|
|
|
|
Leading Chinese rocket scientist dies at 98Qian Xuesen, a rocket scientist known as the father of China's space technology, died Saturday in Beijing, the official Xinhua News Agency said. He was 98. Qian was born in Hangzhou and...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 3:53 am Apple iPhone Has Launched In China - I4U
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 31 Oct 2009 | 3:23 am Disease May Prevent Manned Journey To MarsPickens writes "Science Daily News reports that human missions to Mars and all other long-term space flights might be compromised by disease, first because space travel appears to weaken astronauts' immune systems; and second, because it increases the virulence and growth of microbes. 'When people think of space travel, often the vast distances are what come to mind first,' says Jean-Pol Frippiat from Nancy-University in France, 'but even after we figure out a way to cover these distances in a reasonable amount of time, we still need to figure out how astronauts are going to overcome disease and sickness.' Frippiat says studies show that immune systems of both people and animals in space flight conditions are significantly weaker than their grounded counterparts and that common pathogens such as Salmonella, E. coli and Staphylococcus reproduce more rapidly in space flight conditions, leading to increased risk of contamination, colonization and serious infection."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 31 Oct 2009 | 3:14 am Macrame Masks - Handcrafted Rasta Masks Let You Dress Up the DIY Way (GALLERY)(TrendHunter.com) These macrame masks by Etsy artisan Btrbcomposer are fierce. Whether you choose the Rasta Centurion mask pictured in the first image or the Black Big Snout mask in the second image,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 3:00 am Shareable: stories of sharing and cooperation
Jeremy sez, "Shareable tells the story of sharing. We cover the people, places, and projects that are bringing a shareable world to life. And share tools and tips to help you make a shareable world real in your life.
In a shareable world, things like car sharing, community gardening, and cohousing bring us together, make life more fun, and free up time and money for the important things in life. When we share, not only is a better life possible, but so is a better world.
The remarkable successes of Wikipedia, Kiva, open source software, Burning Man, Freecycle, and Creative Commons point the way. They tell a hopeful story about human nature and our future, one we don't hear enough in the mainstream media."
Shareable
(Thanks, Jeremy!)
Shareable: stories of sharing and cooperationJeremy sez, "Shareable tells the story of sharing. We cover the people, places, and projects that are bringing a shareable world to life. And share tools and tips to help you make a shareable world real...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:57 am Shareable: stories of sharing and cooperationJeremy sez, "Shareable tells the story of sharing. We cover the people, places, and projects that are bringing a shareable world to life. And share tools and tips to help you make a shareable world real...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:57 am Creative Commons Hallowe'en mixZoran sez, "The night before Halloween is known as Mischief Night because it is a time for young people to act out and do things that may get them in trouble with neighbors, with the law, and with satan...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:54 am Creative Commons Hallowe'en mixZoran sez, "The night before Halloween is known as Mischief Night because it is a time for young people to act out and do things that may get them in trouble with neighbors, with the law, and with satan...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:54 am Creative Commons Hallowe'en mix
Zoran sez, "The night before Halloween is known as Mischief Night because it is a time for young people to act out and do things that may get them in trouble with neighbors, with the law, and with satan.
One of those pranks is downloading music illegally, usually in search of a fitting soundtrack for All Hallows' eve, one that will frighten the trick or treaters.
Well this year, we can all focus on bigger and better things, thanks to a set of demonic artists who believe that it is in their interest to give away some of their sonic concoctions for free, because it will help them to cast their spell on a wider audience."
Creative Commons Halloween Mix
(Thanks, Zoran!)
Previously:
 Source: Boing Boing | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:54 am Hallow'en is safe, your kids are safe, the only scary thing is the warningsLenore "Free Range Kids" Skenazy has a stirring editorial in defense of Hallowe'en and kids in today's Huffpo: It's not that I'm cavalier about safety. I'm just a sucker -- so to speak -- for the facts...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:51 am Hallow'en is safe, your kids are safe, the only scary thing is the warningsLenore "Free Range Kids" Skenazy has a stirring editorial in defense of Hallowe'en and kids in today's Huffpo:It's not that I'm cavalier about safety. I'm just a sucker -- so to speak -- for the facts. And the fact is: No child has been poisoned by a stranger's goodies on Halloween, ever, as far as we can determine. Joel Best, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware, studied November newspapers from 1958 to the present, scouring them for any accounts of kids felled by felonious candy. And...he didn't find any. He did find one account of a boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix his father gave him. Dad did it for the insurance money and, Best says, he probably figured that so many kids are poisoned on Halloween, no one would notice one more...As Goes Halloween, So Goes Childhood Source: Boing Boing | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:51 am Hallow'en is safe, your kids are safe, the only scary thing is the warningsLenore "Free Range Kids" Skenazy has a stirring editorial in defense of Hallowe'en and kids in today's Huffpo: It's not that I'm cavalier about safety. I'm just a sucker -- so to speak -- for the facts...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:51 am Creativity and CompressionI spend a lot of time writing, and I'm constantly amazed -- even after decades of this stuff -- how much better things get when you say less. Take out words, and dull prose sits up. Take out sentences,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:50 am Barnes & Noble Planning International ExpansionWant to be the head of Barnesandnoble.com's international business? Because they're definitely hiring a whole team, and they're starting at the top. Recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates is representing...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:38 am Barnes & Noble Planning International Expansion
Recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates is representing Barnes & Noble in a search for the “head of their international business,” according to a source who was contacted about the position. The job entails building the international business for BN.com from scratch, hiring the team and “building the infrastructure outside the U.S.” They prefer the executive live in New York, but Europe is ok, too. Global ecommerce experience is preferred. Barnes & Noble is no Amazon, but it is a billion dollar company and they have an upcoming ebook reader that kicks the Kindle’s butt (it’s so easy to love unlaunched products, isn’t it?). Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 
Source: TechCrunch | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:38 am Xeni on Rachel Maddow Show: World Wide Web grows wider, more worldlyRachel Maddow, host of all that is worth watching on television, very kindly invited me back to The Rachel Maddow Show tonight for a "Moment of Geek" on the big ICANN news today: starting soon, domain name extensions will be available in non-Latin character sets. Chinese, Greek, Arabic, or any one of the more than 20 official languages in India. In other words, the alphabet you're reading this blog post in will no longer be the default for web addresses. When Ms. Maddow's team invited me in earlier today, the first thing I did was phone Hong Kong-based journalist and global 'net culture researcher Rebecca MacKinnon (Twitter: @rmack), who was in Seoul attending the big ICANN meeting. She has written extensively on this topic, and helped me parse the news. First up for the "non-Latin" extensions? Country-specific domain names (.cn for China, for instance). Later on, everything else (.com and the like). Don't expect to see "dot china" in Chinese characters right away, explained Rebecca: starting November 16, registrars can begin to apply, but it'll be a while before the domains show up in the wild. Some US tech reporters covering the news ran with but what about meeee! headlines. "This is a bad day for the English language," wrote one. Well, someone call the whaambulance -- it's an awesome day if you read in Farsi or Hebrew. It's not about our language, it's about the languages spoken by the next billion people to come online, and most of them don't speak English or write in a language based on our Latin character set.
More online:
Hebrew, Hindi, other scripts get Web address nod (AP) Source: Boing Boing | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:26 am Xeni on Rachel Maddow Show: World Wide Web grows wider, more worldlyRachel Maddow, host of all that is worth watching on television, very kindly invited me back to The Rachel Maddow Show tonight for a "Moment of Geek" on the big ICANN news today: starting soon, domain...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:26 am Daily Crunch: Down at the Station Edition
Review: Sanyo Xacti CG10 compact HD camcorder
Source: CrunchGear | 31 Oct 2009 | 1:00 am Yahoo's Yodel Anecdotal Blogger Will Not Be Yodeling Anymore [BoomTown]
While Nicki Dugan (pictured here) was not one of the top execs at Yahoo, she certainly is typical of many at the company who have struck with it through many ups and downs. No longer, according to a memo BoomTown obtained from several sources, since the longtime PR staffer–who has been at Yahoo (YHOO) for almost a decade and worked at an outside public relations firm that worked for the company before that–will leave the company Monday. Dugan has a high-profile role at Yahoo, running its Yodel Anecdotal corporate blog and penning most of the pieces on it. It’s not clear from the memo where Dugan is headed, though it is full of interesting “moments” she had while at Yahoo, which has some nice historical details (including a scoop I had from Web 1.0 that I had long forgotten). Here’s the email she sent to colleagues:
Here’s a link to one of my favorite blogs by Dugan, which she referenced above, on dancer Matt Harding, with a video below she did by dragging him to do jigs all over Yahoo: [ See post to watch video ] Source: All Things Digital | 31 Oct 2009 | 12:49 am Perfect World Announces Appointment to the Board of DirectorsBEIJING, Oct. 31 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Perfect World Co., Ltd. (Nasdaq: PWRD) ("Perfect World" or the "Company"), a leading online game developer and operator...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 31 Oct 2009 | 12:48 am Masten Qualifies For $1 Million Space PrizeRobGoldsmith writes "Masten Space Systems successfully qualified for first place in level two of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge Wednesday. Flying a brand new vehicle named XA-0.1E (nicknamed Xoie), Masten demonstrated their ability to build, debug and fly a vehicle on a very short timeline. " Reader lessgravity points out a video of the craft completing its mission. Apparently, the team was given an extra shot at the challenge on Friday after having trouble during their scheduled attempts on Wednesday and Thursday, which didn't please John Carmack, founder of rival team Armadillo Aerospace.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Gizmodo | 30 Oct 2009 | 11:00 pm Social Media Require 'Community Relations 2.0'Boston College researchers find real-time advocacy challenges long-standing corporate practicesThe rise of social media and real-time advocacy have re-written the community outreach rules companies followed for decades.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Oct 2009 | 10:49 pm GG Allin designer toyBehold: A GG Allin designer toy! Specifically, this fine collectible is an "Extra Filthy Bloody Edition" Allin figurine "loaded into a full color "splatter" box." I remember watching a dub of Hated, the documentary about the transgressive punk performer, on a pre-release review VHS at Mark F's pad in 1994 and being thoroughly disgusted, which, I guess, was the whole point. (Here's the NSFW trailer.) The GG Allin figure, limited to an edition of 500, is 7-inches tall and sells for $16.95 from Aggronautix. Here's what my pal Gil Kaufman wrote about it at MTV.com:"GG Allin Bobblehead... Now With More Blood and Filth" Source: Boing Boing | 30 Oct 2009 | 10:38 pm New Analyses Of Dinosaur Growth May Wipe Out One-Third Of SpeciesNamed dinosaurs may actually be juvenile or subadults of already known taxaPaleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Museum of the Rockies have wiped out two species of dome-headed dinosaur, one of them named three years ago – with great fanfare – after Hogwarts, the school attended by Harry Potter.Their demise comes after a three-horned dinosaur, Torosaurus, was assigned to the dustbin of history last month at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in the United Kingdom, the loss in recent years of quite a few duck-billed hadrosaurs and the probable disappearance of Nanotyrannus, a supposedly miniature Tyrannosaurus rex.These dinosaurs were not separate species, as some paleontologists claim, but different growth stages of previously named dinosaurs, according to a new study.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Oct 2009 | 10:35 pm Angry Faces: Research Suggests Link Between Facial Structure And AggressionAngry words and gestures are not the only way to get a sense of how temperamental a person is.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Oct 2009 | 10:28 pm Caltech Researchers Show Efficacy Of Gene Therapy In Mouse Models Of Huntington's DiseaseAntibodies against intracellular targets can reduce symptoms, lengthen life spanResearchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have shown that a highly specific intrabody (an antibody fragment that works against a target inside a cell) is capable of stalling the development of Huntington's disease in a variety of mouse models."Gene therapy in these models successfully attenuated the symptoms of Huntington's disease and increased life span," notes Paul Patterson, the Anne P.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 30 Oct 2009 | 10:22 pm Contest To Hack Brazilian Voting MachinesAn anonymous reader writes "Brazilian elections went electronic many years ago, with very fast results but a few complaints from losers, of course. Next month, 10 teams that accepted the challenge will have access to hardware and software (Google translation; original in Portuguese) for the amount of time they requested (from one hour to four days). Some will try to break the vote's secrecy and some will try to throw in malicious code to change the entered votes without leaving traces."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Gizmodo | 30 Oct 2009 | 10:00 pm Amazon Kindle DX E-Book Reader - Washington Post
Source: Sci/Tech - Google News | 30 Oct 2009 | 9:33 pm Dear Valve, where is Episode 3?
When Half-Life 2 was released in 2004, it was met with critical praise and great sales. Since then, two episodes have been released, the aptly titled Half-Life: Episode One in 2006 and Half-Life: Episode 2 in 2007. Both titles were extremely well made, though a bit short in nature, to the dismay of the fans. Since then, we’ve heard very little. Valve has worked steadily on other projects (like Team Fortress 2 and Portal) but many have wondered what has become of Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance. Valve has stated previously that they intend on releasing Half-Life: Episode 3 sometime, but no one has heard anything about it since. So the real question is, will Valve ever release Episode 3? Have they pulled a Bungie and moved on to other titles? Or are they just playing it really close to their proverbial vests, and planning to spring the title on us with no warning, as they’ve done before? Only time will tell, but I certainly hope we’re not looking at another Duke Nukem Forever. And the fans are starting to get restless. [via Reddit(the comments are worth reading)]
Source: Gizmodo | 30 Oct 2009 | 9:00 pm Advertisers get creative at Waterloo Station, create craziness with projectorsAdvertising is rough. People get jaded, technology gets old. Viral videos aren’t what they used to be. It’s not just a case of throwing a simple website up and hoping they come to you, you have to actually work for it. Projectors seem to be where it’s at these days. Companies are using them on walls, pool tables, and now train stations. Waterloo Station in the UK is the site of the latest example, using AdTrace, created by two companies in Great Britain. I think it’s safe to assume that this technology will be coming to the US in the near future.
Source: CrunchGear | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:55 pm Bioshock 2 video previewI’ve been told that I need to play the original Bioshock. I missed out on it when it first came out, but picked it up on Steam a while back and just never played it. I’ve been told it’s a great game, but I haven’t had the time to check it out yet. Guess I should get to it, since the hands-on videos are already coming out for the sequel. The preview video that IGN published shows some basic gameplay, graphic examples, and some of the new combat styles. It’s interesting to see how they’ve overhauled the graphics engine, and added some combat options that weren’t available before. All in all, Bioshock 2 is looking to be very compelling game, and could end up being the hottest game of the holiday season.
Source: CrunchGear | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:51 pm Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid
If hype were to be believed, the Motorola DROID is the pièce de résistance of the mobile world; the conclusive creation sent down by the Great Smartphone in the sky to rid us of our woes. It would prepare your breakfast promptly each morning, tuck you in at night, and, maybe -- just maybe -- knock the iPhone down a notch or two.
Beginning about a week before its launch (largely due to Verizon's incredibly intense marketing campaign) I began getting calls and tweets from friends and colleagues asking about the Droid. They always had two questions: the first would be something like "What do you think of the Droid?", followed by "Would you recommend it over the iPhone?" Same questions, each.. and.. every.. time.
I've been using the Droid as my primary phone for a few days now, and I think I'm finally ready to answer them.
Source: CrunchGear | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:51 pm Buffett's Berkshire lowers stake in Moody by 2.9 pctNEW YORK, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Investor Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc sold 2.9 percent of its holdings in debt ratings agency Moody's Corp this week, raising $28.7 million in the transaction,...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:50 pm UPDATE 5-CIT moves closer to pre-packaged bankruptcy approval* Holders of 90 pct of unsecured debt ok prepack bankruptcySource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:50 pm UPDATE 5-CIT moves closer to pre-packaged bankruptcy approval* Holders of 90 pct of unsecured debt ok prepack bankruptcySource: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:50 pm Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid
If hype were to be believed, the Motorola DROID is the pièce de résistance of the mobile world; the conclusive creation sent down by the Great Smartphone in the sky to rid us of our woes. It would prepare your breakfast promptly each morning, tuck you in at night, and, maybe -- just maybe -- knock the iPhone down a notch or two.
Beginning about a week before its launch (largely due to Verizon's incredibly intense marketing campaign) I began getting calls and tweets from friends and colleagues asking about the Droid. They always had two questions: the first would be something like "What do you think of the Droid?", followed by "Would you recommend it over the iPhone?" Same questions, each.. and.. every.. time.
I've been using the Droid as my primary phone for a few days now, and I think I'm finally ready to answer them.
Source: TechCrunch | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:48 pm Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs Motorola DroidIf hype were to be believed, the Motorola DROID is the pièce de résistance of the mobile world; the conclusive creation sent down by the Great Smartphone in the sky to rid us of our woes. It would prepare your breakfast promptly each morning, tuck you in at night, and, maybe — just maybe — knock the iPhone down a notch or two. Beginning about a week before its launch (largely due to Verizon’s incredibly intense marketing campaign) I began getting calls and tweets from friends and colleagues asking about the Droid. They always had two questions: the first would be something like “What do you think of the Droid?”, followed by “Would you recommend it over the iPhone?” Same questions, each.. and.. every.. time. I’ve been using the Droid as my primary phone for a few days now, and I think I’m finally ready to answer them.
A bit about the reviewer: Being that I’m only human, it is absolutely impossible for me to be 100% objective when comparing two phones. Thus, my only option is to be as transparent as possible. Going into this review, I had used an iPhone (which, for disclosures sake, I pay for in full) as my primary device for around 2 years. I also regularly use a Palm Pre, Nokia N97, BlackBerry Tour, T-Mobile G1, and an HTC Touch2 to ensure a general knowledge of all the major platforms. I am an iPhone developer by hobby. This Droid unit was provided by Motorola for review. The Looks:
Comparing the aesthetics of the iPhone and the Droid is.. ludicrous, if not impossible. It’d be like having a heated argument over whether Angelina Jolie was more or less gorgeous than Halle Berry. Each is stunning for their own reasons. Same deal here; the iPhone is engulfed in glistening curves that give it a softer, friendlier look, while the Droid is wrapped in tight, clean angles that make it a shining example of great industrial design. If we were to consider the overall designs par-for-par, all we’d have left to nitpick is the details. In the Droid’s case, the gold details on the camera button, 5-way D-Pad, and rear casing lose it some points for looking like something straight out of a bad 70’s bachelor pad. The iPhone then loses its ground for the fact that the glossy back casing is damned near impossible to keep clean and free of fingerprints. The Winner: It’s a tie. Both are drop dead gorgeous, and the only flaws of each are downright trivial. On-Screen Keyboards:   In preparation for the onslaught of candybar Touchscreens that were sure to follow after the success of the iPhone, Android earned on-screen keyboard support shortly after the launch of the G1. At first, it.. well, it sucked. A lot. It has gotten better since, however – on the stock build of Android 2.0 I’ve got running on this Droid, I’m able to blast about at nearly the same rate as I can on my iPhone. That’s impressive for Android’s sake, considering that I’ve spent considerably more time on the iPhone keyboard. That said, the iPhone’s autocorrect seems a bit better at properly attending to my typos, primarily on shorter words that have more potential alternatives. The Winner: iPhone, by a very slim margin. It just does a better job at guessing what I’m trying to type as I poke my way around a sea of glass. That said.. Physical Keyboard: For many, a physical keyboard is a must-have. Every smartphone I had prior to an iPhone had a physical keyboard, and I still prefer a physical keyboard after two years. The Droid has one, and the iPhone doesn’t – so it wins this one by default. That’s not to say the Droid keyboard is all that great – nor is it terrible. It is decidedly average. The buttons are practically flush with each other, and it’s quite easy to jam down on two buttons at once. To rank it amongst some of the more well known keyboarded handsets of the past few years: the Droid keyboard is better than that of the G1, Helio Ocean, and the BlackBerry Curve, but not nearly as good as anything from the Danger Sidekick line, the BlackBerry Tour, or the HTC Touch Pro 2. The Winner: Droid, by default. The Browser:   On the popular web-standards test known as Acid3, the iPhone scores a 100/100 while the Droid caps out at 93/100. Thus, if we’re going purely by measurable standards here, the iPhone browser wins. That said, we’re not robots – standards schmandards, we like what we like. With that said, I still prefer the iPhone browser. It tends to render pages pixel perfect (as implied by the Acid3 test results), while the Droid would occasionally fall short. Oddly, it renders pages more accurately when they’re being viewed in landscape mode than in portrait mode. What really sealed the deal, however, was multi-touch in the browser. Once you’ve grown accustomed to pinch-zooming, the level of accuracy provided by tap-zooming alone simply doesn’t cut it. The iPhone browser is also considerably faster, with page loads completing anywhere from 15-30% more quickly with both handsets on WiFi. The Winner: iPhone, thanks to multitouch, faster pageloads and web standards compliance. Navigation: When it comes to the standard mapping/directions stuff, the two phones are about on par. Turn-by-turn voice navigation is a whole different matter, however. Out of the box, the iPhone 3GS has Google Maps, which does not currently do turn-by-turn voice navigation. The App Store provides a bunch of solutions for this, ranging from a few bucks a month all the way up to a one-time payment of $99 bucks. The Droid also has Google Maps, but it’s Google Maps with Navigation – and it really, really rocks. It does nearly everything the iPhone Maps app does, with the addition of toggleable layers (show/hide traffic, satellite views, Wikipedia entries, and transit lines), support for Google’s Latitude location-sharing service and, most notably, completely free turn-by-turn voice navigation. You can also search for locations by voice, something we were surprised was absent when Apple added voice recognition to the iPhone. Like with the browser, we miss the multi-touch support – but we’d gladly give that up for the free voice navigation. The Winner: Droid. None of the for-pay apps we’ve used come close to the ease of use and functionality Google provides in their free app. Lock Screen:   On both the iPhone and the Droid, the lock screen is essentially just that: a screen which shows when your handset is locked. The Droid has one small (but clever) bonus feature thrown in which allows you to quickly silence the handset with a single swipe – but considering that the iPhone has a physical silence switch on the side, this isn’t a defining feature. Out of the box, both handset’s lockscreens are equally meh. Yet, this is still somewhere the Droid manages to outshine the iPhone, by playing on the open nature of Android. Right within the Android Market, you can download applications which greatly expand the functionality of the lockscreen, such as the widget-based Flyscreen. You can do similar things on an iPhone – but not without jailbreaking. Considering that Apple wanted to make jailbreaking illegal, it’s hard to consider things that require jailbreaking as fair equivalents to things that come straight from Google’s own catalog. The Winner: Droid. Battery Life:
I’ll be honest: I haven’t done a formal battery life test with the Droid. Hell, I’ve never done one with the iPhone, either. That said, I’ve been using both devices equally throughout the day, and they’re both hovering around a 50% charge. This holds true with what I’ve seen for the last few days of testing; the Droid’s battery life is right around par with the iPhone’s. The Droid’s 1400 mAh battery is slightly larger than the iPhone 3GS’ at 1150mAh, but the battery hungry multi-tasking probably cancels that out. Without any formal testing, I’ve got to declare it a tie. The Winner: Tie (With a slight lean in Droid’s direction as it has a swappable battery – but really, what percentage of the population carries one?) App Stores:   Google’s got around 10,000 apps in their collection. Apple’s got somewhere around 10x that, with the App Store currently floating right around 100,000 items. Of course, quantity does not equal quality. As anyone who’s really spent a ton of time in either App Store would agree, the majority of applications in both range from bad to horrible, and their are plenty of gems in both. Both have a great application (and a handful of not so great alternatives) for nearly every common need. The primary strength of the Android market is its openness. Google has stood quite true to their original promise of allowing anything outside of what was undeniably illegal or malicious. This is something members of the tech industry like to tout about as a killer feature – but in the end, it simply doesn’t matter. The only way to gauge the success of an App Store is to try to view it as an average consumer — you know, the ones spending the most money — would. By and large, the average consumer would not care about any of the things Apple has thus far banned. To make an argument that could go on for many pages very, very short: your grandma does not care about Google Voice. After spending a lot of time in both stores, I feel that I can honestly say that the selection and overall quality of the App Store is significantly better. Everything we’ve seen and all conversations we’ve had with big development houses indicates that they’re putting much, much more effort in iPhone app development than they are with Android. The iPhone has a tremendous lead here, both in quantity and quality. In time, as Android handsets flood the market and hopefully do away with the feature phone all together, it may very well catch up – but that’s simply not the case in the foreseeable feature. Winner: iPhone. Customization: The smartphone is the fifth limb we never knew we needed. It goes with us wherever we go, helps us function from day to day, and serves countless purposes. Where as many turn to body art to customize their original limbs to express themselves and claim ownership, many will customize their smartphone for all the same reasons. Customization on the iPhone is depressingly limited. You can customize wallpaper of the lock screen, change your ringtone, and.. well, that’s it. Want to add your own text alert sound? Nope. E-mail alert sound? Nope. That would be absolutely okay be it that the iPhone was a Nokia from 1998. The flexibility of Android customization is still somewhat limited, but it at least has the basics covered. You can change e-mail and text alerts, app icons, and your ringtone/wallpaper. The Winner: Droid Camera Quality Samples: Photos on the left are from the iPhone; photos on right are from the Droid. Click through to see bigger samples.  
    The Winner: Based off these photos alone, we can’t say. We had a hard time getting the Droid to focus, especially in lower light. While the iPhone was focusing just fine, the details kept getting lost. We’re not ready to make to make that call yet – we’ll snap some more shots tomorrow and make the final call. The Screen:   The iPhone rocks a 3.5″, 480×320 touchscreen display, while the Droid has a 3.7″ 854×480 touchscreen display. While the Droid’s screen isn’t that much bigger, they’ve crammed over 160% more pixels onto that tiny little screen. The result? The Droid screen is absolutely, jaw-droppingly stunning. Now, no one was complaining that the iPhone’s screen was junk. Given more than 10 seconds from device to device, most people probably wouldn’t even notice a difference. When you’ve got both devices side-by-side, however, the difference is clear. Text is that much clearer; curves just that much curvier. The Winner: Droid Interface: This is a huge point, and one that often goes overlooked in reviews. For the past 10 years, Apple has really only done one thing, over and over: they’ve taken something we thought worked fine, and then simplified the hell out of it while maintaining the feature set. That’s exactly what they did to the idea of the smartphone with the iPhone, and it turned the damned market on its head. Windows Mobile suddenly looks like a hot mess by comparison, and most people would go into shock if they tried to screw with S60. Even in version 2.0, Android does not match the intuitiveness of the iPhone. If you need to change a setting on the iPhone, you always know where to go: the Settings app. On Android, it can be in one of any number of places. You can hand an iPhone to a toddler, and they’ll figure out the general gist of things in an instant. (No, really – we’ve done it.) That ease of use is one of the things that makes the iPhone so damned appealing. The Winner: iPhone Multi-Tasking: I can listen to Pandora on the Droid while I peruse around the Facebook App. I can’t on the iPhone. Enough said. The Winner: Droid Conclusion: There are really many, many, many dozens of categories we could dive in to – hell, I’ve got 10 more scratched out in my head alone. But we’d be avoiding an inevitable truth: apples-to-apples, the Droid tends to beat or meet the iPhone. Remote wipe and GPS location? Droid. On-device search? Droid wins. Voice control, contacts, coverage, and call quality? Droid, droid, droid, droid. Now, back to the two questions we had at the beginning:  Get it? He's on the fence. HAH. What do I think of the Droid? It is incredible. It is, hands down, the nicest Android handset on the market. A very significant chunk of this is not so much the Droid’s doing as it is Android 2.0’s, but the hardware is also leaps and bounds better than anything we’ve seen so far. Would I recommend it over the iPhone? Two thousand plus words later, you might be a bit sad to read: Nope. But I wouldn’t recommend the iPhone over the Droid, either – and that’s the Droid’s real win here. This is the very first phone in over two years that I would consider carrying for day-to-day use instead of my iPhone, but that doesn’t mean I would recommend it whole heartedly to everyone. Each phone platform has such tremendous merits. Androids got better navigation; the iPhone has a better browser. Androids got unbeatable expandability and flexibility; the iPhone OS is mind-numbingly easy to use and the rate of growth and drive behind the App Store is simply explosive. With Android 2.0, we’ve come to a very difficult crossroad. No longer can we recommend one handset over the other simply by its feature set. At this point, it’s all about the person who will be carrying it. For you, dearest TechCrunch Network reader: Yes, I’d probably recommend the Droid over an iPhone. Would I recommend it for your mother, father, or little sister? Nope. If you want a phone that just works and does damned near everything you could want and don’t mind Apple’s closed garden: by all means, get the iPhone. If you can handle a bit of complexity for the sake of flexibility and don’t mind having to tinker a bit: by all means, get the Droid. At this point, I honestly feel that either choice would make any sane person incredibly happy.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Source: MobileCrunch | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:35 pm Union withdraws bid to represent some Delta workersATLANTA, Oct 30 (Reuters) - The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said on Friday that it withdrew its application to hold a representation election for fleet service workers...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:34 pm TechAmerica AeA Classic Financial Conference Presenting Company ProfilesSANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- The 39th Annual TechAmerica AeA Classic Financial Conference takes place November 1-3, 2009, at the Marriott Hotel & Marina in San Diego, CA. Below are profiles from several of the companies presenting at the conference.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:18 pm TechAmerica AeA Classic Financial Conference Presenting Company ProfilesSANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- The 39th Annual TechAmerica AeA Classic Financial Conference takes place November 1-3, 2009, at the Marriott Hotel & Marina in...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:18 pm Android 2.0 — Competition Against the iPhone and the RestGMGruman writes "Every few months, it seems, there is a new 'iPhone killer.' Android 2.0, in the guise of the Motorola Droid, is the latest such 'killer.' But what will it really take to beat or match the iPhone (single page), and does Android or any other mobile OS have the right stuff? There's a lot more to the answer than is usually discussed. This article takes a look at the strengths that may allow Droid and Android 2.0 to provide strong competition to devices like the iPhone and the Blackberry, as well as the obstacles it continues to face that could inhibit adoption."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 30 Oct 2009 | 8:05 pm Novell to Los Angeles: Drop Dead!
|
 BusinessWeek | Review: The Motorola Droid Wired News A few days ago we got Motrola's Droid in the mail. The device is quite awesome. Beyond being offered on Verizon's network (which consistently squelches AT&T in coverage and speed) the phone is forged from super-solid (and stylish) ... Droid vs. iphone: Predictions, Weigh-ins, Pre-Bout Chatter Droid and Android, ICANN Votes, Win 7 Residue Can the Droid save Motorola? |
A few days ago we got Motrola’s Droid in the mail. The device is quite awesome. Beyond being offered on Verizon’s network (which consistently squelches AT&T in coverage and speed) the phone is forged from super-solid (and stylish) hardware. Plus it runs freaking Android 2.0 as its OS. From reviewer Priya Ganapati:
The Droid runs Android 2.0 (aka Éclair) as its OS. It feels more refined than the first version of Android on T-Mobile’s G1 and it’s certainly better than the muddled interface on Motorola’s Cliq.
The Droid’s 5-megapixel camera has up to 4x digital zoom. It produces photos that aren’t too noisy and it does well even in low light, thanks to the built-in LED flash.
The most exciting feature of the phone, though, is the Google maps app — with built-in turn-by-turn, voice-guided navigation. Replete with text-to-speech features, the maps are layered with traffic data and a satellite view. But here’s the best part. It’s free! Hear that? You don’t have to pay $10 a month as subscription or buy a pricey $100 TomTom app. You can just zip around with the Droid and Google Maps.
$200, motorola.com
8/10
You can, of course read the full review of the Mottorola Droid on our reviews website.
Photo by Jon Snyder for Wired.com
...Then we will benchmark in the shade.
There’s not a lot more to this story than “this is a freaking huge video card,” so just gaze in awe at this monstrosity and then move on to the next post. [via HardOCP]
FROM GAMERTELL - Gamertell’s Brian Allen had a cautious sitdown with the man, myth and legend that is Count Dracula…
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
A relatively large announcement went live earlier today from RED, which as you’ll remember, made big promises for digital cinema a while ago — with equally big (and vague) timeframes. Today was a minor solidification of those timeframes, but many RED users were expecting solid shipping dates, and those didn’t happen. Instead, a change in strategy was announced, and a few brave RED owners will participate in an intensive beta program with the pre-production camera, dubbed “Tattoo.” After that, the S35, as it will be called in production, will see a wide simultaneous release, hopefully with some bugs squashed.
The various “stages” amount to:
$28k: buy Tattoo, be in hardcore beta program, get Jim Jannard’s cell number.
$19.5k: buy S35, keep your RED ONE
$10.5k: buy S35, trade in your RED ONE
$28k: buy S35 (you don’t own a RED ONE)
Here is the revised spec list. Of note are the internal motion sensor (good for recording metadata for adding effects later), GPS sensor, and a touchscreen electronic viewfinder (good for adjusting settings, but it also supports… touch focus tracking? -that’s not what I think it is, is it?):
New MYSTERIUM-X 5K sensor
5K (2:1) at 1-100fps
4K (2:1) at 1-125fps
Quad HD at 1-120fps
3K (2:1) at 1-160fps
2K (2:1) at 1-250fps
1080P (scaled from full frame) at 1-60fps
Increased Dynamic Range, reduced noise
Time Lapse, Frame Ramping
REDCODE 250
ISO 200-8000
New FLUT Color ScienceCompletely Modular System, each Module individually upgradeable
Independent Stills and Motion Modes (both record full resolution REDCODE RAW)
5 Axis Adjustable Sensor Plate
Multiple Recording Media Options (Compact Flash, 1.8” SSD, RED Drives, RED RAM)
Wireless REDMOTE control
Touchscreen LCD control option
Bomb-EVF, RED-EVF and RED-LCD compatible
Multiple User Control Buttons
Interchangeable Lens mounts including focus and iris control of electronic RED, Canon and Nikon lenses (along with Zoom data)
“Touch Focus Tracking” with electronic lens mounts and RED Touchscreen LCDs
LDS and /i Data enabled PL Mount
Rollover Battery Power
Independent LUTs on Monitor Outputs
Independent Frame Guides and Menu overlays on Monitor Outputs
Monitor Ports support both LCD and EVF
True Shutter Sync In/Out and Strobe Sync Out
720P, 1080P and 2K monitoring support
Gigagbit Network interface and 802.11 Wireless interface
3 Axis internal motion sensor, built in GPS receiver
Enhanced Metadata
Full size connectors on Pro I/O Module. AES Digital Audio input, single and dual link HD-SDI
Support for RED, most Arri 19mm, Studio 15mm, 15mm Lite, Panavision and NATO accessoriesDimensions- Approx. 4”x4”x5.5”
Weight (Brain only)- Approx. 6 lbs (2.72kg)
Jim also posted an actual picture of a brain with grips attached still-camera-style, with a Canon EF mount. Whether they’ll actually be able to take a bite out of established still camera makers is questionable, but we’ll see.
The Scarlet also gets an update, a response to serious encroachments by cameras like the 7D. Much better audio capability, increased bitrates and color accuracy, 1080p at 60FPS, and a touchscreen LCD among other things. No word on pricing or how these changes might affect it, but it’s still going to be a professional camera, not a consumer or even prosumer one, so expect it to be at least $3000.
Read the whole thread here; they’re still updating and adding pictures (they’ve added two since I started this post).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Jed Stremel, Facebook’s Director of Mobile who has been with the company for four years, has resigned, according to a post on his Facebook profile. Stremel was charged with leading the company’s mobile strategy, and was previously involved in Business Development at Facebook.
Below is Stremel’s bio, taken from last year’s MobileBeat conference page.
Jed Stremel oversees Facebook’s mobile strategy transforming how individuals find and express information relevant to their life. Prior to Facebook, Jed played key partnership, business operations, and strategic roles at high-growth businesses. He spearheaded mobile initiatives for Yahoo! building the company’s efforts to empower seamless communications across SMS, WAP, Java, BREW, and other mobile technologies. At Tellme Jed managed distribution, promotion, and licensing relationships with leading online and telecommunications partners. Jed holds a law degree from Santa Clara University and a bachelor’s degree in economics and public policy from Duke University.
Other recent departures from Facebook include Josh Elman, who was Facebook’s Platform Program Manager and was deeply involved in the launch of Facebook Connect. Elman joined Twitter earlier this week as a product manager.
We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Short version: An excellent casual HD camcorder with superior image quality to pocket cams and a flexible focus system, making it useful for bloggers like me as well. At under $200 this thing is absolutely a steal.
Full review
A while back I was at AMD’s overclocking challenge, and for shooting video I had a Kodak Zx1 and a Casio Exilim FC-100 for slow motion. Both are great cameras, but 720p on either one is a bit indistinct, and the Zx1 has a fixed focus lens, which makes up-close shots difficult. Vince from SlashGear had a pistol-grip Sanyo, which I had dismissed before as gimmicky, but having gotten a chance to handle it, I decided I liked it and would pick up the next generation when they came out. Well, they came out a while back and I’ve been using it since. And now I’m reviewing it.
There are a few cameras like this one, so let’s be clear: I’m talking about the CG10, which is sort of the lowest-end Sanyo you can get. 720p is its maximum resolution, which is more than enough for any home video or web media. They make a big deal about how “It’s a Dual Camera! Photos & Videos” but really now, camcorders have been taking pictures for years and years, and I don’t advise doing it if you don’t have to.
Build and layout
The CG10 differs from many other cheap camcorders and pocketcams in that it actually has a real lens. It’s far from a real real lens, but it’s not the fixed-focus pinhole crap you see on Flips, Kodaks, and Nanos. This means it has a 5x optical zoom and better light sensitivity than those other options, at the cost of a slightly larger size.
The CG10 is about the size of a large mouse, just to give you a general idea. It feels pleasantly weighty and is well-balanced. Remember, this isn’t a pocket camcorder, it’s merely compact; it’s certainly small enough to bring everywhere, but unlike a Flip (or an iPod Nano, I suppose) it’s not a front-pocket kind of thing. Though it does sit comfortably in your back pocket if your pants aren’t too tight. Just don’t sit down on it.
As you can see in the pictures, it’s got a nice little 3″ flip-out LCD, which is bright and reasonably sharp. Controls are all situated for your thumb to operate; your other fingers have nothing to do but grip. This works pretty well once you get the layout down. The menu layout is the normal sort of thing, though I have to say I searched for ages for a way to delete things on camera before I realized that the “menu” button was taking me to the wrong place. The usual options are there, with several choices for exposure control, stabilization, and face tracking.
Quality and features
One feature I found extremely handy was the manual focus mode. For keeping a device in focus while I or my hand move in and out of the shot, it’s invaluable. I used it (to great effect) in my Zune HD and Sleek SA-6 reviews. Its macro mode focuses down to 1cm, which is fantastic for getting close-ups of components, plus it gives a great depth of field effect. I found the autofocus to be a bit slow in general (though accurate), so I use manual whenever I can.
For a $200 camera, I found color and sharpness to be good, though the small sensor and major compression mean motion will always be kind of smeary. Of course if you whip it back and forth you’ll get that wobbly skew action, but that’s something you can avoid. Exposure was pretty decent, and you can select center-weighted or spot, but not manual. Low light performance is nothing to write home about, but again we’re talking about a $200 camera here. Make sure you have your lights on or you’ll be seeing noise.
Sound is pretty basic, and the microphones are located on the back of the LCD, which is good if you’re filming the thing creating the sound. Bad if you’re filming yourself and you have reversed the LCD so you can make sure you’re in frame. I didn’t have any issue with the sound other than the fact that it was about as medium-quality as you can expect from a budget device.
Battery life seemed normal for a small camcorder with no moving parts. The battery is removable and comes with a charger, as you might expect. No surprises here.
File sizes are manageable. I set it immediately to the highest quality and a 22-second video took up 25MB, for reference. 640×480 should be about half that, though it will also shoot 640×480 at 60FPS, which obviously will take up more space. It uses H.264 and the files are MP4. It has a tiny amount of internal space (40MB) so you’ll be shooting to SD. One annoying thing I found was that the SD slot can’t be accessed without flipping the LCD up and consequently turning on the camera. Not a big deal but vexing nonetheless.
Bottom line
The Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG10 can be found for far less than $200, and I think at $200 it was already a good deal. It’s not pocketable, but in every other respect it bests the pocket-cam army. If you’re looking for a basic around-the-house camcorder, I highly recommend the CG10.
 Portfolio.com | Nokia to Pull Plug on N-Gage Gaming Platform PC World Nokia has finally decided to kill off its N-Gage gaming platform after years of shifting the strategy behind it with little success. Nokia introduced N-Gage in 2003 as a standalone handheld gaming device, which developed a small but enthusiastic ... Nokia to Shut Down N-Gage Nokia's N-Gage can't survive against iPhone, will be shut down Nokia Ovi Store Absorbs N-Gage Service |
Most bloggers are going to do the majority of their speedy writing in front of a computer. But occasionally there will be instances — breaking-news scenarios — where all we can rely on is our trusty phone to do our jobs.
Gadget Lab’s friends at WP Beginner, a WordPress enthusiast blog, has compiled a list of 10 must-have iPhone apps for bloggers: mobile software that could help bloggers while they’re on the run, or on an everyday basis in general. The list includes a blogging app, a Twitter client, note-taking utilities and others.
The WordPress app [iTunes] for iPhone is a good suggestion: It’s a slick app that works well with WordPress blogs in a friendly way. (Yes, Wired.com uses WordPress.) So long as you’re a decent typist with the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, posting one or two paragraphs of a breaking news story on the scene with the WrodPress app should be no sweat.
Another app mentioned is Evernote [iTunes] a popular cloud-based note-taking service — one I’ve personally found very useful as a blogger who does his work on multiple gadgets. My contacts list, for example, is saved on Evernote, so I look up sources’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses on any computer or phone so long as I have an internet connection.
Twitterific [iTunes], a free Twitter client, also made it to the list, which makes sense: Twitter certainly helps bloggers stay plugged in to the news. However, we’re big fans of Tweetie 2, a Twitter app we think has a superior interface, so we’d suggest getting that instead. It just costs $3.
Visit WP Beginner for the full list of apps. What iPhone apps would you add to this list of must-haves for bloggers? Add your apps in the comments below. To give you some ideas, here are some more of Gadget Lab’s suggestions: News Feed, a $1 news content aggregator; and Scanner 911, a $1 police radio scanner for bloggers and journalists chasing down crime scoops.
See Also:
Photo: johanl/Flickr
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Soon, you’ll need more than two hands to count the number of Android phones on the market. At this rate, it seems inevitable that the number of phones running Google’s open source operating system will eventually outnumber the number of iPhones, which run Apple’s proprietary (and closed) operating system.
It’s a situation that has many observers thinking back to the 1980s, when IBM introduced its PC and eclipsed Apple in market share by betting on open platforms. In the end, Apple was left with a respectable business, but a single-digit morsel of the PC market share. (The Mac has since crept up to 9.4 percent, according to IDC.)
How could Google draft more customers into the Android army and diminish the iPhone’s market share? Focus on the iPhone’s weaknesses, of course. The iPhone’s lack of background-processing capability (i.e., the ability to run multiple third-party apps at once) could push multitasking professionals toward Android. And the notoriety of iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the United States, AT&T, could compel consumers to embrace Android phones carried by Verizon, which has a bigger network and a better reputation for service.
Then there’s the App Store. Despite harboring upward of 90,000 apps, and letting a few developers earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Apple’s App Store approval process has been roundly criticized for being opaque. Apple has rejected some apps submitted by third-party developers for unclear reasons. Programmers complain it’s difficult or impossible to communicate with the secretive Cupertino, California, company.
Did we mention the App Store is overcrowded? In a way, that’s a plus for consumers: the more choices, the better. But it can be a headache for third-party programmers, who have difficulty getting exposure for their apps in an increasingly cluttered space. The flaws of the App Store could drive away the people who create the element that makes the iPhone so appealing — its wealth of apps furthering the capabilities of the handset.
There’s a lot at stake. Research firm Gartner this week stated that worldwide smartphone shipments would grow 29 percent year over year to 180 million units, exceeding notebook shipments. That would suggest smartphones are shaping up to become the next major computing platform — and the companies who control the dominant platforms stand to gain billions in revenue.
Still, most analysts and developers polled by Wired.com aren’t too worried about Apple’s prospects in the smartphone space.
“This is not going to be a space with two giants,” said Raven Zachary, a technology analyst and owner of iPhone app-development house Small Society. “It’s going to be a healthy competitive environment for some time to come.”
Relatively young, the mobile platform ecosystem is a new kind of beast in the technology world. Unlike the PC industry — where Microsoft conquered the operating system market, claiming roughly 90 percent market share to date — the mobile space has multiple companies fighting for their fair share of the pie. Some of those players include Research In Motion, Palm, Symbian and Microsoft.
With an early start, Microsoft did have a chance to dominate the mobile landscape. The software titan launched its first mobile OS back in 1996: Windows CE, which served as the foundation for the Windows Mobile OS shipping with some smartphones today. However, in terms of market share, Windows Mobile has been in steady decline. In 2008, its market share dropped to 14 percent — down from 23 percent in 2004.
With 49 percent market share, Symbian is currently the dominant force in the smartphone platform space, according to Gartner. Gartner predicts Symbian will retain its dominance, and the firm is especially optimistic about Android: Gartner predicts Android will leap to 18 percent market share (up from 1.6 percent to date). Meanwhile, the firm has a less optimistic outlook for Apple: 2.9 percent growth by 2012, giving the company 13.6 percent market share.
These numbers lead Joe Wilcox of BetaNews to declare that “iPhone cannot win the smartphone wars,” in an article that has sparked much debate in the tech community this week. He argues that Android, which is expanding onto other mobiles devices in addition to smartphones (such as Barnes and Noble’s “Nook” e-book reader) is poised to conquer this space.
“Another ‘everyone else against Apple battle’ is coming, with Android looking to be the better OS around which an ecosystem grows and thrives,” Wilcox wrote. “There’s a Star Wars metaphor here somewhere. Apple lost out to DOS/Windows because of the attack of the PC clones. Now the droids are coming for iPhone.”
Tero Kuittinen, an MKM Partners telecom analyst, disagrees, and he isn’t as optimistic about Android because of its bumpy start.
“The key point about Android is the first few models haven’t really been doing great,” Kuittinen said in a phone interview. “Based on that there’s no real evidence that the demand of Android phones is rampant.”
Kuittinen noted that European customers already seem “cautious” about Android because of the sluggish, buggy experience of the earliest Google phones.
Other than technical issues, Google has many areas to address before posing a serious threat, such as offering a compelling music substitute for Android smartphones to battle iTunes, Kuittinen said. Google is just getting started with a music solution: The search giant on Wednesday launched a new music-search feature, which automatically searches for playable music tracks.
Andreas Schobel, co-founder of Snaptic, which develops apps for both Android and the iPhone, said the Android OS has a lot of catching up to do in terms of user interface.
“The UI still sucks; it’s just not being able to pinch, not being able to use gestures, that makes it rough,” Schobel said. “It’s getting better, but it’s still not there yet.”
However, Schobel foresees a division occurring between consumers who opt for Android and those who stick with an iPhone. He noted that Android stands a chance to win over productivity-focused users due to its ability to handle multiple apps simultaneously, which the iPhone cannot do. He added that Android’s open API enables developers to easily create “mash-up” apps that can seamlessly integrate social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter into any app.
Though Android might become a popular platform for productivity, the iPhone will still be the primary handset for gaming, Schobel predicted. Game developers are more attracted to coding a game for the iPhone, because they’re programming a game to work with a specific piece of hardware and take full advantage of its graphic chip — an effort that would not be easy with an open platform like Android, an OS designed for multiple phones using different types of hardware.
In any case, Schobel said Android is gaining momentum fast, and Apple must continue to innovate in order to stay ahead of the smartphone OS curve.
“People on Android are going to be pushing forward in such a feverish pace, and Apple is going to have to start doing stuff really soon,” Schobel said.
Just what determines who “wins” a smartphone platform war? That’s subjective. Wilcox bases his argument purely on market-share numbers; whoever gets the biggest slice of the pie wins by his definition.
But Zachary said the iPhone is still a winner at its current size, and he’d be happy if it one day grew to grab 25 percent of the mobile-platform market share — not a dominating number.
In a space that’s crowded with several players, a definitive loss would be the complete failure and disappearance of a company. Zachary and Schobel are both betting Palm will be the first to go. Palm’s WebOS runs on the Palm Pre, and the company currently possesses 0 percent market share, according to Gartner, who predicts WebOS’ market share will only grow 1.4 percent in the next three years.
The company’s smartphone market share continues to shrink, and Zachary said he previously thought Palm would eventually be acquired by a larger company, such as Samsung, to develop mobile operating systems in-house. However, because Google hands out Android as a free, open source OS, this decreases the value of Palm as an acquisition target.
“Who I’m really scared for is Palm,” Schobel said. “They’re dead.”
See Also:
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
With the except of the Tegra and Ion platforms, we haven’t been hearing much from NVIDIA in terms of graphics cards lately. Mobile graphics are certainly important, but we still need great graphic cards on our desktops or laptops. Screenshots leaked on a Chinese message board show that NVIDIA is definitely working on fantastic graphics with the new Fermi hardware.
The new graphic cards look to be able to render very realistic faces as well as realistic hair, lighting, and reflections. The captions on the pictures claim the new chips are “the most advanced GPU computing architecture ever built,” and given the results that could be hard to argue. The chips themselves will hold up to 512 separate cores to process all of the graphics. Word is these new chips, probably the NVIDIA GeForce 300 series could be out by the end of the year.
These new chips, should the leaks prove to be true, will likely be expensive though the performance should be worth the price. Paired with a Core i7 CPU, machines packing these new Fermi GPUs should be able to do just about anything. GPU-accelerated programs like Photoshop CS4 will benefit greatly and experience very little slow down, if any. Even if they end up being priced too highly, there’s always that fact the the current chips will more than likely go down in price, making great (if not the best) graphics even easier to obtain.
Read [Electronista]
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
FROM APPLETELL - Instead of getting candy, you’ll be giving it for trick or treat, right? To compensate, we’ve rounded up a few free apps to help put a smile on that face (and keep your money in your wallet).
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Not that USB 3.0 will be useful anytime soon—how long did it take manufacturers to finally get behind USB 2.0?—but Asus’ U3S6 should be, provided it’s not cancelled, the world’s first USB 3.0 + SATA 6.0 PCI-E card. Better news: it’s only $30.
The card comes with two USB 3.0 ports and two SATA 6.0 ports. And if I’m doing my maths right, so long as you have a free PCI-E slot you’re good to go.
Like I said in the beginning, the card will mean little in the immediate future, given the lack of USB 3.0 products. That’s not to say I wouldn’t mind being able to sync my Zune HD using the zippy awesomeness of USB 3.0, but it’s going to be a little while before we see that. Never mind that that scenario would never happen, considering the Zune HD’s insides don’t know a darn thing about USB 3.0, but you know what I mean: a future media player that works with USB 3.0 would certainly be handy, especially as we move toward moving higher and higher resolution video to and from our various components.
It should be out “soon.” Nice and vague, yes.
Dozens of owners of Apple’s new 27-inch iMac are reporting performance issues ranging from sluggish Flash playback, erratic hard drive behavior and buggy operating system installations.
The most common complaint seems to revolve around poor Flash performance, whereas videos play back very choppily and appears to cause CPU spikes. The YouTube video below attempts to document the problem.
Some customers complaining in Apple’s support forums also claim there’s a bug forcing the hard drive to spin down, while others have complained their iMacs shipped with a corrupt Snow Leopard installation.
Apple began shipping the 27-inch iMac on Oct. 20. The all-in-one desktop costs $1,700 and includes a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor.
Having problems with your shiny new iMac, too? Report your issues in the comments below.
Wait! Before you head off to that weekend costume party, snap yourself in your Halloween costume and enter our First Annual(TM) Halloween Costume Contest.
We're offering one Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 2 Limited Edition Console to the winner of our First Annual CrunchGear Halloween Costume Contest.
Here's how to enter.
Wait! Before you head off to that weekend costume party, snap yourself in your Halloween costume and enter our First Annual(TM) Halloween Costume Contest.
We're offering one Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 2 Limited Edition Console to the winner of our First Annual CrunchGear Halloween Costume Contest.
Here's how to enter.
Here are some of my recent posts about money for Credit.com.
Charts to Help You Succeed in Online Dating: "If you're investing your time and money in an online dating service and want to increase your chances of getting a reply from someone you're interested in, don't tell them they're "hot." Instead, tell them you dig zombie movies."
Strategies for Happiness: "The shift from being a rat racer to pursuing happiness is not about working less or with less fervor but about working as hard or harder at the right activities -- those that are a source of both present and future benefit."
New Boom on Metal Detectors: "A 55-year-old metal detector enthusiast discovered a cache of Anglo-Saxon treasures earlier this month, estimated to be worth $10 million, in a farmer's field in Birmingham, England."
Big Spenders Living in Denial: "Mark is a 41-year-old executive who makes a six-figure salary but fell into debt because he doesn't believe in self-sacrifice: 'I have a sort of moralistic self-righteousness that I deserve good things,' he says. 'And because I'm surrounded by luxury all day, I know what's good quality and what isn't.'"
Higher pay equals worse performance: "Money is a motivator as well as a stress-inducer. With so much at stake, the volunteers had a harder time concentrating on the assignment."
Consumerism Commentary Podcast: "Flexo and his colleagues are interested in the same kinds of money-related topics that I am: the psychology of money, personal finance tips, investment strategies, life hacks (like haggling tactics), and various fun observations (like how the frequent redesign of US coins is a bad thing). In a blogosphere overcrowded with personal finance blogs, they are one of the best."
Going Minimal: "Leo Babauta at Get Rich Slowly and Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar are both fans of a minimalist approach to personal finances. Monetary minimalism involves taking stock of the ways you spend your money and your time, and then streamline them so you have 1) more money, 2) more time, and 3) a more rewarding life."
How money affects the "moral molecule" in your brain: An interview with Neuroeconomist Paul J. Zak: "When you receive money denoting trust your brain releases a chemical called oxytocin. Oxytocin motivates you to reciprocate. It makes us feel empathy for others. It connects us to others."
Learning to resist anchoring cues: "When it comes to buying diamonds, which most people won't do more than once or twice in their lives and have no idea what diamonds are really worth, people will grab any anchor given to them. And De Beers is only too happy to provide one: 'two months' salary.'"
Nifty Chart and Web App to Help You Find a Better Cell Phone Plan: "BillShrink's Cell Phone Advisor is a useful Web app that helps you search for a cheaper cell phone plan. You enter your current monthly bill, the name of your carrier, and other information, and the Cell Phone Advisor presents other plans that could save you money."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 PC World | ICANN Approves Domain Names We Can't Type PC World This is a bad day for the English language, after ICANN approved non-Latin characters for use in Internet domain names. Having invented the Internet--40 years ago yesterday--the US has given away whatever advantage it offers English-speakers. ... ICANN Approves Non-Latin Domain Name Characters ICANN approves non-Latin domain names Web Addresses Now Can Be All Greek to You, ICANN Rules |
Halloween means time for costumes and some awesome nerd tricks with the pumpkin.
This hack-o-lantern has got to be one of the best we have seen this year. The lantern has a remote control to change its colors. Channel buttons 0-8 on the remote control help cycle through the colors of the rainbow. Button 9 activates an ‘angry pumpkin’ mode that flashes a red strobe for a few seconds, says Ian Lesnet who has published a how-to on instructables.com.
It isn’t an easy project. The idea uses among other things a circuit that decodes the remote control signals and a color changing LED module and you have to have a fair understanding electronics and programming to get it right.
For the rest of us, there’s always the Youtube video that shows the different color modes of the lantern.
For more great geeked out lanterns, check out the winners of SparkFun Electronics’ competition, which include a self-powered illuminated pumpkin that uses zinc and copper plates to light the LEDs, and a Silly String hack-o-lantern.
See also:
Pumpkin Mods Combine Tech, Orange Squash
Weird headsets that read people's minds? It sounds like dystopian science fiction, but these gadgets (helped by a little old-fashioned muscle measurement) are set to be the holiday season's hot toys. The promised future, of mind games that lapse into punishing tension headaches, is finally upon us.
Atari Museum describes it so:
The headband would read resistance from muscles in the users forehead and interpret them into commands on the screen. ... Atari was ahead of its time with innovations such as these and given time for refinement and newer design technologies the idea of the Mindlink system would've grown into a successful peripheral.
A version of Breakout was developed, but the gaming biz hit hard times and Mindlink was canned before it went into production. Times change, however, just as technology moves on and patents lapse. By the mid-2000s, other companies developed their own mind-controlled toys, which started cropping up at trade events like the Consumer Electronics Show.
NeuroSky is most prominent of the newcomers, scoring licensing deals with Sega Toys and Square Enix. I got brains-on with a prototype for Wired:
The prototype headgear is hacked into pairs of headphones, and measures baseline brainwave activity, said to provide an insight into states of relaxation and anxiety ... Liu continually tells me to remain calm, to calm my thoughts, to think of calm, but all I want to do is crush enemies with desks.
It's hard to describe the experience. I was able to maintain a high level of whatever it actually measured but it didn't seem to be calmness. ...
"It's like flexing a muscle you didn't know you had," Liu said.
Neurosky plans educational gear to help attention-deficit youngsters learn focus, but gaming is where the hype is. It's not the only company aiming to develop brainwave toys, either: Hitachi has a brain-controlled model railroad in its lab, and Emotiv has partnered with Intel as it works on its own rig--its design has 14 electrodes to NeuroSky's one, but remains a specialist product. There's also Mindball, a $20,000 table game built on similar principles.
Now, how about those toys? Here's what you can buy, right now.
Star Wars Force Trainer
Mattel's $80 Force Trainer "fulfills a fantasy everyone has had, using The Force," says Lucasfilm's Howard Roffman. The aim of the game: concentrate hard enough for a ball to rise to the top of a perspex tube. Star Wars sound effects indicate the state of play, and add licensed flavor.
Force Trainer
Mind Flex
Also from Mattel and NeuroSky, Mind Flex is a more involved and challenging affair: train your thoughts to increase power to a fan which blows a ball through a course of hoops. Yes, I know, it's hardly Akira.
Mindflex Game
Neural Impulse Actuator
Computer equipment house OCZ makes the "brain mouse"
MindSet
NeuroSky's own standalone brain-measurer is twice the price of OCZ's, but looks comfier and is bundled with fun extras. Built into a set of BlueTooth headphones, it comes with a package of games and brainwave visualizing software.
The included Adventures of Neuroboy, for example, offers various scenarios requiring the use of telekinetic powers to progress. Back-of-the-box bullet points include "Throw benches around" and "Set cars on fire."
Also in development is a title from top developer Square Enix, announced late last year. A dev-kit is included for programmers.
Now, it's easy to be down on this stuff: however cool consumer-affordable EEG visualization is, it's pretty primitive as gaming goes. The same single axis of control, as offered by the original Mindlink in the 1980s, is the core feature. But there's something fascinating about how the new stuff echoes the old, right down to the use of elaborate marketing to imbue crude technology with whatever can be drawn from the player's imagination.
Take Breakout, that classic single-axis game. It was, you may recall, the story of a determined astronaut's harrowing return to Earth.
Either that, or it was a ball, a wall, and a bat.
Source: Boing Boing | 30 Oct 2009 | 3:52 pm
Weird headsets that read people's minds? It sounds like dystopian science fiction, but these gadgets (helped by a little old-fashioned muscle measurement) are set to be the holiday season's hot toys. The promised future, of mind games that lapse into punishing tension headaches, is finally upon us.
Atari Museum describes it so:
The headband would read resistance from muscles in the users forehead and interpret them into commands on the screen. ... Atari was ahead of its time with innovations such as these and given time for refinement and newer design technologies the idea of the Mindlink system would've grown into a successful peripheral.
A version of Breakout was developed, but the gaming biz hit hard times and Mindlink was canned before it went into production. Times change, however, just as technology moves on and patents lapse. By the mid-2000s, other companies developed their own mind-controlled toys, which started cropping up at trade events like the Consumer Electronics Show.
NeuroSky is most prominent of the newcomers, scoring licensing deals with Sega Toys and Square Enix. I got brains-on with a prototype for Wired:
The prototype headgear is hacked into pairs of headphones, and measures baseline brainwave activity, said to provide an insight into states of relaxation and anxiety ... Liu continually tells me to remain calm, to calm my thoughts, to think of calm, but all I want to do is crush enemies with desks.
It's hard to describe the experience. I was able to maintain a high level of whatever it actually measured but it didn't seem to be calmness. ...
"It's like flexing a muscle you didn't know you had," Liu said.
Neurosky plans educational gear to help attention-deficit youngsters learn focus, but gaming is where the hype is. It's not the only company aiming to develop brainwave toys, either: Hitachi has a brain-controlled model railroad in its lab, and Emotiv has partnered with Intel as it works on its own rig--its design has 14 electrodes to NeuroSky's one, but remains a specialist product. There's also Mindball, a $20,000 table game built on similar principles.
Now, how about those toys? Here's what you can buy, right now.
Star Wars Force Trainer
Mattel's $80 Force Trainer "fulfills a fantasy everyone has had, using The Force," says Lucasfilm's Howard Roffman. The aim of the game: concentrate hard enough for a ball to rise to the top of a perspex tube. Star Wars sound effects indicate the state of play, and add licensed flavor.
Force Trainer
Mind Flex
Also from Mattel and NeuroSky, Mind Flex is a more involved and challenging affair: train your thoughts to increase power to a fan which blows a ball through a course of hoops. Yes, I know, it's hardly Akira.
Mindflex Game
Neural Impulse Actuator
Computer equipment house OCZ makes the "brain mouse"
MindSet
NeuroSky's own standalone brain-measurer is twice the price of OCZ's, but looks comfier and is bundled with fun extras. Built into a set of BlueTooth headphones, it comes with a package of games and brainwave visualizing software.
The included Adventures of Neuroboy, for example, offers various scenarios requiring the use of telekinetic powers to progress. Back-of-the-box bullet points include "Throw benches around" and "Set cars on fire."
Also in development is a title from top developer Square Enix, announced late last year. A dev-kit is included for programmers.
Now, it's easy to be down on this stuff: however cool consumer-affordable EEG visualization is, it's pretty primitive as gaming goes. The same single axis of control, as offered by the original Mindlink in the 1980s, is the core feature. But there's something fascinating about how the new stuff echoes the old, right down to the use of elaborate marketing to imbue crude technology with whatever can be drawn from the player's imagination.
Take Breakout, that classic single-axis game. It was, you may recall, the story of a determined astronaut's harrowing return to Earth.
Either that, or it was a ball, a wall, and a bat.
Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 30 Oct 2009 | 3:50 pm
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
YouTube has just posted a series of videos highlighting one the more impressive feats of Mother Nature: the colorful transition from summer to fall. It may sound a bit lame, but if you’ve ever enjoyed the changing colors of autumn leaves or the charming landscape of a local pumpkin patch, the videos are well worth a look (they remind me a bit of the Planet Earth series that came out a few years ago). You can find the four videos featured at the top of YouTube’s homepage, or you can check out the ones we’ve embedded below.
Videos include one called “Autumn on the Blue Ridge”:
And here’s one of a local pumpkin patch:
Image by Micky
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
When I posted about the lives of lovable native lampreys a couple weeks ago, commenter Allegra pointed me to some great videos of vegetarian lamprey in Vancouver's Morrison Creek. For the first couple seconds of watching, I honestly mistook the lamprey for water plants. And then they started building nests and spawning. Which plants don't tend to do.
This video shows a group of male and female lamprey building a nest by moving small stones with their sucker mouths. There's more videos of lamprey working together to build nests if you follow the link. Cool stuff! The group that put this together, the Morrison Creek Streamkeepers, also have a photo page that explains how to tell the difference between a girl lamprey and a boy lamprey--if I haven't burned you out on animal sex this week already.
Section: Communications, Smartphones
T-Mobile customers hoping to get their hands on the new BlackBerry Bold 9700 may have to wait a bit longer. Recent reports have surfaced revealing that the expected release date of November 11 has been pushed back to November 15th. T-Mobile has not confirmed this change or the reason for it. They will offer the 9700 for $200 with a 2 year contract. AT&T and Vodaphone will also offer the device.
The Bold 2 isn’t much different than the original Bold. It’s smaller, sports an updated OS and camera, and instead of a trackball offers a sleek new touchpad for navigation. The touchpad is expected to replace the trackball on all future BlackBerry QWERTY devices, something many BB users are looking forward to. The trackball on the hot BlackBerry Tour has been much maligned as its weakest feature. While RIM hasn’t officially said so, both Sprint and Verizon have admitted that there was a problem with the trackball on the first batch of Tours they sold.
Don’t want to wait? Verizon just released the Storm 2, which it’s offering for $280. Other upcoming BlackBerry devices include the Tour 2, which will sport the trackpad and have Wi-Fi added. It’s set to launch on Sprint and Verizon later this year or early in 2010.
Read [Brighthand]
Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.
Whenever I'm hanging out on a chairlift I like to shout that I'm going to go die a cold, snowy death. Mostly so that if I were to actually perish on the ride down I could say, "I told you so." But also because I am genuinely (and in my case, irrationally) afraid that something terrible like this will happen. The guy in the video is an experienced backcountry skier named Chris Cardello. In his words:
When the slide propagated, I tried to remain as composed as possible and make sure my AvaLung was in. As I was getting buried and the slide slowed, I threw one hand up and with my other hand I grasped the AvaLung, which had been ripped out of my mouth during the turbulent ride. While I was buried, I tried to be as calm as possible; I knew my hand was exposed so my crew would be digging me out shortly. I was able to breathe through the AvaLung, but it was difficult due to the snow jammed down my throat.(via freeskier.com)
Lee Clow, who gets credit for a couple decades worth of Apple’s iconic advertising campaigns, wants us to know that he isn’t going anywhere.
His agency, TBWA/Media Arts Lab, is shuffling people around, however. If you’re reading this story on this Web site, you probably don’t care about the details, but you can find them here and here. The takeaway: Clow isn’t retiring, he’ll still have a hand in Apple (AAPL) campaigns, and he’s a bit bemused by the way the Internet has treated his org chart shuffle.
“Look at how the blogosphere decided to make it a conversation about me,” he writes in a letter distributed to his staff.
Psst! Big secret here: The blogosphere doesn’t really care about Lee Clow.
It cares about Apple, Apple, Apple. And if it’s an Apple, Apple, Apple story that gives the blogosphere the chance to embed some Apple advertising, too? Then the blogosphere really likes that!
Somebody is going to lose the World Series. It's true. I have heard this is how these things work. But, when the inevitable happens, where do all their commemorative hats, T-shirts, shoelaces, giant foam hands, etc. go? After all, nobody knows which team will win. To meet the instant, post-game demand, manufacturers have all that championship memorabilia--for both teams--made up and sitting in a warehouse before the final game is even a twinkle in an announcer's eye.
If you guessed that it ends up in a dump, you'd be wrong. Mental_floss investigated and found the World Vision, an international Christian charity, gets the losing gear from baseball, football and basketball.
The merchandise doesn't go to waste, people living in poverty receive new, clean clothes, and the clothing makers recoup some of their losses--they get tax credits for the charitable donations. Why don't the clothes go to needy families in the United States? Overseas donation is part of the agreement between World Vision and the leagues. The farther away the clothing is, the less likely it is to offend a losing player (or heartbroken Buffalo Bills fan).
In fact, fear of fan alienation used to keep the MLB from donating. Up until two years ago, they required all inaccurate championship clothing be destroyed.
By Daisuke Wakabayashi, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
When Nintendo’s top brass gathered in Tokyo to speak to analysts Friday, they admitted they had been caught off-guard by the slowdown in Wii demand.
To the dismay of analysts and fans, they did not announce a new Wii console, as some had hoped, or a revolutionary new game.
But they dropped a few hints about where they might be heading.
Nintendo’s legendary game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, who helped to create Super Mario Bros., Zelda and a host of other hit games, said a new Zelda game for the Wii will take advantage of the console’s Wii Motion Plus controllers to allow for better swordplay. It is being targeted for a 2010 release.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
 BBC News | Parachute failure only blemish in successful Ares test flight CNET News KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--A preliminary look at data from NASA's Ares IX test flight Wednesday shows the towering rocket performed as well or better than computer modeling predicted during the climb out of the dense lower ... Rocket booster damaged on return Despite dent, rocket test goes 'rock-steady' Faulty Chutes Led to Ares Moon Rocket Damage |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 Techtree.com | Palm Loses Its iTunes Sync Workaround, Yet Again ChannelWeb How long is the spitting contest between Apple's iTunes and Palm going to continue? Hopefully not much longer, seeing as the seesaw battle tottered back in Apple's favor Thursday with the release of iTunes 9.0.2. ... Pre iTunes Sync: Is Palm Getting Ready to Cry Uncle? Apple's itunes 9.0.2 Breaks Pre's itunes Sync Apple itunes update disables Palm sync |
Twitter tweeted out a message today about a special Halloween feature if you Tweet “#trick” or “#treat.” It was difficult to figure out at first, but if you tweet either from your Twitter home page (this is key, you can’t enable the feature when you are on a client), your home page background will go “ghoulish” and the avatars on the Tweets on your page will turn into zombies and ghouls.
The way to trigger it is by tweeting ONLY “#trick” OR “#treat” with nothing else. #Treat is the top trending topic on Twitter so it looks like the masses haven’t figured it out. If you only post #trick or #treat, it doesn’t actually Tweet it out (if you post from Twitter’s site). Happy Halloween!
There are a few variations of backgrounds that Twitter is featuring in the trick. Here are the ones we found.
Thanks @orli!
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Nobody wants to be the kid who only gets invited to birthday parties because his mom calls up the other mom and asks. Everyone knows that only succeeds in making you even more unpopular.
Our guess is a fair number of the geeky employees at Facebook were exactly that kid. Which is why I’m sort of surprised that they’d think asking people to help out Facebook friends who don’t have a lot of Wall activity, or even many other friends. These people get mocked. Obviously.
We’ve all seen the messages under Suggestions on the Facebook home page. So and so only has two friends on Facebook, suggest friends for him? Others are urged to write on the Wall of unpopular users.
A reader writes to us today with a screenshot:
So, apparently facebook is now suggesting you write on a friend’s wall to “make facebook better for them” or “reconnect with them” if they are not getting many wall posts. It’s nice to know that if I’m a facebook loser my virtual mom will call up the other kids and ask if they’ll come play with me. Because that sure worked in the real world when I was 10.
Who knows what levels Facebook will go to to ensure that your unpopularity turns into a mocking sideshow like the one above. Don’t be that guy. Find some friends and convince them to leave a wall post every week or two. The last thing you want is to be a Featured Loser
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Apple’s iPhone finally arrived at market in China today and is evidently selling fairly well, despite wallet-emptying prices. ChinaNews.com found about 300 people queued up to buy the device at China Unicom’s flagship store in Beijing. That’s far fewer than you’d find at an Apple (AAPL) launch event in the U.S., but as I’ve noted, the Chinese version of the iPhone is quite spendy, with prices ranging from 4,999 yuan ($730) and 6,999 yuan (about $1,025).
In any event, those higher prices and the device’s lack of built-in Wi-Fi don’t seem to be as much of a barrier as you might think. And if those issues do end up tempering sales a bit, well, perhaps China Unicom can make them up by poaching iPhone users from rival China Mobile. As iPhonAsia’s Dan Butterfield reported earlier this week, China Unicom is offering an amnesty to users of gray-market iPhones.
“This amnesty program is designed to entice some 1.5 million grey-market iPhone owners in China to sign a contract and pop in a Unicom 3G sim card to take advantage of WCDMA 3G speeds and a variety of new ‘Wo’ 3G services,” Butterfield writes. “The ‘upgrade to 3G’ program is no doubt aimed squarely at the approximate 1,000,000+ iPhones now running on China Mobile’s EDGE 2G network.”
[Image credit: CCID]
British stealth startup Zkatter is launching a real-time microblogging service in the next few months that could be a hit. Similar in theory to Twitter, Zkatter asks users “What do you see now?” vs. Twitter’s “What are you doing?”
The service, which has been in development since 2008, will allow anybody to broadcast and archive ‘live moments’ comprising location, media (image, video and text) to ‘friends only’ or ‘the public’ which can then be discovered instantly via search and friends time-lines. Zkatter’s focus is towards capturing information that you physically see live which offers a interesting addition to the real-time space.
Zkatter, which has received $1.5 million in Series A funding, is also developing iPhone and Android apps to work in conjunction with the standalone site, with the platform updated in real-time across all devices. So if you post an update on your iPhone, it will automatically show on the site. And Zkatter will be integrated with Facebook and Twitter, so you can publish you updates to both social networks as well. There are additional features to the site but this is the general idea of what the Zkatter will be able to do.
We took a little test run of the site, and it’s impressive. Not only is the user-interface easy to use, but the seamless real-time integration between mobile and the web. But Zkatter will still face competition from Twitter and the plethora of content-sharing Twitter applications, like TwitPic or TwitVid, which also let you broadcast “live moments.” The site is also similar to DailyBooth.
Zkatter’s founder Matt Hagger tells me that there is still a good amount of development that needs to be done for the site but he’s confident that Zkatter will find a place in the real-time space. There’s no doubt that the rise of real-time streams is fundamentally altering the way we communicate and interact with one another, which is why we are holding our second RealTime CrunchUp on November 20th. You can buy tickets for the event here. Startups will be launching their latest real-time products and we are bringing together a host of notable panelists to share their thoughts on the realtime stream.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The wait is over. Twitter’s new Lists feature is now available to all users, project lead Nick Kallen has just confirmed through a tweet. The functionality has been in testing for weeks now with a select group of users, and a couple of weeks ago, opened to a wider audience. As recently as yesterday, only 50% of Twitter had access to Lists, but after an unrelated bug forced Twitter to briefly remove the feature, they were able to roll it out to everyone else quickly.
This means that not only can all users now finally make their own lists, but perhaps more importantly, you can now see which lists you have been included on. The latter is quickly becoming a new metric for measuring popularity on the service (which users seem divided about if that’s a good or bad thing). And everyone will now have access to the third party sites already starting to pop up around the Lists API, such as Listorious, a Lists directory.
So, now that everyone can see them, be sure to check out our TechCrunch team list. Later today, we’ll also share some other interesting lists that we’ve been working on.
Update: As a side note, List descriptions should be coming in the next week or so, Twitter’s Vitor Lourenco confirms. This will definitely help users tell what the list is supposed to be, rather than simply relying on the list name.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Reuters - What do Jigsaw from "Saw," Freddy Krueger, and Jason from "Friday the 13th" all have in common, besides serial killing? Videogames, if the horror stars' latest round of promotions are to be believed.
The Palm Pre is out of sync with Apple’s iTunes software yet again.
Apple’s latest version of iTunes (9.0.2) that rolled out Thursday evening breaks the Palm Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes software. The development should be no surprise to Palm Pre owners using iTunes, as it is the third time this year that Apple has disabled the Pre from syncing its multimedia with iTunes.
“Unfortunately, Palm has brought down the ire of Apple because of the way they have decided to make it very easy to sync the Pre to iTunes,” says Chris Hazelton, research director for mobile and wireless at analyst firm The 451 Group. “A better, if more difficult, way to go about the whole thing would be for Palm to build its own sync software though they may not have the time or assets to do it.”
Of course, the simplest solution for Palm Pre owners is to not download the iTunes software update and stick with the older version with functional syncing. Still, the implication of Apple’s move is this could create a bigger headache for Palm Pre customers later down the road — when Apple adds new features to future versions of iTunes and presumably continues “crippling” the Pre.
When Palm first introduced the Pre earlier this year, a key feature was the device’s ability to easily sync music with iTunes through the USB port. The feature was a clever trick on Palm’s part. Palm masked the Pre’s identity to iTunes.
“What Palm did was identify the Pre as a recognizable device for iTunes so iTunes treats it like an iPod, which also meant Palm didn’t have to write a separate application to do this,” Hazelton said.
It didn’t take long for Apple to take action against Palm. Barely a month after the Pre’s launch in June, Apple disabled the Pre’s sync feature through an iTunes update. Palm responded by offering a patch for its webOS operating system that would fix the problem. But another iTunes update in September broke Pre compatibility again.
Meanwhile, Apple complained to the USB Implementers Forum, an industry standards group about the Pre’s deception. The forum ruled largely against Palm and asked it to “clarify its intent.” It wasn’t enough to dissuade Palm.
Now with the release of yet another iTunes update, Palm is back to square one. Patching the sync feature again is one of Palm’s choices — one that the company can keep doing. But it also risks losing the confidence of consumers.
Pre user Jake Lazaroff says the Pre’s problems with iTunes sync has turned him away from using the feature completely on his phone. Instead, Lazaroff has opted to use doubleTwist media sync software for his music.
“Palm thinks this is a cat-and-mouse game they are playing with Apple but it is really Pre users who are affected,” he says. “I don’t use sync so [I] am not angry with Palm but I can see how someone might be a little frustrated with them.”
Finding a fix to the issue is easy. Palm could make its own media sync software, much like its competitors, Research In Motion and Nokia. Last year, RIM introduced BlackBerry Media Sync, software that allows iTunes users to sync their DRM-free music files with their BlackBerry media players. The software greatly simplifies how BlackBerry users interact with iTunes.
Palm needs to reassess its strategy and devote resources to creating a similar app for the Pre, Hazelton said. Or the company could partner, or acquire, DoubleTwist or other media sync software players, he suggests.
“There are alternatives and it’s time now for Palm to start exploring some of them,” Hazelton said.
Lazaroff says he doesn’t blame Apple for the problem with Palm Pre’s sync feature.
“No one is forcing Palm to use iTunes,” he says. “Apple has no obligation to make sure the Pre syncs to iTunes at all times.”
See Also:
Photo: toddmundt/Flickr
Ever since our first Realtime Crunchup last July, the momentum behind realtime streams just keeps getting stronger. Which is why TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I are putting together another Realtime Crunchup on November 20 in San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now (the price is $395 until the final week when they will go up to $495—there are only 500 available).
The one-day event will take place in San Francisco’s fabulous new Intercontinental Hotel. The agenda is still coming together (hey, they don’t call it realtime for nothing). But I am pleased to announce some phenomenal speakers who will be joining us. Many of the members of our Realtime Board will appear on stage, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, FriendFeed founder (now Facebook exec) Paul Buchheit, Microsoft’s FUSE Labs chief Lili Cheng, and angel investor Ron Conway. Twitter COO Dick Costolo will also sit down with me for a conversation about the transition from RSS to Realtime, among other subjects.
The CrunchUp will explore different aspects of the realtime stream, including it’s rise as a new communications backbone, the different stream platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave) and how to navigate between them, and the business opportunities that the realtime stream presents. Is the realtime stream the ultimate marketing vehicle, or just another spammer’s paradise? What are the new streams that are emerging? For instance, we will have one panel focusing on just geo streams and how that ties into emerging mobile apps. Another panel will explore how private and public messaging systems are becoming one and the same. I think I’ll put Gmail creator Buchheit on that one, along with the CEO of TC50 startup Threadsy, who has also agreed to attend. We’ll be sharing a fuller agenda next week.
What is really exciting for me, though, is the incredible response from startups who want to launch at the CrunchUp, such as Brooklyn’s sorta-stealth Hot Potato, which is doing some very innovative things around geo-location, mobile apps, and events. Some established startups will also launch new products. There are still a couple slots left. If you want to launch a realtime product at the CrunchUp or have an eye-opening demo, please contact us at realtime [at] techcrunch [dot] com.
The CrunchUp also gives us a great sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
BusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. “Either you’ll get an offer or you won’t,” is the conventional wisdom among the 400 staffers, an employee tells me.
That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort: The worst-case scenario the employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia, which was also bidding for the publication.
The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.
Here’s the longer version of the plan, provided to me by a person familiar with ZelnickMedia’s bid. It sounds like a plausible idea for a PE group that specializes in turning around distressed assets–and a chilling one for anybody who draws a paycheck at BusinessWeek:
The insult-to-injury kicker: Under ZelnickMedia’s proposal, the buyer wouldn’t pay a dime for the publication it intended to rebuild. Instead, McGraw-Hill would pay the fund to take the publication off its hands. If that sounds implausible, consider that McGraw-Hill just announced that it will save up to $25 million next year by not owning the title.
Given the above terms, it’s easy enough to see why McGraw-Hill ended up going with Bloomberg. For starters, the winning bidder actually paid cash for the magazine, and McGraw-Hill will end up netting a $5.9 million gain, after taxes, on the deal.
Also important: McGraw-Hill won’t have to anguish as it watches one of its flagship properties get dismantled.
So what will happen to BusinessWeek now that Bloomberg owns it? Nothing nearly so drastic, at least in the short term. For now, Bloomberg is talking about bulking up the title, not shredding it, so that’s a good sign for both employees and readers.
Alas, Bloomberg can’t take on all of the magazine employees looking for jobs, and that pool is only going to get bigger.
Forbes slashed deep into its staff this week, and next week Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. will lay out some of its layoff goals. I’ve heard Time Inc. employees refer to layoff plans as “tree-trimming” or “surgical,” but I think the trimming will feel much blunter to the folks who lose their jobs. The publisher’s cost-cutting plans include hundreds of layoffs–something likely similar to the cuts the publisher went through last year, I’m told.
The New York Post’s Keith Kelly reports today that Time’s News and Finance unit, which includes Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, will be particularly hard hit, and I’ve confirmed that myself.
UPDATE: No surprise here: BusinessWeek President Keith Fox is stepping down. Mild surprise: He’s staying on at McGraw-Hill. Here’s his memo:
When we announced that McGraw-Hill was exploring strategic options for BusinessWeek, I promised to communicate with you as openly and often as I could. In this spirit, I wanted each of you to know that I will be remaining with McGraw-Hill after the deal with Bloomberg is closed. I will continue to play a role in the integration post-close and plan to take on a new role at McGraw-Hill in 2010.
During this process, our collective goal was to find the best buyer for BusinessWeek. I am proud that I played a role in ensuring that BusinessWeek has a new home at Bloomberg, where it will thrive under the leadership of Norman Pearlstine. I am committed to the transition and helping in any way that I can.
It’s been a privilege to be the President of BusinessWeek. I thank Terry McGraw for his confidence and trust in me and Glenn Goldberg for his support, direction, clarity, and sense of humor. I’ve also been a member of an amazing team which has navigated the transformation of the media environment with agility, focus, passion, and integrity.
The team–Steve Adler, Jessica Sibley, Tania Secor, Linda Brennan, Roger Neal, and Carl Fischer–is the best in the industry. Like BusinessWeek, they have bright futures ahead of them. I will miss the daily interaction, but I am wiser (and a little grayer) because of their collaborative spirit and desire to make BusinessWeek the global leader in business that it is today.
I also have a special thanks to Patricia Hipplewith, my assistant, who juggled my calendar, protected me from solicitors, and kept me on schedule and well fed! She is the personification of commitment and integrity.
I am humbled by BusinessWeek’s 80-year history. Thank you for allowing me to play a small part in it.
Keith
By Nitrozac and Snaggy
Thank goodness someone built a robot that can play Rock Band on the iPhone. I was getting worried sick about it.
Joe Bowers writes:
Rock Band has been released on the iPhone, and even though its a lot of fun, I would rather have something play it for me. Preferably a robot! The light sensor sends data to an Arduino, which is waiting for a spike in the data. The Arduino runs the sensor data through some averaging filters, and sets a threshold for on and off. The iPhone touch screen isn't like most PDAs. It uses a capacitive touch screen. I had some conductive foam laying around, its usually used for shipping sensitive electronics. If I used something non conductive, like a plastic pen, the foam would do nothing to the screen. My solution to this was to put thin copper wires into the foam (I also used these wires to attach the foam to the servos)... Add all of the above together into a modified Pelican case, with a lot of hot glue (non glittery) and you have a robot that will gladly beat all your difficult songs, sit back and sip some fine tea.
I love the ghostly sound of Blondie playing in the video.
 Telegraph.co.uk | Facebook Wins $711 Million From Spammer InformationWeek In addition to financial damages, Sanford Wallace, among the first to be crowned "Spam King," may face jail time. By Thomas Claburn Facebook has won yet another massive judgment against a spammer who already owes $234 million to MySpace. ... Spammer ordered to pay Facebook $711 million Facebook spammer's $711M fine won't stop problem, analysts say Facebook Dethrones Spam King |
FROM GAMERTELL - Walmart is giving away $20 eGift cards for MW2 preorders. Select locations will also give customers a chance to win an autographed copy of the game.
MORE »
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
AP - The nonprofit body that oversees Internet addresses approved Friday the use of Hebrew, Hindi, Korean and other scripts not based on Latin characters in a decision that could make the Web dramatically more inclusive.
 myGLOSS | Twitter Rolls out Lists Feature to Most Users PC World Enjoy Twitter, but have trouble wading through the deluge of updates from the hundreds of people you follow? In order to help you break down your Twitter consumption into bite-size pieces, the social networking site has begun rolling out its latest ... Twitter rolls out the beta of the 'Lists' feature to more users Twitter Lists Beta Goes Live for More Users Twitter rolling out new Lists feature this week |
Section: Web, Online Music/Video, Google
Google has partnered with several major providers of online music to launch a music search engine. Now when you type in the name of a song, artist or title, you can access audio or video previews of your music search query. The previews will be available via links to MySpace, Pandora, iLike, Lala and Rhapsody.
Once you click on the link through Google, you can preview the music as well as review buying options for full downloads. Further options will include the ability to find tour information for the artist in question and buy tickets. The new search tool will also allow you to enter lyrics in order to look up previews of songs. Google will be rolling out the service over the next couple of days.
These agreements are in addition to partnerships that Google already has with EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. As Google furthers these music partnerships, it could mean that they are poised to start their own music service.
Read: [Google Blog]
Image Source: Google Blog
Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Larry and Sergey told me we could only add this to the homepage if we took a word away — keeping the “weight” of the homepage unchanged at 28. Given that the new Privacy link fit best with legal disclaimers on the page, I looked to the copyright line. There, we dropped the word “Google” (realizing it was implied, obviously) and added the new privacy link alongside it.
– Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, Oct. 2008
Looks like Google (GOOG) is tweaking its homepage again. Surf over to the search sovereign’s front page today and, if you’re in a select “bucket” of users, you’ll find that the buttons for “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” have been swapped out for a bit of new text:
That text does fade out after a few moments. But nothing appears to replace it. I guess Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry page have decided to modify the no-more-than-28-words-on-the-homepage rule they set back in the early days of the company. Or perhaps 23 is the new 28.
UPDATE: Here’s the official word from Google: “At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on Google sites around the world. Today, we’re testing several homepage design changes. This is just a test, and a way for us to gauge whether our users will like an even simpler search interface.”
You’ll find more information about how Google runs experiments here.
With the Sony Ericsson Rachel (otherwise known as the XPERIA X3 or, more recently, the X10) having already made numerous unofficial appearances across the Interwebs, it seems like Sony Ericsson’s down to show their cards a bit early – or at least the back and sides of them.
They’ve just released this new teaser video, showing plenty of just about everything except what you actually want to see. Still, after months of blurry images and hearsay, we’ll take what we can get.
Sony Ericsson is expected to pull back the curtain on the Rachel on November 3rd, with a ship date sometime in Q1 2010.
[Via EngadgetMobile]
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
By Loretta Chao, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
China Unicom may have gotten a bad rap for its lackluster iPhone announcement this week, but its launch upstaged the event at the Apple (AAPL) store.
The iPhone did, in fact, draw a crowd today, despite a rare rainstorm that had streets jammed in Beijing. At China Unicom’s outdoor event, several hundred people lined up to be first to buy the phone. Several said they’d held out for years to buy it because they worried there would be quality problems if they purchased gray-market iPhones.
“The price is a little high, but we don’t care,” said one woman who lined up for over an hour to buy a 16-gigabyte iPhone with her boyfriend, who was shivering in the cold. “I don’t really care about that function,” said Zhang Yuan, a sales assistant for a distribution company who was also standing in line, referring to the Unicom iPhone’s lack of Wi-Fi.
Long rows of computers were set up to process all of the iPhone purchases.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
By Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest effort to call out what it considers violations of copyright and trademark law comes in the form of a mock-awards page, complete with “honorees,” called the Takedown Hall of Shame.
The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.
Among the honorees are National Public Radio, which tried to get an All Things Considered segment removed from YouTube because it appeared in an anti-same-sex-marriage ad. Others include NBC, for yanking an Obama campaign video that used archival footage of Tom Brokaw, and the National Organization for Marriage, which pulled YouTube footage of Rachel Maddow criticizing the audition tapes of one of its ads opposing gay marriage.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Not amazing news but interesting nonetheless: Billshrink, a site dedicated to “saving you money” compared the total cost of ownership in the 3GS, the Pre, the MyTouch 3G, and the Droid. They found that TCO for an unlimited rate plan costs $3,799, the same as the iPhone 3GS. Both the Pre and the MyTouch are over $1,200 cheaper.
You’re obviously paying for hype and, it can be said, features here so you’ll want to factor that in as well. I’m bullish on the Droid so feel free to drop four grand if you must when it launches. I’m sticking with the other money sinkhole, the 3GS.
Click the thumbnail to see it slightly bigger.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Cisco has a message for Tandberg shareholders pressing the networking giant to raise its $3.04 billion offer for the company: Take it or we’re leaving.
Sources tell Bloomberg that Cisco (CSCO) has little intention of meeting the demands of a group of investors who would like it to reach a bit deeper into its wallet before they hand over their 24 percent stake in Tandberg, the world’s second largest manufacturer of videoconferencing kit. Cisco would rather walk away than sweeten a bid that represents a 38.3 percent premium on Tandberg’s closing share price on the day before news of a possible acquisition broke.
Or that’s what Cisco wants them to think, anyway. Because scrapping what is a pretty strategic deal for the company would be silly at this point given Cisco’s huge cash reserves. Rumors that it would “strongly consider walking away” from Tandberg are likely more gamesmanship than anything else.
“I think it’s quite unlikely that they’ll drop their offer, everything points to them buying Tandberg,” Arctic Securities analyst Martin Hoff told Bloomberg. “It’s probably smart of them to send some signals to scare the shareholders into accepting the offer.”
Can you even imagine what it must have been like to be an early explorer? Like, you leave Spain or Portugal on some rickety boat, and arrive in the New World. Cool and all, but, outside of shooting everything in sight, how do you communicate with anybody? What, do you point to the sun and say “sol,” and expect the other guy to repeat “sol”? That can’t be an efficient way to learn a language, especially when it’s, you know, a very real clash of cultures. If only they had (drum roll, please) something like Jibbigo Speech Translator English Spanish, which automatically translates from Spanish into English, and vice-versa.
The $25 iPhone App will take what you say in either language, and spit out the other language in real time. So, say you’re Florentino Perez and need to communicate “fue una derrota muy humillante” to your English friends. Just say the phrase into the iPhone, and it’ll output, “it was a humiliating defeat.” Done and done.
There’s 40,000 phrases in there, so it should totally be sufficient when you’re trying to order some tapas.
Right now, Jibbigo only works with Spanish-English, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see copycats with other languages popping up.
via Macworld
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Yes, it’s a car ad, but you’re going to watch it anyway because a) it’s Friday and b) it features the awesome Danny Macaskill (or the Mac Danny as we like to call him) on his bike. We’ve posted a couple of Danny’s videos here before, but to be honest we just can’t get enough of watching him throw his bike around the city streets.
Check the huge gap he leaps around thirty seconds in and imagine just sitting up on that concrete monster, let alone standing up there on a bike. It’s a fantastic ad, spoiled only by the car at the end.
See Also:
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Mobile, Computers, Desktops, Hardware, Laptops, Software / Applications, Gadgets / Other, ebooks, Features, Originals, Columns, Who's On Crack
This week stands out for me and my mobile phone addiction. Big announcements in the tech world get us all excited until we stop to ask some questions. Then we get kind of pissed off and start turning on the hype. Behold the gems I turned up this week:
Just the mention of Black Friday and shoppers pupils dilate just a bit, showing their arousal. Sears has decided the calendar is for suckers and has started their sale this weekend. Why not? Our Sue Walsh explains:
Sears has announced it will be kicking off the holiday shopping season this weekend by offering special Black Friday deals. It plans to offer those special “Black Friday Now” deals every Saturday from 7am until Christmas.
The Saturday after Christmas Sears shoppers will be welcomed by 1,000s of Abe Lincoln impersonators as the store kicks off “President’s Day Now” sale. Feel free to move holidays around at home kids, it is the new marketing paradigm. Somewhere, Sears marketing team is giggling at duping the American public.
Our Heather Wood posted about Microsoft’s Signature PCs: “When you usually buy a PC, you have to spend time removing all of the pre-installed applications on the computer. These can include 30 day music trials, limited anti-virus protection software and photo editing tools you probably will never use. On these signature PCs, no crapware or trials will be included. “
Instead, Microsoft Signature PCs that they are selling direct to consumers will have only the basics installed. The take-away from this is Microsoft is attempting to control the experience consumers have with their products. Clearly, MS feels the crapware festival that greets most new owners is less than stellar.
It is a good move for MS but you’ve got to wonder, if companies pay to get crapware there in the first place, will prices go up? Could this start a price war between MS and manufacturers at other retailers? This could mean the net result of MS adventures in retailing will be to lower prices in an ever-dropping market. Sweet.
What is likely to happen when folks who love hard covers and the smell of a new book mix with internet-loving einkers? Book fight! Imagine volume upon volume being flung about as screams of “tree killer” and “experience killer” get flung just as hard. It is a nightmarish scene typically reserved for winning an NBA championship.
Our Robert Nelson commented on the plan: “Personally, it seems only logical that Barnes & Noble would have at least some Nooks in stock and ready for those that want instant gratification. But that is not the case, instead it looks like only select locations will have them available to purchase and take home.”
Only a crackhead could come up with a crazy retail plan, right? Do they really fear book fights? Are they worried the Nook would convert masses away from physical books and drive them to their online bookstore? Sounds like some paranoid addict is afraid of losing retail locations over this. That’s embarrassing.
It’s been my experience that folks that are actually smart don’t need to say it, much less make it their new advertising campaign. So it goes with HTC’s new “quietly brilliant” as our Robert Nelson explains:
HTC has just recently begun a new ad campaign which deems them as “Quietly Brilliant” and is simply going by the name of “You.” While some may say that the quietly brilliant part is a bit self centered, the You campaign in general appears to be offering a welcomed push at showing consumers just how nice it can be to have a smartphone.
I am quietly brilliant too. Something along the lines of “keep your mouth shut and let everyone assume your’re an idiot vs. opening your mouth and proving it,” springs to mind. Wait, wasn’t this the plot to “Good Will Hunting”? Will HTC singlehandedly relaunch the career of Ben Affleck, (who was the bomb in Phantoms)? Doubt it.
Robert focuses on the “You” side of the campaign and the “you don’t need to get a phone, you need a phone that gets you” but that troubles me. I don’t get me. How can I expect some engineers in Taiwan to get me? Should I be flattered if they do? Can I get a phone number if they do to talk about being penpals?
Either way, I find the concept disturbing. How about you? Do you think they get you?
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
News reports earlier this month created a global stir around an odd "made in China" product marketed to the Middle East - cheap artificial hymens. They're intended for use by brides who feel compelled to fake virginity, in countries where not being a virgin at marriage is a very big, very bad thing. Conservative Egyptian politicians wanted to ban the product. One curious (male) blogger in Egypt decided to order one.
Mohammad Al Rahhal picked up the contraband gyno-goods at his local post office in Egypt:
it had been opened by various puzzled customs and postal employees who, at a loss, defined the product in writing as "containing an unknown red liquid" - and awaited my description.Al Rahhal told inspectors it was "cinematographic make-up," and took his hymen home.
Marwa Rakha over at Global Voices has more from Al Rahhal's product review (he explains how it works, sort-of NSFW if only for use of anatomically specific language). Also, a report at the UK Guardian.
Spoiler: Al Rahhal's verdict? This thing, and the thinking behind it, are totally stupid. "Morality is worst interpreted by anatomy," he says. Bravo, dude.
Unless you’re one of those nutjobs who pretends that it is Christmas every single day, you will need to disentangle your fairy-lights precisely once a year. For me, it’s a Christmas tradition, as much a part of the festivities as drinking heavily, arguing with my parents and returning my gifts to the store.
But now you will never have to deal with knots of green cable and plastic flowers again. For the paltry sum of $20 you can buy the Store’em, a motorized spool which will wind and dispense your holiday lights in a tangle-free and effortless manner. Think it’s pointless? Think again. Here’s a testimonial on the product page from happy owner Adam:
I’m amazed at how much time I have saved from having the Stor’em driver and spool set.
Amazed! To be fair, Adam was using the spindle to wind other cables in a care-free, devil-may-care fashion, so he may have saved more time than would a once-a-year user. Still not convinced? Here’s what another customer, Colin, has to say: “it was the best $20 I ever spent!” So impressed was Colin that he then went on and “bought more spools.”
It would seem that the Stor’em is the most amazing gadget since the iPhone, which you will remember was also called the “Jesus Phone”, a Christmas-related coincidence. And there is more! For those of you who still have the use of your hands, there is a motor-free version, for the low, low price of $11.50.
So, if you value your time at all (and you should, as you only get one run on this earth) then you should go out and buy one of these right now. Used annually, you should make back the time spent driving to the store in as little as ten or twenty years. Four AA batteries required.
Product page [No Light Mess. Thanks, Eric and Joe!]
Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile
Just yesterday, Sprint executive David Owens took some time and did a live chat for Sprint customers and in that chat were some interesting tidbits.
To begin, plenty of Android users have been wondering about the Hero. Well he confirmed that the HTC Hero, along with the yet-to-be released Samsung Moment would both be getting an update. With that the speculation is that it will skip the current version 1.6 and go directly to Android 2.0. Of course, we still do not have a firm timeline on when that will happen.
Additional Android related news came in the form of an interesting product. It seems that Sprint is “considering an Android phone with a built-in MiFi-type router.”
That last bit by itself is interesting, but at the same time it is good news because David Owens also mentioned that Sprint will never allow “tethering for phones that require Everything plans (such as all smartphones) from here on out.”
Moving on, for those not interested in Android, we also have some BlackBerry and Windows Mobile details.
The BlackBerry news included that the Tour will have Wi-Fi support added and that they will also begin offering other Wi-Fi equipped BlackBerry models in the future.
As far as Windows Mobile, this was mentioned, but less than exciting. Sprint is currently in the testing phase for Windows Mobile 6.5 updates on the HTC Touch Pro2 and other Windows phones. So far nothing firm was given as to when you can expect to see that available, however it is planned for “early 2010.” Additionally, Windows Mobile 7 is coming, but as you would expect that timeline is still in the hands of Microsoft.
Finally, Sprint is also looking to release some WiMax phones next year.
Via [GearLog]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Siliconrepublic.com | Google creates roadblock for tomtom, Garmin, Nokia Reuters By Harro ten Wolde AMSTERDAM, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Google's (GOOG.O) foray into phone-based navigation makes it unlikely that tomtom (TOM2.AS), Garmin (GRMN.O) and Nokia (NOK1V.HE) will ever recoup their big recent investments in navigation technology. ... The Audacity of Droid Google, Garmin, And Free Navigation Why Google Didn't Kill the Standalone GPS |
It isn’t the first, and I assume it’s not going to be the last either.
Apple and AT&T are facing a new putative class action from an iPhone user who alleges that the companies misrepresented the phone’s MMS (multimedia messaging service) capabilities.
Clyde Bernard Franklin filed the complaint (case 1:2009cv00704) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama on behalf of all Alabama residents last Wednesday.
Forget your wussy electric bikes and silly Segways. This is what real men ride when they are feeling too delicate to actually pedal. It’s a Dunlop Bushrager mountain bike retrofitted with a gas engine.
Jeroen van Bergeijk came across this amazing bike mod while on tour in Australia. Found in Port Adelaide, the Mad Max bike has a one-cylinder engine mounted inside the frame with a gas tank up top. Best of all is that it still works as a proper bike, with gears, chain and chainring intact. The engine is instead hooked up to a sprocket on the other side of the rear wheel. Amazing, and surely a lot of fun.
Looks like Mad Max’s Bicycle [Jeroen van Bergeijk via BBG]
Steve Lee, aka Essell, thought that his aluminum and plastic was rather an eyesore, despite its clean lines and super-slim profile. So he did what any design obsessed neat-freak would do: he took a can of white spray paint to it.
The result is a confusing white version of the blank black DAS keyboard, a beautifully sleek object which will no doubt start to flake and peel after a few weeks of use. The irony is that Steve has it hooked up to a PC.
Over at Gizmodo, the lovely Matt Buchanan calls it “the Apple keyboard Steve Jobs secretly dreams of.” We’d disagree. The Steve Jobs dream keyboard has, of course, just one big key.
Section: Gadgets / Other, ebooks
It looks like those once rumored ebook readers from Asus are going to become reality. Well, maybe not exactly like the prototypes (pictured here) that we first saw, but they still sound like they will be interesting, if not fully connected.
What we know so far is that Asus is planning to release a 6-inch and 9-inch model. Both of which will offer an E Ink display. Still unclear is to whether they will offer that dual-screen touch-friendly model. Additionally, is seems that the ebook readers will also come with 3G, WiMax and Wi-Fi support.
Unfortunately, most details, such as the brand are still unknown. However a full announcement is expected before the end of the year.
That said, Asus is expected to launch these ebook readers under the Eee branding. We also still have nothing in terms of price. But it would be safe to think that they will be priced competitively with the current kings including the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. Of course we may be adding the Barnes & Noble Nook to that current kings list as well.
Read [CENS.com] Via [Reg Hardware]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Japan went crazy over the iPhone when it made its debut in summer last year, but China as another big Asian market for Apple seems to react differently. The iPhone officially launched in China today, offered by China Unicom, one the country’s three big cell phone carriers. But our friends over at major Chinese news portal 163.com are reporting [Google machine translation] that not too many people were actually queuing up to get one, at least in Beijing.
Here are some pictures from the Beijing Apple Store (taken Friday afternoon Chinese time, just before sales began):
And these pictures show China Unicom seems to have over-prepared their “sales points”, too:
These rather disappointing, initial reactions don’t mean China rejects the iPhone at all, however. Estimates put the number of iPhones sold in China before the official launch today (through imports from Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example) between two and five million units so far. China as a whole has 710 million total cellular subscribers, the most in the world.
You can find more information about iPhone distribution in China here, here and here.
We’ll update this post when we get more information and pictures.
Many thanks to Snake Chen from NetEase (which operates 163.com) for contributing to this article.
Update (all pictures courtesy of tech.163.com):
Our contacts in Beijing say the situation improved when compared to the afternoon, as more and more customers started queuing up later in the evening. According to them, “almost no one” (quote) was waiting in front of the Beijing Apple Store before 8pm, before around 50 people showed up at exactly that time. Within an hour, 150 iPhone customers were waiting to get the Jesus phone – even though it was cold and raining in Beijing. Not bad, but again, this is nothing against the hysteria when the iPhone launched in other territories (under totally different circumstances and much earlier, we know).
Here are some pictures of that location in the evening (taken between 7:40 and 8:00 pm Chinese time):
China Unicom’s launch event was well-attended, we hear. The person who receives the frame (see picture below) from Apple’s VP is China’s first (official) iPhone owner. China Unicom’s CEO can be seen to the left of the proud guy.
And Unicom’s “The Place” attracted a pretty good crowd later on as well, as these pictures show:
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
| World : News Archives | Business | Entertainment | Sports | Technology | Science | Marketplace Audio |
| India : News | Business | Entertainment | Sports | Telugu | |
| Blogs : Humor pages | Norkay's Blog | Kids Stories | Indian Recipes | Database Tech Blog |
| Sundries : World Video Clips | Songs Clips | Indian Video Clips | |
Want to be the head of 
Aggronautix, the same demented people who have created wobbly-necked figurines of such similarly obscure punk rock icons as Tesco Vee of the Meatmen, Milo of the Descendents and the barely-legal Dwarves, have truly gone all out for the second edition of the Allin figure, which commemorates the scat-loving punk icon in all his messy glory.
![Screen shot 2009-10-30 at [ October 30 ] 7.28.42 PM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Screen-shot-2009-10-30-at-October-30-7.28.42-PM-181x300.png "Screen shot 2009-10-30 at [ October 30 ] 7.28.42 PM")
