to sound more conciliatory.
By media, Auletta means advertising, not content. Google is more than happy to leave the content production to others. The following passage is typical of how Auletta spins the Google story into the most epic media battle of our times:
Still, Page told me, he does not see Google as a content company. Google’s computers can “aggregate content; we can process it, rank it, we can do lots of things that are valuable. We can build systems that let lots of people create content themselves. That’s really where our leverage is.” Their leverage, inevitably, makes it easier for audiences to migrate away from old media. This will cause some distress, but satisfying everyone, including traditional media companies, is not Google’s goal, he said; serving users is. “You don’t want to do things the wring way that is causing real damage to the world or to people. But you also need to make progress, and that’s not always going to make everybody happy. Armed with this conviction, Page and Google’s engineers have made many media companies very unhappy indeed.
The scope of their ambition makes even other Internet entrepreneurs, like Marc Andreesen, suspicious of their motives. Andreessen provides one of the choicest quotes in the book:
“Their game plan is to do everything. Google is Andy Kaufman. The whole thing with Andy Kaufman is you could never tell when he was joking. Google comes out with a straight face and said, ‘We’re just going to be a search engine. We’re not going to be doing any of this other stuff’”—competing with advertising agencies, with telephone companies by getting into the cell phone business, with Hollywood, with publishers, with newspapers. “But I am quite sure they’re joking.”
Did Andy Kaufman ever wear Rollerblades?
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A large number of web services are geographically restricted, such as Hulu, Pandora and Spotify. The reasons are usually to do with content licensing restrictions, or because US visitors (or visitors from other advanced economies) are of a higher value from a monetization perspective. A web application can only guess at the location of a visitor based on an IP address and other information, such as browser language and regional settings.
IP addresses are mapped to countries (and in some instances, further to states and cities) using large commercial datasets such as GeoIP from Maxmind, which is a ‘best guess’ database based on data it has collected (how, I would rather not know). The system is accurate enough to enable services to block on a country level, but often fail at a more local level.
But the nature of the web means that geographically restricting web services is next to impossible, because those who are technically adept have known how to find and use proxy servers (both open and private) and VPN services to masquerade as being from another country.
The demand for such services has become so popular that more apps are being released that make this process almost as easy as installing any other application – one-click VPN/Proxy install and then pick a country you want to be surfing from (default USA). Even better, there are now VPN solutions available for free – some of which are outright free, others which are ad supported.
If you find yourself outside of the USA and wanting to watch Hulu, outside of the UK and wanting to checkout the BBC, or wanting to rig a web poll, here are some tips:
Easy to find, easy to setup. Some sites have become smart enough now to check if the IP address you are coming in from is an open proxy server and will attempt to deny it – but this is most often the easiest solution. The key is to find an open proxy server that everybody else, or even worse, Eastern European crime syndicates, are also not using.
The best source if you are a blogger is to check your spam comments. Most of those IP addresses will not only be open proxy servers (you just have to work out the port – or if you host your own blog, start logging the port), but will be virgin proxy servers.
Otherwise there are a ton of lists available online, often updated each minute, as well as services where you can test your proxy.
FoxyProxy is a Firefox plugin that allows you to easily switch between proxy servers (many Chinese web users are very familiar with having to juggle proxy servers and use such plugins, or browsers that have similar features built-in)
Similar to a proxy, except that a VPN is an encrypted link to a server that will route all of your network traffic (your computer, in effect, becomes part of the network).
FreeVPN – thefreevpn.com – A completely free VPN client and service for Windows machines. No ads, and a fast service. Not sure what the business model is, which is why I wouldn’t trust it with any personal or private information and restrict it to just movie watching or poll rigging. Best free VPN service and super easy to install (see review here)
Feeedur - www.freedur.com – A commercial VPN/anonymizing service that works well.
HotSpotShield – hotspotshield.com – Another free VPN service, but forces you to click on an ad. Working with Hulu again.
UltraVPN – www.ultravpn.fr – cross platform (OS X support). Both free and anonymous.
Using a proxy or a VPN to bypass geographic restrictions or to preserve anonymity online has been known and used by more advanced users for years. More modern services and tools are making it easier for the average internet user to take advantage of the same techniques.
There are entire business models that depend on geographic targeting, so there is a constant cat-and-mouse game between providers of these services and those seeking to bypass the set restrictions. Those who are seeking to access content are winning though, and they will continue to win, as the very nature of the Internet and web make it near impossible to detect where somebody actually is if they refuse to let you know.
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By Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group
Corporations continue to get blindsided by social media –which of course, is just a representation of underlying customer or product issues that should be fixed. Companies respond in three ways: 1) Ignore it and do nothing at their own peril, 2) Are responsive but not necessarily in control 3) Assert themselves and be proactive –even during a crises. The following three examples highlight companies being proactive in the third effort –and analyzes their end result.
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By Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief, Search Engine Land
Is Google a newspaper killer? Not by a long shot, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Nor does he want it to be.
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By Andy Chalk, Contributor, The Escapist Magazine
Thompson was permanently disbarred in September 2008 but that didn’t stop his vocal criticism of the videogame industry, nor did it soften the attitude of videogamers toward Thompson and his strident rhetoric, many of whom have come together in Facebook groups to share their frustration with his antics. But Thompson says he feels threatened by some of the messages posted by those groups and on Tuesday, he filed suit against Facebook for letting it happen.
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By Kevin Kelleher, Blogger, GigaOm
Suddenly, it’s mating season in the tech sector. Xerox is paying $6.4 billion for a piece of the cloud, Adobe is hooking up with Omniture and Intuit with Mint, and that may just be the start. As Om pointed out, this is good news for startups and entrepreneurs, especially those with money tied up in late-stage investments that aren’t likely to go public soon.
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By Justin Vincent, Web Developer
I’m building http://tweetminer.net and – although I’ll always have a free plan – it won’t be very long before I introduce premium subscription plans at around $5 – $10 per month.
I may get 1 paying subscriber – I may get 10,000 paying subscribers – who knows?
What I do know is, no matter how much (or how little) money TweetMiner makes, I can’t help but feel it isn’t very fair I can build a revenue generating business on your dime.
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 Soft Sailor | Adobe tries keeping Flash in Web vanguard CNET News There's a major movement afoot to make rebuild the Web as a foundation for interactive applications. But Adobe Systems, whose Flash technology already plays that role as a nearly ubiquitous browser plug-in, believes its technology ... Flash moves on to smart phones Everyone <3 Adobe, except Apple: no Flash on iPhone Adobe brings Flash to future phones |
Facebook has a problem. One of its main goals now is to be the center for sharing everything on the web, but the key to that is to make the process as quick and easy as possible. And in that regard, its rival Twitter destroys it. That’s a problem.
Now, Facebook isn’t in any immediate danger because of this, it can coast on its sheer size (300 million users). But eventually, if those users find their way to Twitter, I would bet that they’ll start sharing more there, because it’s just so much easier. And while ease and speed may be what the user cares about, traffic is what publishers care about. And despite being much larger, Facebook also loses that battle to Twitter.
A Tale Of Two Buttons
The reason I bring this up is because this weekend, TechCrunch installed a new Facebook Share button on every article, next to the Tweetmeme Retweet button. When we first installed it, we set the Facebook button up with the default settings that included a share count, and the ability to pop open a new window to complete the share. These default settings are awful.
The first time I clicked on the Facebook button to test it out, I could not believe how long it took to populate the information to share. I did some tests, comparing it to the retweet button. Assuming you’re logged in to both Facebook and Twitter already, the Tweetmeme retweet button takes about 2 seconds to send your shared message over to Twitter.com, which you then send by hitting “Update.” So let’s say the total time is about 3 seconds to share.
With the Facebook button, it took quite a few seconds to load this new small window. And then it took another few to post the shared information to my wall. Also, the Facebook functionality attempts to pre-populate a picture from the post you are sharing. That’s a good idea in theory, but it’s almost always the wrong picture, so that’s another few seconds to cycle through those to find one (or get rid of it). So we’re looking at a total share time of 10 to 15 seconds.
While 10 to 15 seconds may not seem like a lot of time, compared to Twitter’s 2 to 3 seconds, it’s an eternity. And people who use both services will realizes this (whether it is consciously or not), and I believe it will push them towards using Twitter more as their main sharing outlet.
And the gap is actually much larger if you’re logged out of both services to start. With Twitter, it takes a couple seconds max to sign in. With Facebook, it can take anywhere from several seconds, up to 30 seconds in my experience. All of this wasted time adds up, and it really disuades me from using Facebook to share things.
Another inexcusable time suck on Facebook’s end is caused by the pulling of the share count. Tweetmeme seems to do this on its button without much problem (though their count is sometimes off). With Facebook, it is another barrier to sharing because it slows the whole process down. Seeing this, our dev team made some changes to the button almost immediately. They removed the count number to reduce load time, and also got rid of the pop up window functionality. Instead, now when you hit the button, it will populate the information in a regular new browser window or tab. The result, is much, much faster (though still not Twitter fast).
A Need To Connect
Facebook does have a weapon that Twitter does not right now: Connect. A core idea behind Facebook Connect is that you can share things to Facebook (and back) without having to manually share them. That’s interesting, and eventually will be very powerful, but it’s still is nowhere near its potential. And the truth is that I’m not even sure Twitter needs a Connect of its own because third-party development community that keep pumping out sites and services that continue to feed the Twitter sharing machine.
Those same developers have not been doing that for Facebook because Facebook until very recently would not supply them with the type of developer support they needed for these third-party sites outside of Facebook proper. And now even with some (but not full) support, developers are not creating the same type of app ecosystem around (again, not inside) Facebook, that they have for Twitter. This limits the sharing pipeline for Facebook.
Facebook also has its Import functionality that users can use to auto post things like stories from Digg, Flickr photos they post, YouTube videos they favorite, and even blog posts they write. But this feature is horribly slow, and laughably unreliable. It was basically trying to offer much of what FriendFeed does, but it is worse in every way possible. Hopefully now that Facebook has bought FriendFeed, that will change.
Sharing Is Caring
Facebook recently added the “Everyone” button functionality and revamped its bookmarklet. To me, both of those signal Facebook’s desire to be the central place for sharing content on the web. Unfortunately, neither of these did anything to improve the speed of sharing.
There’s something else that is often overlooked, but very key to this sharing of information: Facebook has no simple way to reshare items. To be fair, Twitter doesn’t really either, but its users dreamed up the retweet idea, and soon it will be fully baked into the product, with the launch of the Retweet API.
Users have chosen not to use Facebook status messages in the same way, and there is no method to reshare News Feed items. FriendFeed has a very obvious “Share” button on each item which allows you to repost an item, or share it elsewhere. But maybe even worse, Facebook also has no method like FriendFeed of having interesting items that users “like” bubble back up to the top of the stream. Sure, they have a “Highlights” area, but that’s really pretty weak. It’s all about the stream, and currently, once an items falls off of the first page of the News Feed, the likelihood that you will ever see it again, is slim.
Again, maybe the FriendFeed acquisition will help remedy these things. Or maybe Facebook will once again take a play from Twitter’s playbook (as it did with the @ syntax) and create some sort of reshare functionality.
Traffic Doesn’t Lie
Obviously, users are going to want a sharing process to be as quick as possible, but while publishers care about that too, their bottom line is different: Traffic. You might think that Facebook would have the obvious advantage here since it’s much larger than Twitter, but you’d be wrong.
As we shared back in June, Twitter is in our top five referrers. Facebook? Not even on the list.
Actually, they are on the list, but farther down it. While Twitter is #3 or #4 (depending on the month), Facebook is more like #6, #7, or even as low as #10. And the gap between the two is pretty wide. That’s fairly remarkable for a site that is much, much smaller (Twitter) to be already easily beating its bigger rival (Facebook).
Maybe the new Facebook button will change that, but if I had to bet on it, I would say that it won’t. And I believe that speaks to the fact that it’s much easier to share on Twitter than it is on Facebook. And while it may not be a huge problem right now for them, it’s something I’d be taking very seriously. Speed and ease in sharing are only going to become more important in an increasingly social web.
[photo: flickr/mikewoods, flickr/jurvetson]
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India’s largest English-language newspaper, the Times of India, has an interesting print edition front page today – a huge yellow advertisement for Yahoo’s It’s You campaign first announced last month. You can view the print version here.
The newspaper’s circulation as of 2008 was 3.14 million, making it the largest selling English-language daily newspaper (here’s the whole list). Yahoo already has a large presence in India, reaching 26 million of the 35 million online Indians (according to Comscore, August 2009).
What does the ad mean? Who cares. It’s big and yellow. Yahoo has said it hopes to follow up on the ads by personalizing the Yahoo experience for each user.
Thanks to Anand Srinivasan for the tip.
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Schools try to keep up with the current technology trends, especially in Silicon Valley, the home of technology innovation. You would think that schools in Silicon Valley would be the most up to date on technology—with the latest computers, projectors, drawing boards—but coming from a first hand perspective, as a student at a local school, it’s the complete opposite. I go to a high school where there are no technology classes that even teach students the basics of web development, or video production, or anything of that matter.
Our school just upgraded our computer labs to brand new computers, Windows XP machines, that of course, block Facebook, YouTube, and all those other good “time wasting” sites. Just this year, all the teachers’ computers got connected to projectors so that teachers can show presentations, documents, etc. Also this year, our school finally got WiFi, but it is password protected and not open to students.
The restrictions on the use of school computers and the internet, are in my opinion, extreme. Each night all student accessible computers are wiped completely, and restored with all the basic programs – Mozilla Firefox, IE6, Microsoft Office 2003. I understand the need for schools to protect local machines from viruses and spyware, but I feel like school policy is too extreme when it comes to blocking YouTube, Facebook, and other sites. These sites can be “time wasting” sites, but there are occasions when the sites are useful. I was the Technology Editor for my school newspaper last year, where we needed to get pictures and information from fellow students. We used Facebook chat and messages to communicate with other students to get information, to co-ordinate and to find things such as video from events.
In a neighboring high school, they have a full video production studio for daily video announcements – yet at most other schools, such as my own, we are stuck with old PA systems for announcements and old technology along with a restricted web experience. This is not what the rest of the world would imagine for a school in Silicon Valley. A friend’s school in Los Angeles has a full Mac computer lab for video and graphic work. My school — one Mac, and it’s not even allowed to be used by students. Given that in most of the developed world most schools, especially public schools, lag with technology – but it seems that even when there is a will and a budget to implement new technology the policies are still outdated.
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 Geekzone | T-Mobile introduces Android-powered Samsung Behold II CNET News On Sunday, T-Mobile continued its commitment to the Open Handset Alliance and introduced its fourth Google Android device, the Samsung Behold II. The Behold II is scheduled to launch later this year, though a specific release date and ... T-Mobile Unveils Android-based Samsung Behold II Smartphone Samsung Behold II for T-Mobile Announced T-Mobile to Launch Samsung Behold 2, Google-Powered Phone |
Announcing: Alan Moore's "Dodgem Logic" (Thanks, Joe!)
The mere fact that the Great Bearded Wizard of Albion, Mr Alan Moore, is behind a new journal, Dodgem Logic, should be enough to get a lot of us interested. But add in talents like the Josie Long, Graham Linehan, Kev O'Neill, Melinda Gebbie, Steve Aylett and others and I'm pretty much sold and I'd imagine so are most of us.But it gets even better - this is a new underground journal that seems to be part entertainment, part grassroots activism/advice on all sorts of subjects dear to many boingers' hearts, from guerilla gardening to making your own clothes, living on no cash (something most of us will find essential these days!), steampunk guides to rebuilding collapsed civilisation...
Alan's daughter Leah and hubby John Reppion (themselves excellent comics writers) have the official release describing the first edition (which will come with a segment designed to take local content so it can be reworked for different areas - a great idea), which comes from Tony Bennet's great Indy comics press Knockabout (home to Hunt Emerson & Gilbert Shelton as well as UK publishers of the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Is it just me or is this the perfect sounding journal for BBers?
Punk Animals
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Oct 2009 | 10:56 pm
Well, this is just very cool. I throw a few stones over the wall to official DC, but this time I want to send some roses in the front door.Government Printing Office (Thanks, Carl!)The Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register just announced they're making all the "Official Journals of Government" available for free in bulk. Previous price was $17,000/year per product.
But wait, there's more. They've upgraded the Federal Register to XML. And, believe it or not, GPO has been using Ed Felten's shop at Princeton (coming Monday morning) and Public.Resource.Org (our re-design page from Point.B Studio) as alpha testers to see what we can do with the XML, and we're both definitely happy customers.
It was fun working with the GPO and Federal Register teams. This is a clueful product, the price is just right, and it is an important first step in making America's operating system open source.
Link.
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Oct 2009 | 10:40 pm
Caffeine
This is why the world produces more than 16 billion pounds of coffee beans per year. It's actually an alkaloid plant toxin (like nicotine and cocaine), a bug killer that stimulates us by blocking neuroreceptors for the sleep chemical adenosine. The result: you, awake.
Water
Hot H2O is a super solvent, leaching flavors and oils out of the coffee bean. A good cup of joe is 98.75 percent water and 1.25 percent soluble plant matter. Caffeine is a diuretic, so coffee newbies pee out the water quickly; java junkies build up resistance.
2-Ethylphenol
Creates a tarlike, medicinal odor in your morning wake-up. It's also a component of cockroach alarm pheromones, chemical signals that warn the colony of danger.
Quinic acid
Gives coffee its slightly sour flavor. On the plus side, it's one of the starter chemicals in the formulation of Tamiflu.
3,5 Dicaffeoylquinic acid
When scientists pretreat neurons with this acid in the lab, the cells are significantly (though not completely) protected from free-radical damage. Yup: Coffee is a good source of antioxidants.
Dimethyl disulfide
A product of roasting the green coffee bean, this compound is just at the threshold of detectability in brewed java. Good thing, too, as it's one of the compounds that gives human feces its odor.
Acetylmethylcarbinol
That rich, buttery taste in your daily jolt comes in part from this flammable yellow liquid, which helps give real butter its flavor and is a component of artificial flavoring in microwave popcorn.
Putrescine
Ever wonder what makes spoiled meat so poisonous? Here you go. Ptomaines like putrescine are produced when E. coli bacteria in the meat break down amino acids. Naturally present in coffee beans, it smells, as you might guess from the name, like Satan's outhouse.
Trigonelline
Chemically, it's a molecule of niacin with a methyl group attached. It breaks down into pyridines, which give coffee its sweet, earthy taste and also prevent the tooth-eating bacterium Streptococcus mutans from attaching to your teeth. Coffee fights the Cavity Creeps.
Niacin
Trigonelline is unstable above 160 degrees F; the methyl group detaches, unleashing the niacin—vitamin B3—into your cup. Two or three espressos can provide half your recommended daily allowance.
In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site's mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor. It was the source of the lolcat craze (affixing captions like "I Can Has Cheezburger?" to photos of felines), the rickrolling phenomenon (tricking people into clicking on links to Rick Astley's ghastly "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video), and other classic time-wasting Internet memes. In short, while there are many online places where you can educate yourself, seek the truth, and contemplate the world's injustices and strive to right them, 4chan is not one of them.
Yet today, Housh found 4chan grappling with an injustice no Internet-humor fan could ignore. Days earlier, a nine-minute video excerpt of an interview with Tom Cruise had appeared unauthorized on YouTube and other Web sites. Produced by the Church of Scientology, the clip showed Cruise declaring himself and his co-religionists to be, among other remarkable things, the "only ones who can help" at an accident site. For the online wiseasses of the world, the clip was a heaven-sent extra helping of the weirdness Tom Cruise famously showed on Oprah. But then, suddenly, it was gone: Scientologists had sent takedown notices to sites hosting the video, effectively wiping it from the Web.
Housh and other channers knew that Scientology had a long history of using copyright law to silence Internet-based critics. But this time, maybe because the church was stifling not just unflattering content but potential comedy gold, the tactic seemed to inflame the chortling masses. That evening, Housh logged in to an IRC channel frequented by like-minded chuckleheads and started talking with five others about the Cruise video. There was a sense that something must be done, but what? One of them logged out and posted a call to action on 4chan and some similar sites. By the middle of the night, 30 people had joined the chat. Within a couple of days, a consensus emerged: They would take down the main Scientology Web site with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS.
By the time the attacks started on January 18, Housh and many of the now 200 others on the chat channel were devoting every spare moment to the cause: "We were like, OK, we have 24 hours today. None of us need to sleep. Get your caffeine. What's the next step?"
Someone suggested they create a press release. Housh and four others broke off into a side channel to work on it while the DDoS attacks unfolded. They figured they should explain the goals of their spontaneous uprising, but what exactly were those goals? "We had no fricking clue what we were doing," Housh says. "We didn't mean to do it in the first place." They were still more of a riot than a movement—a faceless, leaderless mob growing daily as new adherents flocked in. None of them knew one another, even by pseudonyms, since as a rule there was only one username throughout the community. In fact, it was a standing in-joke on 4chan and related sites that their collective output was the product of a single hive-mind entity, known by that same username: Anonymous.
Instead of a press release, Housh and the others made a video introduction in the name and voice of the hive mind itself. Thrown together in a few days of furious collaboration, it appeared on YouTube on January 21, titled "Message to Scientology."
"Hello, leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous," the clip began in a robotic, software-generated voice-over accompanied by stock footage of clouds rolling over desolate cityscapes. "Your campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent, your litigious nature: All of these things have caught our eye," the voice explained. "For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind—and for our own enjoyment—we shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form." The message ended, as it had begun, on a pitch-perfect note of sci-fi comic book menace: "We are Legion," the robot voice intoned. "We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."
The anonymous campaign against Scientology, better known among its participants as Project Chanology, continues to this day. In the months since it launched "Message to Scientology," Project Chanology has employed a variety of tactics, including pickets, pranks, and propaganda that ranges from the purely informative to the ferociously satirical. It has waxed and waned and waned some more, and yet, improbably, it has endured, evolving into a peculiarly instructive case study in the dynamics of online protest. Project Chanology may well be the first movement to realize the kind of ad hoc, loosely coupled social activism that many have hoped the ad hoc, loosely coupled architecture of the Internet would engender. But it's also the first one founded on the principles of the most obnoxious innovation that architecture ever produced: trolling.
To troll is to post deliberately incendiary content to a discussion forum or other online community—say, kitten-torture fantasies on a message board for cat lovers—for no other reason than to stir up chaos and outrage. Trolling is (for the troll, at least) a source of amusement. But for Anonymous it has long been more like a way of life. Study the pages of the Encyclopedia Dramatica wiki, where the vast parallel universe of Anonymous in-jokes, catchphrases, and obsessions is lovingly annotated, and you will discover an elaborate trolling culture: Flamingly racist and misogynist content lurks throughout, all of it calculated to offend, along with links to eye-gougingly horrific images of mutilation, sexual perversity, and, yes, kittens in blenders. Here, too, are chronicled the many troll invasions, or "raids," that Anonymous has inflicted on unsuspecting Web communities—like the Epilepsy Foundation's online forums, which were attacked with flashing, seizure-inducing animations.
So, after the Tom Cruise video vanished and that first call to arms went out, the nameless multitudes of Anonymous—steeped in the theory and practice of trolling—were well prepared to answer it, even if some weren't convinced that they were up to the task. "Anonymous will never take down a massive multimillion-dollar corporation like Scientology," one Channer wrote. "You're not shutting down a fucking corporation with prank phone calls."
Indeed, the inherent challenges faced by an activist movement made up of trolls emerged almost as soon as Project Chanology got under way. In the IRC war rooms where the DDoS attacks were being coordinated, one Anonymous member redirected the fire of an entire raid onto what he said was a hidden Scientology IP address but turned out to be the Web site of a primary school in the Netherlands. A few days later, a middle-aged couple in Stockton, California, misidentified as Scientology counterhackers, woke in the middle of the night to harassing phone calls and death threats.
As news of the raid filtered out into the world beyond Anonymous, these blunders didn't do much for its public image. Not that Anonymous tended to care what others thought. In trolling, as a rule, the more people you piss off, the better; what matters are the lulz—the laughs you get from trashing someone's peace of mind. But this was a new game, in which public opinion seemed to matter, and so far Anonymous wasn't on top of it. A reflective mood seeped into the IRC channels; fingers were pointed. One participant said they could have done a lot more if they "weren't just a bunch of unorganized brats."
With the lulz wearing thin, Project Chanology was approaching that moment when a typical raid calls it quits. What Anonymous did next, however, was unprecedented in the annals of not just trolling but online activism in general: It executed a major midcourse correction. The site hacking stopped, and a new tactic was announced: A worldwide "RL raid" (real-life protest) on Scientology's offices would take place on February 10, 2008. When the day arrived, thousands of Anonymous members, many with their faces obscured by scarves or Guy Fawkes masks, turned out in scores of cities to protest lawfully and nonviolently (depending, of course, on your definition of nonviolence: In London, an Anonymous crowd carrying boom boxes subjected staffers in a Scientology building to a day of real-life rickrolling). A second protest followed in March, with numbers matching the original.
Now looking less like a swarm and more like a network, Project Chanology moved onto message boards of its own. Housh and others set up a site called Why We Protest, which has become a hub for planning and discussion, ruled by the time-honored hacker protocols of rough consensus. "It's the hive mind at work," Housh says. A new idea or call to action can come from anyone but is vetted by everyone: "If it's bad, we laugh and make fun of you because that's what we do," Housh says. "But if it's good, it sticks." And as the movement's tactics evolved, so did its goals, narrowing from the destruction of Scientology to more realistic aims, focused on broadly exposing the church's alleged fraud and abuse.
Meanwhile, Scientology was hitting back. Working with law enforcement, the church pressed charges where it could. A New Jersey 18-year-old named Dmitriy Guzner was indicted for taking part in the Chanology DDoS attacks; he pleaded guilty this May. Housh was barred from coming within 500 feet of Boston-area Scientology buildings for a year (he cheerfully attends demonstrations in other cities now). But on their own, Scientologists have mounted a more personal countercampaign. Volunteer "handlers" have taken it upon themselves to monitor the actions of Anonymous, standing amid protesters and using video cameras to record anything incriminating or embarrassing. Private detectives and law enforcement have named hundreds of the most active Chanologists, lawyers have sent warning letters not only to their homes but also to their parents, and Anons claim that church members have papered their neighborhoods with flyers identifying them by name and face as members of a "terrorist organization."
"They are a terrorist organization," says Tommy Davis, a church spokesperson. "Their intention is to instill fear and incite hate. There is no other explanation." Leaning back into a cushioned chair in a suite of the church's posh Celebrity Centre in Hollywood, Davis holds in his lap a 2-inch-thick binder of Anonymous-related material. He has just finished reciting a litany of the bomb threats, death threats, arson threats, and acts of vandalism that were directed at Scientology churches and employees, including himself, in the first year of Project Chanology's existence. But he claims that, thanks largely to the church's vigorous response, the protest movement is "in its death throes."
If Chanology is dying, however, it's being awfully leisurely about it: After an early falloff, the numbers at the monthly protests have been roughly stable. The question, it seems, is no longer how a half-baked mob of Internet jackasses ever thought they could take on an organization as powerful and vindictive as Scientology but how Scientology could have failed to squash them long ago. And the answer may be that the church is incapable of following one simple bit of Internet wisdom: Don't Feed the Trolls. By taking Anonymous as seriously as it has, Scientology has nurtured the one thing Chanology depends on above all: the lulz.
That's not to say Anonymous hasn't faced some grave opposition, just that its toughest foe has turned out to be not Scientology but Anonymous itself.
It was early afternoon on January 8, 2009, almost a year after the birth of Project Chanology, when 18-year-old Anonymous member Agent Pubeit emerged from a subway station in New York City's Times Square clothed in nothing but a ski mask, shorts, sneakers, and surgical gloves. The temperature was just above freezing, but it's doubtful Pubeit felt the cold: A thick layer of petroleum jelly covered his exposed upper body, and this was thickened further by a generous admixture of pubic hairs and toenail clippings.
Pubeit was not alone. As he walked along the crowded sidewalk toward his destination—a Church of Scientology center on nearby West 46th Street—he was filmed by an accomplice with a video camera, and the two were in radio contact with more coconspirators. As Pubeit got closer to his target, the remote team unleashed a rolling barrage of distractions on the Scientology center, tying up phone lines with prank calls and faxes. In the midst of this, Pubeit burst into the center's reception area and jogged around for a moment or two, leaving traces of hairy lube on whatever surfaces he could get close to. From there he proceeded to a nearby Scientology management office. Just inside the doorway, he found church materials loaded onto a cart, which he mounted for a few seconds of simulated man-cart love before fleeing into the city's streets.
"Greasy Vandal in Hate Crime vs. Scientology," read the New York Daily News headline. Two weeks later, Davis was citing the stunt as proof that Project Chanology is no more legitimate a protest movement than the KKK. "To have a man slathered in Vaseline and covered in pubic hair and toenail clippings storm in and begin desecrating a place of worship," Davis said with quiet outrage. "That puts it in perspective."
But the main target of Operation Slickpubes, frankly, wasn't Scientology at all. It was Chanology. Or more precisely, it was anyone in Chanology's ranks who had forgotten this was a movement created by and for trolls. Since the beginning of the campaign, there'd been a tension between its "lulzfags," who held that Anonymous must have no higher cause than its own cruel amusement, and the "moralfags," for whom the cause of fighting an oppressive cult was an end in itself. (Neither term is necessarily an insult. In channer culture, the "fag" tag can be pejorative, neutral, or practically a term of endearment.) The tensions deepened after publicity attracted an influx of people unfamiliar with the rules of Anonymous. Not that these "newfags" turned the movement into a Boy Scout cookout. (Some Chanologists who asked to remain unidentified for this article said it was less for fear of Scientology than of their fellow Anons: "They'll call us 'egofags' and fuck with us relentlessly.") But Chanology's drift toward respectability has been more than some Anonymous traditionalists can bear.
Enter Operation Slickpubes, which, according to Michael Vitale, one of the New York City Anons who instigated the prank, was aimed squarely at reversing that drift. Anonymous members, he says, are "the assholes of the Internet" and should play that up, because ultimately the movement survives on attention—from the media, from potential recruits—and only one thing is sure to keep the attention coming: Anonymous' willingness to undertake what Vitale calls "any sort of motherfuckery." For him, it's not that the movement's ethical objectives don't matter. It's that taking them too seriously may, paradoxically, kill Project Chanology before it has a chance to attain them.
"What is the public fascination with our war?" Vitale asks. In other words, why should anyone care about a struggle between a few thousand masked rickrollers and the adherents of a religion founded by a sci-fi writer? "It isn't because you have one group that's right and one group that's wrong. It's because you have two groups that are nut jobs for different reasons, and they are fighting each other in the streets." If Vitale is right, Chanology's greatest strength may be the other conflict—the tension between the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of lulz.
That is, of course, if that conflict doesn't end up being its fatal flaw.
On a Tuesday last winter, a Chicago Zoning Council committee met in a hearing room at City Hall. Among the attendees were representatives of the Church of Scientology seeking permission to build a new facility in the South Loop neighborhood. Opponents of the zoning change were also present, including seven Anons, decidedly out of their element. They had hoped to testify while masked but were informed that it was against the rules.
Their testimony was hit or miss, but mostly miss. They mumbled, they hemmed, they hawed. They tried to raise the church's record as a building owner in other locales, but the committee chair said it had no bearing on the question at hand. The zoning change passed.
The Anons filed out of the hearing room in an unusually contemplative mood and were surrounded instantly by gleeful Scientologists. Some church members were familiar to the Anons from previous encounters at Chanology protests, where they'd stood duty as impassive, cam-wielding handlers surrounded by the protestors' joyously obnoxious placards and chants. The Scientologists seemed delighted to be dishing out the smack this time around.
"Need a fire extinguisher?" one asked.
"For what?" an Anon replied tentatively.
"Down in flames!" the handler crowed.
All in all, the episode was not a bucket of lulz. It foregrounded a question that the typical troll need never concern himself with but that the troublemakers of Project Chanology must sooner or later confront: What meaningful difference are their actions making?
The Chicago zoning fight is not the only arena in which Chanology has groped toward conventional political activism. The revocation of Scientology's US tax-exempt status has long been a central goal of the movement. But efforts on this front remain nascent. Meanwhile, though Anons are fond of saying that their protests and propaganda have already hurt Scientology, this is no easier to verify than the church's claim that business has never been better. "Scientology has expanded more in the past year than the past five years," Davis says, "more in the past five years than the past five decades."
But if Project Chanology fails to upend Scientology in particular, it may yet change the landscape of political activism in general. Already some Anons are applying the Chanology formula to other targets. Operation Didgeridie and Project Cntroll are gearing up to troll the Australian and Chinese governments, respectively, for their Internet censorship policies. And when post-election unrest broke out in Iran in June, Why We Protest dedicated a whole wing of its forums to online activism in support of the Iranian opposition.
Then again, Chanology may turn out to be the sort of thing that can't be duplicated. It's unlikely that Anonymous will ever face an opponent more exquisitely matched than Scientology—a strictly disciplined, hierarchical organization founded on the exact reproduction of relentlessly earnest, fiercely copyright-protected words. Here the assclowns of Anonymous found the perfect antithesis of their own radically authorless, furiously remixed, compulsively unserious culture. Scientology was a target so ideal that there is now almost no point in looking for another. Perhaps this, then, is how Project Chanology will be remembered: not as the first of a new breed of online protest movements, but as the last of the epic trolls.
Contributing editor Julian Dibbell (julian@juliandibbell.com) wrote about virtual gold trading in issue 16.12.
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 Cnet Asia | Just a Touch Away, the Elusive Tablet PC New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — The high-tech industry has been working itself into paroxysms of excitement lately over an idea that is not exactly new: tablet computers. Bill Buxton, a researcher at Microsoft, has a collection of ... Apple Working on Tablet Since At Least 2003 Apple Working on a Tablet Since At Least 2003? New rumors on Apple tablet |
She was in a coma for nine weeks (that's her, hospitalized, in the photo below), and can now no longer walk. "Ground beef is not a completely safe product," one food safety expert in the article is quoted. Well, no shit. Snip from an extensive investigative report in Sunday's New York Times:
E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection (New York Times)The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled "American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties." Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.
Using a combination of sources -- a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger -- allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.
Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on its suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together.
What a beautiful object! Industrial design can be absolutely breathtaking sometimes. And no doubt it sounds as good as it looks. This particular amp is by Elekit, which has a few other amps out there in kit form. This one is pre-assembled and likely costs a bundle.
Case-Real, the studio which designed the amp, has many more pictures for you, and Dezeen translates the description thusly:
ELEKIT TUBE AMPLIFIER
by Koichi Futatsumata / CASE-REALDesign of a new generation vacuum tube amplifier for EK Japan Co., Ltd.(Fukuoka, Japan) who develops numerous electronic kits/ gadgets targeted at both children and adults.
Traditionally, the types of assembly audio kits EK JAPAN has developed have been largely for audio or mechanical maniacs, for an affordable price, thereby serving their quality of life by way of spending time to assemble and then to enjoy the audio from what they have made. The direction of a project commissioned to us this time was completely different and was to design a compact, stylish vacuum tube audio consonant with the life style of young generations novice about vacuum tube but are naively interested in the charm and atmosphere created from/ via a vacuum tube amplifier.
The prototype, as shown in the photo, is an embodiment of the concept which symbolically gives an accent on vacuum tubes on the top, supported by aluminum dials on the front integrating all controls thereinto and by the sides made of cast steel. So that a vacuum tube light stands out, the mechanical structure and parts (which usually exposed outside to radiate heat) are kept inside and the top aluminum plate functions as a heat sink instead.
The circuitry a hybrid configuration, and, on the right side is a mini- jack for portable music players like iPod.[Product] Vacuum tube hybrid stereo amplifier
[Design] Koichi Futatsumata / CASE-REAL
[Manufacturer] EK JAPAN
[Circuit components] Tone control stage / Tubes (2x 6SN7GT), Power amplifier stage / Semiconductors (IC)
[Rated output power] 10 + 10 Watts
[Rated powe consumption] 38W
[Rated Power source] 100V AC 50-60Hz
[Input / sensitivity] Rear RCA jacks / 560mV (For component type player), Side mini phone jack / 180mV (For portable music player)
[Frequency response] 5Hz – 50kHz (-3dB)
[Dimensions] W265 x H103 x D151 (millimeters, including projections)
[Body Weight] 2.6kg
[Special feature] Automatic sleep mode (at no input signal)
*The sale is undecided.
“The sale is undecided” probably means plans for offering it aren’t quite ready (i.e. pricing, availability) — though based on the kit amps’ prices, I’d put this one at around $700, maybe? At any rate, it’s a piece of art.
[via Gizmodo]
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The internet is falling over itself in paroxysms of ecstatic speculation due to a trio of unbelievably innocuous Google ads showing up in Europe. You’d think it was the end of days — calm yourself, internet. Is there really anything here worth looking twice at, to say nothing of gibbering prophetically about? Let’s see here.
You can see screenshots of the original ads at the original post at Apple Insider, but for simplicity’s sake I’m just going to put the translated text here.
Apple’s Newest MacBook. Thinner, lighter and faster! Free delivery. Order today.
The brand new iMac. Ultra Thin 20 & 24 inch models. From only €1099.
Apple’s New Mac Mini. Faster and more affordable than ever. From only €499. Order immediately.
What strikes you about these ads? They say nothing at all.
Technically, the current MacBook is indeed Apple’s “newest.” Thinner, lighter, and faster than what? These statements are general enough to apply to any Apple product.
The “brand new” iMac poses more of a conundrum. Can they really say brand new when it hasn’t been updated in ages? Why not? Apple said twice as fast, half the price when neither was true. How would you expect them to advertise a current product? “The old standby” isn’t going to sell any units. “Ultra Thin 20 & 24 inch models” could also refer to available iMacs.
The “New Mac Mini” priced at €499 is the only compelling one, really — there is no Mini currently available for that price in the store the ad directs you to, but pricing does vary between countries.
Okay, okay, I’m just poking holes in this just for the fun of it. In all likelihood they are real Apple ads, run a little early. But let’s all calm down because there’s nothing of substance in any of them except for a lowered Mini price. Every Apple product since the dawn of time has gotten thinner and faster with every iteration, and everyone has already speculated on products with those predictable improvements.
So WinMo 6.5 is just about to break, and of course, like any company launching a new product, Microsoft would like all the news and handsets and what have you to hit at the same time — overpowering your senses and causing you to speak in tongues. But that won’t happen, first because most of the details of the new OS and phones are pretty well-known, and second because an AT&T store just sold a Pure (i.e. a Touch Diamond 2) to someone at Mobility Digest. Oops!
There’s not a lot to say — it’s a launch phone and it looks solid, but it’s not the most exciting handset we’ll be seeing with 6.5 on it. It’s looks kind of brickish, actually. I’ll leave the reviewing to more able hands, but the pricing is confirmed by a commenter as follows:
$149.99 w/ 2-year contract, after $50 mail-in rebate
$349.99 no-commitment
$30/month data plan required
Indeed. Stop by your local AT&T and maybe you’ll get lucky too.
[Via WMPowerUser]
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
For those who aren't familiar with The Books, check out my post from Friday where I shared some clips from their music. 
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A treat for those of you who love reading about Hollywood’s inner workings: About 7,800 words in this week’s New Yorker dedicated to power blogger Nikki Finke, and those who fear her and/or read her. Which pretty much includes everyone in Hollywood.
It’s a classic New Yorker profile, which means it’s great and thorough read, though there’s not much in the way of news there. Writer Tad Friend mentions Jay Penske’s purchase of Finke’s services in passing, and there’s no update of Penske’s and Finke’s plans to expand the site.
For the record, in late June, Finke said she’d have a New York correspondent hired within three months; four weeks ago, Penske told me said correspondent was going to be signed within two weeks.
What’s the status now? “Not ready to comment right now,” Finke says via email. I’ve also asked Penske for an update.
Back to the story. There’s lots of inside baseball about the symbiosis between the studios and the people who write about them, and some smart reporting about the tradecraft of reporting, and how it’s been altered by the rise of blogging.
I also detected at least a whiff of allusion to Janet Malcolm’s famous description of journalism, published in the New Yorker two decades ago:
Finke’s code is the Hollywood code. She is for hard work, big box-office, stars who remain loyal to their agents and publicists, and the little guy—until, that is, the big guy chats her up. Then she’s for that big guy until some other big guy calls to stick it to the first big guy. And this, too, is the Hollywood code: relationships are paramount but provisional. One executive observes that people who heed Finke’s call to snark about their competitors shouldn’t get too comfortable: “The idea is, The lion won’t eat me if I throw it another Christian. It works for a day, but you’re going back to the Colosseum soon.”
The bond between journalists and their sources is always complex–you’re friends with benefits, without being friends–but its contingent nature is particularly apparent in Hollywood. Finke’s sources can hear in her voice when she sounds low or unwell, and will ask if she needs anything. She’s grateful for the solicitude, but determined to maintain the barrier between her and those she calls “these people.” “A veterinarian treats animals–he’s not an animal,” she says.
What does Finke think? Glad you asked. She has an entire post dedicated to it, of course.
The gist:
As I expected, it’s an amusing caricature, only occasionally true but hardly insightful. Still, I’m relieved that The New Yorker didn’t lay a glove on me. I found Tad Friend, who covers Hollywood from Brooklyn, easy to manipulate, as was David Remnick [the magazine's Pulitzer Prize-winning editor in chief] , whom I enjoyed bitchslapping throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process.
The background debate about whether or not Twitter can actually scale has intensified. More than a year ago I asked “Twitter At Scale: Will It Work?” Today Twitter is far, far bigger. And the uptime woes continue.
The big problem with Twitter is assymetric following without limitations on the number of connections, which means that a single account can theoretically have a number of followers limited only by the total number of Twitter users. This adds massive complexity to the system. Other services solve the problem by forcing both sides to agree to friendship, a one-to-one relationship. Others, like Facebook, limit the connections to 5,000 as well. But Twitter has no limits on complexity. And since they are a centralized, bottlenecked system, it is both hard to scale and easy to attack.
The short messaging format is popular, and it is now part of the web. It should thus be designed and implemented as a decentralized service like most other core web services (email, DNS, blogging etc.). The Internet was built to withstand a nuclear attack, and it is a platform that can’t be owned, attempting to completely centralize a new core service has never worked.
As Twitter grows, it needs to be architected more like the Internet.
New Twitter COO Dick Costolo says that he believes Twitter can scale in a centralized way, meaning the status quo will continue. But he acknowledges that it is a theoretical debate at this point, and he says that he hasn’t ruled out decentralizing Twitter.
We believe decentralizing Twitter solves two problems – it will help the service scale infinitely. And it is potentially a very lucrative source of revenue.
Email Is A Business – The Microsoft Exchange Model (Get Your Customers To Pay You And Do The Heavy Lifting, Too):
Twitter should look at how email, and commercial email servers such as Microsoft Exchange Server, developed. The business generates $2 billion or more in revenue for Microsoft, and powers the majority of corporate office functions (email, calendar, etc.). Businesses pay a few hundred dollars for Exchange, plust $50 or so per year per user. Plus, the businesses handle all the infrastructure costs (servers, bandwidth, etc.).
Twitter should sell Twitter Server just like Microsoft sells Exchange Server. They’d then run their own Twitter node on their own hardware.
Twitter likely couldn’t get $50/user/year out of Twitter Server, but they could certainly get more than the zero they are charging now. And they’d move the burden of scaling Twitter to businesses that want a highly stable solution. And users could still go to Twitter.com to create accounts for free, too. They just wouldn’t have the benefit of controlling the data on their own servers, and having the peace of mind knowing that their uptime was conditioned only on their own infrastructure, something under their control.
There would be some issues to work out, like the namespace and messaging between parties (If we had our own Twitter server, my user name would have to be something like @nik.techcrunch, or we could just use the existing global namespace – email). Twitter could build and sell a kick-ass Twitter server for corporations and those who wish to control their own messaging and their own brand.
But the benefits would be huge. Possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And a partially decentralized service that would stay live even if Twitter.com went down.
So there are the benefits – revenue, lower operational costs, higher uptime. And there’s one more benefit, too. A decentralized Twitter would suck the air out of the idea that Twitter needs a decentralized competitor. Twitter could own the micro-messaging protocols and core service for the long term. Twitter owns the protocol, the users, the format, the trademarks, the brand and the name – why does it also need to host the whole damn thing?
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Goodbye, old storage media!
Rumored for God knows how long, and teased for months, the Sony PSP Go is finally available at your friendly neighborhood retailer. We have one—well, I have one—and have been playing with it for a couple of days now. As such, consider this a review. Spoiler: It’s not bad, but not great either.
What is the PSP Go? Nearest I can tell, it’s Sony’s attempt to usher in the Download Era. No more visiting the local shop to buy Game 3: Yes, It’s a Sequel to the Sequel, or waiting for the UPS man to bring your Amazon or Newegg order. Nope, all you’ll have to do is fire up your device, which, in this case, is the PSP Go, connect to a virtual store, then download the latest game directly to the device’s storage. Congratulations, you’re now the proud owner of Game 3, all without having to leave the comfort of your home. The concept itself, I think, is fantastic, and has been used by the likes of Steam for some time now. Who needs a pile of discs, and their plastic shells, when all you want is the game itself? That’s my attitude, though I can totally understand when people say, “I want the disc!” Your business is your business, and who am I to judge how you want to play your games?
Even Sony recognizes that there’s bound to be more than a few people who aren’t quite ready to give up their discs, which is why the PSP-3000 isn’t going anywhere for a while. (In fact, there’s gonna be a wicked Gran Turismo bundle coming out later this month, which, if I didn’t already have an old PSP (and now the Go), I’d be all over.) Expect the PSP Go and PSP-3000 to co-exist for some time, just like how the Nintendo DS and GameBoy Advance co-existed for some time. Should the PSP Go prove to be any sort of success, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sony axe the PSP-3000 in the future.
So that’s the philosophy of the PSP Go: a neat little device that’s able to download PSP (and PS One classic) games from the Internet.
While the philosophy is fine, and is one I subscribe to, the actual execution isn’t all there. If the PSP Go were a pro wrestling match, and I were using the Wrestling Observer five-star rating system (which I’ll be doing from now on with my reviews, thank you very much), I’d give the PSP Go a solid three point five (3.5) out of five stars. It’s not a perfect device, and it’s just shy of being very good; it’s good. (For comparison’s sake, I’d give the Zune HD a four point five (4.5) out of five: if only the screen were a little more legible in direct sunlight it would the best piece of hardware I’ve ever owned. It really is that good.)
So what’s wrong with the PSP Go? Let’s talk about what’s right first, then get into its shortcomings.
Eu gosto de…
• See you in Hell, UMDs. The UMD could be the worst disc format I’ve ever used. It’s clunky and brittle all at the same time (doesn’t it feel like a slight wind could shatter a UMD?), dreadfully slow, and, in 2009, entirely unnecessary. With flash storage being so cheap these, not to mention so fast, I’m very happy to see Sony kill of the UMD in the PSP Go. That’s right: If you didn’t already know, there’s no UMD drive in the PSP Go. At the moment, that means that your collection of UMD-based PSP games are 100 percent obsolete, provided you don’t plan on keeping a PSP-3000 (or older) handy. Sony has said that it’s planning some sort of trade-in program for the future, but it’s currently being held back by legal reasons. Or, if you’re a cynic, perhaps Sony wants us to buy Vice City Stories or Soulcalibur all over again, this time from the PlayStation Network?
• The general size and shape of the device. The PSP-3000 isn’t exactly huge, but unless you’re wearing Rocawear jeans you’re gonna have a hard time fitting it in your pocket. The PSP Go’s display has the same resolution as previous models (480×272), but on a smaller screen, so images “look sharper,” in layman’s terms. It slides open and shut sorta like the T-Mobile G1 (or pick your slider phone), but never feels like it’s going to break on you. The PSP Go also just looks neat, maybe not as neat as the Zune HD, but neat nonetheless; you tell it was recently designed, whereas the PSP-3000 looks so 2005 by this point.
• The screen. The screen, she is not bad. I played Gran Turismo, Rock Band, and Silent Hill (the PS One game), and all the games looked pretty good to me. I understand “pretty good” is more or less a worthless phrase, but at no point did I think, “Well this screen is rubbish.” Once again, playing the thing in direct sunlight just isn’t going to happen, but you probably assumed as much by now. Besides, I imagine playing this while on-the-go, as it were: on the train, at the airport, etc. If you’re on the Copacabana in Rio playing a portable video game system you may have to check yourself.
Eu não gosto de…
• The download speed. This, I feel, is the single worst part about the PSP G0: it only has 802.11b Wi-Fi! I’m sorry, is this 2003? For a system that’s supposed to usher in the dawn of a new era, this is the absolute dumbest thing Sony could have done. What’s the price difference between an 802.11b and 802.11g chipset? (The Rock: It doesn’t matter that the price difference is!) How much money did Sony lose already with the PS3, $400 zillion? Man up and go with 802.11g. Let me illustrate how slow this is, and keep in mind that I have the fastest residential Internet connection in the United States of America: Gran Turismo for the PSP weighs in at 937MB. It took 21 minutes to download the game, and a further 20 to actually install it. This is not good enough! At that point, I may as well have driven to the store, bought a physical copy of the game, stopped at Taco Bell, then watched a good chunk of The Ultimate Fighter all in the time it took to download and install.
• Game prices. Downloaded from PSN, Gran Turismo cost the same price as it does at retail stores: $39.99 (plus tax! bite me, New York state!) Couldn’t Sony throw us, say, a $5 discount because we’re not buying a physical item that costs money to produce, then ship, then sit on Wal-Mart’s shelves? Isn’t that one of the allures of downloading content, that it cuts out the middleman (the retail stores like Best Buy), and has zero costs associated with production? It’s not like there’s a truck that deliver the ISO from Sony’s servers to my PSP Go, a truck that needs gas, has a driver who’s on a salary, etc. These prices need to be lowered because, otherwise, what’s the point? I already said how it’s not terribly fast to download the game, and now it’s not any less expensive? Lame.
• The nub. If it’s at all possible, I will never use that thing. The physical location of the nub is fine, I have no problems there, but it just feels useless. (Needless to say, I’ve been using the D-Pad to play Gran Turismo, like I did in 1998 when the first game came out.) Would it be impossible to include an actual analog stick? (The D-Pad, for the record, feels more “clicky” than “pushy,” if that makes any sense.)
Conclusão
Again, using the Wrestling Observer five-star rating system, I’d give the PSP Go a fair three point five (3.5) out of five. It’s not going to light the world on fire like the iPhone or anything, but it’s not a huge bucket of fail either. The Wi-Fi is murderously slow, and for something that’s supposed to be all about downloads, well, I think that’s an oversight on Sony’s part. Once your games have downloaded, though, then you’ve got as much space on there as you want. The PSP Go comes with 16GB of built-in storage, which is expandable up to 32GB with the addition of a Memory Stick Micro card. (Are there even 32GB of PSP games worth playing out there? So that’s plenty of space, unless you want to watch movies and whatnot, which I patently have zero interest in.)
So, not bad, but could have been a little bit better, absolutely.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here’s what appears to be a decent iPod dock with an LCD remote that’s priced at just a little over a hundred bucks.
Today only, Amazon’s taken almost $80 off the price of the Philips DLO iBoom — $109 with free shipping, down from the regular price of $187.69.
You get a helmet-shaped speaker/dock combo that recharges your iPod and pushes sound out of a pair of 1-inch tweeters and 3-inch woofers.
The real draw here, though, is the remote control with built-in color LCD screen. It works up to 75 feet away and displays album art and artist info — looks pretty nice. There’s also a line-in jack for hooking up non-iPod players, though that’ll render the remote control useless aside from controlling the volume.
DLO iBoom JukeBox Speaker System for iPod [Amazon.com]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AP - Shouts of "Kill him! Kill him!" ring out as the preteens train their virtual assault rifles on the last remaining terrorist and spray him with bullets. Blood splatters. The enemy collapses. And they cheerfully wrap up another game of "Counter-Strike."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Nollywood Omen" (Thanks, Vann Hall!)
In the first scene of 666, the devil sends two assassins up to earth to kidnap a pregnant woman. They cut her belly open in a tunnel and steal the baby, whom they baptize in the service of Satan. Throughout the movie, Satan terrorizes the people of Nigeria despite the efforts of Pastor Okonkwo (yes, he also stars in the film). Okonkwo often sends lightning bolts down to hell by the power of extreme prayer.
In part two of the quartet, the kidnapped child returns to earth and causes all manner of problems. He seduces a woman in her late 20s by flashing lasers out of his eyes; he goes on a bar crawl and possesses a woman who then kills a priest. Then, when a gang of Christians capture him and attempt to ritually stab him to death, he uses his powers to brand each of their foreheads with a lovely 666.
Cydwoq
Source: Boing Boing | 4 Oct 2009 | 11:04 am
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Yours truly was in Finland most of last week, visiting a bunch of technology startups at their offices, paying a visit to Nokia's research center and attending the great MindTrek conference (thanks again for organizing the tour, FinnFacts).
One of the items in the packed schedule was a visit to the Demola facilities, essentially a type of incubator where students from the three universities in the city of Tampere and beyond can come work on projects in an 'open innovation environment'.
One of the demos there that made a lasting impression on me - and the other bloggers who were invited to the tour - came from startup Ball-it. The fledgling company markets a golfball-sized device that is able to interact with your computer, TV or mobile phone thanks to physical wireless sensing technology that was popularized in large part by the Nintendo Wii gaming console. The technology has been under development for quite a while; tech blog Venturebeat profiled Ball-it about 10 months ago.
Section: Web, Online Music/Video, Google
Anyone searching for Pirate Bay in Google’s search engine this past week were met with the following message in their search results: “In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.” Google had given the site a page ranking of zero. However, pages besides the homepage were still accessible through the search engine.
Google has now admitted that the blocking was caused by an internal error and has issued a statement that Pirate Bay should have never been blocked. The site was originally removed because Google received a cease and desist letter that threatened legal action if Pirate Bay was not removed. According to reports, the letter was sent from an agency that specializes in porn films.
Pirate Bay has been reinstated by Google, which is believed to be the result of a letter sent by Pirate Bay’s attorneys demanding that Pirate Bay be returned to Google’s search index. Reports say the letter hinted at Google trying to suppress the competition and hindering free speech rights.
Read: [CNET]
Image Source:The Blogger
Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Here are some stories you might have missed this week.
LED lightbulb puts out equivalent of 60 watt bulb, uses only 6 watts
Oh yes you can bike to the beach with your surfboard
Mighty Mouse 2: Apple planning to upgrade its ill-fated mouse?
Apple’s new marketing campaign targets toddlers, kindergarteners
New device brings wireless Internet to boats
Crafted by antiques dealer and furniture maker Timothy Oulton of London, our oversized steamer trunk armoire is configured as an ingeniously designed secretary.Mayfair Steamer Secretary Trunk Vintage Cigar Leather (Thanks, Charlie!)* Reproduction antique steamer trunk
* Handmade of distressed vintage cigar leather over a solid wood frame
* Aniline-dyed leather has an antiqued, vintage look
* Accented with over 3,000 hand-hammered brass nailheads
* Features a pull-down desktop and multiple drawers, cubbies, wire management and bookshelves
* Lined in leather-edged canvas
* Stands on wheels for mobility and closes for storage and privacy
Steam Punk R2D2 (Thanks, Robert!)
Section: Communications, Smartphones
After the recent WebOS version 1.2 upgrade, some users found certain features missing or broken. There was an issue with some Exchange servers, there’s an app store, but no paid apps yet, and, oh yeah, iTunes syncing was still broken. Surely this meant that Palm had simply given up after it received the letter from the USB-IF explaining that Palm, not Apple, was in the wrong for using Apple’s USB Vendor ID. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
With the recent 1.2.i WebOS update, Palm fixed a lot of the bugs, including “an issue preventing media sync from working with latest version of iTunes (9.0.1).” That’s right—Palm is still trying to get iTunes syncing to work despite Apple’s and the USB-IF’s best efforts to tell the company “no.” The new update sets up iTunes syncing by using Apple’s USB Vendor ID, identifying itself as made by Apple, and changing the Product ID to that of the iPod with Video. Once again, all of this makes iTunes think the Palm Pre is some sort of iPod. This patch might be more difficult for Apple to fix, which seems to be what Palm is betting on.
Obviously, iTunes syncing is something Palm really wants, which makes sense since iTunes is such a popular music store and application (even if it is a bit bloated). What doesn’t make sense, however, is why Palm doesn’t just make its own software to interact with iTunes, like the BlackBerry Manager does, or like any number of other applications (like MissingSync). Perhaps Palm could even forge a partnership with DoubleTwist, a company that also seems to have it out for Apple and its iTunes empire and whom already provides its form of iTunes integration for the Palm Pre. Fighting against Apple is a noble cause, but this on-and-off syncing can’t be great for the average consumer who wants it to just work.
Read [All Things D]
Read [Pre Central]
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
The boy woke us up this morning with a flyer from Toys ‘r’ Us informing the world that this was Bricktober and that all Lego kits are 30%. What does this mean? Well, some crazy pirate ship now costs $70, down from $100. Isn’t that still really expensive? Back when I was a kid Lego was free because you always inherited a huge bucket of it from someone. There was so much of it around you found it in your spoor. Sadly, this appears to be no longer the case.
Head over to TRU for instant savings on almost all the kits including big buckets of Lego for $15.
AP - When swine flu broke out, the government revved up a massive information campaign centered on three words: Wash your hands. The Obama administration now wants to convey similarly clear and concise guidance about one of the biggest national security threats in your home and office — the computer.
Section: Gadgets / Other, Household, Lifestyle, Reviews
The Powermat receiver/case for the iPhone 3G with a MSRP of $39.99 and is intended to be used with a Powermat charging mat.
A Powermat receiver/case that will fit the iPhone 3G and a Micro USB to USB cable.
The receiver fits around your iPhone 3G pretty easily. There are two pieces, one piece fits over the bottom and connects to the iPod dock connector. The other piece is not necessary for the device to function, but it makes for a cleaner profile. There are holes for the power button, headphones, camera, and volume rocker and hold switch.
The case adds a little heft to the otherwise light iPhone 3G. The base of the receiver has a Micro USB port that can use the included Micro USB cable to connect to a computer for either charging or syncing. If you are looking to carry one less proprietary iPod cable, this could be quite helpful since Micro USB cables are dirt cheap when compared to iPod cables. Call quality is not affected by the case.
The Powermat receiver/case is a bit on the slippery side. I would have liked to have seen a more rubberized grip on the phone. The charging plate on the back is raised and away from the case. That can make for an uneasy grip for smaller hands. The case has to be removed if you want to use an iPod dock or anything that uses the iPod connector.
Powermat could have increased the amount of plastic so the charging plate did not stick out - however, I could see why they chose this design to decrease bulk.
If you buy into the Powermat universe, purchase the Powermat home & office mat or travel mat and have an iPhone, this is very handy. Keeping your phone charged is incredibly easy since you don’t need to search for a fallen iPod cable.
Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Section: Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle, Reviews
The Powermat Home & Office Mat wirelessly charges up to 3 devices simultaneously by placing a device with a Powermat receiver onto the mat. There is an additional USB port to charge a fourth device via USB cable. The mat retails for $99.99. Cases and receivers are available at two price points: $29.99 and $39.99.
| MODEL | SUGGESTED RETAIL |
| Mats | |
| Home & Office | $99.99 |
| Portable | $99.99 |
| Receivers | |
| Case for iPhone 3G | $39.99 |
| Case for iPod Touch (2nd gen) | $39.99 |
| Battery Door for Blackberry Bold 9000 | $29.99 |
| Battery Door for Blackberry Curve 8900 | $29.99 |
| Battery Door for Blackberry Curve 8300 Series | $29.99 |
| Battery Door for Blackberry Pearl 8110+ Series | $29.99 |
| Dock for iPod & iPhone | $39.99 |
| Back for Nintendo DSi | $29.99 |
| Back for Nintendo DS Lite | $29.99 |
| Powercube | $29.99 |
The Powermat Mat is pretty easy to use. Take it out of the box, place the skate-board like mat on a surface, and plug it in. Then you take a receiver and attach it to your rechargeable device. Then place the receiver on the mat.
There are three charging spots located on the mat. When you place the receiver on charging spot, you feel a magnetic pull to the right position, a light turns on below the charging point, and a sound effect is played. You get three points of feedback to make sure your device is charging. The light and sound effect can be turned off.
The Powercube is a small plastic device with a mini USB cable. Tips fit over the mini USB cable. Place the Powercube on the mat and you can charge devices. The Tip Storage container is a nice touch so you can keep your tips together.
The mat is pretty stylish with a gray and black color scheme. While it is always advisable to keep your electronics neat and clean, the charging still works through dust and even business cards. Keeping three devices charged with one device is nice and just reduces clutter.
The mat only has three defined points that charge receivers. You cannot simply place your device just anywhere for a quick charge.
If you just carry one device something like the Powermat probably wouldn’t appeal to you. However, If you a person who carries multiple electronics or live in a house with more than one cell phone, the Powermat is pretty much a no-brainer.
Company Site: [Powermat]
Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Yours truly was in Finland most of last week, visiting a bunch of technology startups at their offices, paying a visit to Nokia’s research center and attending the great MindTrek conference (thanks again for organizing the tour, FinnFacts).
One of the items in the packed schedule was a visit to the Demola facilities, essentially a type of incubator where students from the three universities in the city of Tampere and beyond can come work on projects in an ‘open innovation environment’.
One of the demos there that made a lasting impression on me – and the other bloggers who were invited to the tour – came from startup Ball-it. The fledgling company markets a golfball-sized device that is able to interact with your computer, TV or mobile phone thanks to physical wireless sensing technology that was popularized in large part by the Nintendo Wii gaming console. The technology has been under development for quite a while; tech blog Venturebeat profiled Ball-it about 10 months ago.
As a game controller, the little ball makes most sense to me. Since it detects things like rotation, direction movements, squeezing, tapping and reaction speed, there are loads of gestures that you can make wielding the ball trigger an on-screen activity, as you can see in the video(s) below. I only tried it for two of the games that have been developed for the device so far, but it was intuitive enough for me to get the hang of what I was supposed to do in just a few seconds. It was also loads of fun.
I specifically liked the fact that you can place the ball in your pants pockets, after which the device will be able to detect your running speed, how high you jump, and more to control elements of basic sports games. Besides doubling as a pedometer, it also measures how many calories you burn so you can use to improve your fitness, too.
Ball-it aims to be able to distribute the device in the near future for 15 or 16 euros (approx. $22) the price of an average PC game and actually includes six basic PC games in the same box. Additional games can be purchased from the company’s web shop, which it evidently refers to as an app store.
Also check out the review and video over on ChipChick.com.
Dropico is a brand new service that allows you to drag and drop pictures from multiple social networks rapidly and seamlessly, without the need to upload photos and other imagery to each of them separately.
Have any pictures stored on your TwitPic account that you want to share with your Facebook Friends, or want to bring a couple of your Flickr shots to your MySpace account? Just log on to Dropico, log into the services you use and start dragging and dropping.
Dropico is currently in private beta, but 1,000 TechCrunch readers can try out the service via this link.
Personally, I tend to simply send pictures to my Posterous account by e-mail and auto-distribute them to my blog, Flickr and Facebook account, but I can see why people might be interested in giving Dropico a whirl. It’s an easy way of organizing media across multiple social networks, but aside from that it’s also a decent media uploading service since it also allows you to fetch pictures from your computer or from any web page. Once you’ve imported images on Dropico, you can distribute them to your social network(s) of choice all in one interface.
Dropico currently works with Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket, Bebo, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa. In the near future, the Israeli startup behind the service intends to add more services to the fray, and also make it easier for users to drag and drop other media like videos across social networks. There’s also an API in the works.
The startup is currently operating on some $150k from its founders and some angel investors, but is currently talking to other investors about a bigger round.
(Via Orli)
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
I'm in Taiwan now and as announced last week, there will be a TechCrunch/CrunchGear meetup tomorrow (Monday, October 5) in Taipei at 7.30pm (open door at 7pm). We are holding the meetup with our partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting, a Taipei-based innovation strategy firm.
Every guest should have received the invitation by now, and please remember the venue changed (the schedule remains the same though). Thank you very much for the incredible interest in the meetup, which is sponsored by Taipei- and San Jose-based hardware maker IPEVO.
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Texting while driving seems to be the hotbed issue of today’s world. Even though texting is only one of a multitude of distractive factors in the car, 
